John's Artistic Blog

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

Kerouac is best known as one of the “Beat Generation” authors who came out of New York City after WWII (the others being his friends Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs). In fact, Kerouac coined the phrase “Beat Generation" in 1948 to describe an anti-conformist youth movement of down-and-out people disillusioned by the war and American society afterwards.

Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents. They were extremely religious Catholics so religion was a part of his life growing up. He became very devout and later claimed that when he was six-year-old, the voice of god told him:

“…that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation.”

Later in life, Kerouac often drew sketches of crucifixes in his diary. He also wrote prayers— appeals to Christ to be forgiven.

There’s another anecdote that sheds light on Kerouac’s personality and his writing. In 1943, Kerouac served a short time in the United States Navy Reserves. But he was honorably discharged on the psychiatric grounds that he had a "schizoid personality".

According to Wikipedia, someone with a schizoid personality develops a solitary lifestyle, emotional coldness, and detachment; individuals may be unable to form intimate attachments and may possess an elaborate internal fantasy world.”

It’s difficult to say whether god’s prediction or the Navy’s discharge diagnosis were accurate, but Kerouac became famous and has been remembered long after his death in 1969. That’s a kind of salvation, right?

Kerouac had a stream-of-consciousness writing style that inspired a legion of fans. When the Beatniks of the 1950s hailed his writing because he advocated personal freedom, Kerouac responded by saying:

“I’m not a Beatnik; I’m a Catholic“,

One thing he might never have admitted:

“I’m not a straight; I’m a bisexual!”

But Kerouac’s fame as a writer might not have occurred if he hadn’t gotten involved with a gay murder in 1944. After leaving the Navy, Jack had met Allen Ginsberg at Columbia University. They both competed for the attention of Lucian Carr, an attractive young man, who recently moved there.

In August 1944, Carr killed David Kammerer, who Carr claimed stalked him. The New York press described the crime as an “obsessed homosexual preying on an appealing heterosexual younger man, who finally lashed out in self-defense.”

Kerouac helped Carr dispose of evidence but eventually talked Carr into turning himself in. Kerouac was arrested as a material witness, and his parents refused to bail him out. This led to Kerouac’s first marriage to Edie Parker. Her father agreed to put up the money. Kerouac would eventually be married three times.

According to Ellis Amburn, who wrote a biography of Kerouac in 1998, Jack struggled with his sexual attraction to Lucien Carr. Carr had affectionately called Jack his “has-been queen.”

The main characters in many of Kerouac’s stories were thinly based on himself and his friends. The central character was often a consummate womanizing straight man and alluded to occasional forays of sex with men.

Yet Kerouac was contemptuous about homosexuals in his writing. In “On the Road,” he calls them “queers” and “fags,” and he described New York as “a frosty fagtown.” Amburn (the biographer) described it as Kerouac’s “homophobic homoeroticism.”

The novel, published in 1957, describes Kerouac's road trip across the United States and Mexico with his friend Neal Cassady (Sal and Dean in the novel). Kerouac described the novel as:

“… a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street, San Francisco, and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way.”

Yet the book has also been described as a love story between two “straight” men. It is now known that Kerouac and Cassady had an off-and-on sexual relationship for nearly 20 years. Allen Ginsberg confirmed he had sex with both Kerouac and Cassady—but not at the same time.

In Kerouac’s 1958 novella The Subterraneans, the Kerouac character is solicited for sex by a man in Riverside Park when he’s asked “How you hung?” The scene takes place at the same park where Kammerer had been murdered.

The Subterraneans also includes a reference to a sexual encounter between Kerouac and Gore Vidal. Kerouac described it as a rough trade.

Later, Vidal would write about the event in his memoir Palimpsest. Vidal claimed that Kerouac was the bottom:

“Jack raised his head from the pillow to look at me over his left shoulder. He stared at me for a moment… forehead half covered with sweaty, dark curls—then he sighed as his head dropped back onto the pillow.”

Bottom or not, Kerouac would later refer to Vidal as a “little fag.”

It’s worth saying that from a modern perspective, Kerouac treated women poorly and would probably be labeled as a misogynist. He was a “rebel” who benefited from his own white privileges.