March 12, 2022 – “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” - Marking here the fact that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jack Kerouac. Kerouac’s writing is not known – or remembered -- to the extent that it should be. His cultural impact (leading the Beats who begat the Hippies) proved greater than his literary impact, and that should be fixed. This is a good year for you to visit the writing of Kerouac, and to share your impressions with others, so the magic carries on. It is both joy and sorrow to re-read On the Road, his epic of searching American travel, in which every word rings true. There is his experimental work Visions of Cody, which in a way is the explosive palette from which On the Road and other works were semi-precisely detonated There are touching novels such as Visions of Gerard, about his saintly doomed young brother, and Maggie Cassidy his high school girlfriend living by the river. I’d like to point out that many of our local libraries carry Jack Kerouac’s Selected Letters -in two volumes - and reading these shows the life that enveloped the writing. It can make Kerouac Scholars of everyone. In digging into Kerouac’s writing you find, among so many things, that he created a method of spontaneous composition, or jazz writing, that maps a path for each of us to find our own spiritual lodestar in poetry and prose. - Schools of poetics sprang from his pen-thought, among these schools, with a nod to Langston Hughes, John Sinclair, and Sterling Brown, is school of blues poetry. Lowell, Mass. Celebration today - goes on all year. He was a Son of Lowell, and you can bop around the town and he is in the air. Important to add that from FRIDAY, MARCH 18 – APRIL 29 there will be a Visions of Kerouac Special Exhibit at Lowell National Historical Park – in the Boott Cotton Mills Gallery – 12:00 – 5:00 PM daily that includes a portion of the original “On The Road” scroll (he wrote the book in one fell swoop on telegraph paper roll) under plexiglass. I post below a YouTube rendition of a Kerouac appearance reading On the Road on the old Steve Allen show to lively up my little celebration to “Ti Jean” – HE HONORED LIFE.
Just found today
Jean Shepard Show - On the evening of Kerouac's passing - YouTube
Jean Shepard Show - On the evening of Kerouac's passing - YouTube
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