Download or read book Why Kerouac Matters written by John Leland and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lighthearted discussion of On the Road profiles Kerouac's classic work as a timeless coming-of-age primer, in a literary study that focuses on the character of Sal Paradise and the lessons he imparts about such topics as work, sex, and spirituality.
Download or read book Happiness Is a Choice You Make written by John Leland and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller! An extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being, Happiness Is a Choice You Make weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the “oldest old”— those eighty-five and up. In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise. Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”—informed by those who have mastered the art.
Download or read book The Scripture of the Golden Eternity written by Jack Kerouac and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetic meditations on joy, consciousness, and becoming one with the infinite universe from the author of On the Road During an unexplained fainting spell, Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac experienced a flash of enlightenment. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Kerouac recognized the experience as “satori,” a moment of life-changing epiphany. The knowledge he gained in that instant is expressed in this volume of sixty-six prose poems with language that is both precise and cryptic, mystical and plain. His vision proclaims, “There are not two of us here, reader and writer, but one golden eternity.” Within these meditations, haikus, and Zen koans is a contemplation of consciousness and impermanence. While heavily influenced by the form of Buddhist poems or sutras, Kerouac also draws inspiration from a variety of religious traditions, including Taoism, Native American spirituality, and the Catholicism of his youth. Far-reaching and inclusive, this collection reveals the breadth of Kerouac’s poetic sensibility and the curiosity, word play, and fierce desire to understand the nature of existence that make up the foundational concepts of Beat poetry and propel all of Kerouac’s writing.
Download or read book The Sea Is My Brother written by Jack Kerouac and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a precursor to such landmark works as "On the Road "and "The Dharma Bums," this is an important formative work that bears all the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a materialistic world, and spontaneous travel as the true road to freedom.
Download or read book The Beats written by Harvey Pekar and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the history of the Beat movement, which began in the 1940s, and describes the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs; along with other writers, artists, and events in a graphic novel format.
Download or read book Off the Road written by Carolyn Cassady and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2008-10-15 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir by the woman at the center of the Beat movement is “a great book as well as a wonderful autobiography” (The Washington Post Book World). Written by the woman who loved them all—as wife of Cassady, lover of Kerouac, and friend of Ginsberg—this riveting and intimate memoir spans one of the most vital eras in twentieth-century literature and culture, including the explosive successes of Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, the flowering of the Beat movement, and the social revolution of the 1960s. Artist, writer, and designer Carolyn Cassady reveals a side of Neal Cassady rarely seen—that of husband and father, a man who craved respectability, yet could not resist the thrills of a wilder, and ultimately more destructive, lifestyle. “To the familiar history of the Beat generation, Carolyn Cassady adds a proprietary chapter marked with newness, self-exposure, love and poignancy.” —Publishers Weekly “Rich with gossip, historically significant photographs, intimate memories, [and] unpublished letters.” —The New York Times “A poignant recollection—truthful, coarse, and inviting—teeming with the spirit of the men who inspired and symbolized the dreams of a generation.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Jack Kerouac s American Journey written by Paul Maher and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2007-11-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kerouac scholar traces the true adventures behind the twentieth century classic novel and discusses the real-life inspirations for the novel's memorable characters.
Download or read book Slapstick Modernism written by William Solomon and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.
Download or read book Kerouac on Record written by Simon Warner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was the leading light of the Beat Generation writers and the most dynamic author of his time, but Jack Kerouac also had a lifelong passion for music, particularly the mid-century jazz of New York City, the development of which he witnessed first-hand during the 1940s with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk to the fore. The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds – from the blues to Broadway ballads – and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work – from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names – Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more – credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.
Download or read book Vanity of Duluoz written by Jack Kerouac and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-06-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in 1967 from the vantage point of the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz presents the formative years in the life of Jack Duluoz—Kerouac's alter ego—beginning with his high school experiences as a sporting jock in small-town New England and his time at Columbia University on a football scholarship. Just as Jack's glamorous new adult life begins, so does World War II, and he joins the US Navy to travel the world. The more he experiences, the more he realizes the limits of his former plans, and decides to and return to New York, where he collides with the start of the Beat movement, and a riot of drugs, sex and writing. Vanity of Duluoz was Kerouac's final work published before his death in 1969.
Download or read book The Awakener written by Helen Weaver and published by City Lights Publishers. This book was released on 2014-01-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Awakener is Helen Weaver's long awaited memoir of her adventures with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, and other wild characters from the New York City of the fifties and sixties. The sheltered but rebellious daughter of bookish Midwestern parents, Weaver survived a repressive upbringing in the wealthy suburbs of Scarsdale and an early divorce to land in Greenwich Village just in time for the birth of rock 'n' roll—and the counterculture movement known as the Beat Generation. Shortly after her arrival Kerouac, Ginsberg, and company—old friends of her roommate—arrive on their doorstep after a non-stop drive from Mexico. Weaver and Kerouac fall in love on sight, and Kerouac moves in. " … Weaver] paints a romantic picture of Greenwich Village in the 1950s and '60s, when she worked in publishing and hung out with Allen Ginsberg and the poet Richard Howard and was wild and loose, getting high and falling into bed almost immediately with her crushes, including Lenny Bruce … Her descriptions of the Village are evocative, recalling a time when she wore 'long skirts, Capezio ballet shoes and black stockings,' and used to 'sit in the Bagatelle and have sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist of lemon.' Early on, she quotes Pasternak: 'You in others: this is your soul.' Kerouac's soul lives on through many people—Joyce Johnson, for one—but few have been as adept as Weaver at capturing both him and the New York bohemia of the time. He was lucky to have met her."—Tara McKelvey, The New York Times Book Review “There is a tendency for memoirs written by women about The Great Man to be self-abnegating exercises in a kind of inverted narcissism—the author seeking to prove her worth as muse, as consort, as chosen one. Not so with Helen Weaver’s beautiful, plainspoken elegy for her time spent with Jack Kerouac, who suddenly appeared at her door in the West Village one white, frosty morning with Allen Ginsberg, who knew Weaver’s roommate, in tow."—New York Post "Helen Weaver’s book was a revelation to me! … This is the most graphic, honest, shameless, and moving documentary of what the newly liberated women in cities got up to—how they lived, loved, and created. Who knew? It is time they did! And here’s how."—Carolyn Cassady "Weaver recreates the excitement of a time when things were radically changing and shows us what it was like living with an eccentric genius at the turning point of his life. Eventually she asks Jack to leave but they remain friends, and over the years her respect for his writing grows even as Kerouac's reputation undergoes a gradual transition from enfant terrible to American icon. She comes to realize that by writing On the Road he woke America up—along with her—from the long dream of the fifties. And the Buddhist philosophy that once struck her as Jack's excuse for doing whatever he liked because 'nothing is real, it's all a dream' eventually becomes her own." "Helen Weaver's memoir is a riveting account of her love affair and friendship with Jack Kerouac. She is both clear-eyed and passionate about him, and writes with truly amazing grace."—Ann Charters Helen Weaver has translated over fifty books from the French of which one, Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux ) was a Finalist for the National Book Award in translation in 1976. She is co-author and general editor of the Larousse Enyclopedia of Astrology and author of The Daisy Sutra, a book on animal communication. She lives in Kingston, New York.
Download or read book The Lost Art of Reading written by David L. Ulin and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.
Download or read book Smoke Signals written by Martin A. Lee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the author, an investigative journalist, traces the social history of marijuana from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in an ongoing culture war. He describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a multibillion-dollar industry. In 1996, Californians voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. Similar laws have followed in several other states, but not without antagonistic responses from federal, state, and local law enforcement. The author draws attention to underreported scientific breakthroughs that are reshaping the therapeutic landscape: medical researchers have developed promising treatments for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, chronic pain, and many other conditions that are beyond the reach of conventional cures. This book is an examination of the medical, recreational, scientific, and economic dimensions of the world's most controversial plant.
Download or read book Big Sur written by Jack Kerouac and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road “In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac’s best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more ‘gentle sweetness.’”—San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac’s alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur “reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion.”
Download or read book The Beat Generation written by and published by PediaPress. This book was released on with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Portable Jack Kerouac written by Jack Kerouac and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1995 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents selections from Jack Kerouac's novels, poetry, letters, and essays.
Download or read book Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen written by David Boucher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both Dylan and Cohen have been a presence on the music and poetry landscape spanning six decades. This book begins with a discussion of their contemporary importance, and how they have sustained their enduring appeal as performers and recording artists. The authors argue that both Dylan and Cohen shared early aspirations that mirrored the Beat Generation. They sought to achieve the fame of Dylan Thomas, who proved a bohemian poet could thrive outside the academy, and to live his life of unconditional social irresponsibility. While Dylan's and Cohen's fame fluctuated over the decades, it was sustained by self-consciously adopted personas used to distance themselves from their public selves. This separation of self requires an exploration of the artists' relation to religion as an avenue to find and preserve inner identity. The relationship between their lyrics and poetry is explored in the context of Federico García Lorca's concept of the poetry of inspiration and the emotional depths of 'duende.' Such ideas draw upon the dislocation of the mind and the liberation of the senses that so struck Dylan and Cohen when they first read the poetry and letters of Arthur Rimbaud and Lorca. The authors show that performance and the poetry are integral, and the 'duende,' or passion, of the delivery, is inseparable from the lyric or poetry, and common to Dylan, Cohen and the Beat Generation.
