Re: just when you thought it was safe to stop arguing about

Jake McHenry (seymour@ktis.net)
Tue, 13 Jul 1999 11:22:46 -0500 

Number 13 (and the rest) sum it up for me. Jack also, later on, added the
ever-perfect "Never get drunk outside of your own home."
-Jake

Kerouac's Essentials of Spontaneous Prose


1. Write on, cant change or go back, involuntary, unrevised, spontaneous,
subconscious, pure

2. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild type written pages, for your own joy

3. Submissive to everything, open , listening

4. Be in love with your life every detail of it

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what it 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. Work from the pithy middle eye out, from the jewel center of interest,
swimming in language sea

17. Accept loss forever

18. Believe in the holy contour of life

19. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself

20. Profound struggle with pencil to sketch the flow that already exists
intact in mind

21. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better

22. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and
knowledge

23. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures

24. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

25. Composing wild, undisciplined pure, coming in from under, crazier the
better

26. You're a Genius all the time

27. Writer-Director of Earthly Movies produced in Heaven, different forms of
the same Holy Gold







>     Ok, there's been so much tension over this capitaliz(s/z)ation, e e
>cummings, etc issue that I feel the need to lighten the mood with a little
e
>e cummings anecdote.  For the purposes of my story I will do my best to
obey
>all grammarical rules known to me, in hopes that I will not offend Scottie
>(our resident demi-god), or anyone else for that matter.
>    I have a friend name Joseph, and he is exceedingly brilliant.  He has
two
>older brothers named Ari (middle) and Daniel (oldest), who are exceedingly
>brilliant.  Joseph is at Stanford, Ari is at Yale, and Daniel graduated
from
>Harvey Mudd.  I'm not sure why I used their schools as evidence of their
>brilliance.  I guess that in my young mind it means something, though I
>understand that it may mean nothing at all.  These boys are much more than
>we-got-into-good-schools brilliant.  They really are.
>    So, I was corresponding via email with Joseph, and he commented on my
>lack of capitali(s/z)ation or major punctuation, and references were made
to
>none other than (you guessed it) e.e. cummings.  Joseph then proceeded to
>tell me that when he and his brothers were younger, Daniel ran into a wall
in
>their house producing a sort of hole.  (The circumstances surrounding the
>incident were not made clear to me.)  Before the hole in the wall could be
>fixed in a usual way, Ari (aged around 14 at the time) produced a poster
that
>he had made to cover the whole.  It was made with construction paper, and
on
>it was written e.e. cummings's anyone lived in a pretty how town.  The
poster
>was chosen as the preferred solution, and the poster is there to this day,
>(and the hole still...in tact).
>     I was quite found of the story, myself, and actually found the action
of
>poster-making-to-cover-a-whole-in-the-wall quite Glass.  And now, as you
will
>notice, that I have so tactfully segued into Salinger, I would like to tell
>all of you that may not know that I am reading The Complete Uncollected
Short
>Stories of J.D. Salinger for the first time, as I have located them in rare
>books and manuscripts library.  And, as I am reading them today, and I
begin
>crying like a stupid girl, right in the middle of the rare books and
>manuscripts library, and I am hoping nobody is looking, I just wonder "How
>come they're so good?"
>
>Leila
>
>Pardon the tense change towards the end of the last paragraph.