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Kerouac, is witness to his changing
moods, the roads not taken, the
yawning inevitability of Kerouac’s
decline and the fleeting victories,
fresh books, renewed optimisms. Yet
at the conclusion, Kerouac being 47
and White 44, it fades away into a
kind of paranoia on Jack’s part. Bob
Burford and Robert Lax are at
White’s house, White wants to reunite
Jack with old friends and phones him,
but Burford is drunk and it descends
into chaos. Jack tells White to make
sure he doesn’t give out his phone
number or home address to anyone.
White feels the distance in Jack’s
voice.
Being from a sober working
background, pillar of the community
is a phrase that springs readily to
mind here, it is debatable whether
White ever composed that ‘madder
letter’ to his friend Kerouac. What is
evident is that White was a loyal ally
for Kerouac. White was quite capable
of flights of imagination that spurred
Kerouac on, especially in their
younger days, when in reality White
was the footloose traveller in Europe
and Kerouac, to an extent was the
stay at home. Though of course
Kerouac was subjecting himself to a
writerly discipline and taking
enormous pride in his daily word
count of writing amassed.
A very warm collection of
letters from both men. It would be an
absolute bonus if this little paperback
sparked fresh interest in the friends of
Kerouac who went to the nine to five
jobs. There’s a mountain there, new
revelations about Kerouac to be
uncovered. It doesn’t all have to be
Beat.
The letters are on sale for one and a
quarter million dollars. I don’t know
yet if they have found a buyer.
info@glennhorowitz.com
RUTH WEISS
Make Waves
(Edition Exil)
Released in 2013 at Temple studios in her town of Albion in California.
Ruth Weiss, a pocket dynamo. She’s an inspiration, a survivor. A
plethora of books in recent years, more often than not published in
Europe, have raised her profile after ‘swinging in the shadows’ as
Wallace Berman once talked of poets and artists languishing. This
compact disc might be a surefire way to get a handle on Weiss. She’s
an enthusiastic poetry with jazz exponent. Others may have abandoned
the form but Weiss embraces it, luxuriates over her words. She
reads the very first poem she ever wrote. She draws upon her Desert
Journal work, some of her best writing in my view. She blends well
with the band, a sax, a flute, acoustic bass, percussion. It is a subtle
blend. Weiss and the band would have made an apt house band for the
Walter Salles film adaptation of On the Road methinks. A lot more
appropriate. She’s fluid, fluent, expressive, as she chuckles at the
conclusion of her poems, she’s having fun. It all sounds very ‘live’ to
these ears, no studio trickery here. There is no diminishing in her
delivery, you might expect being 80 years old she’d be struggling,
there’s no sign of that. In some respects what you have here are the
sounds you might have encountered descending the stairs in some
smoky cellar bar in North Beach, San Francisco back in 1956, as the
San Francisco poetry renaissance was in full swing. I can’t think of a
better compliment. It’s just so......authentic.
Running time approximately 40 minutes.
www.editionexil.at
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Recent numbers 71a and 72 are sold out.
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