I, too, am speechless. I’m sure many of you are wondering…”Jesus Dave, where do you find this crazy shit?”

I honestly don’t have a good explanation for you. This sort of thing just finds ME.

Video link.

-Dave

There has been some debate on whether or not Jack Kerouac truly wrote the original draft of One the Road in three weeks while hopped up on Benzedrine and coffee. There isn’t any debate that he used several very long continuous scrolls of tracing paper that he taped together to measure a total of 120 feet – single spaced – with no paragraph breaks.

All work and no play makes Jack obsessive compulsive apparently.

Well, many years ago when I was an english major in college I was enthralled by the beat writers. The adventurous spirit and lust for life that Kerouac, Snyder, Cassady and Ginsberg represented made a staggering impact on me as a young student looking for answers. Here was a group of writers struggling with the same gloriously unanswerable questions I was struggling with at the same time. Who am I? What does it all mean…and why are my roommates crazy?

When I decided to go to graduate school several years later I actually considered an MFA in literature with a focus on the Beat writers. This thought was short-lived when I assessed my earning potential as a career Starbucks employee, but I actually considered it for a short while.

When I reflect on the beats today (perhaps through the eyes of someone slightly more mature) I realize the beat writers were a pretty self-center lot. Kerouac and Cassady’s misogynistic tendencies make me cringe now and Burroughs’ drug use was unbelievably self-destructive.

But they were onto something bigger than their faults. Something completely unacceptable in the 1950s…and that was cool.

So why am I talking about the beats? Well, Viking Press has published the original scrolls Kerouac used to write On the Road. I’m not sure I would want to read an unedited version of this manic stream of consciousness memoir/novel, but I think it’s cool that someone finally published it the way Kerouac wrote it.

Amazon | Borders | Barnes & Noble

There’s no denying the beat writers were “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Allen Ginsberg summed up the Beat Generation in that one beautiful line of his poem Howl.

But make no mistake, they were also dicks.

-Dave

From the New York Times

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

Here are some links about her life and work:

Her Wikipedia entry
Her personal webiste
Her books on Amazon

God speed, Madeleine, on your final tesseract.

-Dave

Here are links to their specific interviews:  William Gibson, Frank Oz and Joss Whedon

Good stuff.  Enjoy.

-Dave

Now all you need is some free time to actually read them.

-Dave

Every year, English teachers from across the USA can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year’s winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room
temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who
had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River .
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

There are so many good ones that I am having a hard time picking a favorite.  Post a comment on your favorite if you have a free moment (although, you must have a free moment, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog when you should be working.)

-Dave