New Jack Kerouac book to be published
From the London Daily Telegraph…
By Chris Hastings and Beth Jones
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A novel co-written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two giants of the “Beat Generation” of poets, writers and drug-takers, is to be published for the first time more than 60 years after it was written. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945, was inspired by an actual killing which led to the arrest of both authors. The novel draws upon the stabbing in 1944 of a homosexual, David Kammerer, by Lucien Carr, a friend of the duo and another Beat leading light. Carr served two years after admitting manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become violent. Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessary to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, stood bail. Burroughs was arrested but escaped incarceration after his father put up bail. The book’s publication will be a cause célèbre, given the enduring appeal of the authors. It is understood legal wranglings within the Kerouac estate are the reason it has not been published before, although neither writer was keen for that to happen. In a documentary Burroughs described it as “not a distinguished work”. Gerald Nicosia, who wrote Memory Babe, the widely recognised definitive biography of Kerouac, said the pair would find it funny such a juvenile work was seeing the light of day. “This was one of the first books they wrote… it’s probably pretty bad. But I’m not surprised it is being published now because it’s a sure-fire way of making money,” he said. Kerouac, considered the father of the Beat Generation, wrote his classic On The Road in 1951 and died at 47 in 1969 of liver cirrhosis. Burroughs, who wrote The Naked Lunch, died in 1997 at 83. Carr died in 2005, aged 79. · Penguin Classics will publish And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks in November. |
Happy Birthday Jack Kerouac – March 12, 1922
I made it to Jack’s grave yesterday because tomorrow it will rain. It was a beautiful sunny day and I sat on a chair by the grave and read a few chapters of Big Sur and Doctor Sax just quietly by myself.
I also visited the Church of Saint Joseph the Worker in downtown Lowell. Here are my notes.
Huge ornate stained glass windows abound in this Church of Saint Joseph the Worker. Too many to describe. And statues galore! What a strange place right in downtown Lowell. I had been there years ago with Frank D.
As you walk in the side door, the first statue is Saint Lucy, Patron Saint of Eye Trouble, in her right hand is a platter on which rests two eyeballs. You heard me right. In her left hand a very large QUILL pen. Unbelievable! I remembered the eyeballs, but didn’t remember the pen. How can you forget two rolling eyeballs on a platter held by a saint?
The place has many many candles all around to light for $2. People were kneeling praying at different altars. One guy seemed pious but as he walked behind me he started laughing very loudly (!) I thought, what a nut. Then he went out the door and kept circling back around and coming back in! He did this at least six times! Nutcase!
One window says: “In whatever tribulation they shall cry to me I will hear them and be their protector.” There’s Jesus the Man up there with yellow rays like strings coming from his hands down to church, globe, Russian or Greek Orthodox church, and the WHITEHOUSE! Aaaahh!
Another window – and I mean these are HUGE ornate windows – is Jesus learning his carpentry work from his father Joseph. It reads “My father has never ceased working. I too must work.” Freaky! Many windows have Freemasonic symbols, electrical plants like Tesla electricity, I can’t describe it. I have to go back!
Last phenomenal stained glass window, you won’t believe this one, is the Miracle at Fatima window, I can’t describe, the children looking up at multitudinous blazing SUNS coming down ZIGZAG like UFOs from the sky! Wow!
Last statue is Saint Joseph in a Blue Alcove of stars holding a SAW! I touched the saw because it looked real, but it wasn’t. There was a Last Supper sculpture dated 1881 behind glass.
Above the altar in the front is Jesus hanging on the cross, but suspended down from the ceiling like he’s coming in on the Sun! The Sun of God. Oh man. What a trip.
It was cool because I went to the church before I went to the grave and I just know that Jack must have loved this church too! but perhaps more piously and reverently than I.
Joan
Joan, thanks for sharing.
btw, it just so happens that I share the same birthday with Kerouac, as well as George Van Tassel and Ron Jeremy…Draw your own conclusions!
I share mine w/ Michael Jackson! Draw you’er own.
my bortday was on the same day as both the catholic church’s good friday and the jewish passover sabbath friday
i grew up the lone village yiddiot (was beaten up almost daily for being a christkiller…c’est obligatoire) in a roadappalachian town which had the very first nuclear reactor built on private property (which leaked like the proverbial sieve, and at one point caused the town to have BOTH the highest rates of leukemia AND the highest rates of miscarriages in the good ol’ u.s.a.
yeh thats where i growd up witch explanes alot about my incrediel tru storie you can find out more about hear: ruperttheantichrist.com
it really was the first nuke reactor built on privately owned property…a 5 megawatt westinghouse reactor used for experimental research…the original lead shielding was way too thin to stop those bad boy gamma rays, and the lead ingots or bricks–still radioactive–were stored in a shed
some good ol boys broke into it and stole the lead bricks to melt down for making bullets and fishing weights and got radioactive poisoning instead
a girl that i knew at high school saw both her father and brother die of same…they worked out at the reactor
the scumbags who ran it approached the high school principal and proposed that they would build a radiation monitoring facility, and have the high school kiddies provide the labor free as a sort of school science project…they were turned down flat
apocryphal stories abounded
some of us idiot kids would party out at the site after it was shut down (the army came with big trucks in the middle of the night and yanked out the reactor rod cores and loaded them onto flatbed trucks and roared off to parts unknown with them)
how come only rupert gets to be an antichrist…what makes him so special…life is just so unfair
did anybody ever hear about johnny depp buying kerouac’s coat that he wore while on the road for what kerouac himself earned in like the five best yearly incomes he had?
we should all go drink hard likker until our livvers explode…just like kerouac
cheers, down the hatch!
happy birthday jack-i found you 50 years ago -when i was 17-and have loved you ever since-i own every book of yours that has been published-and re-read them many times-wish i could be at your party in Lowell on saturday-why are they publishing Hippos?-and i hear they plan to publish The Sea Is My Brother-surely you wouldn’t want that anymore than you meant for Atop an Underwood to be published-is john sampas that desperate for money?-well as you once instructed “rest and be kind”-i am opening a new jug of cheap red tonight to toast your having blessed this planet with your infinite compassion-for me Whitman-Thomas Wolfe-and you are the holy trinity of american literature-Namu Amida Bhutsu