Beat News: February 27 1995

1. Guess what … Literary Kicks got a mention in the new Bob Dylan CD-ROM. COOL !!!. The CD-ROM, which is called Highway 61 Interactive, has a sort of Myst-like feel, and shows much awareness of Dylan’s Beat connections (see here). A section called DYLAN@INTERNET lists several Dylan-related Web sites as well as mine. You have to click on the picture of the telephone to see this section. I spent about six hours clicking around on this CD-ROM before I discovered that my name was in it.

2. Some interesting new material on Jack Kerouac has been surfacing lately. Newsday (a Long Island/New York newspaper) published an article about Kerouac’s last night in Northport, Long Island before he moved to St. Petersburg, Florida (where he died). It turns out Kerouac’s local friends had a minor beer-bash/going-away party for Jack, and taped the whole thing. No real revelations; the tape mostly confirms other descriptions of Jack’s declining years. He babbles about the past, yells for people to bring him beer, and ballet-dances around the room to the tune of “The Wabash Cannonball.” (Note: if you want to see the article, it has been posted to rec.music.gdead — catch it before it disappears. I have the text but am afraid to link it here. Newsday probably has great lawyers).

I also ran into an issue of The Missouri Review (Volume XVII, Number 3) with Kerouac on the cover and a bunch of previously unpublished letters from Jack to Ed White (a friend of Jack’s from Columbia, who turned up as Ed Gray in ‘On The Road‘.)

3. To those of you who have sent me material that hasn’t shown up yet — I haven’t forgotten, I’m just very busy. I’m working on a new Web site, a fiction/art project, which I’ll be announcing here soon. After I finish this other site I’ll start devoting all my attention to LitKicks again, and growing it much faster.

Also, I wish I had more time to shape up my bibliographies and expand into other areas. If anybody out there would like to become a part of this project and take over an area of specialty, I’d like to hear from you. It’d be nice, for instance, if I had an official Kerouac Bibliographer, a Burroughs Film Indexer, a Ginsberg Activities Chronicler, a Kesey expert, etc. Send me mail if you’re interested!

4. Lots of news on the upcoming ‘On The Road’ film. I went to a casting call — read about it here.

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Litkicks will turn 30 years old in the summer of 2024! We can’t believe it ourselves. We don’t run as many blog posts about books and writers as we used to, but founder Marc Eliot Stein aka Levi Asher is busy running two podcasts. Please check out our latest work!