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Adalbert is a forum for me, to post ephemera, photography, poetry, occasional travel notes, and various spontaneous motions. Cover photo: Parsonage where my great-grandfather spent his early years. Taken near Liegnitz, Silesia, ca. 1870. The "xothique" portion of the web address is a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's fictional continent of Zothique.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

24 March, 1995 Journal

Since April, 1985 I have kept a sporadic, handwritten journal. The following is an lightly-edited entry selected from 24 March, 1995, as representative as any:

Got card from Gina from Taiwan today. 

Went & saw Ann Charters at Powell's this evening who gave a rather interesting talk about Kerouac, visited him for two days & talked about how bloated he was, drinking Johnny Walker & beer, playing the piano at a bar, walking on the beach, supporting the Vietnam War, rude & anti-Semitic. How he was a writer, memorial park in Lowell, his mother making him chicken pies he didn't eat, asking Charters to fuck him. She didn't drink herself.

J. & S. were there. 


Photo by me from February, 1986. I spent a fair amount of my youth in a house perched atop the hill on the left.

2 comments:

  1. Sometime in the 70s, after reading Ann Charters' 'Kerouac: A Biography' I wrote to her with some questions I had. She was good enough to write back with her ideas which I found helpful. A rather sad piece on Kerouac, he was a strange guy.

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    1. That's admirable that Ann Charters responded to your questions. I think she was reading from The Portable Beat Reader at the event I saw. And the anecdotes were from when she visited Kerouac near the end of his life, of course; sad as you write.

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