The Power of Location - A Visit to the Kerouac House.

Everyone's got that one place in their hometown that they've never been to. It can be anything; a public garden, a particular restaurant, a concert hall, an abandoned building that people take questionable drugs in, or anything in between and well beyond. Usually, it's tucked away in the corner of the neighborhood you don't go to often or that you always pass through. Maybe it has a particular historical context to it, maybe it's a tourist hotspot, a secret local gem, or some other mix of blogosphere buzz words. You hear people talk about it here and there, sometimes in between chugging beer, heading to work, or rambling on about it in the voice of the suspiciously normal-sounding NPR host. And you tell yourself you'll visit it one day and you nod your head and make a mental note of it as you pass by but you never do get around to it. So in the end the whole place sits there more as a concept than an actual location teasing you for your procrastination and perpetually being the one thing you definitely should know about, but alas you do not.

For me, that place was the Kerouac House. Well, I had gotten sick and tired of not having been there so (relatively) recently I got out of my perfectly fine panic room apartment and forced myself to interact with monsters known as human beings individuals at a reading hosted at the Kerouac House.

For those of you that are unfamiliar a quick background on Jack Kerouac and his titular house.

Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac, born in 1922, was an author famous for works such as On the Road and Dharma Bums. He was a member of the so-called "Beat Generation" movement of authors and poets. These writers were centered in bohemian artist communities of San Fransisco, Los Angeles, and of course NYC's Greenwich Village primarily in the 40s-60s. Despite the distance, these were not a disparate group of artists who rarely met, many of them mentored, supported, and were good friends of each other. Their work was known for rejection of quote-on-quote square society, influences from drugs, jazz, and Zen Buddhism, and a general sense of displeasure at the conformity of modern society. While these were certainly the predominant themes another compelling element was the often boundary-pushing and avant-garde style of their work, from the frenetic style of Ginsberg's Howl to the dark, often confusing world of Burrough's Naked Lunch, and the zenned-out musings and travels of Kerouac's Dharma Bums, the beatniks never ceased to write in an authentic, musical, if at times off-putting style.

(Interestingly, as Allen Ginsberg tells it, Kerouac himself was the originator of the poetic moniker of Beat Generation. In Ginsberg's foreword to The Beat Book: Writings From the Beat Generation he outlines how a conversation between Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes in 1948 where the two went back and forth comparing their generation to the lost generation. More appealing phrases such as 'angelic' and 'found' but Jack was rather insistent that this generation was nothing but a beat generation. Implying a certain deadbeat nature to them. Holmes later took that phrase and ran with it in 1952 with a New York Times Magazine article effectively naming his generation. Later Kerouac anonymously published an excerpt of On the Road under the name "Jazz of the Beat Generation" and the name stuck. It's not often that literary movements get to name themselves if they did they probably wouldn't name themselves after stuck-up Tudor patrons that they were obliged to kiss the asses of.)

I think the nominal "Beat literature canon" endures...because it holds together, through communality, a discourse that manifests a visceral relationship to language...Initially one is engaged, entertained, and drawn in by the Beat myth - the lore, the cultural image - but finally one focuses on the writing itself and exults in finding that it still breathes. These writers were literary companions who not only championed each other's work but also spoke of and to one another inside of their work.

- Anne Waldman from her Editor's introduction to The Beat Book:Writings from the Beat Generation.

This is admittedly a very abbreviated and 'literature professor' sounding description of the movement. The way I would explain it is with a highly specific comparison/mental image.

Picture, and perhaps remember for a moment a minuscule city apartment with far too many roommates. They're all disheveled young men with questionable taste in drugs, a little over half of them are in an experimental band together, one or two of them are slam poets, and the last few just do the opposite of what everybody else they know is doing. Most of them are still enrolled in college, one of which will stick it out through grad school but most of them will drop out under the weight of the system - man. You'll often see one of them hanging off hallway doors, attempting to get a one-night stand, or lazily playing three chords on the guitar at the corner of someone else's house party. They all have ~interesting~ political and philosophical viewpoints and though your better instincts and nice, proper upbringing would tell you to stray away from those occasionally pretentious deadbeats, you can't help but be attracted to their peculiar charm. And you find yourself cramming into disgusting smelling bars that are probably not up to code just to listen to whatever eclectic music and poetry these deeply flawed folks produce.

Now imagine all of that, but the music and writing are actually good not just a mildly amusing combination of cliches they think are completely new inventions. That's the Beat Generation. At least for me. Admittedly, everyone has their way of relating to and understanding art. This perception is often brought on less by the art itself and the rumors and perceptions of the authors, our personal experience, and the cultures we were raised in. But after we move past our romanticization of particular authors and periods, once we see their humanness in all of its ugliness and normalcy, and focus on the writing instead of our ideological predisposition or our judgment of the art's creator, we see uniquely captivating works. Books and poetry that express a truly honest discomfort with the chains society and even ourselves place upon us, a reverence for music and belief, and irreverence for all the rules that exist only to breed cynicism and cage the consciousness of man.

...

So what does all this have to do with a quaint bungalow in Central Florida?

Well from 1957-1958 as Jack Kerouac's On the Road was reaching a critical mass of acclaim the writer was quietly renting and residing with his mother in the back half of a small bungalow in the Orlando neighborhood known as College Park. It was during this time that he also typed the original manuscript for its sequel Dharma Buns. These two works are quintessentially 'beat' and even people who couldn't give two shits about mid-20th century literary movements have at least a passing familiarity with them.

Interestingly, Kerouac's presence at College Park was considered local lore, few people knew exactly where he lived in the neighborhood, Kerouac's biographers often failed to mention his time at the house, and many considered it to be of little importance.

This meant that the house was left in disrepair for decades and came relatively close to facing the same fate a lot places in Orlando experience, which is to be mercilessly bulldozed by our Lady of Perpetual Real Estate Development. The story of how a journalist, a couple of local activists, and the President of Cole National bought up and saved the location from destruction to eventually be listed on the National Register of Historic Places is quite interesting. And I encourage you to read about it here. The non-profit helps maintain the building, supports the local arts and writing community, and continues to run the writers-in-residence program which is still accepting applications from writers of every stripe to stay at the house.

Since 2000 the project has had over 65 writers-in-residence stay for three months at a time to work on their craft while being in the same space that such a fascinating literary figure used to write one of his last three books. These writers-in-residence also give readings to the local community, usually at the house itself.

At last, we are back to the story that began this article - my visit with my father (who is a huge nerd for Kerouac and the beat generation at large) to David Morgan O'Connor's farewell reading at the titular house.

Despite not having a large raw number of people in attendance, inside the small space everything seemed filled with life, people talking and smoking, folks from the board of directors and community members, some new to the project others deeply familiar. Before the reading began we had the pleasure of being taken around the little place and seeing the variety of photographs and learning more about the history of the house. The art donations, historical photographs, and the oddly small door in the back. We also got to see the back room where Kerouac slept, smoked, wrote, watched baseball, but mostly smoked. It's a small area with just a large desk under a picture window and an old reclining chair. This was the chair Kerouac watched tv and probably had more nicotine drip soaked into it than fabric. We even got to sit in that chair! The consensus? Surprisingly comfortable and much respect to the poor sod who had to clean that chair after the place was acquired.

We sat down in our chairs that were notably not graced with the presence of an American writer's ass and listened to O'Connor read a good number of his poetry as well as local Iranian-American poet Ehsan Emad read some of his work.

Courtesy of The Drunken Odyssey I'll let you listen to their art yourselves without spoiling anything, there's no point in trying to gild a lily.

When I think back of what it was like sitting in that room and getting to hear the visual and at times nostalgic poems of O'Connor, the visceral and almost musical work of Ehsan Emad, and listening to music afterward while people smoked and drank on the porch and talked somewhat aimlessly about life and work, I don't think about the specific words or what people looked like. I remember the feeling of being in the house, my eyes wandering around the room seeing all of the remnants of writer's past, the cadence in their voices as words flew off the pages, the reverence people had for the perfectly normal-looking location, how the spirit of a loose community of artists tied together by a shared desire to be primally free and to capture that in writing, seemed to live on - in whatever small way - in my hometown. I remember when I spoke with my dad afterwards how I got to see a completely different side of my father talking about how his cynicism started to fade away.

Most of all how I can't quite forget the place. How a location I so easily passed by or even forgot about has etched its way into my brain and provided such a wonderful experience for one evening and a truly special place for myself being an aspiring writer and a Central Floridian.

...

"Holy shit we sat in Jack Kerouac's chair!"

"Fuck yeah we did."

That was one of the last things my dad said to me before dropping me off back home and indeed I do relish in now having that highly specific flex. Truly, the most important thing about the Kerouac House.

Please consider supporting kerouacproject.org and seeing if there are any writer's residencies near you and your local community. Art doesn't happen outside of the world in some far-off spiritual plane, it happens here. In places that are obviously special and especially in places that aren't.