Remember this piece about cityCityCITY?

Let's start the cavalcade of year in review...remember this piece about cityCityCITY?

...Last year saw release of the beat manuscript legend known as “And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks,” a book about Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer composed by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in their early writing days [circa 1945]. But that is not what I came here to talk about - Boston sports writer George Kimball does a real good job on the 'hippo' book in the Nov 8 [2008] issue of the Boston Phoenix in a piece entitled Back Beat ; I will take another tact. I am here to write about a short story by Kerouac called “cityCityCITY” . This is a Kerouac story stylistically unlike any of his others. In a beat buff blindfold test, I’d bet most people would guess that William Burroughs wrote it. Yes, stylistically it is closely related to the Missourian’s work...

Read the rest of the story...

Poem: Charles River Newton Reporter Transcript

Falling leaves
upon mottled yellowed green red reflection
sailing leaves
on river meander
glassine down stream
to the bridge pontoons
I am holding on
letting go
I'm telling you?
I am telling everyone!
-Jack Vaughan, 2009

Joe McCarthy

i.
Preparing the brown bags
At the Manawaw Cashway
Smiling Irish to
The old Wisconsin ladies

Joe McCarthy in 1929
Put on his charm and fanfaronade
To wangle out of here
To college to get away

Forget that he had to do
High school at night –
well he was a dairy farmboy
pullin the tits – milkin’
This is after the hens
2000 of them
On the McCarthy farm
The hens that made him
A big egg man
Almost
The hens that would die
When he came down sick
ad the boys that he had hired
were Appleton slow to
grok the details

Sure and the ckens croaked
And that wasn’t the way out
Did he think once
Lord what’s the use

But Joe kept on
not beat yet
At the night school high school parsing
At the day job Cashway bagging
The scratch to get
To go to Marquette...

By Jack Vaughan, Oct 2009

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A fuller look at Joe would include: Circuit Judge Joe in between sessions playing cards at the Racine elks club – Drunk on the road with the list of communists – The jig is up: taken down by Boston lawyer Welch – last days of drinking, feeling small.