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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Credo by Jack Kerouac

 Yes, more Kerouac.

Credo by Jack Kerouac

Remember above all things, Kid, that to write is not difficult, not painful, that it comes out of you with ease, that you can whip up a little tale in no time, that when you are sincere about it, that when you want to impress a truth, it is not difficult, not painful, but easy, graceful, full of smooth power, as if you were a writing machine with a store of literature that is boundless, enormous, endless, and rich. For it is true; this is so. Do not forget it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm, drive it home American-wise, don't mind critics, don't mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they don't know what they're taking about, they're way of the track, they're cold; you're warm, you're red hot, you can write all day, you know what you know, like Halper; you remember that, Kid, and when you feel as if you cannot write, as if it is no use, as if life is no good, read this over and realize that you can do a lot of good in this world by turning out truths like these, by spreading warmth, by trying to preach living for life's sake, not the intellectual way, but the warm way, the way of love, the way which says: Brothers, I greet you with open arms, I accept your frailties, I offer you my frailties, let us gather and run the gamut of rich human existence. Remember, Kid, the ease, the grace, the glory, the greatness of your art; remember it, never forget. Remember passion. Do not forget, do not forsake, do not forget. It is there, the order and the purpose; there is chaos, but not in you, not way down deep in your heart, no chaos, only ease, grace, beauty, love, greatness.....Kid, you can whip up a little tale, a little truth, you can mop up the floor with a little tale in no time; it is a cinch, you are the flow of smooth thrumming power, you are a writer, and you can turn out some mean stuff, and you will turn out tons of it, because it is you, and do not forget it, Kid, do not forget it; please, please Kid, do not forget yourself; save that, save that, preserve yourself; turn out those mean little old tales by the dozens, it is easy, it is grace, do it American-wise, drive it home, sell truth, for it needs to be sold. Remember, Kid, what I say to you tonight; never forget it, read this over in your gloomier moments and never, never forget.....never, never, never forget.....please, please, Kid please…

Monday, September 3, 2012

The Foxhole Manifesto


Belief & Technique For Modern Prose-- List of Essentials

JACK KEROUAC
  BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
LIST OF ESSENTIALS

    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 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. Youre a Genius all the time
    30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
                                                                                                As ever,
                                                                                                        Jack

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Antipodal Dwelling by Aimé Césaire

Crucible in which is born the world hair humus of the first earth
hair first worry stone
when the rain shall be the thread with which bit by bit the world undoes itself
when the sun shall be a spider in which to lose ourselves one by one
when the sea shall be an octopus to spit our hopes at us in our faces
when the moon shall uncoil and will unroll for us its long serpent body
when the volcano shall shake its wrinkled pachyderm body
when the wind shall no longer blow because we have forgotten to strike the wind stones
when the stones shall cease to speak for having preached too much in the desert
(entangling my veins an entire forest down to its lowest branches
entangling my veins completely the water and the regime of faithful fires
entangling that from the bottom shall dash waterlilies in my face and my blood
of redemption and my shoulders slipping better than any knots
entangling
a drop of water in the precious alembic of water tables that shall go to the window and
cry out in Esperanto that the weather is fine poorly heard by the volutes scored by our bitterest spit)
a drop of fire in the throat without risk of wind
firefly and water I shall assemble myself in little drops of water of fire too beautiful for any other architect
dwelling made of water glimpsed upon waking
dwelling made of rumpled perfumes
dwelling made of spangled sleep
dwelling made of swelled chests stretched out of benumbed lizards
strength lines me up on the shadowless meridian
pythons crews of catastrophes unnatural brothers of my longitude
roads raise themselves to the height of green-eyed female gnomes intersected with
prayers taking aim at us on the footbridge of the malfunctioning compass sky
dwelling made of a laying-on of palms of hands
dwelling made of red cheetah eyes
dwelling made of a rain of shells of sand
the revolver shots give me a halo too vast this time for my head which arrives via portage in spare parts

In a Grove by Philip Lamantia


Ulysses on water

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

– from Ulysses, Chapter 17