Notes and photos

I'm reading an interview on Jack Kerouac and I smile when I get to the part where I discover he's a Pisces. My mind drifts to James Merrill (he's a Pisces, too) and the James Merrill phase I went through after discovering him in my Contemporary American Literature class in college. I feel a pang of sadness as I think about the thick James Merrill book I found at a book sale (I don't remember where). It's one of the books I've lost in the turbulence of '11. I remember the Irish Setter in one of his poems, "The Broken Home". I can still recall, quite vividly, the smile James Merrill was wearing in the picture on the book's jacket. His smile was shy and sad, a faraway look in his eyes. He didn't seem to be where he was. Very similar to this one, though he was a little younger in the other:

Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

- from "The Broken Home"

But yes, Jack Kerouac reminded me a little of you.

photo from www.brainpickings.org

And that's probably why I started jotting down these notes.

#19. Accept loss forever.

Jack Kerouac's "30 Cool Tips"

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. Don't 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

via Dodo Dayao.