On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

"I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions." - Henry Miller (Tropic Of Cancer) "But get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear..." - George Orwell (Essay: Inside The Whale) I look at Tropic Of Cancer in 2019 and have to think; these days the internet would be eating Henry Miller's flesh, or doing it's best to ban the book without being so uncool as to actually openly proscribe it. Which isn't an indictment of Miller, as the same thing would happen to Jesus or Buddha if they had an online presence. It's a book that's been canonized like an ancient Saint, kept on a virtual shelf and treated as a sacred work that everyone knows is l...

"…I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future..." - Jack Kerouac (On The Road, The Original Scroll) "It was my last observation that it was the custom of every man to call every other man a madman. The truth, in my judgement, they were all mad." - Jack London (The Jacket, aka The Star Rover 1915) Jack London is known (these days) as an adventure writer whose most famous books, Call Of The Wild and White Fang, are considered children or young adult classics (at least in abridged editions). He was quite popular in his time, and wrote several books that are considered classic. His real life became legendary and many works like On The Road, a book about hobos, came from experiencing, and not just visiting, that life. London treated writing as a discipline, and part of that involved churning out 1500 words a day. That resulted in a body of work that included short stories, ...