Re: Kerouac's house

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Fri, 29 May 1998 19:27:48 -0400 

> just by coincidence have certainly had a
> drink or two at several of the bars he used to frequent (his favorite --
> The Wild Boar, near the University of South Florida in Tampa -- is no
> longer there, but you can still chat with several older female faculty
> members at USF who had to constantly rebuff his rather wild *and* boorish
> advances).  Of course, by the time he settled here to look after his mother
> he was heavily into his binge-drinking, guilt-ridden, misanthropic state.

<*grin*>  I confess to having written a story in which the narrator, who
thinks he has the chops to be a poet, does a reading in the 50s up at
Columbia, and encounters Kerouac in the bathroom.  Jack advises him gently
that he'd be better off at some other profession, and the narrator, um,
turns from his urinal and pees on Kerouac's leg accidentally.  That was
just a whim but it struck me as somehow in perfect taste for those wild
years -- which (in the story) greatly predate his St. Pete life.

> (I'm still planning my trip to Prague).

Me too, in an almost imaginary way.  8-)  I want to see the balcony to
which Kafka was banished one night by his father, when he was a child....

> Speaking of such matters:  there is a scene at the end of *Wild Man Blues*
> (the new documentary about Woody Allen), where Woody has lunch with his
> parents and you see how everyone, no matter how accomplished an artist they
> are, has to go through the same things.   At one point his mother scolds
> him for quitting tap lessons as a boy... "You never stick with anything,"
> she says... and his ninety-five year old father suggests, seriously, that
> maybe he *would* have been better off becoming a druggist... that he might
> have done better than he has "as an actor."  Woody later calls it "the
> lunch from Hell".

It's funny, but even back before Annie Hall, his parents continued to
encourage him to open a drug store because it would provide him with a
stable living!  My first job, when I was 13, was in Brooklyn, working for a
fellow who grew up near Woody Allen, and he fit the mold a little more
perfectly.

I haven't seen the movie yet -- but am eager to.

> Even the most apparently extraordinary lives are, in so many ways, so normal.

Does anyone know the exact line Flaubert said about this?  It was something
to the effect that a writer should be as regular and normal in habits as
any plain person, in order to be able to be unpredictable in writing.  (I
have none of my books with me, not even a damned dictionary, so I can't
check on anything, which is endlessly frustrating!)

I think we sometimes expect our (creative) heroes to be the characters they
create, and very few are.  Certainly the ones I know are nothing like the
work they do, except when they get down to it and get to work.

--tim