"Compunction Junction"

[gypsyjoker]

A Canticle For Leibowitz



Front Cover

My mother once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. This is true all over the world in the jungles of Mexico, in the back streets of Shang Hai, in New York cocktail bars, husbands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babes of their ever darkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home and get on their knees and ask for forgiveness and the women bless them peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the apocalypse.

Jack Kerouac's Famous Scroll, 'On the Road' Again

[mtmynd]

Damn that Jack! He sure had a way with words. That's why he was a writer, I reckon. Couldn't imagine him being anything else. A man that changed the landscape of writing in ways that are still unfolding. A man that is a legend and a writer to be emulated by many.

And then I read something like this -

Jack Kerouac's death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking. At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife, Stella, and his mother, Gabrielle.

Wikipedia

... and wonder how something like that could happen? So respected and admired and he ends up like that... He's not the first, for sure, but I have no choice but to ask: "Why?" Need talented people have such sorrowful endings..?

[stilltrucking]

All that matters is the work.

[stilltrucking]

Just before his marriage to Stella, Jack had visited Mary Carney, who was now married for a second time. Her daughter Judy, then twenty-one, remembers the morning clearly. ' My mother was hanging clothes out on the line in the back, and he asked her to marry him and she said, "No. You've never stopped drinking." He said, "You'll never see me again. I'm gonna leave here and I'm gonna drink myself to death." And he did. She always felt guilty about that.' According to Gregory Corso, 'Because he was a catholic, he didn't want to commit suicide, but he wanted out.'---
Angel Headed Hipster

...", my opinion is that it's certainly best to separate an artist far enough from his work, so that one does not take him with the same seriousness as one does his work. In the final analysis, he is only the precondition for his work, its maternal womb, the soil or, in some cases, the dung and manure out of which it grows—and thus, in most cases, something that we must forget about, if we want to enjoy the work itself. Our understanding of the origin of a work involves physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit—never the aesthetic men, the artists, never!" ---Nietzsche

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsc ... alogy3.htm

I never learned a thing from Sylvia Plath's death. It is the work she did while alive that learned me.

[the mingo]

A backpack full of wives, wine, one mother & the road. I like to imagine he was making the sound of one thousand passenger pigeons as he passed the door.

[stilltrucking]

Conservator Jim Canary is fond of pointing out the differences between the original scroll and the published book.
In the book, it says
'My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness, but Dean knew this,'" Canary points out. In the scroll, though, the passage went on:


My mother once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness. This is true all over the world in the jungles of Mexico, in the back streets of Shang Hai, in New York cocktail bars, husbands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babes of their ever darkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home and get on their knees and ask for forgiveness and the women bless them peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the apocalypse.
"I mean, that's a little different, don't you think?" Canary laughs

Kerouac reportedly complained to Allen Ginsberg that Viking botched his manuscript. Lord, his agent, says the editing was handled gracefully.

I am hoping someday someone will publish the actual scroll so we can see what he wrote before it got edited by the publisher.

I like to imagine he was making the sound of one thousand passenger pigeons as he passed the door

Ten four mingo,

To paraphrase the Guy Clark song Let Him Roll

"Let him roll boys let him roll
bless his soul
He always said that heaven was just a Mexican whore"

[mtmynd]

...my opinion is that it's certainly best to separate an artist far enough from his work, so that one does not take him with the same seriousness as one does his work. In the final analysis, he is only the precondition for his work, its maternal womb, the soil or, in some cases, the dung and manure out of which it grows—and thus, in most cases, something that we must forget about, if we want to enjoy the work itself. Our understanding of the origin of a work involves physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit—never the aesthetic men, the artists, never!" ---Nietzsche

Damn writers! Of course they defend their actions... whose gonna call them on that... not another writer.