#ann charters

[manwalksintobar]

The Basic Con // by Lew Welch

Those who can’t find anything to live for, always invent something to die for.

Then they want the rest of us to die for it too.

[macrolit]

The Portable Beat Reader, Ann Charters

[latesummermoon]

Ann Charters, The Portable Jack Kerouac

[aranazo]

Kerouac by Ann Charters,

[litteratured]

Herbert Huncke at UCONN, December 7, 1995

"Herbert Huncke answers questions from Ann Charters and audience members following his reading at the University of Connecticut on December 7, 1995.  Video by Laki Vazakas, Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved.  Huncke's reading was organized by Kurt Hemmer."

[sumarugla]

Neal Cassady once imagined a mutual friend saying of Jack: "Where is this guy, Kerouac, anyway?" Kerouac himself never knew. His essence lay in a romantic vision of himself. It lay in his fantasies: as a child, the fantasy of living with a saintly older brother Gerard; as an adolescent, of fighting evil alongside the mysterious Doctor Sax, of going with a football scholarship from a small high school to All-America fame at an Ivy League college; then, as an adult, the fantasy of being the greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare and James Joyce, and when that success didn't come, in desperation, successive fantasies of being a drifter, a railroad brakeman, a Zen mountaineer, a holy mystic living on simple foods cooked along lonely streams; and through everything returning again and again to the only fantasy that always held him, the vision of being a child permanently cut adrift in a darkening universe. [...] To this generation Jack Kerouac became a romantic hero, an archetypal rebel, the symbol of their own vanities, the symbol of their own romantic legend. He never understood this. He was a man whose life was dominated by a deeply felt sense of mortality, not the actual circumstances of what happened to him. His real life lay in his "vanities" and the legend he made out of them. Until, as he wrote it down, the legend became, finally, the only reality his life had.

from Kerouac: A Biography by Ann Charters

[latesummermoon]

Jack Kerouac, On Bop and the Beat Generation (The Portable Jack Kerouac)

[latesummermoon]

Ann Charters on Jack Kerouac’s Old Angel Midnight