The Windblown World: The Journals Of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954

Rating:
Summary: Providing an essential insight into the roots and foundation
Review: Douglas Brinkley editors and provides the introduction for Jack Kerouac: Windblown World; gathering of Kerouac's journals from 1947-54. With University of New Orleans professor Brinkley's background in history, Windblown World comes alive, providing a gathering of materials synthesizing works entered by Kerouac in ten notebooks and providing two fine sections centering around his early efforts to publish his first works and the events which led to his finest "On The Road" novel. These two pivotal focuses succeed in providing an essential insight into the roots and foundations of not only Kerouac's life, but his literary inspiration. Very highly recommended.


Rating:
Summary: Another Brinkley sell out
Review: Growing up as a "boomer" in the 50's and 60's as I did was as transforming an event as the transition from the 20's to the 30's for many, and Kerouac was one of those whose writings captured that transformation for me and millions of others with his "On the Road" best seller in 1957. He had his detractors like Capote who sniffed at him as just being "a typist" but millions loved his break from the suburban swamps and into the "beat" generation which he had named, doing drugs, experimenting with all kinds of sex, and just adding to the general adolescent rebellion that took form in the 60's in many ways. This book, in Kerouac's letters and other writings from his other friends, shows him to be a much different kind of person. A serious student of other writers in serious times, he was much more complex than "sex, drugs, and rock and roll".
He was almost completely paralyzed by self-doubt for most of his life, and his alcoholism obviously took a toll on his brain before it killed him at 47. This book in the form of Kerouac's writings is most revealing. The problem with this book is its author/editor, Brinkley. Brinkley leaves out any mention of the journal Kerouac completed which is at the U of Texas in Austin, or his tangle with the law with Ginsberg, and many other misquotes and factual errors. But what this book reveals most about Brinkley is that he is really not the historian he holds himself out to be; he is just another hired gun, willing to write incomplete and misleading hagiographies for the right price, as he did for John Kerry or Jimmy Carter, among others.
Hopefully someday the Kerouac estate will allow a real historian access to the material they have and not leave it to someone who is willing to shave the facts here and there to make a work of fiction instead of a real story about a real man.


Rating:
Summary: A Literary Miracle
Review: It's beyond amazing that, after all these years, after all
Kerouac's work: novels, poetry, letters, etc. have long been
available...that suddenly a brand new book appears...and it's
beyond great. It's up there with anything he ever wrote.
If you love Kerouac, make getting this book #1 on your list.
If I may offer one brief quote (on page 12) on the subject
of maturity: "...the flashing exhilirated maddening discoveries
and truths of youth, the ones that turn young men into visionary
demons and make them unhappy and happier than ever all at once--
the truths later dropped with the condescension of "maturity"--
these truths come back in true maturity, maturity being nothing
less than disciplined earnestness--"
The book is LOADED with cool stuff like that.
Even though I'm not a Christian, all Kerouac's writing about
Jesus in these journals don't bother me, because he's writing from an ENLIGHTENED perspective. We are truly lucky that Jack Kerouac existed on Earth; and all those lunkhead critics who
dumped their ignorant bad reviews on him all those years ago
have been proven to be morons.

Rating:
Summary: Kerouac wrote from a place beyond this Earth.
Review: This book is what we have all been keenly waiting for. Kerouac's own words and thoughts and his own mad sad times in the prime of his life (25-32yo). One page he decribes going into NYC to see D. Gillespie at Bopcity then crosses the street to Birdland to see Miles Davis and Stan Getz all in the same night , other times he is hanging out with friends and late night breakfasts in the city (ham and eggs figures alot). Alot of writing on his favorite writers Twain , Balzac and especially his most favorite "old Dusty " (Doestevesky). The first part deals with his completion of Town and City and progresses to his beginning On The Road with anecdotes galore. Kerouac writes like an angel and this is the best book on or by Kerouac since the mid 1960s when he penned his last books. Buy it and keep on a special shelf. We NEED ALL his journals soon but it will be truly remarkable if any are at this level !!!

Rating:
Summary: Comedown, Sorrow, and Truest Love
Review: Two of Kerouac's journals, published together and finally available for the lay reader to pick up and delve into. Editor Douglas Brinkley does a fine job putting this material into context, even if he makes overstated claims for it, and even if he seems so needlessly to kiss John Sampas' ass, even dedicating this book to him among others of his cohort. We learn a lot about Kerouac from these journals, a lot that's valuable and a lot that shows us just why so many fell in love with his mind and his thoughtful, sometimes halting way of proceeding, always trying to do the right thing despite innumerable obstacles. I think also he had a natural inclination to be sort of the bad boy, and then he had the spectre of his dead brother acting on him as a kind of good angel always steering him right. With utmost seriousness he tried to plot out his life and his course of spiritual action; of course, as we see, women, booze, guys, and wanderlust got in his way, caused him to stray from the path.

His very earnestness however is endearing: "This is why life is holy," he states on pg. 211 (think of the irony on top of which such a statement would be laden today by Kerouac's so-called successors), "Because it is not a lonely accident. Therefore, again, we must love and be reverent of one another, till the day when we are all angels looking back." He sounds an apocalyptic note: "Those who are not reverent now may be the most reverent then (in their other, electrical, spiritual form.) Will there be a Judgement Day? No need to judge the living or the dead: only the happy and the unhappy with tears of pity." Kerouac seems to have seen clearly what escapes all of us but the most enlightened, that we are all creatures of sorrow and of what he calls "electricity," the charge that makes us human.

But not all of WINDBLOWN WORLD is so solemn, there are some hilarious tidbits and routines, such as the curriculum JK develops in October 1949 (pp. 226-28) for a kind of "New College for Comedians," with imaginary courses that might be given by Burroughs "How to Play the Horses" and Huncke: "Modern Drugs." His own courses were more poetic: "Riddles and Roses" and "The Myth of the Rainy Night." The requirements to get into the school? "Sixty points in elementary realization, largesse, comedown, sorrow, and truest love."