http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2014/03/12
Watch the video:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justincarissimo/which-beat-generation-writer-are-you#.jnb1bqzZE
Answer the questions:
Mar. 12: birthday: Jack Kerouac
It’s the birthday of Jack Kerouac (books by this author), born Jean-Louis Kerouac, in Lowell, Massachusetts
(1922). His parents were from Quebec, and Jack grew up speaking a local French
dialect and didn’t start learning English until he was seven years old. He was
a track and football star in high school, and he got a football scholarship to
Columbia in New York, where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal
Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement. It was with Neal
Cassady that he would take the momentous cross-country road trip in a Cadillac
limousine in 1949, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the
speedometer broke, the trip that would form the backbone of his book On
the Road.
The story about how Kerouac
composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of
tracing paper so that they’d fit in the typewriter, and he taped them all
together so he wouldn’t have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add
paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no
paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his
typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined
his generation. Allen Ginsberg called it ‘‘a magnificent single paragraph
several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself.’’ On May 22, 2001, the
original draft was sold at an auction for $2.2 million, a record for a literary
manuscript at auction.
1.
What is On the Road?
2.
Who founded the Beat Movement?
3.
Why was his first language
French?
4.
What is unique about how he
wrote On the Road?
5.
What is the thesis of this
article?
6.
What is your response to this
article, the listening, or the video?
At the junction of the state line of Colorado,
its arid western one,
and the state line of poor Utah
I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall
the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me
through halos and rolls and gold folds
that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand,
and sayeth, Go thou across the ground;
go moan for man; go moan, go groan,
go groan alone go roll your bones, alone;
go thou and be little beneath my sight;
go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod,
go thou, go thou, and die hence;
and of this world report you well and truly.
its arid western one,
and the state line of poor Utah
I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall
the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me
through halos and rolls and gold folds
that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand,
and sayeth, Go thou across the ground;
go moan for man; go moan, go groan,
go groan alone go roll your bones, alone;
go thou and be little beneath my sight;
go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod,
go thou, go thou, and die hence;
and of this world report you well and truly.
I'm writing this book because we're all going to die.
In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away,
nothing here but my own tragic hands
that once were guarded by a world,
a sweet attention,
that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death,
sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid. . . .
In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother far away, my sister and my wife far away,
nothing here but my own tragic hands
that once were guarded by a world,
a sweet attention,
that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death,
sleeping in me raw bed, alone and stupid. . . .
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