Tagged with Jack Kerouac

Ever since On the Road was published, sporadic attempts to bring it to the screen have come to nothing. Hollywood producers evidently saw the book's lack of a storyline with a limiting three-act structure as a drawback. By the time Jack wrote On the Road in 1951, after five years of false starts, he was already in rebellion against conventional storytelling. (more)

On October 7, 1951, Jack went to Birdland to hear the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz.  The music sounded "so profoundly interior" to Jack that he was sure very few people would understand it. In fact, he compared Konitz's extended phrases to the sentences he was writing lately.  Jack saw that he and the musician were essentially doing the same thing. (more)

Jack Kerouac called from a phone booth while his friends Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky anxiously paced outside. "Hello, I'd like to meet with Dr. Suzuki . . . Right NOW!" The scholar's secretary told him to be there in a half hour. Elated, the three friends skipped down First Avenue to hail a cab. (more)

Jack Kerouac's experiments with mescaline, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms influenced his 1962 novel Big Sur, just as earlier trials with peyote shaped his trademark  "spontaneous prose" style. So why does the public still think he scorned psychedelics? (more)

"Howl" is about family, friends, lovers, nations that go mad, or die, or try to.  Allen lost his mother, but found Jack Kerouac and friends. The magnitude of the loss meant that the find couldn't simply be an inspired group of intimates; it had to give birth to something, it had to change the world.  In a sense, it did. (more)

Over the last decade the cultural figure known as the “hipster” has increasingly turned into a target of scorn, despite an apparent disagreement over what the term means and to whom it refers. This semi-mythological character reveals our own compliance with barbaric totalitarianism, a fault we’ve been projecting onto others. (more)