perfect ( )

Ik las er twintig bladzijden in, ik kocht het. En toch ...

Er staan weliswaar vele stukken in dit boek die magistraal zijn. Maar dan is er ook de rest - sketches ... Anderen noemen dat wel eens 'gedichten', mensen die er destijds 'bij' waren beweren dat het 'blues' is (of zijn?), 'pure writing' ook wel. Kerouac zelf geloofde er ook erg in ...

Maar meer dan wat losse, vaak chaotische aantekeningen zijn het eigenlijk niet: observaties, intenties, gedachten, dromen, herinneringen, aanzetten tot, overzichtjes, to-do-lijsten ... aardig, maar elke schrijver heeft wel zo'n koffer vol met dit soort boekjes. Zelden verdienen die boekjes ook een afzonderlijke - niet geannoteerde - uitgave en ook in dit geval is het twijfelen aan zo'n uitgave best gerechtvaardigd. Al blijft het natuurlijk Kerouac en ...

Slechts hier en daar zijn de teksten, de schetsen in dit boek ook echt interessant te noemen: wanneer je er (de intentie tot) het andere werk in hoort of herkent, wanneer de 'anderen' (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady, ...) vermeld worden, wanneer hij een feitelijk verslag neerschrijft van wat hij ziet, meemaakt, de truckchauffeurs beschrijft die hem een lift geven, de hobo's op de treinen, wanneer hij terugdenkt aan zijn jeugd, zijn familie, zijn vorige passages & wanneer het (meer dan eens) raak is:

Cold fog winds blowing
from the wreathed hills
of houses, I can see
the blazing fog shaggin
over from old Potato Patch
in a cold whipped blue
-bay waters clear to
Oakland are ripple & keen
blue & cold looking - The
majestic Mormacgulf with
her creamy white masts
& rigging in the pure blue
sits before me, a rusty
redpaint waterline on
the green Jack London
swell of old piers -*

of

& writing & watching
W.S. while Negro &
Filipino cats sit in
bar watching game
without buying or
drinking anything at
all - Mike Levesque
is like that, the
Pilgrim of the Fellaheen
is a simple & joyful
fellow & no "innocent
boy" camper like Peter
Martin ) but no
more words, now for
the scenes-
(She was born in Montreal
a simple-intentioned pure
heart, & remained so for
a lifetime thru histories, paranoias
& grief)

maar je moet er voor in de stemming zijn & het bladzijde per bladzijde tot je nemen, kleine hapjes ... anders doorbreek je de betovering, en ontbeer je diepgang, variatie, argumentatie, anekdotiek, feiten, literaire waarde ...

En toch ... de verrukking die ik ervaarde bij het lezen van die eerste bladzijden (die ik nu niet durf te herlezen), bij eerste lezing van bovenstaande fragmenten, bij andere fragmenten, ... de kleine uitgave ook van dit boek, die er om vraagt om met me mee op reis te gaan (o waar zouden we eens heen gaan?), een uitgave die er om vraagt om bepoteld en helemaal smoezelig te worden ... die verrukking maakt dit, vermoed ik, een boek waar ik later met plezier naar terug zal grijpen. Niet zozeer om de inhoud - er is amper inhoud - maar om de sfeer, om dat alleen zijn temidden van een wereld waar je, mocht het net even anders zijn, van kan houden.

http://occamsrazorlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/08/book-of-sketches-1952-57.html ( )

After completing his scroll version of On the Road in April 1951, Kerouac was still unsatisfied and wanted to break away from its "conventional narrative survey of road trips etc." In October his architect student friend Ed White suggested to Jack: "Why don't you just sketch in the streets like a painter but with words?" Kerouac tried it, and was gripped by the power of the new technique which lent a new form of spontaneity to his writing. He began straight away, enthusiastically rewriting his Road book in this new fashion. The first 36 pages of Visions of Cody are pure sketches, recorded in the streets, subways and diners of New York in the fall of 1951. This new publication, Book of Sketches, contains over 400 more pages of sketches, typed up by Jack in 1959 from the original small breast-pocket notebooks in which they were recorded. They begin with sketches of life at his sister's home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in August 1952, just after Jack had returned there from Mexico City where he had completed work on Doctor Sax. Jack describes his work on the North Carolina railroad just before taking off on the road once more on a mammoth hitch-hike to California, via Denver, and the new Cassady home in San Jose. Then follow sketches of Mexico from December 1952, and one on an airplane flying from St Louis to New York, a previously unknown trip taking Jack back home in time for Christmas.

In the following year Jack sketched while on a visit to Montreal in March 1953, and during his railroad work at San Luis Obispo, California that April, before taking off by sea for New York and a meeting with "Mardou" during the summer of the Subterraneans. Sketches of Jack's work on the Long Island railroad in October are also included , as well as more descriptions of the streets of Manhattan and Long Island that fall. The book comes to a close with a glimpse of life in San Francisco in early 1954, and tagged onto the end are a few sketches recorded during Jack's big overseas trip of Spring 1957, to Tangiers, France, and England.

The writing is superb throughout, and particularly the description of what must have been Kerouac's longest ever hitch-hike, 3000 miles from North Carolina to California in late August 1952, via Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, a trip not previously mentioned in his other writings. Jack lists each town he passed through and describes practically every lift he obtained on the way. Reaching Denver, Jack spent a whole day sketching Neal's old haunts, including Zaza's barbershop, the Glenarm poolhall, and Pederson's. But as well as sketching the scenes before him, Kerouac also explored philosophical topics, such as his Spengler-inspired sympathy with the Fellaheen, in his "Notes on the Millennium of the Hip Fellaheen, Oct. 1952, California" and planned his future with them -- "Go among the People, the Fellaheen not the American Bourgeois Middle-class World of neurosis nor the Catholic French Canadian European World -- the People -- Indians, Arabs, the Fellaheen in country, village, of City slums -- an essential World Dostoevsky."

This has to be one of the most important pieces of Kerouac's writing to have been released in several decades. As well as providing further examples of Kerouac's innovative sketch-writing, it also fills some gaps in the Duluoz Legend. It will become an essential part of the Kerouac canon. The marketing of the book raises some queries, however, since it is described on the back cover as a collection of "poems" and is published in the Penguin Poets series. Kerouac always seemed quite clear that his sketches were not poems but prose. In his definition of a sketch (in Some of the Dharma) he notes that "A sketch is a prose description of a scene before the eyes," and on the title page of his typescript wrote: "Book of Sketches -- Proving that sketches ain't verse." It is clear, though, that sketching led to Kerouac's development of the spontaneous poems he called Blues, which he began in 1954 with San Francisco Blues, continuing with his classic Mexico City Blues the following year. Whatever, it's the content of the book that matters, and this is quite simply outstanding, and essential for any Kerouac enthusiast. ( )

Oddly enough, Kerouac best work. Poetic, fast, oneiric, it out does any of the his "legends" or "Visions". This is pure writing. ( )