That's Jack Kerouac's list of 30 rules for writing. I don't think he planned to come up with 30. More like 18 to 20, but he damned well resisted turning that page.
When you need to cover a blank page, write big, because you might run out of things to say, and when you see the end approaching, don't wrap it up in fewer words, write smaller and smaller.
I used to teach my classes this way, talking expansively in the first half, with side roads and pauses, gearing up and pushing forward expeditiously in the second half. I saw myself doing that for more than 30 years, yet I never acquired the belief that there was plenty of material and expansiveness could be done at the end, if there was extra space. I guess I liked the expansiveness, the big writing on the left-hand page. If we're cramped later, we'll adjust, but for now, while we're young, we're left-side-of-the-pagers, let's breathe.
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is...Those are the ones about about time. What does "Like Proust be an old teahead of time" mean? From "The French Genealogy of The Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac" (page 82)(click to enlarge):
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time...
29. You're a Genius all the time
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33 comments:
"3. try never to get drunk outside your own home"
Jeez, what a buzz kill!
Getting drunk in public is one of the true joys of life.
Try cold compresses, 2 aspirin, and bedrest. It may be an outbreak of writer's cabin fever.
I know what he means, but still: Proust does not ramble or digress. If you read him right.
He just didn't do Proust right. Real Proust has never been tried. Proust is the answer.
Isn't this like those gag "Plan Ahead" signs, where the last few letters are scrunched to the very margin or even below the intended line,
http://themetapicture.com/always-plan-ahead/
btw, "'having a future time orientation' (academese for having long-term goals) is among the 'aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype and label people of color.'"
That is, planning ahead is racist.
And the Seattle Public Schools, and the leftists that run it, had that as a policy,
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/opinion/article/Planning-ahead-is-considered-racist-1204942.php
He just didn't do Proust right. Real Proust has never been tried. Proust is the answer.
LOL.
Real Proust never dies; it just never gets finished.
Heidegger?
Proust Blue Ribbon!
The Germans have a word for this.
gspencer said...
"..btw, "'having a future time orientation' (academese for having long-term goals) is among the 'aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype and label people of color.'"
That is, planning ahead is racist."
From Aesop:
"One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.
"What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"
"I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."
The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.
"Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work."
By 'grasshopper' we know who Aesop REALLY meant.
Insects of color.
The Germans have a word for this.
13. remove literary, grammatical, and syntactical inhibition.
Sorry, I had to add the second comma (before the "and")
As much as I love my main man Jack, I follow EB White into writer's hell for the comma before "and"
Be that as it may, number 13 is the key to learning ANY language--just speak (or write)
Our Neurology professor in medical school, Dr Karl O von Hagen was a model of precise 55 minute lectures.
He would appear in front of the classroom and disappear at the end of his lecture. If you blinked, he seemed to disappear.
Two of his children were classmates of mine in college. His wife was a silent movie star.
In person he was the perfect Germanic professor
More like, "Blow as hard as you want to blow."
There are two ways to read 3, is the rule to try to get drunk outside other people’s houses?
I didn't find Kerouac's list all that illuminating; but I was struck by the Oglivy list, and how it is at variance with what I observed in the corporate world--especially with the part of eschewing jargon. When I was in that world, jargon was king. It seemed to be a kind of virtue-signaling, as in, "I know the jargon the Big Boys use, therefore I must be a Big Boy (or Gal) myself--or at least I should be."
As a teenager, when I first read "On the Road," I loved it.
Of the Hippies, Kerouac was head and shoulders above the rest, particularly that pedophile, Ginsburg.
In fact, I vaguely recall that towards the end of his life, Kerouac returned to his Catholic roots, and gave up all that hippie-dippie nonsense that wrecked so many lives in the 60s an 70s.
Here's Kerouac's famous 1968 drunk appearance in Buckley's Firing Line show.
Buckley helped defeat Communism and the Soviet Union; Kerouac and the Hippies got stoned, avoided work, avoided baths, and wrecked college campuses across land.
Who had the bigger lasting impact?
Jeez, I didn't know that Kerouac died so soon after his appearance with Buckley. The poor fellow died at age 47! From Wiki:
"..on the morning of October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kerouac was sitting in his favorite chair drinking whiskey and malt liquor, working on a book about his father's print shop in Lowell, Massachusetts. He suddenly felt nauseated and walked to the bathroom, where he began to vomit blood. Kerouac was taken to a nearby hospital, suffering from an abdominal hemorrhage. He received several transfusions in an attempt to make up for the loss of blood, and doctors subsequently attempted surgery, but a damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. He died at 5:15 the following morning at St. Anthony's Hospital, never having regained consciousness after the operation. His cause of death was listed as an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of longtime alcohol abuse.
What good is having some nice rules of writing, if you drink yourself to death by age 47?
His hand-printing looks just like mine. That's weird. Okay now I see his A's are not exactly like mine, but if I ran across this in my notes I'd think it was my notes.
"What good is having some nice rules of writing, if you drink yourself to death by age 47?"
A dead person is beyond help. What's your excuse? If you follow Kerouac's writing tips, your writing style might improve. There remains the problem of your problematic thinking process. If I were you, I'd emulate Kerouac's drinking style and drink instead of trying to write like him. The liver damage be damned. You can get a liver transplant if need be. Sorry, look elsewhere. My liver is NOT for sale.
@BayAreaGuy - I was living in Tampa/St.Pete when JK died and I remember my english teacher (her name is long lost) being really upset. I also recall being really disappointed it wasn't someone really famous, like the author of The Phantom Tollbooth or something.
-XC
Trumpit has a case of the grumpies today. Someone, please, help him turn that frown upside down.
A lot of the people here have read On The Road, but how many have ever re-read it. Compare with TKAM. That's not just a widely read book, but a widely re-read book. I'm sure the people who claim to love TKAM are completely sincere in their affections. The people who claim to love On The Road I'm not so sure about. Kerouac is to literature what Miles Davis is to music. People rave about Kind of Blue, but there's dust on the dust cover.......My nomination for the most widely re-read of the widely read novels is The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is about as close as prose can come to being poetry without breaking into iambic pentameter.
It's small writing writ large.
Bay Area Guy: "The poor fellow died at age 47."
Perhaps some things run in the family. My father died at the age of 47, too. My father and Kerouac were descendants of Zacharie Cloutier (c. 1590 - 1677), a French master carpenter who immigrated to New France in 1634.
Kerouac had liver problems. I also have liver problems despite the fact that I rarely drank alcohol.
Zacharie's other descendants include Madonna Ciccone, Celine Dion, Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé Knowles, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Yep, they are all distantly related.
I enjoyed your description of your teaching style, and realized I have almost the opposite approach. At the beginning of the semester and the beginning of each lecture I stick to the topic and forge ahead with determination, then relax a bit, reflect on the subject and explore the side rods as we get toward the end.
The Beats were not Hippies. Kerouac was paradigmatic of the Beats in that his stoning was not about Counter Culture, it was about spirituality--entering the cosmic FLOW of events. He was actually more of a Shaivite than a Buddhist. The dope was the vehicle, the mantra, the tool that Patanjali's yoga okays in the fourth chapter.
He hated the sixties and how Kesey had bastardized what Kerouac's generation had started. Kerouac was fiercely patriotic of AMERICA and sought to level the injustices to augment rather than tear down.
I read Kerouac in 1971 as part of a distributional requirement for Religious Studies, Religious Existentialism in Contemporary US Literature. I read most of his works and continue to reread The Dharma Bums. It gets a bit more puerile each read but remains an excellent statement of the transition from unbridled sadhu experience into Zen. Credit Gary Snyder for that.
There are several interesting articles about his last days: one by Jack McClintock and the other by Richard Hill. They are two views of the same guy at the same time; disciples of the Hermit of St Pete. They drew him out; he began to return; he got a phone installed; he wrote numbers on the wall next to the phone; and then his stomach herniated and he was gone.
" He was on the Buckley show a while back with two other guests, a student and a sociologist. "Yeah, two Communists." (Later, during another conversation, he said "The Mafia? The Communist is the main enemy – the Jew.")
"On the program they talked about the Beat Generation a little, but mostly about the hippies and the political activists of today. Kerouac doesn't care much for today.
""Yeah, they got something from us – they just took it too far. The Communist Party jumped on my movement, they wanted a youth movement to use.
""Ginsberg … At a party with Kesey's Merry Pranksters Kesey came up and wrapped an American flag around me. So I took it (Kerouac demonstrates how he took it, and the movements are tender) and I folded it up the way you're supposed to, and put it on the back of the sofa. The flag is not a rag.
""When we went to school together, we were 21 and it was books and Shakespeare. But now Ginsberg's anti-American.""
It's an important distinction to make, one that the Democrats fail to understand, that one can smoke a joint but still respect the Flag, the ideal of America as a process toward which to work, and KNOW the spiritual dimension of life cannot be discarded.
There should be MORE courses on Kerouac; not less.
If you follow Kerouac’s writing tips, your writing style might improve.
Said the oddly compelled reader.
"If you follow Kerouac’s writing tips, your writing style might improve."
Or not.
I've tried to read ON THE ROAD twice. Nope. Grandiose navel-gazing.
"Kerouac is to literature what Miles Davis is to music. People rave about Kind of Blue, but there's dust on the dust cover...."
Hardly. (In fact, what does that even mean?)
BTW, Miles Davis is known and admired for far more than KIND OF BLUE.
The conservative writer M. Stanton Evans, in his groundbreaking book REVOLT ON THE CAMPUS, about the growing (circa 1960) dissent against the fuddy-duddy "liberal" establishment of the time, cited Kerouac--or at least a Kerouac character--as an example. Evans mentions a character from ON THE ROAD whose three pet peeves in life are labor unions, liberals and cops. The character was sort of a prototype for a type of free-spirited libertarian who would become more common (although always a minority) on campuses in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and dismissed by Ayn Rand as "pot-smoking hippies* of the Right."
*pronounced "heepees."
My guess is Miles Davis would be insulted by the comparison.
I think "teahead of his time" is a bit of a portmanteau. Didn't the beats call potheads teaheads? I'm sure Burroughs did. Kerouac I'm sure would have considered himself a pothead ahead of his time.
Robert Cook accuses Kerouac, in ON THE ROAD, of "grandiose navel-gazing." He may be right; I read it completely decades ago, when I was doing a lot of (ultimately productive) navel-gazing. I tried to read a second time, about ten years ago, but only got about a third of the way through. I was going through some hard times, and didn't want to read about people who were voluntarily seeking out poverty, which I desperately wanted to avoid. The main thing I got out of that second, partial re-reading was the eerieness of a scene--written, I guess, around 1950!--in which one character wraps a towel around his head and jokes about being "an Arab terrorist, come to blow up New York City"!
But Comrade Cookie's negative view of Kerouac's "grandiose navel-gazing" amused me because it was just the kind of thing, possibly verbatim, that the protagonist/narrator's Communist parents would say about his girlfriend's hippie-ish parents in Scott Spencer's novel ENDLESS LOVE. (As I recall, the Red Diaper Baby angle was downplayed in the Brooke Shields movie version.) I thought: "But of course."
"Kerouac is to literature what Miles Davis is to music. People rave about Kind of Blue, but there's dust on the dust cover...."
I must disagree about Miles Davis. I wore out 3 LP's of Kinda Blue and have bought at least 2 CD's of that classic recording, about which at least one good book book has been written. You had three , young jazz virtuossos on the same record (Miles, John Coltrane, Bill Evans-with Cannonball Adderly) playing on a planned, carefully recorded project, replete with classic compositions by Davis and Evans. Musicians have been inspired by KB ever since its release. i.e. the Allman Brothers listened to it as a group until they had internalized it.
On the other hand, I have to agree about Kerouac. I have reread OTR and it doesn't hold up very well to a second reading. The best parts are (unattributed) Neal Cassady quotes. I made the mistake of paying good money for Dharma Bums which was little better than a newspaper report from the Berkeley Beatnick/in-crowd scene.
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