“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

- Jack Kerouac

What a sentence. 

Forget about all of the imagery, parallelism and the literary devices that make it special; for me, it’s holistically one of the most memorable sentences in the English language.  Ever since I read it a few days ago I’ve been enamored with Kerouac, his alcohol and drug-induced prose, and his fellow writers of the Beat Generation, or beatniks. 

It’s this sentence that has single-handedly inspired me to read Kerouac’s On the Road.  His utterly insouciant, free-flowing style is something that you really don’t find in today’s modern literature, and it’s a real shame.  

His direction and command of words is truly remarkable, and invokes comparisons to the strikingly analogous, sensational language of soccer commentator Ray Hudson.  Yes, I know juxtaposing Hudson and one of America’s greatest writers is a bit far-fetched, but Hudson shares a similar gift to Kerouac in his diction and expression. (Head over to the link or Hudsonia on the blogroll to compare for yourself.)

I really don’t know what’s so compelling about Kerouac or even that particular sentence.  The imagery?  The amorphous style?   Maybe it’s his arrogance.  To write a sentence that long, and good, is a feat in itself.  Or maybe I’m ineffable because he probably wrote the sentence intoxicated or under the influence of psychoactive drugs, and therefore has no definitive category.

Indeed, Kerouac was quite the figure.  He played football.  He joined the navy.  He abetted a murder.  He constantly wrote.  He got high off Benzedrine.  He inspired a literary movement.

And with that, I’ll leave you with Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you 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 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 for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
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, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven