Posts tagged ‘Kerouac’

February 3rd, 2012

Kerouac at the Super Bowl in Spirit, Reports boston.com

by PaulM

Kerouac played football like he wrote, with a lot of power and invention. He was an athlete at the typewriter who could compose with speed and accuracy. It is fascinating to see how he keeps popping up in the news stream. Today, boston.com and the Bos. Globe  include an arts note among the Super Bowl news from Indianapolis—the legendary scroll typescript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” is featured in a big museum display in the city along with other cultural treasures from the collection of Colts owner Jim Irsay. The scroll photo illustrates the news note. Read about it here.

Jack Kerouac in the 1938 Lowell-Lawrence football game.

 

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January 30th, 2012

‘Variety’ Writer Tweets About ‘On the Road’ Film

by PaulM

Jerry Cimino of the Beat Museum in San Francisco has an intriguing segment in his latest newsletter, which I’m reproducing in full because the effect would be lost in paraphrasing. So, courtesy of www.kerouac.com, here’s news about the now-completed “On the Road” film that is expected to premiere in France this spring. The tweets must be read from the bottom up.

In related news, a reporter from Radio France, the national public radio network, will be in Lowell tomorrow as a guest of the Greater Merrimack Valley Convention and Visitor Bureau to prepare a story about Kerouac and Lowell in connection with the film’s release in Europe.

B).  Variety Says On The Road is Gonna Be Great


JOSH DICKEY WRITES FOR VARIETY and he was at the Sundance Film Festival last week and as he was
boarding the plane for his flight back to LA he sent out the following excited five tweets on Twitter.  We copied them below and you need to read them from the bottom up:

27 Jan  Josh Dickey @Variety_JLD
        •       Reply
Retweet Favorite ·
And that’s all I know. (At least, that’s all I can tell you!) Hope it’s new to somebody; I don’t follow as close as some of you guys.

27 Jan  Josh Dickey @Variety_JLD
        •       Reply Retweet
Favorite ·
There were no problems w/ film; just awaiting the right moment to show & actively start seeking distribution.

27 Jan  Josh Dickey
@Variety_JLD
        •       Reply Retweet Favorite ·
… it would not be a stretch to see it open Cannes. Producers are thrilled with the result & eager to at least have it there. More …

27 Jan  Josh Dickey
@Variety_JLD
        •       Reply Retweet Favorite ·
OTR is finished. Took 1 year to edit, and is very, very good. According to a discerning and in-the-know viewer, it’s so good that …

27 Jan  Josh Dickey
@Variety_JLD
        •       Reply Retweet Favorite ·
ON THE ROAD fans, I have some cool news to share with you. Just got to the airport so stand by…
—————–

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January 25th, 2012

Gloucester Writers Center Celebrates 90 Years of Kerouac

by PaulM

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January 12th, 2012

Kerouac’s Typewriter at Nat’l Park Makes News

by PaulM

Read Rita Savard’s fine article about typewriters in our culture and, specifically, Jack Kerouac’s typewriter at the National Park’s Mogan Cultural Center museum exhibit about the immigrant history of Lowell. Filmmakers were in the city yesterday documenting the old Underwood typewriter on display with one of Kerouac’s backpacks on the first floor of the Mogan Center. See the article here, and get the Sun if you want more.

The typewriter at the Mogan Center was donated by Kerouac’s first wife, Edith Parker, now deceased. From her we learned that Kerouac used the typewriter when he was living with her and her family in Michigan after they were married in 1944. He was there only a short time. The machine is an Underwood portable, but not the Underwood referenced in the title of the book of early writings that I edited, “Atop an Underwood.” That machine was a rented typewriter that he used in an apartment that he rented in Hartford, Conn., when he was there in the fall of 1941. That’s the source of the “Atop an Underwood” title—he blasted out stories, poems, prose sketches, and other compositions in his room after coming home from a part-time job at a gas station. He writes about that episode in his life in “Vanity of Duluoz,” the novel he wrote most of on Sanders Avenue in the Highlands, when he lived in Lowell in 1967-68 with his wife of the time Stella Sampas Kerouac. Stella donated the green canvas backpack and camping materials that are on display with the typewriter at the Mogan Center. The actual backpack and its contents are described in Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur.” The Kerouac display case was included in the “Immigrants” exhibit when the Mogan Center opened in 1989, not only because they are Kerouac actifacts but also because they fit in with the other images and objects representing the social history of people from the many different ethnic groups who made Lowell their home.

See a photograph of the typewriter by Lorianne DeSabato on her Flickr site.

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January 6th, 2012

‘On the Road’ Film Publicity Poster

by PaulM

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January 5th, 2012

‘On the Road’ Movie to Be Released in France in May

by PaulM

Thanks to the Beat Museum in San Francisco and its website www.kerouac.com, here’s news about a film release date for the movie version of Jack Kerouac’s legendary novel “On the Road.” The cast includes Amy Adams, who starred in “The Fighter” and Viggo Mortensen of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Here’s the notice from the Beat Museum in quotes:

1).  MARK MAY 23, 2012 ON YOUR CALENDAR
The internet websites are abuzz with
the news that came via a tweet yesterday from the French Film Production Company
MK2.  They announced the French Release of OTR the movie will be May 23rd.  Now,
we have no inside info but we can read a calendar as well as anyone and the
Cannes Film Festival is May 16 – May 27.  Hmmm.  And Walter Salles has a long
history at Cannes with a number of his films as well as an OTR trailer at the
2011 festival.  Double hmmmm.  And MK2 is a French company.  Triple
hmmmmm.

Here’s a link to more info.

 

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December 1st, 2011

Jack Kerouac Baseball Card, Manager, Pittsburgh Plymouths

by PaulM

Another twist on the Kerouac thing. Read about this designer, Gary Joseph Cieradkowski, and what he writes about Kerouac and baseball.

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November 30th, 2011

Of Note: Kerouac on New Yorker Cover, Dec. 5

by PaulM

This version is small, but you get the picture for the new issue of The New Yorker, Dec. 5, whose cover illustration titled “Black Friday” by Daniel Clowes depicts an an average-looking man entering a shop selling books and literary paraphernalia, including in the lower left section a row of four hats emblazoned with the names of authors: Tolstoy, Kerouac, Poe, Bronte. Other writers shown prominently in the shop scene are Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wolff, and James Joyce (canvas bag), Mark Twain and Shakespeare (bobbleheads), and Emily Dickinson (lunch box).

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November 25th, 2011

Kerouac’s Early Novel Published in U.K.

by PaulM

The Sea Is My Brother by Jack Kerouac

The Daily Mail in the UK and many other media outlets worldwide are reporting on the publication of what is considered Jack Kerouac’s first novel, “The Sea Is My Brother,” written when he was about 20 years old.  The book is being published first in the UK by Penguin, and Harper reportedly has the U.S. rights. The editor is Dawn Ward, a professor at Becker College in Worcester, Mass. According to the Daily Mail:

Published for the first time, the novel betrays the faults of inexperience (lack of narrative shape and focus, an abrupt ending, dozens of redundant synonyms for ‘said’). But these are outweighed by its virtues – the vitality of its dialogue, the freshness and power of its descriptions, whether of cheap saloons, cramped cabins or sunrise at sea, a social concern rarely found in American fiction since Dos Passos.

Here’s the coverage in The Guardian of the UK.

And here’s the BBC coverage.

Here’s The Metro in London.

Here’s the Edinburgh Evening News in Scotland.

The novel was excerpted in 1999 in the collection of the author’s early writing that I edited, “Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings” by Jack Kerouac (Viking/Penguin). “Atop” has an 18-page selection from “The Sea Is My Brother,” with excepts showing the arc of the whole story. There are elements of the narrative that prefigure Kerouac’s legendary novel “On the Road,” as two main characters, Wesley Martin and Bill Everhart, with shades of the worldly Dean Moriarity and more reflective observer Sal Paradise, head off for an adventure at sea instead of on the highways.

 

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October 26th, 2011

from ‘Old Love-Light’ by Jack Kerouac, Age 19

by PaulM

This is an excerpt from a poetic sketch titled “Old Love-Light” by nineteen-year-old Jack Kerouac. October was his favorite month. In “On the Road,” he wrote: “In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall is was Kansas.  The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”—PM

.

. . .

It was astonishing to read

what I read about October

the following day. I thought

I had it all figured out—

I thought the lonely little

houses, lost in the middle

of great tawny grass,

shaggy copper skies and

mottled orange forests, were

full of fine humanity that

I was missing. Instead, the

writer informed me that

it was chlorophyll that

colored the leaves. I

thought I had all the

significance of October

under my hat & pasted.

I thought that October

was a tangible being,

with a voice. The

writer insisted it was

the growth of corky cells

around the stem of the

leaf. The writer also

said that to consider

October sad is to be

a melancholy Tennysonian.

October is not sad, he

said, October is falling

leaves. October comes

between Sept. & Nov. I

was amazed by these facts,

especially about the

Tennysonian melancholia. I

always thought October was

a kind of old Love-light.

.

—Jack Kerouac, 1941 (c) 1999, from “Old Love-Light”

in ”Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings” by Jack Kerouac

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