The Times

 Of course, Dylan's song comes to mind, considering The Times.. they are a changin'..  

Someone posted a photo today of Jack Kerouac's book "On The Road".. sitting on another copy of "On The Road" sitting on a road.. It reminded me of reading the book "On The Road" years ago and hoping that I can find my copy. Ah.. here it is.. underneath "Tristessa" another novella by the author.. under books by friends and others. A growing stack .. my bedside reading. Tim Hallinan, Lisa Segal, Lafcadio Hearn, Tom Hanks, Thomas Savage...

Kerouac was the voice of a generation that I missed. Capote criticized his freeform style.. but  stream of consciousness is a style, that .. if we are lucky.. comes to us when we are putting words to paper... hah.. who puts words to paper these days? Well.. in fact.. I still do.. and I find that even though this form.. the ease of simple corrections and  a nice keyboard that doesn't make you smack the keys.. is nice.. when committing to an actual sheet of paper and in Kerouac's case, a roll of paper for a teletype.. another long gone device.. just let his story unfold.  I did that one time for an art installation and wonder what I did with the long roll of that hole punched dot matrix recounting of the art we had at The Brand Galleries in 1997? 

Reading Kerouac is a smorgasbord of images and sounds and even the smells of an old Chevy revving across the country, streamline moderne gas stations, tired guys who washed your windshield and pumped the gas; twilight...  headed west to California to the edge of the continent.  

My intention right now.. to share Kerouac's last paragraph that I looked up on line when I saw the silly photo of the books on the road.. and.. that'll be it. for now.. 

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? 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 and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

 

write what moves you.. for you.. for goodness sakes. 

michaelsheehan