Kerouac times

2007 was a very good year for Kerouaciana. Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the publication of his break-through novel On the Road, but it was also a year marked by many new scholarly initiatives and publications, media products and artistic productions of various kinds, and not least a full blossoming of Internet attention to the old King of the Beats.

Ever since an American teaching assistant named Norman decided not to lecture on Shakespeare but to have his students at Aalborg U. read Kerouac instead, I've personally been hooked on the spontaneous bop prosody of Jack. Like most migrant workers Norm didn't hang around very long, but I still owe him a good deal of gratitude for a reading list including not only two Kerouac novels, On the Road and Dharma Bums, but also Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller...

This semester I am offering an elective course at Aalborg U. called "The Beat Generation Revisited". You are all cordially invited to tag along. The course has its own website, and I have collated links to some of my many Beat Generation writings at the bottom of the page. The course itself is quite basic in that we only use one reader, Ann Charter's Portable Beat Reader, which has all the essentials but naturally mostly in excerpts. But in accordance with the Aalborg U. project based learning model, I hope that students will spend the latter half of the coming semester writing projects on Beat related topics.

One obvious project would be to look at the spate of publications that came out last year, the jewel of which has to be The Original Scroll version of On the Road. Unfortunately Penguin didn't actually publish the legendary manuscript in scroll form, so what we get is still a square traditional book, and not a neat little roll of teletype paper...

For scroll fetishists I recommend this little article and the video pasted below...




What is good about the new edition is that not only are there very comprehensive introductiory essays (100 pp.), but the text itself has all the real names of the cast of characters: Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Bill Burroughs etc., instead of the rather silly pseudonyms Kerouac was forced to use in the original published version (Dean Moriarty?!?). Furthermore we get a more breathless punctuation style in this version which emphasizes the speed of Kerouac's prose style (not unrelated to the speed he reportedly ingested while typing the scroll), and we also get a version that is not edited by Malcolm Cowley who, without consulting Kerouac, made some cuts in the manuscript in the original Viking Press 1957 edition.

To supplement the reading of the scroll version, I recommend that one consults Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 which covers the period of composition of Kerouac's first novel The Town and the City and of On the Road. I am not too keen on the editing done by Douglas Brinkley for this edition, but I suppose he did what he could with the budget and time allocated to the project. What I am missing is more of the paratext (doodles, drawings, marginalia) Kerouac adorned his notebooks with, and actual plates reproducing more of the notebook pages (the ones that are there are tantalizing). That said, I respect Brinkley for the archival work he has done and for the working out of what Kerouac actually scrawled in the apparently increasingly illegible notebooks. The problem is also that there are so many other notebooks left behind by Kerouac that this publication only makes a small dent in the available stuff.

The two volumes of Kerouac's letters, edited by Charters are also invaluable companions to a new reading of On the Road. Volume 1 covers 1940 to 1956 (and thus the composition of the novel), but you'd also want vol. 2 for references to the battle of getting On the Road published in the first place.

Finally, I've enjoyed watching What Happened to Kerouac, a mid-1980s documentary which finally came out on DVD in 2003, as a companion piece to going on the road again with Jack. In this film all Kerouac's friends, lovers, wives and literary peers speak about aspects of remembering 'Memory Babe' as Kerouac dubbed himself. Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke and Burroughs are only some of the colourful male figures we meet in the film, but Edie Kerouac Parker, Carolyn Cassidy, Ann Charters, Diane Di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Jan Kerouac and other women voices supply a much more provocative take on Kerouac (and his mother!)

The course will end with a look at some of the many Internet sites celebrating the Beat/Kerouac legacy. First and foremost among these is Levi Asher's Literary Kicks, but did you know about the Kerouac House project in Florida with its rotation of writers-in-residence? Or Beat Angel - the independent fim based on a play titled Kerouac: The Essence of Jack? Or the French project, Memory Babe: A Tribute to Kerouac, that you can still participate in?

The Beat goes on...