Finally finished reading  Joni Eareckson Tada`s  A step further  which I borrowed from our church library .  Joni became paralized  after a diving accident and it is about her personal experience of  how God  uses  difficult periods in our lives to grab our attention to  reveal himself in a much more personal and  powerful way.  Joni`s life  is an example of how God does not promise us a life without problems - however he does promise that he will walk with us and give us the strength and determination to get through lifes trials and tribulations.  Well worth reading .

-for my Son on his birthday, in hopes that he may soon leap...

The supreme pleasure in beauty
the Creator's perfections
in beauty cast over the landscape
of earth and heaven

Rapture in the delectable
rapture in the seared eye
stricken and slain by beauty

Pale leaves unfolding tinged
with silver, gold, pale copper
The delicate softening of
bark and branch and formidable oak

There is sighing to be done
and leaning into the breeze
Love may rise quickly on days like this
running fast and hard from winter
headlong over the precipice and into the green.

.

pbsweeney.april30th2008

Each Peach, Pear, Plum - Allan Ahlberg

When my 2 eldest where in primary school- since closed down there was a teacher who made a point of teaching all her children Each Peach Pear Plum and I must admit to loving it too.

Bear brought the book home on Tuesday and I have spent the past few days teaching him it . Im a proud mummy as this morning he said it all by him self going out to school

Each peach, pear, plum, I spy Tom Thumb,

Tom Thumb in the cupboard, I spy Mother Hubbard,

Mother Hubbard in the cellar I spy Cinderella,

Cinderella on the stairs I spy three bears,

Three bears out hunting, I spy Baby Bunting,

Baby Bunting fast asleep, I spy Bo Peep,

Bo Peep on the hill, I spy Jack and Jill,

Jack and Jill in the ditch, I spy the Wicked Witch,

Wicked Witch over the wood, I spy Robin Hood,

Robin Hood in his den, I spy three bears again,

Three bears still hunting, they spy Baby Bunting,

Baby Bunting safe and dry, I spy plum pie,

Plum pie in the sun, I spy…..

EVERYONE!

Its a wonderful book very easy for young children to learn , Its I spy with a difference as each sentence is part of a nursery rhyme or fairytale that leads cleverly to the next making it easy to pick up . There is also the added bonus of wonderful pictures that give the child a chance to find the characters

Мда, това е текста на онова парче... За мен това парче е ултимативното доказателство, че при поп музиката основна роля играе музиката, а текста е някъде на втори план, ако някой изобщо го забелязва. Как иначе да си обясним възможността на цитираната словесна постройка?! Безпроблемното и безкритично приемане на подобен нонсенс от публиката? Какво е това мартини с малко лед, но с много маслини... за бога - МНОГО маслини?!? Колко МНОГО маслини се събират в чаша за мартини, при това така че да остане в нея място и за малко лед, а и за самото мартини?! Ебати текста, ебати полета на поетичната муза. То бива поезия, то може, ама... ама кило маслини за едно мартини не бива. Кой е автора на този брилянт лирически? Но има ли значение... Просто за сведение:

''1 1/2 oz gin
1/2 oz dry vermouth
Stir with ice cubes, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an olive or a twist of lemon.''

An olive - една маслина...

A slender body, hands soft and white, for the service of my delight, two sprouting breasts round and sweet, invite my hungry mouth to eat, from whence two nipples firm and pink, persuade my thirsty soul to drink, and lower still a secret place where I'd fain hide my loving face.

(from the wikipedia entry on Isadora Duncan)

Around the corner I have a friend,

In this great city that has no end,

Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,

And before I know it, a year is gone.

And I never see my old friends face,

For life is a swift and terrible race,

As in the days when I rang his bell.

And he rang mine but we were younger then,

And now we are busy, tired men.

Tired of playing a foolish game,

Tired of trying to make a name.

'Tomorrow' I say! 'I will call on Jim

Just to show that I'm thinking of him.'

But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,

And distance between us grows and grows.

Around the corner, yet miles away,

'Here's a telegram sir,' 'Jim died today.'

And that's what we get and deserve in the end.

Around the corner, a vanished friend.

Remember to always say what you mean.

If you love someone, tell them.

Don't be afraid to express yourself.

Reach out and tell someone what they mean to you.

Because when you decide that it is the right time it might

be too late.

Seize the day. Never have regrets.

And most importantly, stay close to your friends

and family, for they have helped

make you the person that you are today.

send it to all the people who have made difference in ur life

thx gupi  =)

http://forums.waheguroo.com/Sikhitothemax-2-Download-Nowand33-t23546.html

http://www.sikhseva.org/
Make sure you folow the intructions!

 Sangat Jee,

You can download the desktop version of SikhiToTheMax 2 from the below links:

http://www.sevatothemax.com/mp3s/list_file...0and%20Veechaar

http://www.sikhitothemax.com/downloads/sttmsetup.exe

http://www.sikhnet.com/downloads/sttmsetup.exe

http://www.sikhseva.org

Please forgive us if you have problems downloading the software, we are having problems with our servers but still wanted Sangat to use it.

Our Veers at other sites will also host the software. We will advise you as soon as the software is on their sites.

Below is some information about the new release:

PREREQUISITES - IMPORTANT!!

Before using this software, you need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 installed. To check if you have it installed, go to your C: drive on your computer and check to see if you have the following directory:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322

Alternatively, go to Control Panel and double click on Add Remove Programs. The "Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1" program should be listed in the list.

If you DO NOT, then you need to install the following setup that is available at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

IF YOU ARE USING VISTA - after installing this program, you must set the permissions of the install directory (default C:\Program Files\SikhiToTheMAX II) and give full control to all users.

See below:

Vista Security - Permissions Issue

By default the directory where STTM II gets installed does not have the correct permissions. We will endeavour to fix this shortly. To overcome the problem follow these instructions. You will need administrator rights.

1) Open file explorer

2) Select the install directory (by default this will be C:\Program Files\SikhiToTheMAX II)

3) Right click on the directory

4) Select properties

5) Select the Security tab

6) Click the "Edit..." button

7) In the "Group or user names" list select "User (YourPC\Users)" (YourPC will be your computer name)

8) In the "Permissions for Users" click on the "Allow" checkbox for "Full Control".

All of the checkboxes in the "Allow" column should now be selected.

Click "OK"

Click "OK"

Run the software.

=======================================================

Latest Features and Bug fixes

23 March 2008 - Office 2007 look and feel

23 March 2008 - Grouping and sorting in the results grid

23 March 2008 - Rich Text simple view

23 March 2008 - Powerpoint presentation and customisation of ppts

23 March 2008 - Akhand Paat mode with customisation for font sizes

23 March 2008 - Hukamnama scroller

23 March 2008 - PDF output

23 March 2008 - Toggle tranliteration

23 March 2008 - Toggle Larreevaar view

23 March 2008 - Toggle Bisraam view

23 March 2008 - Indexes for Guru Granth Sahib, Amrit Keertan, Dasam Granth, Hukamnamas

23 March 2008 - Compiled Gurbani files for popular Banis

23 March 2008 - Auto update ability - receive latest updates if connected to the internet when starting application

23 March 2008 - Extensive help pdf files and videos (online)

And so much more…………………

You will need to use Powerpoint 2003 onwards for this version of STTM.

Please look at the PDF help files before emailing us or posting problems, they are in the STTM 2 folder on your PC: c:\programs\SikhiToTheMax II

Please email us on the below address's for any information or problems. We will try and help and resolve any issues as fast as we can.

Requests@SikhiToTheMAX.com

info@sevatothemax.com

Any mistakes in the program or any work we did to bring this software to the Sangat please forgive us and we humbly ask the Sangat to do Ardas for us so we continue to Seva in spreading Guru Jee's Word.

SikhiToTheMax Sevadaars!

WaheguruJeeKaaKhalsa WaheguruJeeKeeFateh!

To understand the disease of jealousy, we need to clarify the difference between ‘habits’ and ‘nature’. ‘Habits’ are formed over the years and can be rectified. When our wishes and dreams are fulfilled, they shape up to become our habits. Since childhood, if we obtain whatever we wish and seek for, it becomes part of our disposition, which further develops into a habit.
‘Nature’ is related to the permanent laws of the nature, i.e. this ecological system that is functioning within constant laws defined by the creator, every action in this creation is governed by physical & chemical laws. Through gurbani, we understand that the word ‘nature’ as ‘kudrat’ / ‘power’, as explained in the following verse, page 3 of Guru Granth Sahib:

(Kudrat kavan kahan vichar)
How can Your Creative Potency be described?

Meaning that we cannot describe the power of the Almighty. And further also as in the verse on page 702 of Guru Granth Sahib,
(ta ki keemat kahan na jaee kudrat kavan hamari)

What is my status to judge your infinite powers?
Thus we understand that we are nowhere near and have no strength vis-à-vis the powerful natural laws of the God. If we consider that we are drop in the ocean, then the drop is infinitesimally small as compared to the ocean and has no capacity to judge the various dimensions of the ocean.
Also when we usually talk in vernacular language like ‘meri ki panyan’, ‘mere vas ki hai’ & ‘mein ki karan joga haan’; this clearly shows that nothing is under my control and I cannot go against God’s laws which is again understood from the following verse, page 736 of Guru Granth Sahib :

(mere har jeo sab ko tere vas)
O my Dear Lord, everything is in your power, i.e. your laws of nature govern the function of this universe.

(asaa jor naahee jae kish kar hum saakeh jio bhavae tivae bukhas)
I have no power to change the laws of nature & I am humble and blessed by living and abiding by the laws of your nature.

The other meaning of nature (kudrat) is the creation of the universe itself. Whenever we are talking about the existence of the sun, stars, moon, the rain, the sea, the gardens with beautiful flowers, we are talking about the above said nature ‘kudrat’, the creation all around.

Interestingly our habits are not natural; i.e. there is very little and hairline difference between our ‘habits’ and ‘nature’. We have to understand this difference and use it to our benefit to develop ourselves qualitatively and improve our habits. A human being is considered a micro unit of God thereby showing that we all are an extended part of God, the creator, just like a drop of water in the ocean. A drop of water has all the qualities as that of the whole ocean, so if chemically analyzed, water will always be composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen no matter where it is found or flows.
Similarly when we search our inner self (conscience) we will realize that by being the micro unit of God we all have Godly attributes and qualities inside us and at our core we want to do good deeds. Many times because of our bad habits we feel as though we don’t want to do good deeds, but sometimes unconsciously & spontaneously we help others. Then later we realize how we performed a good deed although we never intended to do so. Sometimes we maintain feelings of hatred for some specific people and look forward for a chance to take revenge; yet when an opportunity comes we do not do anything bad for that person. We do not speak badly about him with low esteem words, nor abuse or insult him. We also express surprise at our naturally and spontaneously done good deed by saying, “I don’t know what happened to me at that moment. I never wanted to pardon him, yet somehow I did not say anything to him”. Now we have to understand, why we get this inner conscience feeling of ‘not to abuse our enemy even if we are given a chance to do so’. This is because of our inbuilt Godly attributes, which is called ‘nature’ or natural habit, i.e. since we the creation are born out of the creator & the creator is ‘divine and pure’, therefore we do harbor divine nature and characters that reflect the creator.
Being ignorant and unaware, many people dupe themselves by calling their own habits as nature, but we now know that habits are our own production and we can definitely control them as explained in Bhai Gurdaas Ji’s bani:

(charan saran gur eak painda jae chal)
If I live the laws of nature, I follow the characteristics of the nature,

(satgur kot panda agae hoi laet hai)
The laws of nature guide me further ahead as for how to live creatively.

This verse of gurbani explains that it is for sure that the first step be initiated by the person himself/herself otherwise the doors of God’s grace and blessings remain closed. Now the question stands, how do we change our habits?

To change our habits, we really have to tussle and struggle within ourselves and to become aware of which habit is bad or good and if it is necessary. We should analyze and decide in the beginning which of our habits can be used for our betterment and the welfare of others and which habits can be disastrous or harmful to others and us. We have to maintain and encourage our good habits and leave our bad ones. The only reason for our spontaneous wrong doings is that we are not conscious of the ill implications of our bad habit because of which both mental and physical decay begins and serves as a natural poison. This way we die slowly and slowly through slow poison given by our own self.

The main theme of this underwritten article is about “jealousy as a deadly mental disease”. People who get envious because they ignore bad habits are not aware of its harmful and evil effects on themselves and others. Then why is it the case that some ignore these bad habits? There can be many reasons but lets discuss here below the common reasons of jealousy, its symptoms, losses and then remedies.

Characteristics of people who get jealous are, (reasons for jealousy)
Those who are devoid of self-respect (self-esteem).
Those who have some inferiority complex in any corner of their mind.
Those who think they have less money and materialistic things than others.
Those who think that God is more gracious on others and happiness does not stay with them.
Those who are unsuccessful due to their own drawbacks but doubt on the success of others.
Those who profess that their doings are right while others are wrong.
Those who keep nurturing their false ego.
Those who are ignorant of the natural law of the system that behind anybody’s success there is an endless and ceaseless effort of days / nights.
Those who do not know that God is impartial.
Those who identify themselves as “Aapas ko deeragh kar jaane auran koi lag maat”, which means that those people who only consider themselves and their achievements as great and achievements of others as most trivial.
Those who neither want to learn anything nor want to change themselves because they think that they know everything
Those who are not aware that God’s Law prevails the same everywhere and that God helps those who help themselves.
Those who do not know that “ Jeha beeje so loone” (as you sow, so shall you reap) which means that our successes and failures are the result of our own deeds.

When a third person comes in between a cordial relationship of two people, then one of the two becomes jealous of the third new person.

Furthermore in order to obtain acceptance in society, some people whether they know how to do anything constructive or not, keep on collecting news, develop jealousy and do many other ill acts for and about other people and then narrate them to other people with great interest. With the passing of time, this becomes part of their habit and the worm of jealousy makes them do this futile work meticulously. Their mind remains restless and they pass on this contagious disease to others by continuously giving/feeding negative news and making others sick and restless as well.

People who think they are most religious or people who want to be known as most religious suffer most from this disease of jealousy. At religious places, if someone excels in doing better service, reciting religious hymns or doing better religious rituals, it serves as fuel to their innate burning feeling of jealousy. Even religious preachers and interpreters have not been able to prevent themselves from this disease. As a result, they only try to justify themselves as best while condemning other preachers as God opponents and sinners instead of inspiring people towards God and His qualities.

Because of the above-said reasons or some other inferiority complex inherited in us, these germs of jealousy enter within ourselves and dwell in our mind. Gradually, these germs disease our mind and cement our habit permanently towards jealousy. Hence we sicken our mind, body and soul (conscience) in the long run.

Sometimes, under the influence of the disease of jealousy, if two people are conversing with each other in our absence, we think that they are talking ill or condemning us. Similarly, if two people are quiet, we think that they stopped talking after seeing me. During the above two conditions, the deadly germ of jealousy makes us restless and we do not realize that our suffering is because of our own inferiority complex. We should ignore any conversation where we are being criticized wrongfully and unnecessarily. If possible, we should go away from that place. But alas! We put in more effort to listen to our criticism than we do to listen to our praises. As a result of this faultfinding, the harmful germ of our temperament perturbs us. This causes friction in our minds towards those people and unfortunately, we nurture and sustain feelings of hatred towards them.

Symptoms of Jealousy
Let us recognize some symptoms of this deadly disease of “jealousy”. Those who suffer from this ailment of jealousy have frowns on their faces and their face gets sunken. They become irritable, cunning and inculcate bad habits of twisting all facts and conversations. Such people even keep praying to God to cause harm to their enemies. They always wish and yearn for Divinely punishment, materialistic loss and fatalities in the homes of their so-called foes. Such infliction and imposition of losses on their enemies gives solace to them.

However, such damaging feelings, prayers, wishes and hate-filled thoughts in the core of their hearts instead of giving them solace, always keep them agitated and restless. Their inner being and conscience gets heated to several thousand degrees causing them to suffer the fever of animosity. There is no doubt that a physical temperature above 108 degrees can cause death to a human being. But ironically, hate-related illnesses that keep one’s inner temperature always elevated to several thousands degree on the thermometer of jealousy, do not cause a quick death. Just as “Bin simran jo jeevan balnaa sarap jaisay arjaaree”, these people by virtue of their own envious habits live long life like that of a snake and die while secreting the slow poison of hatred. Such people do not know that while slandering others, instead of nurturing their own heart with love and compassion, they feed it with deadly chemicals like malice and aspersion. They also lose their respect in the eyes of those listeners among whom they continuously make derogatory and slanderous remarks about other people. Those listeners realize that such people are malicious by habit and by feeding on criticism and hatred, may even be causing aspersions on them in their absence at some other place while being among some other listeners.

us analyze the losses that one has to face when being engulfed with jealousy. Looking at material possessions and the wealth of others, we wish to possess them at the earliest under the influence of jealousy. However, we do not realize that while in a race to get those things and also continuously slandering others, we would always be emotionally and physically perturbed and would never attain peace and tranquility of our mind. Sometimes under the influence of this disease, we make slanderous remarks about others and also plan and pray for their downfall and loss. However, we do not realize that our downfall and debacle had started for sure even before others, as the germs of this ailment enter our mind. Whether our vicious plans and suggestions adversely affect other people or not, we definitely suffer mentally much before the other because the germs of jealousy affect our habits. Because of this hatred, we always make enemies, inculcate feelings of revenge and make malicious plans to harm and destroy others, which bear only losses for us both in the start and in the long run. The mental condition of such jealous people remains polluted; their conscience becomes weaker day by day as they start forgetting to do well for others. They do not develop qualities like sharing with others, showing kindness and doing good for all humanity. Moreover, they cannot do anything creative.

Finally let us study some of the remedies of this disease. If we want mental peace and tranquility, then we should start controlling our bad temperament of jealousy rather than abetting and fueling it. We must endeavor to save ourselves from this poison, and then these feelings of hatred and avenging on others will dissipate and disappear. There is a divine rule, that in our mind we can possess only one thing at one time, which is, either Godly attributes or combustible feelings of jealousy and animosity. This is explained as on page 1381 of Guru Granth Sahib,
(Fareedaa buray daa bhalaa kar gusaa mun na handhaa-ay)
Fareed tells in first person, answer evil with goodness; do not fill your mind with anger

(dayhee rog na lag-ee palai sabh kichh paa-ay)
Your body shall not suffer from any disease, and you shall obtain eternal bliss in everything.
And also on page 1381 of Guru Granth Sahib,

(Fareedaa man maidaan kar to-ay tibay laahe)
Fareed, flatten out your mind; smooth out the hills and valleys by plowing out all the evil thoughts of discrimination and jealousy,

(Agae mool na aavsi dojak sandhi bhai)
Hereafter, the fires of hell shall not even approach you for the rest of your life.

Hence, we have to see who has to be housed in our inner being and mind. To permanently get rid us off this disease of jealously, we not only have to forget our past sorrows and discomforts but also have to strive to get them eradicated totally from our hearts, forever. To prevent the origin of malicious feelings towards others, we should contain our desires, wishes, and expectations and limit our needs for materialistic things by emancipating ourselves from the shackles of materialism. A contented person while possessing solace and mental equilibrium neither gets into the blind race for obtaining wealth nor condemns other people ardently. We should also hold our temperaments from falling in the pits and valleys of complaints, sarcasm and condemnations. We should neither remember our insults and criticism nor expect any thanks in return, though it may be due to us. As explained in the following verse on page 274 of Guru Granth Sahib,

(Karam karat hovai nihkaram)
Performing good deeds, he does not seek rewards.

We have to inculcate thoughts of selfless deeds without expecting any benefit or gratitude. If we want to curtail these germs from sickening our mind and body, we should not be bothered about unsubstantiated or unjustified slandering and criticism being imposed on us and should continue to live a righteous life. But if we have shortfalls and are being condemned, then instead of hitting back or envying our so-called foes, we should rather work on uprooting and controlling our bad habits. In this way, our slanderer’s claims would be unfounded; we would not be perturbed by the disease of jealousy and would be able to attain mental peace, stability and equipoise. Our experience of inculcating qualities in life will augment and bolster, thereby our mind will never be in commotion and we will never be under the influence of jealousy and will never develop the habit of defaming or criticism others. This is explained as on page 633 of Guru Granth Sahib,

(nah nindiaa nah ustat jaa kai lobh moh abhimana)
One who is not swayed by either slander or praise, nor affected by greed, attachment or pride is really blessed eternally.

Making enemies and becoming jealous of others are very deadly diseases that no doctor has a cure for. If we keep ourselves busy in our work and inculcate good habits and temperaments, then we will get no time towards jealousy, hatred, avenging and slandering. If we get or find time to indulge in these bad temperaments, then it is really unfortunate for us and it is the worst form of punishment to us.
There is a good saying that, ‘Lokee aapne dukhaan toin itne dukhee nahin, jitne irkhaa kaaran doojeyan de sukhaan toin’, meaning people are not unhappy because of their own miseries but much more due to jealousy they have with the riches and comforts of others.
We should indulge ourselves and keep ourselves so busy in improving ourselves, cleansing our soul, shunning our bad manners and increasing our qualities that we should not find any moment to indulge in the habit of slandering and fault-finding, as explained on page 12 of Guru Granth Sahib,

(bhaee prapat manukh daehoria)
This human body has been given to you

(gobind milan ki aeh taeri bariah)
This is your chance to meet the Lord of the Universe, i.e. every moment of this life is vital and important to be qualitatively elevated.

It means that our life is very precious and we should use each and every moment in knowing about God and Godly attributes by discussing and implementing divine qualities rather than whiling it away in discussing bad qualities/habits about other people. This is explained on page 1361 of Guru Granth Sahib,

(rasna japae na naam til til kar katiae)
The tongue, not the physical one but in reference to the mind & the thought process, which does not chant the Naam (not chanting physically but by qualitative elevation) ought to be cut bit by bit

This means that when we speak words of criticism, complaints, discrimination and ignorance, we are hypothetically cutting our tongue into small pieces and literally wasting our life-span, though we have been ordained only to recognize, praise and adopt the divine qualities.

Now that we have become aware of the habit of this jealousy disease, let us evaluate and probe ourselves and prick our conscience while sitting alone and ask it the following questions.

Let us Search our Inner Self -
Do I get jealous on someone’s success?
Do I get into a race of obtaining wealth by looking at wealth and other valuable possessions of others?
Do I have a complaining habit towards God and wish that he may/might be more kind to make me rich for enjoying all luxuries of life?
Do I wish to help others for their betterment or do I pray for their deceleration?
Do I ever derive pleasure on loss, slandering, fall and lowering of prestige of my enemy?
Do I forgive the person who has caused harm to me or do I intend to avenge on him by defaming him somehow or other?
Do I even exaggerate small mistakes made by others?
Do I form bad opinion about people only by hearing what others say about them?
Do I have a helping nature to find solutions of others’ problems or do I desire to spread news and shortcomings of others after gathering the same?

Conclusion
In the end, through this article, we come to this conclusion that we get into jealousy disease by virtue of our own habits only. Even if we just start recognizing it, the germs of this disease will eventually vanish from our inner self and our slandering habit will gradually and automatically be controlled. Only prayers and continuous recitation of scriptures to show off to others and not work on the inner self will not help us to eradicate this disease. Instead, we have to control our habit to obtain the nectar (Amrit). Hence, we and only we have to move forward towards becoming immune to this disease so that our body and soul (conscience) gets purified and thus, disease-free in this life itself. As explained on page 1382 of Guru Granth Sahib,

(aap savaraen mae milae, mae milia sukh hoie )
”If you reform yourself qualitatively, you shall meet me, and thus you shall be at peace."

Thus, we have to check these germs of jealousy in the clinical laboratory of our 'conscience' and make sure that these germs do not pollute and weaken our soul, nature and behavior like the diseases of sugar and cholesterol pollute and weaken our body. By just becoming aware and recognizing this disease, we will get free from it and our soul and body will become healthier. Our depressed, dejected and pale faces will glow up and we will have a shining gold like face body and mind and our eyes will radiate care and concern for others.

Bhupinder Singh
The Living Treasure

P.S. Veer Bhupinder Singh in coming to Palatine Gurudwara in last weekend of April

the white breast of a junco resting there
is the range of my vision
an ice crystal, a solitary seed
a brown leaf caught

one red berry
one golden crowned kinglet
her small heart beating
past the stone and the swale.
.

pbsweeney

Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac

Photograph of Jack Kerouac Taken by Allen Ginsberg

Jack Kerouac: Selected Biographic Notes

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents, who were natives of Québec, Canada. Like many others of their generation, the Kerouacs were part of the Quebec emigration to New England to find employment. Kerouac did not start to learn English until the age of six, and at home, he and his family spoke Quebec French. At an early age, he was profoundly affected by the death (from rheumatic fever, age nine) of his elder brother Gérard, an event later described in his novel Visions of Gerard.

Kerouac's athletic talent led him to become a 100 meter hurdler on his local high school track team, and his skills as a running back in football earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia University. He enrolled at Columbia University after spending a year at The Horace Mann School, earning the required grades that were necessary to enroll at Columbia. Unfortunately, Kerouac broke a leg playing football during his freshman season, and he argued constantly with coach Lou Little who kept him benched.

When his football scholarship did not pan out, Kerouac dropped out of Columbia, although he continued to live for a while on New York City's Upper West Side with his girlfriend, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he met many of the people with whom he was later to journey around the world. This group later came to be known as the pioneers of the so-called Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs.

[video 3401 w=420]

Silent Movie: Kerouac's Beat Generation Friends

Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marines in 1942 and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but was honorably discharged during World War II on psychiatric grounds (he was of "indifferent disposition"). In between sea voyages, Kerouac stayed in New York with friends from Fordham University in The Bronx. Later, he lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they, too, moved to New York. He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City while living there. The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac," and, though it earned him some respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflected on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger, city.

For the next six years, Kerouac wrote constantly but could not find a publisher. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled The Beat Generation and Gone on the Road, Kerouac wrote what is now known as On the Road in April, 1951 . The book was largely autobiographical, narrated from the point of view of the character Sal Paradise, describing Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady, the model for the character of Dean Moriarty. Part of the Kerouac mythology is that, fueled by Benzedrine and coffee, he completed the first version of the novel during a three week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose.

This session produced the now famous scroll of On the Road. In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over several years. Most publishers rejected it due to its experimental writing style and its supportive tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of the United States in the 1950s. In 1957, Viking Press purchased the novel, but it demanded major revisions.

He chronicled parts of his experiences with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with some of the San Francisco-area poets, in his book The Dharma Bums, set in California and published in 1958. The Dharma Bums, which some have called the sequel to On the Road, was written in Orlando, Florida during late 1957 through early 1958. Kerouac also wrote and narrated a "Beat" movie entitled Pull My Daisy in 1958.

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Pull My Daisy (1958): Full Version

In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house on Clouser Ave. in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida to await the release of On the Road. A few weeks later, the review appeared in the New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. His fame ultimately came to be an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing. Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation," a term that he never felt comfortable with, and once observed, "I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic."

John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie began and ended with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1957. Kerouac appeared intelligent, but shy. "Are you nervous?" asked Steve Allen. "Naw," said Kerouac, sweating and fiddling.

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Kerouac Reading from On the Road: The Tonight Show

Kerouac moved to Northport, New York in March 1958, six months after the release of On the Road, to care for his aging mother Gabrielle and to hide from his newfound celebrity. Some time later, he moved to St. Petersburg, Florida. Kerouac died on October 21, 1969, one day after being rushed with severe abdominal pain from his St. Petersburg home by ambulance to St. Anthony's Hospital. His death, at the age of 47, resulted from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the liver, 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. Kerouac is buried in his home town of Lowell and was honored posthumously with a Doctor of Letters degree from his hometown's University of Massachusetts-Lowell on June 2, 2007.

Beat Generation Writers: The Men's Room

Allen Ginsberg once observed that the social structure that was most true to 1096s and 1970s artists was the boy-gang. It’s a sentiment that Frank Sinatra would have appreciated. The time of Howl and On the Road was also the time othat Frank Sinatra sang for Only the Lonely and the original Ocean’s Eleven, and although by many measures a taste for the product of North Beach is incompatible with a taste for the product of Las Vegas, the Beat Movement writers and the Rat Pack entertainers were shapers of a similar sensibility. When On the Road came out, it was praised in the New York Times as the novel of the Beat Generation, equivalent in stature and significance to The Sun Also Rises, as the novel of the Lost Generation.

The book was a best-seller, and it made Kerouac, who had worked on it for ten years, a celebrity. It is sometimes said of Kerouac that fame killed him, that he was driven crazy by being continually addressed as the spokesman for a generation and by endless unwelcome requests to explain the meaning of the term Beat. In addition, after the success of On the Road, he continued to write at a manic pace, as he always had, but he became a suicidal alcoholic, and he died, of a hemorrhage caused by acute liver damage.

Beat is really old carnival workers' slang. According to Beat Movement legend, Ginsberg and Kerouac picked it up from a character named Herbert Huncke, a gay street hustler and drug addict from Chicago who had begun hanging around Times Square in 1939. The word has nothing to do with music; instead it specifies a condition of being beaten down, poor, exhausted and at the bottom of the world. Kerouac soon began using the term himself. Beat Generation was one of his early titles for On the Road. After the book came out, he wrote a play called Beat Generation, an article for Esquire on The Philosophy of the Beat Generation, and another for Playboy on The Origins of the Beat Generation.

While the group of Beat Generation writers gained increasing public notice and popularity, at the same time they were caricatured and abused. In the literary world, academic critics, whose aesthetic was all about form and restraint, ignored them, and the New York intellectuals, whose ethic was all about complexity and responsibility, attacked them. Irony was the highbrow virtue of the day, and the Beats had none. This response probably did matter somewhat to Ginsberg and Kerouac. They were Columbia boys. They had genuine literary aspirations, and they wanted to be taken seriously. On the other hand, they could hardly have lived in hope of the approval of people like Diana Trilling and Norman Podhoretz.

Something about the Beats simply made people uncomfortable. For the nineteen-fifties images of the Beat, The Partisan Review’s bohemian nihilist and Hollywood’s hip hedonists, are almost complete inversions of the character types represented in On the Road. The book is not about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists, or rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen-sixties. Nor is the book an anti-intellectual celebration of spontaneity or an artifact of literary primitivism. It’s a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys.

On the Road: Inception of The New Journalism

Nostalgia is part of the appeal of both Jack Kerouac and On the Road today, but it was also part of the book's appeal in 1957. For it's really not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. By the time that On the Road came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. There was little romance left in long car rides.

In reality, the characters in On the Road spent as short a time on the road as they could. They weren't interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed was essential. The men rarely even had time to chase after the women they ran into, because they were always in a hurry to get to a city. A lot of the book takes place in cities, particularly New York, Denver, and San Francisco, but also Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Even there, the characters were always rushing around. The bits and pieces of America that the book captures are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that was coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country, following the seasons in search of work.

The sadness that soaks through Kerouac’s story comes from the certainty that this world of hobos, migrant workers, cowboys and crazy joyriders was dying. But the sadness is not sentimental, because many of the characters in the book who inhabited that world would have been happy to see it go or else were too drunk or forlorn to care. They did not share the literary man’s nostalgie de la boue. They were restless, lonely, lost, beat.

Yet, the car was the place to be. Why? The obvious answer is that nothing happens in the car. Everyone in On the Road had an irresistible urge to get to Denver or San Francisco or New York, because there would be work or friends or women there, but after they arrived, hopes started to unravel, and it was back into the car again. The characters couldn't settle down except when they were nowhere in particular, between one destination and the next. But they wanted to settle down somewhere in particular.

"Beautiful" is a word that some women used to describe Kerouac. Before he became bloated by drink, he was rugged, too; he had been recruited to play football at Columbia and he had a husky baritone. He spoke with a Boston accent and he was excruciatingly self-conscious. That was one of the sources of his perpetual discomfort, but when he was sober it added to his appeal: he was virile and he was shy. In 1959, he appeared on television, on The Steve Allen Show. "Steverino" was a jazz buff who used to fiddle around on a piano while he interviewed his guests (an unbelievably annoying routine). He liked Kerouac, and Kerouac seemed less than usually guarded with him. After they chatted, a little awkwardly, two men in jackets, Kerouac read the last paragraph of On the Road, while Allen contributed background riffs on the piano.

There is something risky and exposed about Kerouac’s reading, as there is about Kerouac’s prose. The Beats were men who wrote about their feelings. On the Road is somewhat sub-canonical, but also also a tour de force. It is usually considered to be more a literary phenomenon than a work of literature. On the other hand, it has had an influence that is equivalent to a work of literature. Kerouac revealed how one could stretch a canvas across an entire continent. He made America a subject for literary fiction; he de-Europeanized the novel for American writers. On the Road might well be considered the first nonfiction novel. Kerouac’s book came out eight years before Capote’s In Cold Blood. It is certainly one of the major literary sources of The New Journalism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. On the Road served as a catalyst for the outburst of magazine pieces by writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson, a surge of avant-garde articles which took America and its weirdness as its great subject.

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To Remember Kerouac: Jimi Bogdanov

A More Personal Glimpse: Notes from Kerouac's Journals

In 1998, Douglas Brinkley published an article in The New Yorker noting that Jack Kerouac began keeping journals as a fourteen-year-old boy, in 1936, and continued to do so until his death, at the age of forty-seven. The following entries span the years from 1948, when the twenty-five-year-old Kerouac had recently returned to New York from a cross-country trip, to 1950, when his first book, The Town and the City, was published. Here is a sampling of his journal entries between 1948 and 1950:

JANUARY 1, 1948. Queens, New York. Today, read my novel [“The Town and the City”] in its entirety. I see that it’s almost finished. What is my opinion? It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go, and my opinion of it is like my opinion of myself!—gleeful and affectionate one day, black with disgust the next.
Wrote 2500 words, until interrupted by a visit from Allen Ginsberg, who came at four o’clock in the morning to tell me that he is going mad, but once and if cured he will communicate with other human beings as no one ever has—completely, sweetly, naturally. He described his terror and seemed on the verge of throwing a fit in my house. When he calmed down I read him parts of my novel and he leeringly announced that it was “greater than Melville, in a sense—the great American novel.” I did not believe a word he said.

Someday I will take off my own mask and tell all about Allen Ginsberg and what he is in the “real” flesh. It seems to me that he is just like any other human being and that this drives him to wit’s ends. How can I help a man who wants to be a monster one minute and a god the next?

APRIL 17, 1948. Went to N.Y., argued with a girl all night. Also, Ginsberg went mad and begged me to hit him—which spells the end as far as I’m concerned, since it’s hard enough to keep sane without visiting the asylum every week. He wanted to know “what else” I had to do in the world that didn’t include him. I told him I did have an unconscious desire to hit him but he would be glad later on that I did not.</p

I have been through with all that foolishness since the days I fought with Edie [Edith Parker, Kerouac’s first wife] and climbed trees with Lucien [Carr], but these Ginsbergs assume that no one else has seen their visions of cataclysmic emotion, and try to foist them on others. I have been a liar and a shifty weakling by pretending that I was the friend of these people—Ginsberg, Joan [Burroughs], Carr, Burroughs, [David] Kammerer even—when all the time I must have known that we disliked each other and were just grimacing incessantly in a comedy of malice. A man must recognize his limits or never be true.

JUNE 2, 1948. After supper Allen Ginsberg dropped in, bringing the remainder of the manuscript which, he said, ended so “big and profound.” He thinks I’m going to be a rich man now, but worries about what I’ll do with money; that is, he can’t picture me with money (nor can I). He thinks I’m a true Myshkin, bless his soul. . . . The madness has left Allen now and I like him as much as ever.

JUNE 3, 1948. I worked out an intricate mathematical thing which determines how assiduously I’m getting my novel typed and revised day after day. It’s too complicated to explain, but suffice it to say that yesterday I was batting .246, and after today’s work my “batting average” rose to .306. The point is, I’ve got to hit like a champion, I’ve got to catch up and stay with Ted Williams (currently hitting .392 in baseball). If I can catch him, June will be the final month of work on “Town and City.”

JUNE 17, 1948. Madly, painfully lonesome for a woman these evenings . . . and on I work. I see them walking outside and I go crazy. Why is it that a man trying to do big work, alone and poor, cannot find one woman who will give him her love and time? Someone like me, healthy, sexual, riven with desire for any pretty girl I see, yet unable to make love now, in youth, as they parade indifferently by my window—well, goddamit, it isn’t right! This experience is going to make me bitter, by God!

Went to bed with a .350 average.

JULY 3, 1948. Big party in Harlem, at Allen’s and Russell Durgin’s. I spent another three days without eating or sleeping to speak of, just drinking and squinting and sweating. There was a vivacious girl straight out of the twenties, red-haired, distraught, sexually frigid (I learned). I walked 3½ miles in a Second Avenue heat wave to her “streamlined Italian apartment,” where I lay on the floor looking up out of a dream. Seems like I had sensed it all before. There was misery, and the beautiful ugliness of people, and there was [Herbert] Huncke telling me that he had seen Edie in Detroit and told her that I still loved her. Do I love Edie still? The wife of my youth? Tonight I think so. In my phantasy of glee there is no sea-light and no beatness, just the wind blowing through the kitchen window on an October morning.

AUGUST 17, 1948. Babe Ruth died yesterday, and I ask myself, “Where is Babe Ruth’s father?” Who spawned this Bunyan? What man, where, what thoughts did he have? Nobody knows. This is an American mystery.

Told my mother she ought to go live down South with the family instead of spending all her time slaving in shoe factories. In Russia they slave for the State, here they slave for Expenses. People rush off to meaningless jobs day after day, you see them coughing in the subways at dawn. They squander their souls on things like “rent,” “decent clothes,” “gas and electricity,” “insurance,” behaving like peasants who have just come out of the fields and are so dreadful tickled because they can buy baubles and doodads in stores.

My life is going to be a farm where I’ll grow my food. I won’t do nothing but sit under a tree while my crops are growing, drink homemade wine, write novels to edify my soul, play with my kids, and thumb my nose at the coughing wretches. The next thing you know, they’ll all be marching off to some annihilating war which their leaders will start to keep up appearances. Shit on the Russians, shit on the Americans, shit on them all.

I have another novel in mind—“On the Road”—which I keep thinking about: two guys hitchhiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, coming all the way back hopeful of something else.

SEPTEMBER 9, 1948. Got form-rejection card from Macmillan’s. I’m getting more confident and angrier each time something like this happens, because I know “The Town and the City” is a great book in its own awkward way. And I’m going to sell it. I’m ready for any battle there is. Even if I have to go off and starve on the road I won’t give up the notion that I should make a living from this book: I’m convinced that people themselves will like it whenever the wall of publishers and critics and editors is torn down. It is they who are my enemies, not “obscurity” or “poverty.”

JANUARY 3, 1949. San Francisco. The Saga of the Mist (New York to New Orleans). N.Y. across the tunnel to New Jersey—the “Jersey night” of Allen Ginsberg. We in the car jubilant, beating on the dashboard of the ’49 Hudson coupe . . . headed West. Haunted by something I have yet to remember. Neal [Cassady] and I and Louanne [Henderson] talking of the value of life as we speed along: “Whither goest thou America in thy shiny car at night?” Seldom had I been so glad. It was sweet to sit near Louanne. In the back seat Al and Rhoda made love. And Neal drove with the bebop music playing on the radio, huzzaing.

Neal got lost outside of Baltimore and wound up on a ridiculously narrow little tar road in the woods (he was trying to find a shortcut). “Doesn’t look like Route One,” he said ruefully. It seemed a very funny remark. Near Emporia, Va., we picked up a mad hitchhiker who said he was Jewish (Herbert Diamond) and made his living knocking at the doors of Jewish homes all over the country, demanding money. “I am a Jew!—give me money.” “What kicks!” cried Neal.

I drove in South Carolina, which was flat and dark in the night (with star-shiny roads, and Southern dullness somewhere around). Outside Mobile, Ala., we began to hear rumors of New Orleans and “chicken, jazz ’n’ gumbo,” bebop shows on the radio, and wild back-alley jazz; so we yelled happily in the car.

“Smell the people!” said Neal at a filling station in Algiers, before going to Bill Burroughs’ house. I’ll never forget the wild expectancy of that moment—the rickety streets, the palms, the great late-afternoon clouds over the Mississippi, the girls going by, the children, the soft bandannas of air coming like odor, the smell of people and rivers.

God is what I love.

FEBRUARY 1, 1949. California, Richmond to Frisco. (Riding to Frisco from Richmond on a rainy night, in Hudson, sulking in back seat.)

Oh, the pangs of travel! The spirituality of hashish!

I saw that Neal—well, I saw Neal at the wheel of the car, a wild machinery of kicks and sniffs and maniacal laughter, a kind of human dog; and then I saw Allen Ginsberg as a seventeenth-century poet in dark vestments standing in a sky of Rembrandt darkness; then I myself, like Slim Gaillard, stuck my head out of the window with Billie Holiday eyes and offered my soul to the whole world—big sad eyes, like the whores in the Richmond mud-shack saloon. Saw how much genius I had, too. Saw how sullen, blank Louanne hated me. Saw how unimportant I was to them; and the stupidity of my designs on her, and my betrayal of all male friends.

FEBRUARY 6, 1949. Spokane. Portland to Butte. Two hobo panhandlers in back of bus on way out at midnight said they were bound for The Dalles—a small farming and lumber town—to beat a dollar or two. Drunk—“Goddamit, don’t get us thrown off at Hood River!”

“Beat the bus driver for a couple!”

We rolled in the big darkness of the Columbia River Valley, in a blizzard. I woke up after a nap and had a chat with one of the hoboes. (Said he would be an old-time outlaw if J. Edgar Hoover had not made it against the law to steal. I lied and said I had driven a stolen car from N.Y. to Frisco.)

I woke up at Tonompah Falls: hundreds of feet high, a hooded phantom dropped water from his huge, icy forehead. I was scared because I could not see what was in the darkness up beyond the hood of the ice—what hairy horrors, what night?

The bus driver plunged along over mad ridges. Then northeast through Connell, Sprague, Cheney (wheat and cattle lands like East Wyoming), in a gale of blizzards, to Spokane.

FEBRUARY 7, 1949. Miles City. Visions of Montana. Coeur d’Alene to Miles City. We came along the waterbed of the Coeur d’Alene river, to Cataldo. I saw clusters of houses homesteading in the wild mountain holes. We rose to the heights in the snowy gray; below in the gulch one single shack light burned. Two boys in a car almost went off the ridge avoiding our bus.

In Butte I stored my bag in a locker. A drunken Indian wanted me to go drinking with him, but I cautiously declined. A short walk around the sloping streets (in below-zero weather at night) showed that everybody in Butte was drunk. This was a Sunday night—I hoped the saloons would stay open until I had seen my fill. They close at dawn, if at all. I walked into one great old-time saloon and had a giant beer. Another gambling saloon was indescribable: groups of sullen Indians (Blackfeet) drinking red whiskey in the john; hundreds of men of all kinds playing cards; and one old professional house gambler who tore my heart out because he reminded me so much of my father—big; green eyeshade; handkerchief protruding from back pocket; great rugged, pockmarked angelic face (unlike Pop’s)—and the asthmatic, laborious sadness of such men. I could not take my eyes off him. My whole concept of “On the Road” changed as I watched.

An old man with slitted eyes, called “John” by respectful men, coolly played cards till dawn; he has been playing cards in the Montana saloon-night of spittoons, smoke, and whiskey since 1880 (days of the winter cattle drive to Texas, and of Sitting Bull). Ah, dear Father.

BIGTIMBER. I saw old-timers sitting around in an old ramshackle inn (in the middle of the snowy prairie)—playing cards by old stoves, at noon. A boy of twenty, with one arm missing, sat in the middle of them. How sad!—and how beautiful he was because he was unable to work, and must sit forever with old-timers, and worry about his buddies punching cows and roistering outside. But how protected he is by Montana. Nowhere else in the world would I say it were at all beautiful for a young man to have but one arm. I shall never forget that boy, who seemed to realize that he was home.

In Billings I saw three of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in all my life, eating in a sort of high-school lunchroom with their grave boyfriends. You can have your Utopian orgies: I should prefer an orgy with the Montanans.

FEBRUARY 9, 1949. North Dakota. From Montana to Minnesota. The mad bus driver almost went off the road on a sudden low snowdrift. It didn’t faze him the least, till, a mile out of Dickinson, we came upon impassable drifts, and a traffic jam in the black Dakota midnight blasted by heath winds from the Saskatchewan Plain. There were lights, and many sheepskinned men toiling with shovels, and confusion—and bitterest cold out there, 25° below, I judge conservatively. Another eastbound bus was stuck, and many cars. The cause of the congestion was a small panel truck carrying slot machines to Montana. Eager young men with shovels came from the little town of Dickinson, most of them wearing red baseball caps, led by the sheriff, a strong joyous boy of twenty-five or so. Some of the boys were fourteen, even twelve. I thought of their mothers and wives waiting at home with hot coffee, as though the traffic jam in the snow was an emergency touching Dickinson itself. Is this the “isolationist” Middle West? Where in the effete-thinking East would men work for others, for nothing, at midnight in howling, freezing gales?

We in the bus watched. Once in a while a boy came in to warm up. Finally the bus driver, a maniacal and good man, decided to pile on through. He gunned the Diesel Motor and the big bus went sloughing through drifts. We swerved into the panel truck: I believe we may have hit a jackpot. Then we swerved into a brand-new 1949 Ford. Wham! Wham! Finally, after an hour of travails, we were back on dry ground. In Dickinson, the café was crowded and full of Friday-night excitement about the snow jam. I wish that I had been born and raised in Dickinson, North Dakota.

The trip across sunny, flat Minnesota was uneventful. How dull it was to be in the East again: no more raw hopes; all was satisfied here.

FEBRUARY 25, 1949. New York. The sad fact about the modern American small city like Poughkeepsie is that it has none of the strength of the metropolis and all the ugly pettiness. Dismal streets, dismal lives. Thousands of drunkards in bars. But out of this wreckage rises a veritable Cleophus—the Negro I met there this weekend. The future of America lies in the Negro like Cleo . . . I know it now. It is the simplicity and raw strength, rising out of the American ground, that will save us.

APRIL 17, 1949. Waiting for word from Robert Giroux to begin revising “T and C.” I feel like working. Also, I like the idea that we’re going to “work in his office in the evenings”—with its coffee in cartons; in shirtsleeves (good Arrow shirts); maybe a pint of whiskey; chats; the big-city night of April and May outside the windows of Harcourt Brace, and old Broadway glowing.

Then finally the book will come out in print, in a big black volume, indicative of the darkness and solitary joy that went into its writing.

I will eventually be happy at the prospect of my worldly success.

Meanwhile, I have great ideas for my future Hollywood career. Imagine making “Look Homeward, Angel.” And “Heart of Darkness,” and “A Passage to India.”

APRIL 23, 1949. In the past week, Bill, Allen, and Huncke were all arrested and put in jail—Bill for narcotics, in New Orleans, the others for robbery and etc. in N.Y.

It’s about time for me to start working on “On the Road” in earnest. For the first time in ages, I want to start a new life.

We—the whole family [Kerouac; his mother; his sister Nin; and her husband, Paul]—are going to move out to Colorado within a year. And within two years I’m going to marry a young lady. My aim is to write, make money, and buy a big wheat farm.

This is the turning point, the end of my “youth” and the beginning of manhood. How sad.

JULY 4, 1949. Denver. Today was one of the saddest days I’ve ever seen. My eyes are pale from it. In the morning we drove my Ma to the depot, bringing the little baby [Kerouac’s nephew] in his diapers with us. A hot day. Sad, empty holiday streets in downtown Denver and no fireworks. In the depot we wheeled the baby around on marble floors. His yells mingled with the “roar of time” up in the dome. I checked my mother’s suitcase in anticipation of a send-off stroll to a bar, or something, but we only sat sadly. Poor Paul read a Mechanix magazine. Then the train came. As I write this, at midnight, she’s somewhere near Omaha.

In the afternoon Paul and Nin and the baby and I tried to make a go of it with a picnic at Berkeley Lake. But we only sat sadly under gray skies, and ate tasteless sandwiches.

At the fireworks at Denver U. Stadium great crowds had been waiting since twilight, sleepy children and all; yet no sooner did the shots begin in the sky than these unhappy people trailed home, before the end of the show, as though they were too unhappy to see what they had waited for.

AUGUST, 1949. I walk in darkness, and no one will help me but my own mad self. I want to communicate with Dostoyevski in heaven, and ask old Melville if he’s still discouraged, and Wolfe why he let himself die at thirty-eight. I don’t want to give up. I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing.

The softball game in Denver was better than all this poor philosophizing. In a fever of sad understanding, I saw beyond envies such as these.

I had just seen Bob Giroux off on the airplane to N.Y., and walked and hitched back from the airport in a mammoth plains dusk, a speck on the surface of the sad red earth. I arrived among the lights of Twenty-seventh and Welton, the Denver Negro-town.

With Giroux, at Central City, I had seen that my being a published writer was going to be merely a sad affair—not that he intended to show me that. I saw how sad he was, and therefore how the best and highest that the “world” has to offer was in fact empty, spiritless; because after all he is a great New Yorker, a man of affairs, a success at thirty-five, a famous young editor. I told him there were “no laurel wreaths,” i.e., the poet did not find ecstasies in worldly fame, nor in fortune, nor even in anything like acclaim or regard. He quite sensibly told me that the laurel wreath is worn only in the moment of writing.

But that night my dream of glory turned gray, because I saw that the best the “white world” has to offer was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, music; not enough night.

I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot, red chili in paper containers. I bought some and ate it strolling in the dark, mysterious streets. I wished I was Negro, a Denver Mexican, or even a Jap, anything but a white man disillusioned by the best in his own “white world.” (And all my life I had white ambitions!)

I passed the dark porch steps of Mexican and Negro homes. There were soft voices, and occasionally the dusky leg of some mysterious, sensual girl. A group of Negro women came by and one of the younger ones detached herself from motherlike elders to come to me and say, “Hello, Eddy.”

But I knew damn well I wasn’t so fortunate as to be Eddy—some white kid who dug the colored girls down there. I was merely myself.

I was so sad—in the violet dark, strolling—wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-minded, ecstatic Negroes of America. All this reminded me of Neal and Louanne, who had been children here and nearby. How I yearned to be transformed into an Eddy, a Neal, a jazz musician, a nigger, a construction worker, a softball pitcher, anything in these wild, dark, humming streets of Denver night—anything but myself so pale and unhappy, so dim.

At Twenty-third and Welton the great softball game was going on under floodlights which practically illuminated the gas tank. What a cruel touch!—now it was the nostalgia of the Gas House Kids. A great eager crowd roared at every play. The strange young heroes, of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, Indian, were performing with utter seriousness. They were just sandlot kids in uniform, while I, in my college days, with my “white ambitions,” had to be a professional-type athlete. I hated myself thinking of it. Never in my life had I been innocent enough to play ball this way before all the families and girls of the neighborhood—no, I had to go and be a college punk, playing before coeds in stadiums, and join fraternities, and wear sports jackets instead of Levi’s and sweatshirts.

Some people are made to wish they were other than what they are, only so they may wish and wish and wish. This is my star. What had I done with my life, shutting off the doors to real, boyish, human joy like this, what had made me strive to be “different” from all this?

Now it was too late.

I walked away to the dumb downtown streets of Denver, for the trolley at Colfax and Broadway, where the big Capitol building is, with its lit-up dome and swarded lawns. I walked the pitch-black roads and came to the house I’d spent my $1000 on for nothing, where my sister and brother-in-law were sitting worrying about money and work and insurance and security and all that, in the white-tiled kitchen.

SEPTEMBER 21, 1949. New York. After a little work in the office Bob Giroux and I put on our tuxedos and went to the Ballets Russes at the Met. It is the most exquisite of the arts—one can die a strange little death after seeing the ballet for the first time. The girls en masse in blue light are like a vision; they all look Oriental, or Russian, too. Bob and I visited the great dancer, Leon Danielian, in his dressing room. Danielian sat in a chair, the old Death’s Head Impresario of the Ballet, looking like an ancient John Kingsland. Gore Vidal was there with his mother. Everybody keeps saying, “I like her better than I do Gore.” Our group consisted of John Kelly (a millionaire of the arts and Wall Street), and Gore Vidal and Mrs. Vidal, Danielian and his sister, Don Gaynor—who is like the sinister intellectual at parties in British films—and later John Latouche and Burgess Meredith (who is funny).

We spent $55 in the Blue Angel just for drinks and supper. I gunned the little French hat-check girl and made a date with her. Berthy’s her name—so great. But this evening I learned that I have to change now—being so much “in demand” it is impossible to accept all invitations to lunch, and equally impossible to try to communicate with everybody, as I’ve always done out of mere joy. Now I’ll have to start selecting. Isn’t that awful?

It appears that I am terrifically naïve. “Yes, yes!” I say. “Oh yes, I’ll call you!” And to top that off, running after every pretty girl I see (in my tuxedo), making dates that conflict with everything else—a bloody mess. Finally, I simply go home and sleep all day. They think I’m crazy.

Berthy is a sizzling little Parisienne. We will meet in Paris. She’s married to a New Yorker, and is soon divorcing him, and has cute little dark-eyed scruples that I want to devour out of sight.

One thing at a time.

NOVEMBER 30, 1949. People aren’t interested in facts, but in ejaculations. That is why straight naturalism fails to express life. Who wants Dos Passos’ old camera eye? Everybody wants to Go! So must the author, oblivious to all petty details, huffing and puffing in the heat of his fiery soul, go!

Novelists should write about rational people? Trilling’s “The Middle of the Journey”? Trilling pulled the most absurd irrational mask it has been my honor to observe: after Ginsberg was thrown out of college, and I had been mixed up in this downfall and barred from the Columbia campus, Trilling refused to recognize me on the street in the most farcical way, as if I’d suddenly acquired leprosy and it was his rational duty to himself as a Liberal Enlightener of Intellectuals to repair at a safe distance from the area of my septic running sores. From down the street I waved at him eagerly. He hurried on, deep in thought. Finally he came face to face with me at a drugstore counter behind which I was implacably washing dishes. There was nothing he could do; he forced a wan smile, paid for his coffee, hurriedly drank it. There was a crush at the door; he couldn’t get out fast enough.

I can take no crap from such men about my own work.

FEBRUARY 18, 1950. In twelve days my “Town and City” will be published and the reviews will appear. Will I be rich or poor? Will I be famous or forgotten? Am ready for this with my “philosophy of simplicity” (something which ties in a philosophy of poverty with inward joy, as I was in 1947 and 1948).

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1950. My new plans for March: soon as I get my money, I’ll join the morning club at the Y and work out almost every weekday. Also, black coffee (no cream and sugar); chinning from the door (which has no real grip, so I can only do ten or eleven or twelve); and less sleep. I’ve been getting fat and lazy. Time for action, time for a new life, my real life. I’ll be twenty-eight in two weeks. Two meals a day instead of three. Much travelling. No stagnation. No more sorrows! No more metaphysical awe! Action . . . speed . . . grace . . . Go! Writing from true thoughts instead of stale rehashes. I’m going to express more and record less in “On the Road.”

—You have to believe in life before you can accomplish anything. That is why dour, regular-houred, rational-souled State Department diplomats have done nothing for mankind. Why live if not for excellence?

Music: Mavis Staples/Hard Times Come Again No More

[audio=http://www.musicwebtown.com/disembedded/playlists/48421/1165281.mp3]

On the Road: Emergence of The New Journalism

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Be Social:

I am watching the wind lift the boughs
in that way – that way
that is arousing
weather is arousing.

Soon I’ll be where the wind takes hold of you
where your breath and pulse
are subject to an untender mercy
I can hear it calling through my weeping.

.

Pbsweeney . Clearwater . 11.03.2007

a) Guha writes well. His prose is precise, his words are carefully chosen and he has written a book which is definitely ‘'readable.''

b) Despite the enormity of the task, Guha has managed to cover almost all important events of the last 60 years. Considering how colorful India's history has been, this is by no means an ordinary achievement.

c) It is quite clear that Guha greatly admires Nehru. We are all entitled to our biases and Guha certainly cannot be grudged his. However, his portrayal of Nehru goes beyond admiration and his book sometimes reads almost as a hagiography of Nehru. If Guha is to be believed, the entire credit for India's secular democracy should go to Nehru. (with a passing nod to Gandhi, Patel and Ambedkar.) And if Nehru did anything wrong (his Himalayan blunder for one), others should be blamed. It is never entirely Nehru's fault even though he ruled this country virtually unchallenged. The first section of book has been appropriately titled Nehru's India; in Guha's view, one suspects, India is still Nehru's India!

d) While Guha has covered almost all important events, the detailing is uneven. While a great deal of space is devoted to the Indo-china war of 1962, the equally important war of 1965 is dismissed in a few pages.

e) Guha claims he has worked for five years on the book. For all the energy he has ostensibly devoted to writing the book, it lacks insight and understanding. Most of it reads like a bland retelling of history without any attempt to actually educate the reader. To give one example, while the period before 1980 held some interest for me and filled some gaps in my knowledge, the period after that is covered in the most perfunctory manner. I cannot recall one single thing which was unknown to me in Guha's history of the eighties and nineties. Considering the fact that Guha devoted almost 250 pages to this period, it is a damming indictment of his inability to write anything better than Times of India regurgitated. I frequently found myself skipping paragraphs and then entire pages. I don't like leaving books half unread and that is almost the only reason why I completed it.

f) Guha's book abounds in clichés--the obvious. There is absolutely nothing new. Same old truisms about how India survives because of democracy, secularism e.t.c. We have heard it so many times before. If that's all Guha wants to say then why bother writing a 750 page book?

In conclusion, a deeply unsatisfying book; an entirely pedestrian effort. I acknowledge that it can serve as a useful starting point for someone who may not know anything about India but for anyone with more than a passing interest in modern Indian history, the book offers nothing. Even allowing for the fact that it attempts to capture 60 years of Indian history, one cannot help but conclude that Guha lacks the scholarship to write a book of this nature. It's not as if he is a bad writer; he simply doesn't know enough! No one expects him to do a Naipaul, but most certainly one expected Guha to attempt something better than the James Hardly Chase (1) style of history writing. (Without the sex as the dictator helpfully added.)

Guha is a delightful chronicler of cricketing history. He should stick to that!

1. Perhaps, comparing Guha to Chase is unfair. Khushwant Singh would be a more appropriate comparison. But when Singh wrote a serious historical book--he wrote a scholarly masterpiece. His two volume book, The history of Sikhs , is a wonderful read.

~My Wounded Warrior~

You are like
Beams of light,
Rays of sun,
Moonvelvet softly
Lighting the way in
The dark, a satin
Heart soothing
The wrinkled brow of
The forlorn, lips of
Songbird winging
Your praises to Me,
And pouring warm honey
On the suffering
Souls of humanity,
Melting hardness
Into fluid love
That runs like streams
Into meadows, touching
The golden edge of
Eternity, banishing
Sorrow and Pain.

Touch My heart
Of love, My daughter,
I love you, I call you
From above.
Let My oil of joy
Pour into your wounds
So deep. Just as I
Have poured through you -
To heal the lame
And the lost,
So I desire
To pour out Myself
Into you, and fill you,
Until you become
As a life-buoy.
An ocean-buoy -
Upright and afloat.
A sea-buoy -
That no troubled wave
Of life’s storms
Can touch or harm.

Visit Me in
The meadow on the hill.
Your Heavenly-Husband
-Lover - awaits you
There. My Face…
Is bathed in wreaths of
Smiles, at the joyous
Expectation of your next
Visit. My welcoming
Arms are spread wide,
Waiting and ever
Longing for your presence
There. I ache to
Hold you close,
And pour fresh oil
On your Precious head.
Run to Me,
My Wounded Warrior…
And I will heal you
There in the Secret
Meadow Of Peace.

©2000~Poetry by Amber~
{~Swan Song~}

~A Poem Inspired By Jesus~

~Their Ashes Are Clothed Wih Beauty~

Wisdom walks,
And Prophesy talks.
My daughter is kind,
And my daughter loves.
I taught her that!
She learned it from Me!
She listened to Me,
And let Me lead the way.
I clothed her heart with love.

Though her path
Was dark & occluded at times,
I shone A Light on
Her weary days.
She became refreshed;
She became renewed!
Now I send her as a shining star,
Bright & glistening in
A night so bleak.

By My Light shining through her,
Others will now find their way
On a long, dusty path of ash.
But My Beauty will be birthed,
And I, the Bright & Morning Star,
Will light their path,
As slowly they arise from
The pile of ashes at their feet,
And their ashes are clothed with beauty!!!

~Love, Jesus~

©2006~Poetry by Amber~
{~Swan Song~}

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~THE UNKNOWN CLOUD~

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Oh how I feel
Caught up in
The unknown cloud
A cloud like this
I have not known.

A mysterious cloud it is,
Weaving it’s way
Through Darkness.
Through Light,
Through Love.

It winds it’s way
Mysteriously through
Many paths,
Many ways,
Many eons of fate.

It whirls & winds
It’s way through
Mirrors of Glass,
And reflected memories,
Played on my mind.

It surfaces at the
Most unusual times,
Flitting in it’s own
Unique ways, across
The fields of my mind.

It’s journeys seem
Endless, as it weaves
It’s way through
Streams, Winds, & Sails
Of the Ancient Mariner.

It rocks my world,
Yet it sweeps me up
Into some sublime,
Yet hidden, future of
A Time not known.

Vistas of a new time,
A time not yet
Revealed to the
Inhabitants of earth,
Or it’s playful creatures.

The repugnance of
Our current world
Situations, cause
My nose to recoil,
From it’s acrid air.

Fresh air, I cry!
Please bring fresh air!
Refresh this world
Of mine! Bring Sweet
Relief & Joy Sublime!

Oh rays of sun,
Beam down on us!
Bring new light to
A world filled with
Deep darkness, now!

Rekindle a spark of
Hope, in us now!
Breath of Wind,
Blow on us, stirring
Our hearts with joy!

Radiant light of
The Son Of God,
Please fall on us
With Your kindest,
Gentlest Arms of Love!

Please enter our world
Afresh, & anew,
With new waves of
Glory, falling on our
Soil! Send kind winds!

To restore us now!
Before it’s too late!
And humanity no longer
Breathes any fresh
Air, & we gasp our last!

Let not fate
Take us to the
Depths of despair!
Renew our hope in
Your love, so fair!

Help our hardened
Spirits to yield to
Your Great Truth & Light
Fall on us & fill us,
Great Glory from on High!

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©2007~Poetry by Amber~
{~Swan Song~}

Penned: Aug 14 2007

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