Monk

One of the many surprises tucked away in the vast Jack Kerouac Archive at the New York Public Library is the tiny pocket notebook in which Kerouac reacted in the fall of 1947 to a conversation he'd just had with his mother. She had been horrified by a story in her morning paper about bands of abandoned children living in caves in a remote part of Italy, who were ravaging the countryside in their search for food and having sex and babies as early as 13. Jack's mother wanted the Pope to step right in and put a stop to this. Her son wrote in his notebook: "I want to go there."

-- Joyce Johnson at Huffington Post

Joyce Johnson is also the one with the new biography on Kerouac, and in this article, she gives us a taste of how ambivalent and uncertain Keruouac was about a movement, the Beat Generation, that he ostensibly originated.

Darling, your father is going to be famous someday. People will say his books are dirty, but they are truthful books because people in real life use dirty words. I'll never forget my mother telling me this. Her tone was earnest and it scared me. I must have been 8 or 9. My heart was heavy with this news, so I shared it with a couple of my friends at school, My dad is going to be famous for writing dirty books!

-- Nanette Vonnegut

In 1979 about 100 people gathered at the Gramercy Park Hotel for the inaugural gathering of the Jane Austen Society of North America, dressed in a style The New Yorker summed up as “dinner dresses, subdued-looking jewelry, comfortable-looking jackets.”

When the society took its annual meeting to the Marriott in Downtown Brooklyn last weekend for a kind of homecoming, things were rather different. Attendance was over 700, the event lasted three days, and the daytime dress code for many ran to pale Regency dresses, demure bonnets and straw baskets to hold anything that wouldn’t fit into a period-correct reticule.

“This is a place where people can let their Jane Austen freak flag fly,” said Julia Matson of Minneapolis, the creator of an Austen-themed tea line.

-- JENNIFER SCHUESSLER at The New York Times

I just liked that last line. I have only read "Pride and Prejudice" and I did not become a fan. I have tended to think of Jane Austen as being a softer Charles Dickens, perhaps a Charles Dickens for girls and women, as Dickens was known not to be very good on his women characters, apparently being rather tone-deaf on the feminine cast of mind and heart.

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote. By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”

-- Walt Whitman

Well, I doubt that such writing would make for a good novel, but it may serve for a good diary, or maybe for blog posts.

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”

-- Virginia Woolf

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, and enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.”

-- Vladimir Nabokov, "Lectures on Literature"

And what can be more enchanting than stories about banging young girls?

“It’s not really that David [Foster Wallace] had any answers for people. But he never stops taking his life seriously and he never stops taking the reader’s life seriously. And I think that’s the connection: you never stop mattering to him and he never stops mattering to himself.”

-- D. T. Max at The Millions Millions

Maybe that was part of the problem. You cannot take life that seriously all the time. It will drive you crazy and crush your spirit.

“To bring you out of that purposelessness –– surely that is a great thing, even if you move but an inch from yourselves…”

-- Theodore Roethke, "On Poetry and Craft"

Alas, I cannot feel any of that sense of artful specialness in the words that I list on the page, but must crawl my inch in the enjoyment of the works of genius that have fallen on our laps.

It is reported that rare book collectors have uncovered Lord Byron's copy of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". How sweet! I wonder what took so long. Somebody finally decided to look inside that closed box of Byron's that was kept lying around but nobody could be arsed to open?

(Source: The Millions Millions)