1. Okay, goddammit, my new CD-Rom movie is finally done, and I’m giving away 750 copies starting tomorrow, Tuesday August 4, beginning at 12 noon Eastern Standard Time. You can get one by filling out this form, which will remain up until all the copies are gone. I’m hoping to get feedback on the movie which will help me iron out any technical bugs before I officially release the CD-Rom in October (it will sell for $12). If you get a copy before then, please remember to fill out my Feedback form.

2. There’s going to be a big Beat party at the site of a legendary hippie/beatnik commune in Cherry Valley this weekend. I’ll be there, and I’m looking forward to meeting Charlie Plymell and a lot of other people. If you’re there and you recognize me from my picture please say hello! The weekend is officially some kind of town Arts Festival but from what I hear it’s going to be one big party.

3. The publishers of a new biography of Jack Kerouac, “Subterranean Kerouac” by Ellis Amburn, are indulging in a bit of sensationalism by trying to sell the book as a “tell-all” revealing Jack’s alleged deep dark secret, which is that he was bisexual. I have a couple of points to make about this deep dark secret:

• Virtually every biography of Jack Kerouac, from Ann Charters’ “Kerouac” in 1973 to Gerry Nicosia’s “Memory Babe” and most of the others in between, mention that Jack had bisexual tendencies. So why all the publicity now? It’s well documented, for instance, that a drunken Jack Kerouac once had a spontaneous fling with Gore Vidal (an openly gay writer) in a Manhattan hotel, and was later found in a crowded bar yelling “I blew Gore Vidal!”. So a new book revealing the stunning secret that Kerouac was bisexual is about as necessary as a new book revealing the stunning secret that Bill Clinton fools around with White House interns.

• Here’s what the evidence tells us about Kerouac’s sexual inclination, if anybody cares. Unless he was lying to his readers, to the friends he wrote letters to, and even to himself in his journals, he mostly felt attracted to women. He fell in love with them often, married twice, and yearned for female companionship when he didn’t have it. As he documents in autobiographical novels like Subterraneans and Big Sur, he wasn’t the smoothest lover in the world, or the most secure. He seemed to have a hell of a lot of what my wife would call “issues”, and especially seemed to resent the power women had over him because of his attraction to them. He also had at least some capacity for attraction to men, or at least an open-minded attitude about men as sexual partners. He hung out with a lot of literary and artistic types in Greenwich Village and San Francisco, and so was surrounded by gays and grew to feel comfortable experimenting with his own gay tendencies, whatever they were.

  To twist these facts around and try to portray Kerouac as deeply repressed by a secret buried desire for men is disingenuous. Like I said, this is a man who once announced “I blew Gore Vidal!” in a crowded bar. Doesn’t sound very repressed to me.

  The worst thing about the depiction of Kerouac as tormented by a buried sexual desire is that it leads to a reinterpretation of his writing that trivializes some of his best work. I don’t believe that On The Road was secretly about Sal Paradise’s attraction to Dean Moriarty, and I also don’t think this idea illuminates the book in any way. It’s like the supposed “discovery”, a few years ago, that Van Gogh used so much yellow in his paintings because he suffered from an obscure eye disease. I like to think Van Gogh used so much yellow because it meant something. If it was just an eye disease, then it’s not art.

• There have been about sixty new books about Jack Kerouac in the last eight months, and I really, really just don’t think the world needs any more new books about Jack Kerouac. Really. No, really.

Oh, I forgot to say, about being gay: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” No, really.