The parting of the Gray Lady’s payveils reveals a bunch of articles about Jack Kerouac. Here are some of my favorites. A recent essay on a 1964 “great American pilgrimage on Kerouac’s ‘holy road’."

What I quickly learned was that buses were the way poor people traveled long distance, people who couldn’t afford planes, trains or cars. Many of my fellow passengers, and more and more the farther south I went, were African-American. Unpacking the single sentence in chapter two of On the Road recounting Kerouac’s first faltering steps, this is probably my favorite thing written about the book in the last ten years. In all probability, his journey began at the elevated train station at Liberty Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. There, according to Joe Cunningham, a subway historian, he would have boarded a train consisting of six old wooden cars and taken it to Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn. Ozone Park has largely forgotten Kerouac. “I never heard of him, but I went to school in Ecuador,” said Adriana Loga, 24, who then dialed her boss and handed over the phone. “You’re wasting your time,” the boss said. “No one there even understands what you’re talking about.” On Kerouac’s dénouement in Northport, Long Island, from 1958—1964: We used to wonder how he’d get so drunk on just a couple of bar drinks, until we found out he was taking swigs of his own bottle in the bathroom. Well, we ended that.

The long and winding ‘Road’

Here’s the published version: “My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”

In the scroll, the section runs four times longer and wraps with: “If these men stop the machine and come home - and get on their knees - and ask for forgiveness - and the women bless them - peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.”

“Holy moly, man,” said Canary. “That’s a whole different book.”

I felt that mapping Sal’s journey would provide new levels of understanding, for me and others, on Kerouac, his motivations, the motivations of his characters and other things about “On the Road.” For example, he talks about being stuck in Shelton, Nebraska. It’s one thing to read that particular passage, but another thing to put it in perspective with a map—to see just exactly how far away from everything Shelton, Nebraska really is and to realize how that would have affected Kerouac and Sal. World Hum interviews Michael Hess on his annotated Google Map of the first trip west in On the Road.

• Littourati
• Sal Paradise’s Journey Across America

Beat waves by Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News:

6,000 hours of lectures, performances and classes featuring some of the greats of American arts and literature, particularly the beat poets, have been recorded at Naropa over the past 30 years.

Those voices include writers Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Michael Ondaatje, Andrei Codrescu and Ken Kesey; cultural agitator Timothy Leary; musicians John Cage and Philip Glass; and spiritual leaders Ram Dass and Chogyum Trunpa Rinpoche.

Already, Naropa is setting up a listening station in its library, and by summer plans to have part of the collection available to the public on the Web. It is also producing a boxed set of four CDs - Taylor calls it a "virtual workshop" - with poets Diane DiPrima, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Waldman.

Monterey County Herald: Dharma Dumb: How four guys stumbled about while trying to conquer the Matterhorn. Why this is in the Sports section I can not tell you, but I’m glad that it is.

There's a thing there that's got all the outside and it's got the momentum and it's going to move and it's going to demand certain forms and it's totally not embodied at all. There's no material to it yet and you feel absolutely that you're about to embody that, whatever your material is. I think painters feel that too. I remember Philip Guston talking that way. In fact he and I used to talk about paint and words to the extent that we weren't talking about paint and words anymore, we were talking about art, I mean, making that thing where we use all whatever materials we've been given to make it with. I remember some nights talking with him where we felt like it's absolutely up there somewhere and it's not paint and it's not words.

LIFE Interview: Allen Ginsberg

Kerouac was all-American if anything. Neal Cassady was an all American kid, foot warts and all. But it really was Americana and Americanist, something in an older literary tradition that runs through Whitman and William Carlos Williams and Sherwood Anderson. There was that old Americanist tradition of recognition of the land and the people and the gawky awkward beauty of the individual eccentric citizen. Or as Kerouac said, "the old-time honesty of gamblers and straw hats." His 1959 [Playboy, June] article on "The Origins of the Beat Generation," that's his statement on what he intended, a kind of yea-saying Americana which was interpreted as some kind of negative complaining by the middle class who were themselves complaining. So yes, we were, or I was quite aware of the [cultural] impact. But so was Kerouac in "Origins of the Beat Generation" and in The Dharma Bums. He predicts a generation of long-haired kids with rucksacks. He predicts and asks for it.

“William Burroughs, author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night, talks to Don Swaim in 1984 about his drug addiction, living in Tangiers, working as an exterminator, and his memories of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.” [link]

“Kerouac reminds us how hard this form really is. Only a couple of dozen of the hundreds of haiku in this collection really work.” Jack Kerouac’s Haiku.

If you're actually able to handle the manuscript, you have a kind of contact with the author that you otherwise wouldn't get. At the risk of sounding too obscure, the most advanced physics teaches us that the moment you come into contact with something, it is part of you and you are part of it forever.

"There some challenges at Jack Kerouac Park, where if you're an advanced skateboarder, there's a challenge in the grinding and things," said Thomas Bellegarde, director of the city's Parks Department. "The skateboard parks we have are for the learner and the inexperienced person."

"We've had some odd occurrences in the store," said Haslam's co-owner Ray Hinst. "The temperature seems to change in certain spots, and books have flown off the shelves." Hinst said a psychic recently went through the store with "little sensing things." "She concluded spirits were around and one was Kerouac. He was restless . . . but comfortable."

We bent down and began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, and beyond them the brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight to the brown arroyo foothills and then the snow-capped Sierras in the morning air. This was so much better than washing dishes South Main Street. But I knew nothing about picking cotton. I spent too much time disengaging the white ball from crackly bed; the others did it in one flick. Moreover, fingertips began to bleed; I needed gloves, or more expeience. There was an old Negro couple in the field with They picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience the grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; the moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bag increased. My back began to ache. But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth. If I felt like resting I did, my face on the pillow of brown moist earth. Birds an accompaniment. I thought I had found my life's work.

Visible Darkness is down on Kerouac for all the wrong reasons. Kerouac’s contribution to literature was an unimaginable honesty. The trouble is most people simply aren’t interesting enough to create a masterpiece out of an honest accounting of their lives. His contribution to humanity, however, was much greater than his contribution to literature – the revelation of his tragic spiritual journey, and through it, his compassionate soul.

The Eye Begins to See “will be spending the week discussing Kerouac’s On the Road. We’re starting today with a background on Kerouac and the Beat Movement.” Woohoo!

Creator Michael Hoerman calls this a “short video-poem” of Jack Kerouac Park in Lowell Massachussetts.

Jack, or "Ti Jean" ("Little John"), as he was known, was born on March 12, 1922, at 9 Lupine Road, in the upstairs apartment of a shabby duplex building in a Lowell slum called Centralville. He was delivered at home by Dr. Victor Rochette, whom Kerouac later described as a lonely, desolate man, unwanted and unloved. According to a neighbor, Reginald Ouellette, Dr. Rochette's wife had died in childbirth and he'd never remarried, which struck Jack, who grew up in a close-knit family that spoiled him, as tragic. In a December 28, 1950, letter to Cassady, Kerouac disclosed that his birth occurred at 5 P.M. and that Gabrielle later gave him a blow-by-blow account of his delivery. As Jack was born, his mother could hear Pawtucket Falls a mile away, crashing into the Merrimack River, heavy with spring-thaw snow and ice. Her lurid description of the way he was forcibly dragged from her body, and then yelled at and spanked into life, led to his belief that birth was the beginning of the tragedy of consciousness, the dance of life that ends in death. The processes of nature, which most writers extol as symbols of renewal and eternal life, were always seen darkly by Kerouac.

What are we to make of the exclusive publication of an early Kerouac novella fueling the launch of a new proprietary Windows-only ebook reader? Tell you what, they’ve already got my $3.95 – but I’ll be ripping the text from that file faster than you can say “the one thing we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the rememberance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced at death,” even if I have to print, scan, and OCR the fucker. Email me if you want a copy.

Literary Kicks' Beat News page has been updated with word of a handful of new books including another collection of Kerouac’s letters and a book about the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris. Also check out another beat news page at the second best Beat Generation site on the web.