Other Birthdays II this month . . . . Carolyn Cassady

Carolyn Cassady was born the 28th April in 1923. Much more than just Neal Cassady’s wife, Carolyn was featured heavily in Jack Kerouac’s work but was also a writer in her own right. Cassady authored two memoirs: Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal (published in 1976) and Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg (published in 1996). 

Cassady also appears in John Clellon Holmes' novel “Go,” and was portrayed by Kirsten Dunst in the 2012 adaptation of On The Road.

April 28, 1923 – September 20, 2013

More from Elliot Erwitt | ‘Jack Kerouac’ 1953

After reporting the death of Elliot Erwitt it is amazing how many classic brilliant shots have shown up and nudged me into remembering him fondly when we met. Here another from the year I was born and boy what a shot; a seminal portrait of a favourite author

Elliott Erwitt Jack Kerouac, New York City 1953

“Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?” 

Jack Kerouac

 

Hey, JACK KEROUAC! [spoken word for a Sunday] - Zerosounds

Jack Kerouac reads on The Beat Generation [1960] - Zerosounds

Zero G says: 

Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation is the third and final spoken word album by the American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, released in January 1960 on Verve Records. The album was recorded during 1959, prior to the publication of Kerouac's sixth novel, Doctor Sax.

"Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation" was the culmination of the author's short-lived recording career, a solo performance that transcends poetry and music -- it's literally spoken jazz, the artist improvising freely on the printed text of his own work in front of him.

Produced by Bill Randle, it was Kerouac's most musical performance, despite the fact that the recording contained only his voice and no accompaniment, using his voice and language the way a saxophonist might improvise on a particular melodic line or riff. He's spellbinding throughout, intense, focused, and even subtly changing voices with the work itself. 

Kerouac - Blues & Haikus 1959 - Zerosounds

Zero G says:

Blues and Haikus is the American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac's second album and was released in 1959. On the album, Kerouac's poetry readings are accompanied by jazz saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims.

The art-soaked, kicks-filled life of Jack Kerouac produced three records, and the second one Blues and Haikus found him in the studio with post-bop saxophone mainstays Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. While the record only sporadically attains the heights of its rather lofty ambitions, it remains a fascinating document, for it illuminates Kerouac as an artist of beautiful if problematic vision, vindicates Cohn and Sims as a pair of true pros, and brings great perspective to the mindset and milieu of the ‘50s American hipster.            

In the spring of 1958, just a few weeks after cutting "Poetry for the Beat Generation", producer Bob Thiele suggested making a second album - quite a daring notion, considering that the first album would prove so controversial that it wouldn't reach the public for a year - and Jack Kerouac agreed. Instead of pianist Steve Allen, however, Kerouac insisted that he be accompanied this time by two good friends, tenor saxmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. With Cohn doubling on piano, the resulting "Blues and Haikus" is a stunning duet between speaker and saxmen, working spontaneously in this peculiar mix of jazz and voice, in which the saxmen do get their solo spots around Kerouac's work. There's much more of a sense on this album of a conscious interaction here between Kerouac and his accompanists, and the album is more arch but also more intense and more imposing than its predecessor.

Tracklist:

A1: American Haikus (10:03) 

A2: Hard Hearted Old Farmer (2:17)

A3: The Last Hotel & Some Of Dharma (3:52)

B1: Poems from the unpublihsed "Book of Blues" (14:10)

JACK KEROUAC on THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW with Steve Allen on piano 1959 |ZeroSounds

This is fun and right for a Sunday of contemplation somehow and the Zen beat readings of the famous session of live broadcasts that Kerouac undertook with Steve Allen on piano on his show  

Jack Kerouac & Steve Allen - Poetry for The Beat Generation - ZeroSounds

Jack Kerouac by Elliott Erwitt

Hey, Jack Kerouac!

As the post with the biggest numbers of 'hits' is a photographic one [Gary Winogrand - see below] so here's a masterwork by one I have actually met. I was fortunate enough to have been able to promote certain artists and photographers when the manager of BH Blackwell's Art & Poster Shop these included Elliott Erwitt, Eve Arnold, Robert Doisneau, and relationships with artist the like of the then Ruskin Master, Stephen Farthing, the lovely David Mach, Gilbert & George (who came twice so that they ended up calling me Mr Andy!) to name but a few. 

 Jack Kerouac, New York City, 1953. Elliott Erwitt. [Silver Gelatin print.]

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. 

~ Jack Kerouac.

Top posts visited

10,000 Maniacs  . . . . . of course! 

Jack with Steve Allen

KEROUAC's BIRTHDAY

“I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written ‘On the Road,’ The Doors would never have existed.” - Ray Manzarek

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being. 

Jack Kerouac 1922-1969

l-r Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg off in the distance and a fully dressed William S Burroughs in Tangiers

DREAMS

KEROUAC/ISHIGURO

I had been thinking about the dream work we did at art college and how much Jack Kerouac's 'Book Of Dreams' affected me at the time that I posted it on Facebook to bid my fellow friends a 'good night'. 
A group of fellow students and I set up a group to meet in the evenings to discuss poetry and then an off shoot become an interest in dream recall. You can (one can) train one self to recall dreams with very little effort something akin to setting one's body clock or circadian rhythms to awake at a set time which presumably can interrupt the last cycle of REM sleep when dreams occur and bring forth the most recent dream landscape. I believe I got this technique directly from Kerouac's book. 

We quickly became quite adept at this and wrote down our dreams then shared them at several meetings. I think I lost enthusiasm when I realised a fellow student's dreams would always be somewhat more exotic than my own more mundane dreams which consisted of landscape dreams and timeless long sequences featuring events and places where nothing much happened. My fellow student, the extraordinary and wonderful Carol Jones who went on to work in Arts Administration I believe, always seem to have incredibly vivid surreal dreams that involved on one occasion as I recall legions of flamingos in wellingtons marching down the street where she lived. I never forgot that image as mine sank into mundanity!

The City Lights cover of Kerouac's 'Book of Dreams'

Then suddenly stumbled across this

Kazuo Ishiguro - “Dream Techniques”

1. Unwarranted Emotion

2. Unwarranted Relationship

3. Delayed realization (ENTER/EXIT)

4. Odd postures—figurative postures + escaped metaphors

5. Placing

6. Weird Venues

7. Extended, tangential monologues

8. Distorted time frame

9. Unwarranted recognition of place

10. Private enclaves

11. Unwarranted familiarity with situation (or person or place)

12. Characters from foreign contexts

13. Characters continuing under different surfaces

14. Distorted Logistics

15. Transmuting Narrator

16. Partial invisibility (And odd witnessing)

17. Backward projection of Intentions

18. Bleeding with Memory

19. BACKWARD projection of Judgment

20. Restricted Witnessing

21. Tunnel Memory

22. The Dim Torch Narrative Mode

23. Crowds—Unwarranted Uniformity

24. Robert Altman [illegible]

25. (“More than I expected”) Unwarranted Expectation

26. MIXED PERSONALITY

A favourite Kerouac book I read at college whilst at Leicester's Fine Art Dept.  Earlier I had started reading Kerouac whilst studying GCE's at Witney Tech College not starting out, as so many must have done before me, with 'On The Road' but with 'Lonesome Traveller' and 'Dharma Bums' but this edition a City Lights special as I recall is especially important to me [I still have it somewhere and at the time it was considered a rarity over here in the UK) and it helped me start the Dream Club at Fine Art school . . . . several students and a lecturer (printmaker Roy Bizley as memory serves, who I liked enormously) met to discuss dreams, poetry and so on and we explored the idea that you can train yourself to remember ones dreams by the technique I think divulged therein or certainly that Jack used. We got pretty good at improving our recall and wrote certain dreams down and then read them to each other . . . . . my favourites from this period were from fellow student the wonderful Carol Jones who went on to successful administration in the arts at Nottingham I think. Her dreams were amongst the most vivid I had ever heard of and invariably made us all howl with laughter! She was a good friend and I miss her. My dreams at the time and frankly now are as dull as wallpaper by comparison but that's another story. Wherever she is I wish her well.

“I’m a lonely independent man with no ties, no hopes, bleak tricks to make a living, full of death, indecision, sedentary laziness and worst of allI don’t know why I’m on earth and what I should do to satisfy not any craving inside myself but some kind of craving in the sky, the lostcloud sky.”

Jack Kerouac, Book of Dreams, 1961

Yesterday was Jack's birthday! He would have been 96!

“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.”

Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life but that great consciousness of life.”

Jack Kerouac ( in a journal entry dated November 1951

HEY, JACK KEROUAC!

“I would say he [Jack Kerouac]  offered his heart to the United States and the United States rejected his heart. And he realized what suffering the United States was in for, and so the tragedy of America, as (Walt) Whitman had seen the tragedy of the United States. "When the singer of the nation finds that the nation has sickened, what happens to the singer of the nation?” This is Gregory Corso’s question. 

And America, by his day, was sick. Militarily sick. Military-Industrial-Complex had taken over. Hard-heartedness had taken over. Everything that as a Canuck-peasant Kerouac hated had taken over - the mechanization, the impersonality, the homogenization, the money-grabbing, the disrespect for person - that had all taken over. And vast wars - and the attack on the provincial in the wars.  

So I would say America broke his heart.“

“And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.

—	Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

Writer's Almanac tells us:

Today is the birthday of novelist Jack Kerouac , born in Lowell, Massachusetts (1922), to parents who were French-speaking Québécois. He grew up speaking French, and didn't start learning English until grade school.

He was a track and football star in high school, and he got a football scholarship to Columbia in New York, where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Jack Kerouac idolized Neal Cassady, and he typed the story of their cross-country adventures together on a single scroll of paper, 120 feet long, which was published in 1957 as On the Road. He depicts Neal Cassady - whom he calls Dean Moriarty - as a charismatic bad boy American hero. Kerouac took a backpacking trip with another friend whom he idolized, the poet Gary Snyder, and he turned Snyder into the character Jaffy Ryder and made him the hero of The Dharma Bums (1958).

From On the Road:

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds."

'Lonesome Traveller' was the first Kerouac I read and I read a few before getting round to 'On The Road'. As a youngster they meant a great deal to me and I was hitchhiking all over the country then without a penny in my pocket usually, finding memories of traipsing the back roads to get to a major road to get to cities I remember at night and have no idea where they were.  Jack accompanied me then in my wandering spirit . . . . . Later on I read pretty much everything by him including more rarefied titles like 'Book of Dreams' which I used in a poetry group at college to recall our dreams and write them down. He meant a great deal to me . . . . . . 

'Jack Kerouac' - Liquitex & ceiling paint on Canvas [3' x 4'] 1978 by A.Swapp (destroyed)