Another one of those 50th anniversaries ... something to think about ... Oct 21 is the 50th anniversary of Great Jack Kerouac's Death. When I first heard the news, I was in a TV commons space in a dorm at Marquette University in Milwaukee. I recall the big news of the moment was around the Chicago 8. Then Walter Cronkite announced the author of On the Road had died. Caused me to pick up Selected Letters and turn to a page on the process of Spontaneous Prose.
Whew ! Here is a pretty good take on Jack Kerouac's Spontaneous Method from the Bard Himself. March 19, 1957, Jack Kerouac complaining about to editor working on an excerpt of The Subterraneans for the Evergreen Review. He, Don Allen, had been cutting up the run-ons into shorter sentences. Ultimately, “October in the Railroad Earth” was swapped in instead. March 19, 1957.
“Don, I cant possibly go on as a responsible prose artist and also as a believer in the impulses of my own heart and in the beauty of pure spontaneous language if I let editors take my sentences, which are my phrases that I separate by dashes when “I draw a breath” each of which pours out of the tune of the whole story its own rhythmic yawp of expostulation ….”
“… now the whole thing is no longer the Subterraneans, the swing, the heartbroke sound, the blues style, the rush of lowdown confession that embarrasses no one but me, the crude glad (if-you-wish Carlylean) personal quavering sound of my own voice, which took me so long (15 years of writing) to find and tap and only after removing all that literary and grammatically-inhibited and unenlightened debris. … So I eschews ‘selectivity’ and follow free association of mind into limitless blow-on-subject of thought, swimming in seas of English with no discipline other than the story-line and rhythm of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like fist coming down ona table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space – dash) ... Like Lee Konitz in 1951 I want to blow as deep as I want, for nothing is muddy that runs in time …”
--“Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1957-1969", p.15-16
Other bits Kerouackian on MoonTravellerHerald.
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2009/01/citycitycitytake1.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2013/03/before-going-on-road-jack-kerouac-was.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2019/01/jack-kerouac-in-his-room.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2007/10/on-road-scroll-in-lowell.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2014/11/jim.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2008/06/kerouacs-home-in-orlando-working.html
https://moontravellerherald.blogspot.com/2017/01/from-vaults-kerouac-in-orlando.html
"This world we have .. is a torrent of suffering. You can see it streaming across the newspapers in a blur of print." - Jack Kerouac, Kerouac's Letters V1, p. 479
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