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!