In 1948 Jack Kerouac hitchhiked back and forth across the country and in 1957 he wrote about this adventure (too strong? Okay, "exploits"). He filled a coffee urn, loaded a continuous roll of brown paper towel into a typewriter and wrote the saga (too strong again? "account") of what transpired. It took several uninterrupted days but when he finally collapsed it was done. It was done, Dean Moriarity.
Along the way with Neal Cassidy (referred to as 'Dean Moriarity') Sal Paradise (as Kerouac calls himself) encounters other hipsters of the day: Allan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and many others. Sentences run on for pages, just as the days ran into night and then into the next day. Four or five page sentences are not unusual. Nor was the voice of God in the clouds as Jack rolled into Denver. "You Boy" he would exclaim.
The nights, the days, the jazz. Kerouac often explained "I'm not a writer. I'm a musician. I play the typewriter." Truman Capote once said "He's not a writer, he's a typist." And I say -
"yeah Daddy-O, yeah!" You almost get it, you breakfast at tiffany's in cold blood hanging out with andy warhol because you think that will make you an artist loser. What else you got? What if Lennon/McCartney only ever wrote "I Should Have Known Better" and "A Hard Day's Night"? Do they diminish as artists? I think not, Truman, you arrogant piece of fat dead flesh.
Keep trying, daddy-o, because.....somewhere in America, when the night falls.....
I remember Dean Moriarity......and so does the whole world.
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