053 - What Old October's Bareness Everywhere

Oct 9, 2022

No no no Jack, you can’t do this, you can’t spend the eternity of your entire life with the devil and talk of dharma and christ, and what? you steal a beat from a bud and talk about his life for seventeen years and take all the glory? and now you want October too. You can’t have October, October is mine, I drank the whole month and carry it with me, you go find another. Fine fine fine, you have it, maybe you take this October with you, I am good with all others, hey maybe take all the last half a dozen, they haven’t been much October to me, they are how do you say it? a melancholy tennysonian? Yeah, you keep them and their old love light, you keep them with your sauce, they are waiting for you under the Lowell sun, I, I will quietly watch the stars roll in November.

I have written three different letters through this weekend to you, before settling in on this. The others were a short story and very long joke. Maybe you will get them someday. But today the mood is a drunken Kerouac on his writing desk about to haemorrhage out from life. I write this dream and its associated sources in the early dark of this October morning, wondering what did I spend my Saturday on the other two for. This then is your Sunday Daak, sent fresh from the oven, kindly ignore the mistakes.

Grape Dirigible Stars

There are sentences in this book that you know aren’t American slang, but it sure sounds like one, and you do not know what it really means, and yet you know what he meant, and you have felt all that’s there to feel in the moment, and you know it is for the words he has strung together like a beaded piece of necklace that has you strung around it instead.

In August, I wrote this in my thoughts on reading Kerouac’s Big Sur

Then I read Ginsberg in an interview where speaks he of Kerouac:

…like unnatural thoughts put down naturally, and then you find out that those thoughts that are unnatural – “tarpaulin power,” “mosquitoes of straw,” (and) “grape dirigible stars” – actually make sense and the prettiest poetry that anybody was writing around…

That’s what I meant to say, but I suppose you need the verbal calibre of a Ginsberg to put the calibre of a Jack Kerouac in perspective.

October in Railroad Earth

October was a tangible being with a voice

Excerpt From a 19 year of Kerouac's “Old Love-Light”

I thought that October
was a tangible being,
with a voice. The
writer insisted it was
the growth of corky cells
around the stem of the
leaf. The writer also
said that to consider
October sad is to be
a melancholy Tennysonian.
October is not sad, he
said. October is falling 
leaves. October comes
between Sept. and Nov. I
was amazed by these facts,
especially about the
Tennysonian melancholia. I
always thought October was
a kind old Love-light. 

—Jack Kerouac (1941)

Lowell Celebrates Kerouac

The Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival is going on right now. The pre festival had a one day reading of the whole 300 pages of Big Sur; I took 17 weeks. Maybe that’s the way to read it. Read it like he wrote it, capture and be in the moment uninterrupted by anything outside or inside you.

Soon, or just eventually the festival will stop being about Kerouac (or it has already), and it will become just one more avenue to forget their lives and show up for 5 days to enjoy an October that runs just as fast as his words. A small town’s attempts to masquerade selling hotel rooms as community’s cultural heritage.

Home I’ll Finally Be

My friend and I held an annual Jack Kerouac party for seven years, driving from Denton, Texas to Ciudad Juarez at 2:00 in the morning after one. Fans and fools alike, though I can now laugh as I survived it. On those nights, we would set two to four typewriters out around whichever house or venue we were at and feed through paper that anyone could type on and leave, add to but never edit, then carry that to a microphone where our musician friends would be improvising to accompany the reader.

This essay is a lot more than this fragment from it, although this just struck me as a neat an idea as can be on paying your obeisance to whoever it you admire.

Everyone Goes Home in October

In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

From the end of Part 1 of On the road

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac