moon traveller herald

  i searched the graveyard all over trying to find where kerouac lay i searched the graveyard all over trying to find where kerouac lay just me and my racine buddies on the hottest august day they had come out in a rambler and we were out on a spree to play they had come out in a rambler and we were out on a spree to play but when came sunday  went looking for kerouac's grave he was a lonesome traveller who showed the world another way on the road and in the dharma the holy poet sadly prayed we thought he'd send a message an eminission from the grave then a dove rose in the meadow where the peoples memories must stay and we went in the direction the spot from where it came the bird like a flying beer can showed the place where ti jean laid  on the hottest august day.                         -jack vaughan This opened up upon listening to Champon Jack Dupree - a song where he searched a graveyard for his motherl. W...

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 librari...

At the heart of Beat writing is the idea that spontaneity is crucial in expression. The method is best summarized in Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” – featuring such an apothegm as “Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind” and “Blow as deep as you want to blow.” The immediate guide for Kerouac was jazz, most especially the bebop form led forward by Charlie Parker. But among the other influential jazz players there were many others that Kerouac followed. And among these was Lee Konitz, vaunted alto saxophonist who passed away last week at 92 in New York, from complications of Covid-19 and pneumonia. Although the brutal coronavirus caught up with him, Konitz was truly a survivor, one who followed his own beacon across a cavalcade of styles of jazz, continuing to play until very recently. His connection to Kerouac is enduringly important. Born in Chicago, Konitz as a lad was inspired by Benny Goodman. He went on to play with the Claude Thornhill orchestra, Stan Kento...

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 h'ippo' book in the Nov 8 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. Kerouac saw this as another possible collaboration with Burroughs Thought it might outdo Mutiny on the Bounty, as a novelistic collaboration. As much as 'The Hippos', and available in anthologies for a while, i...