Sunday, July 31, 2016

Kerouac Sunday

If you Google "Kerouac Sunday," you will get a number of search results.

The first result I get is my blog post from July 3 which you can read here: http://thedailybeatblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-sunday-haiku-for-jack-kerouac.html

The second result I get is for a piece of clothing called a Sunday Best Kerouac Jacket. You can see it here: http://us.aritzia.com/product/kerouac-jacket/52134.html. I wonder if they got permission from the Kerouac Estate to use his name?

The third result for me is this quote on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7299513-sunday-morning-i-empty-of-my-little-tricks-to-make-life. I recommend Goodreads, by the way. It's a place to keep track of books you have read and want to read, and to connect with other readers.

Further results range from a Sunday event at The Beat Museum to a FeMMFest Sunday evening at Kafe Kerouac to a Google Books result for Subterranean Kerouac.

Here's a Sunday quote from Chapter 16 of my favorite Kerouac novel, The Dharma Bums:
And that's what I said to myself, "I am now on the road to Heaven." Suddenly it became clear to me that there was a lot of teaching for me to do in my lifetime. As I say, I saw Japhy before I left, we wandered sadly to the Chinatown park, had a dinner in Nam Yuen's, came out, sat in the Sunday morning grass and suddenly here was this group of Negro preachers standing in the grass preaching to desultory groups of uninterested Chinese families letting their kiddies romp in the grass and to bums who cared just a little bit more. A big fat woman like Ma Rainey was standing there with her legs out­spread howling out a tremendous sermon in a booming voice that kept breaking from speech to blues-singing music, beau­tiful, and the reason why this woman, who was such a great preacher, was not preaching in a church was because every now and then she just simply had to go sploosh and spit as hard as she could off to the side in the grass, "And I'm tellin you, the Lawd will take care of you if you re-cognize that you have a new field . . . Yes!"— and sploosh, she turns and spits about ten feet away a great sploosh of spit. "See," I told Japhy, "she couldn't do that in a church, that's her flaw as a preacher as far as the churches are concerned but boy have you ever heard a greater preacher?"
I suspect Sunday was a sacred day to Jack, given his bent for Catholicism. I count 9 instances of Jack using the word Sunday in Bums. I'll share some others in the future.

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