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I love to read Jack Kerouac, but I think that the last word I would use to describe him is "honest".

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Have you ever read "Tristessa"? It's by far my favorite of his books.

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and who desperately wants to be cool.

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As a person who has studied Kerouac's public identity, I find it interesting that you would choose to paint his face on your wall because you find his life "inspiring". Kerouac's public identity has been lionized since the 1980's, when it became trendy to closely associate the work of an author with his personal identity and to observe fiction as autobiographical.

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All literature is autobiographical. Until robots start dipping the ink pen, we can assume that literary output carries with it the blueprints of the individual's consciousness (as well as the interaction between the reader and the writer).

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Belief & Technique For Modern Prose

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

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So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.

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The bottom of my shoes
are clean
from walking in the rain.

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Kerouac's "life" wasn't "inspiring". His work was inspiring.

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and even his poety can be nice, I enjoy his american haikus:

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kriminalelement said:

I love to read Jack Kerouac, but I think that the last word I would use to describe him is "honest".

The man was so conflicted about his own identity that he killed himself with drinking. He is viewed as a champion of counterculture and youthculture, but in fact he was anything but. He used counterculture to shock himself and to shock his readers, but he never really identified with it. In fact, he never really identified with anything that he said. Most people identify him with his beatnik associates, but he grew increasingly alienated from them. He supported the Viet Nam war and once in his middle age burned a cross on a black family's lawn. His work is replete with his own sexual escapades, but he really lived with his mother his entire life, and the women featured in his novels deny that their relationship was ever sexual. He had a number of homosexual attachments, including a very interesting relationship with his older brother. Most fascinating are his recollections about his early relationship with his mother, who picked worms out of his anus at community gatherings.

The fascinating thing about Jack Kerouac is that once you really start reading his work, his letters, etc., you realize that he actually can't bring himself to tell the truth. To do so would cause an identity crisis too profound in himself. He lives through the identity of others, vampirically. He's nothing like his writing. I love his writing, but too many people conflate his fiction with his personal identity. He's a totally different person than the characters in his novels. I find his personality to be jingoistic, limited, self-hating, sexist, racist, and traditionalist. Inside, Jack Kerouac is a 1950's all-american, crew-cut sporting married man from the suburbs who can't come to grips with his sexuality and who desperately wants to be cool.

Have you ever read "Tristessa"? It's by far my favorite of his books.

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