Saturday, February 10, 2007

Try never get drunk outside yr own house

Still one of my favorite tips for writing. Very popular among the "new pagans" in early 90s.

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
List of Essentials

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr wife
5. Something that your feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the hold contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr monrning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazzier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
as ever,
Jack
[By Jack Kerouac, exerpted precisely as published [sic] from a letter to Don Allen 1958]
from Heaven & Other Poems, Grey Fox Press, San Francisco 1994

3 comments:

psaur said...

These were like our Dogme rules.
Of course we broke them all...
Sorry, JK (like you care)

Brian Kunath said...

Psaur's comment here expresses our ethos with the 100 proof distillation of a Haiku.

It's all about a polar swing between effort and apathy, importance and self effacement -- like a signature that crosses itself out, a Dinosaur Jr. song, or how Marty DiBergi's folded arms fall hopelessly to his side when summing up the success of his documentary.

Hence Saur's apology to Kerouac and immediate parenthetical acknowledgement of our relative unimportance.

psaur said...

Relative?