Synchronicity

Being in the initial stages of settling my mom's estate (she died two days after Jack's death anniversary), this article about the on-going legal battles over Jack Kerouac's estate caught my eye: Get Your Sordid Kerouac Estate Details Here.

The lesson? Have a will. Make sure it is clear, legal, and current. Provide a copy to your attorney, personal representative, and beneficiaries (don't forget to be specific about who gets your collection of Jack Kerouac books and memorabilia).

But only if you care about your wishes being followed after you head out on your last road trip.

You might also want to prepare a document containing details like social security number, bank account and investment information, insurance policy and retirement information, and other stuff it might be hard for those left behind to pull together or find out about (e.g., usernames and passwords, safe deposit boxes, outstanding loans). Oh, and a concise directive about what to do with your body and how you'd like us all to go about your send-off would be very helpful as well.

And no, it's not morbid. It's called being responsible and considerate.

Kerouac, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and more at The Paris Review

During my research on the Kerouac-Hemingway connection, I discovered that all The Paris Review's writer interviews since 1953 are available online for free!

Yup! They interviewed Jack - in 1968. See The Paris Review Interviews 1960s. You'll find an interview with Allen Ginsberg on that page as well. And William Burroughs. And William Carlos Williams. All of them beat writers or of interest to a beat aficionado (which means "a fan of bullfighting," a Hemingway connection).

If you jump to The Paris Review Interviews 1950s, you'll find an interview with Hemingway.

For each decade, there are a couple dozen interviews.

It's an amazing resource. Robert Frost is there. Kurt Vonnegut.

You'll get to read James Dickey, author of Deliverance, say about Allen Ginsberg:

I certainly hope so. I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that. They damn themselves to a life of inconsequentiality when they could have been doing something more useful. They could have been garbage collectors, or grocery-store managers.

Dickey's entitled to his opinion. And so am I. The high point of his entire career was playing the hard-ass sheriff in the movie version of his novel, wherein he sneered at Jon Voight:

Don't ever do nothin' like this again. Don't come back up here.

But I digress. As you will once you start reading the writer interviews made available by The Paris Review! Huzzah to them!!