Old Angel Midnight

by Jack Kerouac, Donald Allen (Editor)

Overview

A sensory narrative poem capturing the rhythms of the universe and secrets of the subconscious with stunning linguistic dexterity from the author of On the Road

A spontaneous writing project in the form of an extended prose poem, this sonorous and spiritually playful book is one of Jack Kerouac’s most boldly experimental works. Collected from five notebooks dating from 1956 to 1959—a time in which Kerouac was immersed in Buddhist theory—Old Angel Midnight is comprised of sixty-seven short sections unified by an unwavering dedication to sounds, the subconscious, and verbal ingenuity.

Friday Afternoon in the Universe, in all directions in & out you got your men women dogs children horses pones tics perts parts pans pools palls pails parturiences and petty Thieveries that turn into heavenly Buddha. Thus begins Kerouac’s Joycean language dance. From birdsong to dharmic verse, street jargon to French slang, the resonances of the universe come blaring in though the windows, unfurling their meaning as the mind lets go and listens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504033978
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	03/22/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	67
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was an American writer best known for his novel On the Road. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac attended Columbia University. Along with his friends, including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, Kerouac was a key figure in the counterculture movement known as the Beat Generation. He wrote his first novel, The Town and the City, about his struggle to balance the expectations of his family with his unconventional life. Kerouac took several cross-country trips with Cassady, which became the basis for On The Road. He published several more novels including Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and his final great work, Big Sur. He settled with his mother and his wife, Stella Sampas, in Florida, where he died in 1969 at age forty-seven.

Read an Excerpt

Old Angel Midnight

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By Jack Kerouac, Donald Allen

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1993 John Sampas Literary Representative
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3397-8

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CHAPTER 1

1 Friday Afternoon In The Universe, in all directions in & out you got your men women dogs children horses pones tics perts parts pans pools palls pails parturiences and petty Thieveries that turn into heavenly Buddha — I know boy what's I talkin about case I made the world & when I made it I no lie & had Old Angel Midnight for my name and concocted up a world so nothing you had forever thereafter make believe it's real — but that's alright because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too — and but d y aver read a story as vast as this that begins Friday Afternoon with workinmen on scaffolds painting white paint & ants merlying in lil black dens & microbes warring in yr kidney & mesaroolies microbing in the innards of mercery & microbe microbes dreaming of the ultimate microbe-hood which then ultimates outward to the endless vast empty atom which is this imaginary universe, ending nowhere & ne'er e'en born as Bankei well poled when he ferried his mother over the rocks to Twat You Tee and people visit his hut to enquire "What other planet features this?" & he answers "What other planet?" tho the sounds of the entire world are now swimming thru this window from Mrs McCartiola's twandow & Ole Poke's home dronk again & acourse you hear the cats wailing in the wailbar wildbar wartfence moonlight midnight Angel Dolophine immensity Visions of the Tathagata's Seat of Purity & Womb so that here is all this infinite immaterial meadowlike golden ash swimswarming in our enlighten brains & the silence Shh shefallying in our endless ear & still we refuse naked & blank to hear What the Who? the Who? Too What You? will say the diamond boat & Persepine, Recipine, Mill town, Heroine, & Fack matches the silver ages everlasting swarmswallying in a simple broom — and at night ya raise the square white light from your ghost beneath a rootdrinkin tree & Coyote wont hear ya but you'll ward off the inexistency devils just to pass the time away & meanwhile it's timeless to the ends of the last lightyear it might as well be gettin late Friday afternoon where we start so's old Sound can come home when worksa done & drink his beer & tweak his children's eyes —

2 and what talents it takes to bail boats out you'd never flank till flail pipe throwed howdy who was it out the bar of the seven seas and all the Italians of 7th Street in Sausaleety slit sleet with paring knives that were used in the ream kitchens to cut the innards of gizzards out on a board, wa, twa, wow, why, shit, Ow, man, I'm tellin you — Wait — We bait the rat and forget to mark the place and soon Cita comes and eat it and puke out grit — fa yen pas d cas, fa yen pas d case, chanson d idiot, imbecile, vas malade — la sonora de madrigal — but as soon as someone wants to start then the world takes on these new propensities:

1. Bardoush

(the way the craydon bi fa shta ma j en vack)

2. Flaki — arrete — interrupted chain saw sting eucalyptus words inside the outside void that good God we cant believe is anything so arsaphallawy any the pranaraja of madore with his bloody arse kegs, shit — go to three.

3 Finally just about the time they put wood to the poets of France & fires broke out recapitulating the capitulation of the continent of Mu located just south of Patch, Part, with his hair askew and wearing goldring ears & Vaseline Hair Oil in his arse ass hole flaunted all the old queers and lecherous cardinals who wrote (write) pious manuals & announced that henceforth he was to be the sole provender provider this side of Kissthat.

Insteada which hey marabuda you son of a betch you cucksucker you hey hang dat board down here I'll go cot you on the Yewneon ya bum ya — lick, lock, lick, lock, mix it for pa-tit a a lamana lacasta reda va da Poo moo koo — la — swinging Friday afternoon in eternity here comes Kee pardawac with long golden robe flowing through the Greek Islands with a Bardic (forgot) with a lard (?) with a marde manual onder his Portugee Tot Sherry Rotgut, singing "Kee ya."

Tried to warn all of you, essence of stuff wont do — God why did you make the world?

Answer: – Because I gwt pokla renamash ta va in ming the atss are you forever with it?

I like the bliss of mind.

Awright I'll call up all the fuckin Gods, right now! Parya! Arrive! Ya damn hogfuckin lick lip twillerin fishmonger! Kiss my purple royal ass baboon! Poota! Whore! You and yr retinues of chariots & fucks! Devadatta! Angel of Mercy! Prick! Lover! Mush! Run on ya dog eared kiss willying nilly Dexter Michigan ass-war-lerin ratpole! The rat in my cellar's an old canuck who wasnt fooled by rebirth but b God gotta admit I was born for the same reason I bring this glass to my lip —?

Rut! Old God whore, the key to ecstasy is forever-more furthermore blind! Potanyaka! God of Mercy! Boron O Mon Boron! All of ye! Rush! Ghosts & evil spirits, if you appear I'm saved. How can you fool an old man with a stove & wine drippin down his chin? The flowers are my little sisters and I love them with a dear heart. Ashcans turn to snow and milk when I look. I know sinister alleys. I had a vision of Han Shan a darkened by sun bum in odd rags standing short in the gloom scarey to see. Poetry, all these vicious writers and bores & Scriptural Apocraphylizers fucking their own dear mothers because they want ears to sell —

And the axe haiku.

All the little fine angels amercyin and this weary prose hand handling dumb pencils like in school long ago the first redsun special. Henry Millers everywhere Fridaying the world — Rexroths. Rexroths not a bad egg. Creeley. Creeley. Real magination realizing rock roll rip snortipatin oyster stew of Onatona Scotiat Shores where six birds week the nest and part wasted his twill till I.

Mush. Wish. Wish I could sing ya songs of a perty nova spotia patonapeein pack wallower wop snot polly — but caint — cause I'll get sick & die anyway & you too, born to die, little flowers. Fiorella. Look around. The burlap's buried in the wood on an angle, axe haiku. La religion c'est d la marde! Pa! d la marde! J m en dor. —

God's asleep dreaming, we've got to wake him up! Then all of a sudden when we're asleep dreaming, he comes and wakes us up — how gentle! How are you Mrs Jones? Fine Mrs Smith! Tit within Tat — Eye within Tooth — Bone within Light, like — Drop some little beads of sweetness in that stew (O Phoney Poetry!) — the heart of the onion — That stew's too good for me to eat, you! —

People, shmeople

4 Boy, says Old Angel, this amazing nonsensical rave of yours wherein I spose you'd think you'd in some lighter time find hand be-almin ya for the likes of what ya davote yaself to, pah — bum with a tail only means one thing, — They know that in sauerkraut bars, god the chew chew & the wall lips — And not only that but all them in describable paradises — aye ah — Old Angel m boy — Jack, the born with a tail bit is a deal that you never dream'd to redeem — verify — try to see as straight — you wont believe even in God but tbe devil worries you — you & Mrs Tourian — great gaz-zuz & I'd as lief be scoured with a leaf rust as hear this poetizin horseshit everyhere I want to hear the sounds thru the window you promised me when the Midnight bell on 7th St did toll bing bong & Burroughs and Ginsberg were asleep & you lay on the couch in that timeless moment in the little red bulblight bus & saw drapes of eternity parting for your hand to begin & so's you could affect — & eeffect — the total turningabout & deep revival of world robeflowing literature till it shd be something a man'd put his eyes on & continually read for the sake of reading & for the sake of the Tongue & not just these insipid stories writ in insipid aridities & paranoias bloomin & why yet the image — let's hear the Sound of the Universe, son, & no more part twaddle — And dont expect nothing from me, my middle name is Opprobrium, Old Angel Midnight Opprobrium, boy, O.A.M.O. —

Pirilee pirilee, tzwé tzwi tzwa, — tack tick — birds & firewood. The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity.

5 Then when rat tooth come ravin and fradilaboodala back-ala backed up, trip tripped himself and fell falling on top of Old Smokey because his pipe was not right, had no molasses in it, tho it looked like a morasses brarrel, but then the cunts came. She had a long cunt that sitick out of her craw a mile long like Mexican Drawings showing hungry drinkers reaching Surrealistic Thirsts with lips like Aztec — Akron Lehman the Hart Crane Hero of Drunken Records came full in her cunt spoffing & overflowing white enlightened seminal savior juice out of his canal-hole into her hungry river bed and that made the old nannies gab and kiss that.

6 0 he was quite racy — real estate queen — Europe & Niles — for pleasure — stom stomp absulute raze making noise — I can write them but I cant puctuate them — then he said comma comma comma — That skinny guy with black hair — Atlean Rage — in India in the last year he's getting even ignoring all common publications & getting Urdu Nothing Sanskrit by Sir Yak Yak Yak forty page thing Norfolk — let's all get drunk I wanta take pictures — dont miss with Mrs. lately in trust picture pitcher pithy lisp — that's an artistic kit for sex — Trying to think of a rule in Sankrit Mamma Sanskrit Sounding obviously twins coming in here Milltown Equinell Miopa Parte Watacha Peemana Kowava you get sticky ring weekends & wash the tub, Bub — I'll be gentle like a Iamb in the Bible — Beautiful color yr lipstick thanx honey — Got a match Max? — Taxi crabs & murdercycles — Let's go to Trilling & ask him — I gotta wash my conduct — Dont worry about nothin — I love Allen Ginsberg — Let that be recorded in heaven's unchangeable heart — Either bway — Rapples — Call up Allen Price Jones — Who is that? — They re having fun on the bed there — Soo de ya bee la — And there came the picture of Ang Bong de Beela — Fuck it or get it in or wait something for the bee slime — Then the ants'll crawl over bee land — Ants in bands wailing neath my bloody ow pants, owler pants — Ta da ba dee — He thinlis I'm competive in a long pleasant souse of Wishing all of ye bleed stay meditation everybody martini destroy my black — Allen ye better voice the stare, this beer these room sandwiches — Where did you get these? Big greasy socialists — Are you gonna konk, Allen? Mighty tall in the saddle — Anybody got a ceegiboo? — The moon is a piece of tea — (Under the empty blue sky, vertebrate zoology.)

7 And make the most malign detractor eat from the love of the lamb — and the pot that's for everybody not diminish when somebody comes — Tathagata, give me that —

Visions of Al

Women are so variously beautiful it's such a pleasure

Think happy thoughts of the Buddha who abides throughout detestable phenomena like lizards and man eating ogres, with perfect compassion and blight, caring not one way or the other the outcome of our term of time because celestial birds are singing in the golden heaven. In the golden hall of the Buddha, think, I am already ensconced on a tray of gold, invisible and radiant with singing, by the side of my beloved hand, which has done its work and exists no more to tone up the troubles of this birth-and-death imaginary world — And that's because the Old Angel Midnight is a Fike — that's because the Old Angel Midnight never was. And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves, many heads bend beneath the light, arguments are raving avid lipt and silly in silly secular rooms silly seconsular rooms full of height agee — Swam! reacht the other shore, folded, in magnificence, shouldered the wheel of iron light, and shuddered no more, and rowed the fieldstar across her bed of ashen samsara sorrow towards in here, the bliss evermore.

So.

Saw sight saver & fixt him. — Love you all, children, happy days and happy dreams and happy thoughts forevermore —

Dont forget to put a dime in the coin box by dipping your finger in ancid inkl the holy old forevermore holy water & bleep blap bloop the sign a the cross, when facing the altar down the aisle when you're waltzing — Ding! Up you go, smoke

8 The Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look and there's a tangled eucalyptus hulk stick fallen thru the late sunlight tangle of those needles, hanging from it like a live wire connecting it to the ground — just below, the notches where little Fred sought to fell sad pine — not bleeding much — just a lot of crystal sap the ants are mining in, motionless like cows on the grass & so they must be aphyds percolatin up a steam to store provender in their bottomless bellies that for all I know are bigger than bellies of the Universe beyond — The little tragic windy cottages on the high last cityward hill and today roosting in sun hot dream above the tree head of seas and meadowpatch whilst tee-kee-kee-pearl the birdies & mommans mark & ululate moodily in this valley of peaceful firewood in stacks that make you think of Oregon in the morning in 1928 when Back was home on the range lake and his hunting knife threw away and went to sit among the Ponderosa Pines to think about love his girl's bare bodice like a fennel seed the navel in her milk bun — Shorty McGonigle and Roger Nulty held up the Boston Bank and murdered a girl in these old woods and next you saw the steely green iron photograph in True Detective showing black blotches in the black blotch running culvert by the dirty roadside not Oregon at all, or Jim Back so happy with his mouth a blade of grass depending —

Hummingbird hums
hello — bugs
Race and swoop

Two ants hurry
to catch up
With lonely Joe

The tree above
me is like
A woman's thigh
Smooth Eucalyptus bumps
and muscle swells

I would I were a weed
a week, would leave.
Why was the rat
mixed up
in the sun?

Because Buddhidharma came from the West with dark eyebrows, and China had a mountain wall, and mists get lost above the Yangtze Gorge and this is a mysterious yak the bird makes, yick, — wowf wow wot sings the dog blud blut blup below the Homestead Deer — red robins with saffron scarlet or orange rud breasts make a racket in the dry dead car crash tree Neal mentioned "He went off the road into a eucalyptus" and "it's all busting out," indicating the prune blossoms and Bodhidharma came from the India West to seek converts to his wall-gazing and ended up with Zen magic monks mopping each and one and all and other in mud koan puddles to prove the crystal void.

Wow

9 Lookin over der sports page I see assorted perms written in langosten field hand that wd make the 2 silhouetted movie champeens change their quiet dull dialog to something fog — ah, Old Angel Midnight, it will be all over in a year.

Dying is ecstasy.

I'm not a teacher, not a sage, not a Roshi, not a writer or master or even a giggling dharma bum I'm my mother's son & my mother is the universe —

What is this universe
but a lot of waves
And a craving desire
is a wave
Belonging to a wave
in a world of waves
So why put any down,
wave?
Come on wave, WAVE!
The heehaw's dobbin
spring hoho
Is a sad lonely yurk
for your love
Wave lover.

I would I were a little tiny Jesus examining the mystery above the lightbody-cloud of the moon on still Marin nights, the flowers are my moon goddesses, & take craps naked. Horrible delightful the old retired harridan joys that wobble on the walking stick hill with nervous Collies yarking Yowk here in Journal Town where I wobble the card crate prayer bead Juju box with swing of wordage while Chas Olson reads my prose, man of the broad mysterious smoky Mountain Morn. (And everything is non-existent), heh. —

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Old Angel Midnight by Jack Kerouac, Donald Allen. Copyright © 1993 John Sampas Literary Representative. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Publisher's Note on Poetry,
Old Angel Midnight,
Editor's Note,
About the Author,

Editorial Reviews

``Never before has inconsequentiality been raised to such a peak that it becomes a breakthrough,'' poet McClure writes in one of this volume's two prefaces. Culled from five notebooks, the writing presented here--one continuous prose poem--spans 1956-59, a period when Kerouac (1922-1969) had immersed himself in Buddhist theory. Offbeat, sometimes preposterous references to religion are to be found throughout: ``This holy and all universe is a wonderful white wild power, why, hell, should, heaven, interfere, words, waiting, flesh, sure, I know . . .'' While it seems redundant to call anything by Kerouac ``spontaneous,'' Beat critic and biographer Charters points out that Kerouac ( On the Road ) conceived of this work as a map of his subconscious, ``without the end or narrative direction'' that his novels often groped for. Thus even more unconstrained, he plays with words, puns, delights in juxtaposed sounds, invents new words and throws in foreign ones almost at random: ``Shoot, pot, proms were flowery purple lilac Richmond eve roadsters redlegs sweetdolls . . .'' Like Kerouac's other manuscripts, this material was kept from publication until after his widow's death. At the time of its writing, this volume might have been considered an experimental ``breakthrough,'' but it feels tired and trite now. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Old Angel Midnight (1959) was one result of Kerouac's automatic writing experiments in which he would spill his chemically inspired thoughts onto paper to see what came out. Though Kerouac was initially denounced by literary critics as an oddball, his spontaneous twistings and turnings of language rate well with those of Joyce and Stein, and time has proven him to be an important and enduringly popular American writer. Also newly available from Grey Fox is Kerouac's Good Blonde & Others ( |ISBN 0-912516-22-4)

Library Journal

I've long been drawn to lost books, hidden books, books that reverberate through an author's career like subterranean bits of code. Kurt Vonnegut's Canary in a Cathouse, Lynne Tillman's Weird Fucks, Patti Smith's Witt or Ha! Ha! Houdini! — each reads to me as a secret message, highlighting (or so it seems) a set of elemental concerns. This is especially the case with Jack Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight, a prose poem (or a cycle of prose poems) written in five notebooks over three years, from 1956 to 1959. Partly, it's the provenance: When I was a young reader, just discovering Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight was — along with Some of the Dharma, San Francisco Blues, and other then-unpublished works — the stuff of legend, a manuscript that seemed essential in some sense to the author's canon but only marginally available if at all. Inspired by his friend Lucien Carr (the original title was Lucien Midnight), the text was published in two installments during Kerouac's lifetime, parts 1–49 in the Spring 1959 issue of Big Table and the remaining 18 sections in Evergreen Review in 1964. It first came out in book form in 1973. My initial exposure came via snippets cited in biographies by Ann Charters and Gerald Nicosia, the latter of whom called it perhaps "the closet thing to Finnegans Wake in American literature," although, he concluded, "the ultimate failure of the piece is due to its being too successful an imitation, for it lacks the original conception that distinguished the majority of his works."

Nicosia has a point: Old Angel Midnight is a pastiche (homage, even) to Finnegans Wake. But it is also something more than that, a tone poem, an extended stream of consciousness that aspires — Kerouac was nothing if not ambitious — to channel the breath of creation itself. "Friday afternoon in the universe," the book begins, "in all directions in & out you got your men women dogs children horses pones tics perts parts pans pools palls pails parturiences and petty Thieveries that turn into heavenly Buddha — I know boy what's I talking about case I made the world & had Old Angel Midnight for my name and concocted up a world so nothing you had forever thereafter make believe it's real." I fell in love with it the first time I read the words. Partly, it's the felicity of the set-up, Friday afternoon in the universe, "workinmen on scaffolds painting white paint & ants merlying in lil black dens & microbes warring in yr kidney & mesaroolies microbing in the innards of mercery & microbe microbes dreaming of the ultimate microbehood which then ultimates outward to the endless vast empty atom which is this imaginary universe." (There's something accessible about this vision yet also cosmic, which is, of course, the whole idea. We tend to think of Kerouac as a road warrior, desperate for kicks and experience, but this is a misreading that deflects his actual concerns. His subject, rather, is consciousness, "the point of ecstasy," he notes in On the Road, "that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm." In Old Angel Midnight, he achieves this by stripping away even the loosest frame of narrative. "I've been finally doodling with an endless automatic writing piece," he wrote to the novelist John Clellon Holmes in 1956, "which raves on and on with no direction and no story and surely that won't do tho I'll finish it anyway while doing other things . . . "

Those "other things," it turns out, are instructive, if only in what they suggest about Kerouac's creative state of mind. Old Angel Midnight comes out of a run of odd work, ancillary (but not really), poetic more than narrative. It was directly preceded by The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, his attempt to write a Buddhist sutra, and before that by the long poem Mexico City Blues. During this period, he also wrote Some of the Dharma and two short novels, Visions of Gerard — about his older brother, who died in 1926 at age nine — and Tristessa, a love song of sorts for a Mexico City prostitute. All of these works are impressionistic, even the fiction, and all of them deal directly with the tragedy and transcendence of being alive. "Dying is ecstasy," he writes early in Old Angel Midnight. And then: "I'm not a teacher, not a sage, not a Roshi, not a writer or master or even a giggling dharma bum I'm my mother's son & my mother is the universe — "

What we're seeing is a shift away from storytelling toward something more like the direct transcription of experience. This suggests, I think, a key tension in Kerouac: the Buddhist intention, on the one hand, of being in the moment, juxtaposed against the writer's intention to set it down. Kerouac knows everything is ephemeral, that we and all that surrounds us, "[t]he Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look . . . [t]he little tragic windy cottages" will disappear. It's the source of his sadness, but also of his inspiration; his work represents a sustained attempt at self- preservation despite his understanding that nothing, really, can be preserved. That's what makes Old Angel Midnight so vivid, because it is an attempt to record something close to pure perception, even as it recognizes the impossibility of the task. "Silence in my window now in the fullmoon of haiku," Kerouac intones, "which goes OO yellow continent in a birdbath, April full moon which rattle the goldroom little death chair that never will collapse."

Here, we get close to what I admire best about the book, its embrace of sound, of rhythm and music, of literature as aural in the most specific sense. As such, Old Angel Midnight is a record of listening, of hearing beyond, or beneath, language, of seeking to engage a cosmic beat. It's not the only work of Kerouac's to attempt this; his 1962 novel Big Sur ends with a long poem called "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur." Yet like the fiction that contains it, "Sea" is an unconsoling effort; "But these waves scare me —" Kerouac admits. "I am going to die / in full despair — " Old Angel Midnight, on the other hand, is about acceptance . . . or better yet, about presence, about pause. It's encoded in that opening gambit, Friday afternoon in the universe, "timeless to the ends of the last lightyear it might as well be getting late Friday afternoon where we start so's old Sound can come home when worksa done & drink his beer & tweak his children's eyes — " That's vintage Kerouac right there, down to the beer and the sentimentality, "but that's alright," he reassures us, "because now everything'll be alright & we'll soothe the forever boys & girls & before we're thru we'll find a name for this Goddam Golden Eternity & tell a story too."

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Reviewer: David L. Ulin

The Barnes & Noble Review

"Kerouac’s ambition to capture the living moment (crucially for him, recapitulating memory) developed poetic form in 1954 with his collection San Francisco Blues, and it reached greater fulfilment with the sixty-seven free-association passages of Old Angel Midnight. This new edition from City Light Books adds one more, found among Kerouac’s papers by John Sampas, concluding 'Eyes of Ray Charles see Me here realize O Holy.' Mostly written during April 1956 when Kerouac shared a shack with Gary Snyder in rural Mill Valley, outside San Francisco, Old Angel Midnight was likely facilitated by the 'letting go' technique he observed from Snyder’s Buddhist meditation. Kerouac described this as 'multilingual sound representing the haddal-da-babra of babbling world tongues coming in through my window.' Onomatopoeic sounds of trees, birds and deer intermingle with childhood flashbacks and in-jokes about his current lovers, friends and rivals. Assonantal and alliterative effects abound: 'perts parts pans pools palls pails parturiences and petty Thieveries that turn into heavenly Buddha.' The stream of mixed-up language is habitually libidinous, peppered by Joycean wordplay ('Taxi crabs & murdercycles'), an orgy of made-up words that culminate in pure sound: 'ampho andiam yerka yama chelmsford alya booneavance koroom cemada versel.”––Jules Smith, The Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher