FINALLY...I completed my 60-page thesis on Jack Kerouac. I've been working on it for about a year now, but didn't start writing it until this past summer...it's been really tough and really rewarding.

I'm done with the rough draft, at least...hopefully I won't have to make many revisions! 9's, still wanna take a look at it?

And I still have to defend it.

After a travel grant to go to SF for "research on the Beats"...and shopping, going to see the house Kerouac and Neal Cassady lived in together for a time, and seeing the On the Road scroll, and now having written 60 pages and read a billion...I feel like I know the man!!!

And that's pretty awesome!!!

There was nothing better than, exhausted, typing out the last sentence, the last period, and hitting print...only to have my printer break, my roommate's printer run out of ink, and me having to make a mad dash to the library computer lab to get it printed and turned in on time....but gotdamn am I glad to have it outta my hands.

congrats, you should be very proud

Fantasic!!
Ain't Murphy's Law always out to get ya with the printer not working?

I almost feel a sigh of relief for you.

YAY!

Good for you Scandalous!! I know that's a tremendous burden lifted!!



[Edited 10/26/05 19:46pm]

That is AWESOME!

Congrats!

thescandalouslife said:

Congrats, scandy, that's great news!

Way to go, scandalous!!

Thanks, everyone!!!!

!!!

What GREAT news! Are you looking into getting it published? I remember how awesome I felt after I finished my collection of short stories. The feeling is unexplainable.

Real quick - what's the topic? Or was it more of a research based thesis? Will you share your favorite paragraph with us?

Well done!

Going to celebrate?

Natsume said:

Probably won't get it published...I know the content is good, but there are structural issues that I probably won't get a chance to perfect. I don't know...we'll see what my advisor thinks of it!

It was research-based. Jack Kerouac lost his older brother when he was four, to rheumatoid fever. One of his major influences in his life was Neal Cassady (hero of On the Road and Visions of Cody). So I basically argued that through his relationship with Neal and with other male figures, he was searching for a surrogate older brother. I got into sibling bereavement theory, and sibling relationship theory which was mainly psychology mumbo jumbo.

I don't really have a favorite paragraph...I'd be too embarrassed to share, anyway! Maybe I will orgnote you one, if I can think of one!

It was all very sad, really. I really believe Kerouac ultimately drank himself to death because of the fame, and because the public misunderstood him. When he wrote Visions of Gerard, the book based on his brother's death, critics ripped it apart, and it was the one book, besides Visions of Cody, that he felt very strongly about. He didn't even live to see Visions of Cody published, although he always claimed it was his greatest work. Once, at a Kerouac festival, they played a tape of a show he'd been on, on which he'd read from On the Road. Only during this playback did Ginsberg and John Clellon Holmes realize he was reading from Visions of Cody taped into a copy of On the Road, not On the Road itself - a quiet protest. He couldn't live up to the media image of the grand "King of the Beats" and so slowly drank himself to death. He even told his childhood pastor that he was drinking so much so that he could hurry up and see his brother Gerard again. He died one year after Cassady was found collapsed on railroad tracks in Mexico.

As Ginsberg said, "He offered America his heart...and America broke his heart."

Fauxie said:

No, I have a 10-page research paper due tomorrow for my film class. I'm pulling an all-nighter.

thescandalouslife said:

You should look into getting it published, or even sending it out to see what people say. I sent out my first story to Glimmer Train and was rejected a few months later! In all seriousness, it just means I am that closer to being accepted.

Your thesis sounds interesting. Are you a big fan of the Beats? I could never quite get into them, including Kerouac, but I do recognize the mark they made at the time and ultimately left behind. The bit about his brother - it's so tragic. The poor fellow. I really should make an effort to get into Kerouac. What should I start with? (I admit I started On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, and Dharma Bums and ultimately put all three down. )

Hey, thanks for sharing. I do miss academia. What's your film paper on? That's much more up my alley. Unless it involves film theory.

Natsume said:

Yes, I love the Beats! My first college English course was The Beat Generation...I signed up accidentally. I was the only freshman in the course (it was a 300-level for juniors/seniors only). But I absolutely loved it, and did well, so I decided to major in English.

Honestly, I'm almost more of a fan of Ginsberg than of Kerouac, because Kerouac's prose can get damn dense and rambling. But that was his style - spontaneous prose, he called it - he learned it from Cassady who, incidentally, never published anything in his life but inspired both Kerouac and Ginsberg ("Howl" is dedicated to "N.C." or Neal Cassady). I would recommend Dharma Bums or On the Road, but I guess you didn't like them! Hmmm...maybe one of his shorter novels, like The Subterraneans? It's about a tragic love affair he had with a Black woman in NYC.

My film paper is on Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth...grrrr. It's for my New Wave Cinemas class....I've nearly run out of things to say and I have 3.5 pages to go! I'm doing a feminist criticism of Makoto's character and how it relates to the upheaval of Japan's society at the time the film was made...I'm researching as I write! ME