Jack Kerouac: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 01:13, 25 October 2005

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Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, but especially the BeBop genre championed by [[Charlie Parker]], [[Dizzy Gillespie]], [[Thelonious Monk]], and countless others. Later he would include ideas he developed in his Buddhist studies. He called it [[Spontaneous Prose]]. Kerouac's motto for the style was "first-thought=best thought". It would be the style that he wrote many of his books in, including ''On the Road'', ''Visions of Cody'', ''Visions of Gerard'', ''Big Sur'', and ''The Subterraneans''. The central feature of the writing method was the idea of breath (borrowed from Jazz), improvising words over the inherant structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word. Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, and using a long, connecting dash instead. The phrases that would occur between dashes would be akin to improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, they take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.

He would go on for hours to friends and strangers about his method, often drunk, which wasn't well recievedreceived by Ginsberg, who had an acute awareness of the need to sell literature (to publishers) as much as write it; though he'd later be one of its great proponents. It was at about the time that Kerouac wrote ''The Subterraneans'' that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate exactly how he wrote it, how he did Spontaneous Prose. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be [[Belief and Technique for Modern Prose]], a list of thirty "essentials".

*1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy