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.
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.
ReplyDeleteThat'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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