[lbo-talk] good morning my fellow ecosystems

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Apr 17 13:23:20 PDT 2009


On Fri, 17 Apr 2009, Jordan Hayes wrote:


> I presume you mean "That's not cooking, that's just shopping" in the way
> that Truman Capote said "That's not writing, it's just typing" for
> Kerouac's 'On The Road' ...

BTW, did anyone else get to see the original scroll of On the Road when it was, well, on the road? FWIW, the exhibit made it very clear that this witticism of Capote's (one of my favorites) wasn't in any way true. Kerouac spent a couple years filling notebooks with sketches for the book. Then after reading them all, he typed out the first draft in a fury. And then afterwards he marked it up by hand very minutely -- there's crossing out and re-writing everywhere. According to the accompanying material, Kerouac never originally claimed he'd written it in 3 weeks. It was an artifact of a talk show snippet. He at first denied it, considering it an insult to his craft, but once it became lore, he eventually stopped fighting it and milked it along with other parts of his celebrity.

BTW, in the scroll version (which is now published, and which I read), everyone has their real names, which personally made it more fun for me.

Michael



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