Sunday, January 18, 2009

Kerouac's 30 Essentials

He'd go on for hours about his method, practicing inebriated glossolalia through cracked lips
to friends and strangers and all bebop, rocksteady, rollers, razorgirls and dim drunk chumps grasping the polished oak bar slab like floating refuse in the south pacific.
Among the writings he set down specifically about his "Spontaneous Prose method",
the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy

Submissive to everything, open, listening

Try to never get drunk outside your own house

Be in love with your life

Something that you feel will find its own form

Be a crazy dumb-saint of the mind

Blow as deep as you want to blow

Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

The unspeakable visions of the individual

No time for poetry but exactly what is

Visionary tics shivering in the chest

In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Like Proust be an old teahead of time

Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

Accept loss forever

Believe in the holy contour of life

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better

Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning

No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge

Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it

Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

You're a Genius all the time

Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

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