Thursday, March 21, 2019

21st sentence of the 21st book

Esperanza Villanueva Tercerero (Tristessa)

The 21st book* on my Kerouac bookshelf is Jack Kerouac's Tristessa (Penguin Books, 1992), and the 21st sentence (in honor of today being the 21st day of the month) is:
"Eets you l a w v."

Man, it is hard to count sentences in Kerouac's work. If there is a capitalized word after an em dash -- which he uses frequently -- I tend to count the em dash as the end of a sentence. But what if that capitalized word is "I"? Then it's anybody's guess. So I've made quite a few guesses.

In case you are guessing at today's sentence, that is Jack's way of capturing Tristessa's accent and inflection when she says, "It's your love."


*The next book on the shelf was actually Kerouac's Heaven & Other Poems, and you know from following along that poetry doesn't lend itself to our current project.

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