Kerouac Speaks

The other day I was reading a few letters from Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1957 - 1969. Kerouac was a voracious letter writer and kept meticulous records, something akin to modern day GMail archiving all the emails you write (so be careful, they could end up in a book someday).

Anyway, it just so happened I stumbled upon this picture of Kerouac at the center of attention. It’s reminiscent of a speaking gig he did in December 1958 at New York’s Village Vanguard that I was reading about when I found this pic.

This picture really has a strong sense of place for me; a smoky room, idle chatter and clinking-glass background noise… and Jack slightly slurring his words in a drunk tirade.

Kerouac, in his Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, set down the following 30 essentials regarding his free-flowing spontaneous prose method:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven