Jack Kerouac's 30 Essentials!

Want to be a better writer? Check out Jack Kerouac's 30 'essentials' from his Belief and Technique for Modern Prose (196-) at this link. As Jack would say, "First thought, best thought!"

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Life of famous chess player Paul Morphy!

You can read more about Morphy's life in my novel The Pride and the Sorrow.

Kafka (1991) the movie!

Check out the trailer above for Kafka (1991), the little known biopic with the following impressive cast list:

Jeremy Irons as Mr. Kafka
Theresa Russell as Gabriela
Joel Grey as Mr. Burgel
Sir Ian Holm as Doctor Murnau
Jeroen Krabbé as Mr. Bizzlebek
Armin Mueller-Stahl as Inspector Grubach
Sir Alec Guinness as Chief clerk
Brian Glover as Castle henchman
Keith Allen as Assistant Ludwig

It's not unsurprising that this film is not better known, given the dark and disturbing subject matter. (We are in Kafka territory after all!) It continues to baffle some, but was clearly a passionate personal project of director Steven Soderbergh, and acts as a kind of sequel to his influential first film, the much better known Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) with James Spader and Andie McDowell. I would recommend Kafka as a directorial curiosity, though, and for the impressive performances of its cast, especially Jeremy Irons as "Mr. Kafka", even though the film is somewhat plotless without being satisfying, and ultimately fails to hang together.

James Hogue, Princeton graduate, athlete, imposter!

James Hogue, Princeton graduate, athlete, imposter! on Facebook

Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen show

This is a great video of Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show. While Steve Allen plays some tinkling jazz on the piano, Jack reads a passage from his book Desolation Angels (1965) about Dean Moriarty, also the hero of On The Road (1957). Enjoy!

Quarry diving!

Passed!
I got my PADI.

Yes, it's official, I can now go diving. Watch out fish!

Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac

This is a brief introduction to Memory Babe, A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia. Without a doubt, this is a full a portrait of Jack's life as any biography has yet delivered. It is very thorough about both the life and work, especially the life. We learn more or less everything that happened to Jack - from his French-Canadian ancestry, his childhood in Lowell Massachusetts to his adventures in the Merchant Marines, New York City, relationships with 'the Beats' poets and writers, and of course, his struggles with fame, fortune and the bottle...
I have been a Kerouac fan for some time - how can you like writing and not be? His language is full of life, energy, and has moments of transcendent beauty unlike any other writer. Its breath is one of youth, hope and new possibilities - no joke! What feeling is there better to capture in writing?

I came to this biography via On The Road (1957) and Big Sur (1962), which read together act as bookends to Kerouac's writing life. I still find it incredible - and here Memory Babe is particular adept at unravelling the life and the myth - that Kerouac wrote so many of his novels before his first (On The Road) was even published.

Overall, Gerald Nicosia's book is an impressive achievement, and my impression is that in its insistence to be faithful to all sides of every point of view on Kerouac, it does achieve a greater objectivity than other Kerouac biographies. At 767 pages, you would hope so. If you are as interested in Kerouac the eternal contradiction - both shy and gregarious, industrious and lazy, free-spirited and dogmatic, soaring spiritual writer, and alcoholic self-abuser - then this book is for you.

Read it and weep!

Guide to Britain's Best Pubs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/interactive/2009/jun/15/guide-britains-best-pubs

Matt Fullerty - author fan site!

Matt Fullerty on Facebook

The Story of "A Confederacy of Dunces"

This is arguably the best biography out there about John Kennedy Toole, the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1981). It is also definitely the best biography about his mother, Thelma Toole, who was instrumental in getting the novel published after her son's suicide. As Joel L. Fletcher explains, without Thelma, there would be no Ken. And Thelma's jounrey to publish the book is as interesting as Ken's own struggle to write it.

I say best biography because the challenge with any biography of John Kennedy Toole is to gather sufficient material to tell the story of his life. Toole left few records beyond a handful of letters to friends and family (including to Fletcher, and many of these letters between the two are transcribed in this biography). There is another biography available called Ignatious Rising (2001), but by all accounts - Fletcher's incivive attack on that book's credibility not the least - the authors of Ignatious Rising, Rene Nevils and Deborah Hardy, were at great pains to speculate and elaborate on Ken's life, without having any read evidence to back them up. For that is precisely what is missing from Ken's life - the evidence - but Fletcher is able to side-step that question somewhat by focusing on Thelma as much as her "genius son", as she called Ken.

The Knight of New Orleans - chess in the crescent city!

The Knight of New Orleans on Facebook

Novel's first review - thanks Geoff!

Geoff Cush, New Zealand novelist and a member of the Bookhabit judging panel, had this to say about THE PRIDE AND THE SORROW:


"What made Matt Fullerty's writing stand out, from the very first sentence, was an unusually strong and individual way with words. Taking us into the vanished world of old America and Europe he uses a highly textured language to give an almost physical experience of being in that place and time. Drawing subtle lines between a society top-heavy with leisure and the profligate genius it produced in Morphy, he holds back the historical and personal reckoning while letting it gather and brood like the storm that finally washes away New Orleans. In my view this makes THE PRIDE AND THE SORROW a stand-out all rounder in the craft of literary fiction."

This smart-looking chap is Paul Morphy. You can follow this link to find out more about his New Orleans family. And to learn more about his formidable chess opponents with slideshows of the players click here!

Are you a fan of murder and mayhem in London?

The-Murderess-and-the-Hangman on Facebook