LASTBEATYOUNGLION

Excerpt from Tristessa-Jack Kerouac-analysis

Bull gets up and helps her clean things- To me he says, “Them artists and writers, they don’t like to work—Don’t believe in work (as the year before, as Tristessa amd Cruz and I chatted gagly with the gaiety I had last year, in the room, he’s banging with a Mayan stone statue about the size of a big fist trying to fix the door he’d broken down the night before because he took too many goofballs and went out of his room and locked-clicked the padlock, key in the room and him in his pajamas One A M)—Wow, I do gossipy—(So he’d yelled at me “Come help me fix this door, I can’t do it all by myself”—“Oh yes you can, I’m talking”—” You artists are all lazy bums”)

The first part of a  short dialogue exchange with Old Bull Gaines in Mexico City reveals that the sentiment expressed on the part of Gaines is certainly wrong. Though Kerouac purported his use of “spontaneous prose” there is no doubt in my mind that a hell of alot of work went into all of these projects.

Also advice on reading Kerouac and his close contemporaries one must get the rhythm of the prose—not classicist meter or rhyme but pick up the writers syntax and the like.