16.6.2023, Re-reading Jack Kerouac (1962): Big Sur

Jack Kerouac (1962): Big Sur. Penguin Books (1992). [Acquired 1993]

• p.5 … coming 3000 miles from my home in Long Island … in a pleasant roomette on the California Zephyr train watching America roll by … up the Hudson Valley and over across New York State to Chicago and then the Plains, the mountains, the desert, the final mountains of California …
• p.9 … cabdriver … he lets me off at the Raton Canyon bridge … [i.e. Bixby bridge]
• p.18 … I myself turned from serene Jekyll to hysterical Hyde in … six weeks, losing absolute control of the peace mechanisms of my mind …
• p.23 So easy in the woods to daydream and pray to the local spirits …
• p.107 … confusion that’s beginning to pile up in my battered drinking brain …
• p.166 … the cabin of sweet loneness on Big Sur …
• p.203 If I try to to turn over the whole universe turns over with me but it’s no better on the other side of the universe …
• p.211 … a series of explosions that get louder … some of them big orchestral and then rainbow explosions of sound and sight mixed …
• p.217-241 „SEA“ – Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur

p.v-vi Foreword (Aram Saroyan)

p.vi His work … brought something of the luminous pleasures of the French Impressionists into American writing, and something too of the brooding syntactic circuitry of Proust … he was a tender writer …

Back cover / Allen Ginsberg, 10/10/91, N.Y.C.: … a humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac …at the peak of his suffering humerous genius he wrote through his misery to end with „Sea“, a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Sur_(novel): … written in the fall of 1961 over a ten-day period, with Kerouac typewriting onto a teletype roll … recounts the events surrounding … three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, California, owned by Kerouac’s friend … Lawrence Ferlinghetti; at the same time dealing with his increased drinking and declining mental health … departs from his previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the character Duluoz [Kerouac] is shown as a popular … published author; most of Kerouac’s previous novels … portray him as a bohemian traveller.

Cf.:

• 5.5.2023, NYC (Sub)Cultural anchorage [incl. cumulative listing of Beat references]
• 25.2.2021, Lawrence Ferlinghetti died 3 days ago, at age 101
• 30.7.-1.8.1988, Amtrak California Zephyr; Chicago – Oakland