Taking Stock
What have we accomplished? Good new poetry, that oughta be enough. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, 472
Tag: Jack Kerouac
Today’s One-Liner (#340)
Everybody should simply make a vow of kindness and let it go at that, try to stay sober too—start new party Vow of Kindness party. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen…
Today’s One-Liner (#325)
I believe in Buddha kindness and nothing else, I believe in Heaven, in Angels, I eschew all Marxism and allied horseshit and psychoanalysis, and offshoot therefrom. –Jack Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, January 1958
Today’s One-Liner (#312)
[Y]ou know the greatest of all Balzac’s novels is Cousin Bette. –Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, The Letters, 392
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….
Find Your Book: A Summer Class in Recognizing and Embracing
Something that you feel will find its own form. Jack Kerouac I’ve shared Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones with a lot of readers, who went on to do writing practice or freewriting. But what does…
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…
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
The death-dealing Chancery! The waste of Jarndyce and Jarndyce! The magnanimity of John Jarndyce! The plain loveliness of Esther Summerson! The delusion of Richard Carson! The dignity of George Rouncewell! The lovable hater of Lady…