Category: Beats

Catholic Jack

As Kerouac aged, he reclaimed the Catholic identity he had inherited from his devout parents, although to the reader, the influence was often muffled under the Benzedrine and booze-fueled bacchanalia of his youth, especially when…

Today’s One-Liner (#287)

And of course, for your beginning studies of Buddhism, you must listen to me carefully and implicitly as tho I was Einstein teaching you relativity or Eliot teaching the Formulas of Objective Correlation on a…

Soulwork

“One big thing is to develop a strenuous accountability (you see it’s moral, no gadgets invade man’s true necessity), and the habit, the daily labor of writing en passant, keep a vast and cosmic diary….

Today’s One-Liner (#171)

My life is botched-up because, at 26, I’ve yet to earn a steady income, I’ve yet to really help anyone in the world, including really taking care of myself, and I’ve yet to love a…

Second Thoughts on Kerouac

But, disconcertingly, Kerouac was as likable in the flesh as he was repellent in print. In contrast to the seething Ginsberg, who went at me with everything he had, Kerouac (in spite of being the…

Today’s One-Liner (#37)

One advantage of knowing the classics is that no matter the what situation you might find yourself in, you’ll remember that someone else was there before you. –Kenneth Rexroth, quoted in Anne Waldman and Laura…

Appreciating Jack Appreciating

Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940-1956, v. 1 As I’m convinced of the the utility of “pulling”* from my reading, I found the following gems in some of Kerouac’s letters up till  he had to deal…

New Life

Later I’m back in New York sitting around with Irwin and Simon and Raphael and Lazarus, and now we’re famous writers more or less, but they wonder why I’m so sunk now, so unexcited as…