Synchromysticism

" Synchromysticism:
The art of realizing meaningful coincidence in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance."

- Jake Kotze

October 24, 2012

On The Road With Proust

 I saw the movie On the Road last weekend, and I couldn't help noticing the copy of Swann's Way always laying around as Sal (Jack) was working on his books.
 Obviously, Proust was a big influence on Kerouac.  
Proust's madeleines ...
well like the ones he would have had.
A saying of Proust's that I have
sitting on my computer desk.
Another big Proust fan is Cliff Pickover, who quotes Proust left, right, and center in his book Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves.
"The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs everyday"
Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone.
Also, a major influence on Jack Kerouac was Lee Konitz.
 "On October 7, 1951, after a gloomy Sunday when he seemed to be making no progress on the chapters about Neal Cassady he was adding to On the Road, Jack went to Birdland to hear the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, who recently had come into his own as a leading innovator of cool jazz.  
During Konitz's solo in "I Remember April," which he played as if it were "the room he lived in," his music sounded "so profoundly interior" to Jack that he was sure very few people would understand it. 
In fact, he compared Konitz's extended phrases to the sentences he was writing lately, sentences whose direction seemed mysterious until the "solution" was suddenly unveiled in a way that shed light backward on everything that had preceded it. 
Admiring Konitz for refusing to make the concessions that would gain him a wider audience, Jack saw that both he and the musician were essentially doing the same thing -- attempting to communicate "the unspeakable visions of the individual." 
Grabbing a pencil, he scribbled a reminder to himself: 
"BLOW AS DEEP AS YOU WANT TO BLOW." 
It was a rule he would start to follow in his work, despite his continued brooding about his tormenting inability to finish his second novel."
"Tranced Fixations" -- Kerouac's Breakthrough

4 comments:

  1. Read 'On the Road' when young and thought it was great. Tried to re-read it again recently and couldn't get into it - must be an age thing. Might go and watch the film, but can't imagine quite how they could make a good movie out of it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The movie is not bad,but it is no substitute for the book.
    I would see the movie as more of a supplement to the book.
    It would be good to see once you have read the book,or maybe even vice-versa.But it is no substitute for reading the book.
    I've got to say that I'm no real Kerouac fan.After reading
    "On The Road" I have no real desire to read any more of his work.
    Like Salinger's
    "The Catcher in the Rye",
    I read them to see what all the fuss was about,but can't say that I was overwhelmed by their writing.
    Probably ground-breakers for their time,and had a tremendous ripple effect on authors who followed them,but I have no desire to read either author's other books.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Like Mike, I read on the road when I was in college, tried to read it again and couldn't get into it. I think it was a groundbreaker for its time. I'm enjoying sex, drug, einstein and drugs. I got a kick out of the author saying he's a skeptic, then launching into an explanation about how he was different from other skeptics. Uh, yeah. Because u aren't a skeptic. Thanks for that recommendation!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm about to finish reading the last chapter on Burning Man and then I'll give it a 5 star review at Amazon.
    The only chapter that dragged for me was chapter 7,but even that one was kind of interesting.
    I've got one other book of his -"Immortality",but I'm going to read something a bit different first before I get stuck into that one.

    ReplyDelete