BoredJadedAndAlmostForty
WhitePortTearsVille
The most recent Christmas shopping season not long past the two E's and I went shopping in downtown Victoria rather than along our usual route on the other side of the Salish Sea that stretches, pretty much on a line from Kitsalino to what was once 3-Vets down by Vancouver Police Headquarters.
So what you ask?
Well, because littler e. wanted to walk down Fort St. in downtown Victoria it meant that we stopped in at Russell Books.
Which, because Russell's has such a great selection of all kinds, meant that I was easily able to get the remaining books for gifts that I hadn't already found elsewhere.
And then I ran across Joyce Johnson, nee Glassman's, insightful tale of how Jack Kerouac's distinctly antagonistic dual personality traits could only truly be self-assuaged by his development of the spontaneous prose method that was spurred on with a little help from his friends and a truly insane work ethic. In the end this resulted in the continuous 1951 typewriter scroll manuscript that, a full six years later, after much editing and re-writing, would finally be published.
Glassman was with Kerouac in September of 1957 on the night he read Gilbert Millstein's New York Times review that helped to make him very famous, very fast after so many years trying. The image at the top of the post was taken of the two of them not long after.
Three years later, after sneaking into San Francisco, not in the passenger seat of a broken down Hudson driven by Neal Cassady, but instead in his own private roomette on the cross country California Zephyr passenger train, Kerouac, who was by then in his late thirties and a raging alcoholic, decided that he had to make one fast move or he would soon be gone.
So he headed down the coast to Big Sur.
Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard wrote and recorded an entire album about the novel that ensued.
Track one is 'California Zephyr'.
Here's my version...
.
So what you ask?
Well, because littler e. wanted to walk down Fort St. in downtown Victoria it meant that we stopped in at Russell Books.
Which, because Russell's has such a great selection of all kinds, meant that I was easily able to get the remaining books for gifts that I hadn't already found elsewhere.
And then I ran across Joyce Johnson, nee Glassman's, insightful tale of how Jack Kerouac's distinctly antagonistic dual personality traits could only truly be self-assuaged by his development of the spontaneous prose method that was spurred on with a little help from his friends and a truly insane work ethic. In the end this resulted in the continuous 1951 typewriter scroll manuscript that, a full six years later, after much editing and re-writing, would finally be published.
Glassman was with Kerouac in September of 1957 on the night he read Gilbert Millstein's New York Times review that helped to make him very famous, very fast after so many years trying. The image at the top of the post was taken of the two of them not long after.
Three years later, after sneaking into San Francisco, not in the passenger seat of a broken down Hudson driven by Neal Cassady, but instead in his own private roomette on the cross country California Zephyr passenger train, Kerouac, who was by then in his late thirties and a raging alcoholic, decided that he had to make one fast move or he would soon be gone.
So he headed down the coast to Big Sur.
Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard wrote and recorded an entire album about the novel that ensued.
Track one is 'California Zephyr'.
Here's my version...
.
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