This just popped up on the radar: a new Kerouac documentary produced by Jim Sampas et al. 

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti’s cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. The story unfolds in several synchronous ways: through the narrative arc of Kerouac’s prose, told in voice-over by actor and Kerouac interpreter, John Ventimiglia (of HBO’s The Sopranos); through first-hand accounts and recollections of Kerouac’s contemporaries, whom many of the characters in the book are based on such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson and Michael McClure; by the interpretations and reflections of writers, poets, actors and musicians who have been deeply influenced by Kerouac’s unique gifts like Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, Robert Hunter, Patti Smith, Aram Saroyan, Donal Logue and S.E. Hinton; and by stunning, High Definition visual imagery set to original music composed and performed by recording artist, Jay Farrar of Son Volt, with additional performance by Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie.

current mood: exhausted

First recording of Allen Ginsberg reading poem 'Howl' found at Oregon college  By: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS PORTLAND, Ore.

- What is believed to be the first recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his iconic Beat poem "Howl" has been found at the library of a private Oregon college. For years, it has been thought the first recording of Ginsberg reading "Howl" was on March 18, 1956, at a performance in Berkeley, Calif. But researcher John Suiter has found a recording at Portland's Reed College that predates that by a month, The Oregonian newspaper reports. Suiter was at the college library in May to research a biography of Gary Snyder, a poet who grew up in Portland, graduated from Reed and was a friend of Ginsberg. On Feb. 13, 1956, Snyder and Ginsberg read to about 20 people at Reed, and on Feb. 14, they gave another reading that was recorded on tape. At both readings, Ginsberg read a version of "Howl," a few months before publication of the poem that was to make him famous. At Reed's library, a special collections assistant brought Suiter a box marked "Snyder Ginsberg 1956." In that box he found a 35-minute tape of Ginsberg reading the first section of "Howl" and seven other poems. "It was completely serendipitous," Suiter said. "I had no idea there was a tape." Reed has put the recording of "Howl" and the other poems on its website (www.reed.edu) but it won't be accessible until Friday, when the issue of Reed magazine with Suiter's article is published. "Howl," which was the subject of a landmark obscenity trial after its publication, has sold more than one million copies over the last five decades.

current mood: contemplative

Our worldview is largely a function of our location. The range of what we can experience and imagine is bounded by the culture that spawned us, and the place that we hold within it. Transcending locality is key to comprehending quantum consciousness.

current mood: contemplative

On the Road Again Date: April 9, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Ann Douglas;

Lead:

THE PORTABLE JACK KEROUAC Edited by Ann Charters. 625 pp. New York: Viking. $27.95. JACK KEROUAC: SELECTED LETTERS, 1940-1956 Edited by Ann Charters. 629 pp. New York: Viking. $29.95.
Text:

IS Jack Kerouac this country's most important critically unrecognized modern writer? He now is remembered (if at all) as, at best, a one-book wonder, the author of the novel "On the Road" -- the so-called "King of the Beats," a faintly ridiculous proponent of masculine irresponsibility whose ill-disciplined style mirrored the sad faults of the man. But Kerouac's work represents the most extensive experiment in language and literary form undertaken by an American writer of his generation. "On the Road" is only one of about a dozen major novels from his hand, all carefully designed to form a vast chronicle of American life in the mid-20th century.

The publication of "The Portable Jack Kerouac" (along with a selection of his letters) may serve to demonstrate Kerouac's achievement. This artfully chosen anthology makes clear, as perhaps only the anthology form can do, that Kerouac was a stylistic innovator whose work, as he put it, "comprises one vast book." In that regard it bears comparison with the publication in 1946 of "The Portable William Faulkner," edited by Malcolm Cowley, the book that permanently established Faulkner's reputation. Cowley a few years later became a qualified but real supporter of Kerouac's work; he persuaded Viking to publish "On the Road" and served -- not always to the author's satisfaction -- as its editor.

Kerouac's first, relatively conventional novel, "The Town and the City," won modest critical success upon its publication in 1950. "On the Road" rocketed him to notoriety seven years later. In The New York Times, Gilbert Millstein hailed the novel as "an authentic work of art . . . the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."

His was a lone voice. Over the next decade, Kerouac's work was greeted by a barrage of incomprehension and vilification almost unparalleled in American letters. Kerouac, a self-designated "strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic," brought pacifist, celebratory and spiritual connotations to the label "Beat." It really meant "beatific," he explained; he was waiting, he told interviewers, for "God to show His face." Few listened. Critics attacked him as untalented, anti-intellectual, un-American, an apostle of mindless violence. Although "On the Road" appeared briefly on the best-seller list, none of his subsequent books enjoyed wide sales.

Kerouac's esthetic philosophy invited attack. He claimed that he wrote "On the Road" in a three-week adrenaline rush of inspiration; he insisted on "spontaneous prose"; he refused to revise. His stance was deceptive: although he had not exactly revised "On the Road," he had written it in three or four different forms, and he never slighted hard work or discipline. Rather, he believed that, like the jazz musicians and athletes he idolized, a writer must stake everything on the moment of performance. To Kerouac's way of thinking, a writer should be no more able to redo his work than a quarterback is to revise his last pass or a bop saxophonist is to delete his last solo. Each performance was a rehearsal for the next. Such opinions inspired Truman Capote's famous quip that Kerouac's fiction was not writing but typing.

Kerouac died in 1969, at the age of 47. He went to his grave believing that he had inherited what he once described in a letter to Neal Cassady as "the curse of Melville" -- the fate of a writer without an audience. Although Kerouac does not lack for readers and enthusiasts -- virtually all of his books are in print and Francis Ford Coppola is preparing a film version of "On the Road" -- he has been paid scant attention by most critics and academic departments of literature.

Ann Charters, the editor of "The Portable Jack Kerouac" and "Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956," has been a scholar of Kerouac and the Beats for nearly 30 years. She visited Kerouac in 1966 while preparing a bibliography of his work ("I've kept the neatest records you ever saw," Kerouac told her). Ms. Charters, who teaches English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, wrote his first biography, "Kerouac" (1973). She is also the author of a photographic history, "Scenes Along the Road" (1986), and the editor of a two-volume encyclopedia, "The Beats: Literary Bohemianism in Postwar America" (1983), and of another anthology, "The Portable Beat Reader" (1992).

Ms. Charters has selected, and meticulously annotated, nearly 200 letters written by Kerouac (along with nine written to him, principally from his mother), about half of the total available to her for the period from 1940 to 1956; she is preparing a second volume of letters from Kerouac's final 13 years. Included in the current book is a rich array of correspondence, most of it previously unpublished, to editors, family members and friends, especially important figures in the Beat movement like Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and John Clellon Holmes. While of great importance to anyone interested in the man and his movement, Kerouac's letters are not the strongest evidence of his gift. He saved his best prose for his books, using letter writing as he did his omnipresent notebook: as a backstage space to explore his art and the troubled sexual identity with which it was entangled. (His letters to Allen Ginsberg are full of uneasy, sometimes hostile, references to Ginsberg's homosexuality.)

The letters to and from his mother are of special interest. Despite two brief marriages and the birth of a daughter Kerouac refused to acknowledge, he lived with his mother, Gabrielle, for most of his last two decades. In a passage from "Desolation Angels" (1965) included in "The Portable Jack Kerouac," he dismissed "my fellow writers" who profess "to 'hate' their mothers and make big Freudian or sociological philosophies around that." He declared "Mamere," as he called Gabrielle, to be "the most important person in this whole story and the best." Kerouac could not have become a writer without his mother's belief in his talent and her financial aid -- she supported him by working in shoe factories until sales of "On the Road" gave him a modest income. The stories she told him as a child inspired his narrative method; all great writers, he wrote in "Vanity of Duluoz" (1968), possess a "soft and tender curiosity, verging on maternal care, about what others think and say." A shrewd infantilism is at the heart of his special genius.

"The Portable Jack Kerouac" presents excerpts from all of the major novels as well as several short stories (including the superb "Home at Christmas") and selections from his poetry. Kerouac's meditations on Buddhism and his seminal statements about the Beat esthetic in literature, film and music are included as well, notably "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" (1957), "The Beginning of Bop" (1959) and "Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation" (1958).

Kerouac saw himself as a latter-day Boswell, and his novels offer brilliant portraits of his many friends, but the person who commanded his most complete artistic attention was himself. His "true story novels" are direct transcriptions of his experience, sometimes written just months after the events they describe. Kerouac's goal, as he wrote to Allen Ginsberg, was to "unleash the inner life in an art-method." Convinced that an American life described with total honesty could constitute art, even great art, he intended his books to form a single autobiographical legend. Ms. Charters has organized her selections from the novels in "The Portable Jack Kerouac" to illustrate how thoroughly he executed his plan: she presents the excerpts according to the chronology of Kerouac's life, not in the order in which they were written. She opens with "Dr. Sax" (1959), a rhapsodic chronicle of Kerouac's working-class boyhood as the son of French-Canadian immigrants in Lowell, Mass., and closes with the harrowing "Big Sur" (1962), the story of the dead end of his life four decades later in California.

THERE are piercing stories about Kerouac's saintly older brother, Gerard, who died at 9 when Kerouac was 4; about life in an impoverished industrial New England town; about high school sports (Kerouac was a track and football star). We follow him to New York, where he attended Columbia University on a football scholarship and began a happy collaboration with the sardonic William Burroughs and the wild-minded young Allen Ginsberg, to his service in the Navy during World War II, and on to his first, ecstatic encounters with Neal Cassady, the Colorado "jailkid" who served as the crazed "Holy Goof" hero of "On the Road" and "Visions of Cody" (1959). Finally, there are accounts of Kerouac's travels across the United States and Mexico during the late 1940's and early 50's.

In a 1950 letter, Kerouac described himself as a member of the " 'minority' races." The designation was not altogether fanciful. His great-grandmother was half American Indian, and as a French-Canadian he was one of the despised Canucks in his hometown of Lowell; he did not master English until he attended high school. His first imperative, he wrote, was "Study mongrel America." Kerouac was always drawn to the nation's underground life -- to Times Square with its drug addicts, prostitutes and con artists, to the remnants of Depression America that persisted beneath the surface affluence of the late 40's and 50's. In the underclass, Kerouac believed he had discovered the repository of the spiritual values mainstream American had apparently forgotten.

Kerouac chronicled the final breakdown of his quest as faithfully as he had documented its joyous beginnings. Through it all, he recorded a strangely persistent belief that "the only decent activity in the world" is "to pray for everyone, in solitude." In an essay published five days after his death, he asked: "Ever look closely at anybody and see that particularized patience all their own, eyes hid, waiting with lips sewn down for time to pass, for something to lift them up, for their yesterday's daily perseverance to succeed, for the long night of life to take them up in its arms and say, 'Ah, Cherubim, this silly stupid business . . . what is it, existence.' "

Existence, he continued, might be "a lifelong struggle to avoid disaster," a struggle in which, by his own telling, he met defeat. But Kerouac's work has survived the wreck of his life. "The Portable Jack Kerouac" should send us back to the books themselves, to appraise anew his genius for the innovative use of language, for what he called "wild form," for "telepathic shock and meaning-excitement." Jack Kerouac's road is worth traveling. 'A Young Jailkid Shrouded in Mystery'

With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we ever would meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. From "The Portable Jack Kerouac."

current mood: exhausted