Spitball Army

She felt odd writing her heart in a V-mail, so she chronicled the weather lovingly: in Iwo Jima ash, he read of her Michigan snow.

The fountain pen, of crushed oyster shell, wrote with a gold nib. The note, on a telegraph form, began: I’ve been a damnable fool.

His new job revealed the most vital topics of inter-office gab: cars, kids and sex. He was willingly conversant in one of them.

I feel comforted and far from alone when my telephone identifies a missed call as TEXAS, as if one-fiftieth of America wants me.

“I love Christmas,” said the woman, ankles wrapped in plastic bags, “It’s the Lord’s time.” Her companion rummaged in a Frito bag.

Jack Kerouac listening for music in the ether.  (photo: John Cohen, 1959)

Writer and cultural mouthpiece Jack Kerouac’s style of “spontaneous prose” has been a wonder for decades. In the mid-20th century, he was encouraged to attempt the near-impossible by some of his contemporaries; asked to describe “how he did it,” in a 1958 letter to Don Allen he wrote the following canon:

Belief & Technique for Modern Prose
List of Essentials

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. Dont 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