and yet you live
“And I had many a romantic fancy then, and sighed at my star. The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that’s no Harvard lie.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
New Orleans glowed orange bright
“There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
the stars
“At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who’s lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
a handful of crazy stars
“I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
where Frisco fogs are born
“There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary Potato Patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
the manuscripts of the snow
“Great snowstorms overtook them. In Missouri, at night, Neal had to drive with his scarf-wrapped head stuck out the window with snowglasses that made him look like a monk peering into the manuscripts of the snow because the windshield was covered with an inch of ice.”
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.
real mental power kicks
“Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks.”
—Jack Kerouac, in a 1951 letter to Neal Cassady; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.
the beautiful dream of life
“More and more as I grow older I see the beautiful dream of life expanding till it is much more important than gray life itself—a dark, red dream the color of the cockatoo.”
—Jack Kerouac, Journal, July 4, 1949; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.
Vernacular Baton Rouge
We in graphic design call the graffiti and hand painted signage of a given area “the vernacular.” And I have been impressed for years by the vernacular here in Baton Rouge. I don’t know how many times I’ve said to myself “I should take a picture of that.” So here it is, the first in a series. These unsigned heads face River Road just south of the I-10 bridge.
the full moon
“‘So there was a old woman told my mammy once that if a woman showed her belly to the full moon after she had done caught, it would be a gal.’”
—William Faulkner, Spotted Horses, 1940.