I've been trying to decide which dead author I'd like to meet, but it's been difficult. I guess it'll be a toss-up between Thoreau and Hemingway.
c.i.
Wouldn't mind knocking back a drink or three with Jack Kerouac....
Or maybe some other kind of mind altering substance.
Not sure Jack dabbled much in those, except maybe for amphetamines...
He did losts of pot, remember he was wrote that they had to go to the black clubs to get it - one of the ways he got so much into jazz. Uppers, he lived on those! Of course, his buddies did everything!
Another author in the vein of Jack - Richard Farina, would enjoy that talk.
Bill, right you are about Jack and pot--I forgot (tends to happen sometimes these days). And yeah, Farina would be fun to sit down with, too. He used to hang with Thomas Pynchon when they were at Cornell...
D' - I think that you are correct except for pot and uppers he didn't do all the other stuff. Liquor killed him.
Did you ever read "Off the Road" by Carolyn Cassady. That was a real go book about the real happenings and where the happened. I believe she stresses the point about him not doing all the other stuff - especially when they got mixed up with the Greatful Dead and of course, there was Ken Kesey and the "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Maybe he didn't stay that far away from other stuff. However, I think Cassady was more involved in the acid scene.
Bill, I haven't read Carolyn Cassady's book, but I have read a fair amount about Kerouac. In his own weird way, he never strayed too far from home and momma. You're right, by the time the hippie movement was underway, Jack was off the road, drinking himself to death and spouting reactionary political views!
You know he was a right wing intellectual - his good buddy was William Buckley.
William S. Burroughs...oh wait, he just looks dead...and I did talk with him at a book signing....
Swinburne then, to ask him what was up with all those flagellation poems...
Cav, I think Bill did buy the ranch in 1997...You didn't meet him since then, I don't suppose?
Probably, him and Keith Richard just need a little injection to get'em out of the coffin. BTW, Willie B. was Tex in Jack's book.
Wait a second, Bill, isn't Keith still among the living? Hard to say sometimes...
Or is he just a meth injection away from another performance? Yeah, under current medical methodologies, he is still considered to be alive!
Oddly enough, I just finished reading "Just Kill Me", an oral history of the punk scene in NYC. Man, talk about substance abuse, bad behavior and early death. Well, what can one expect for a group that had Iggy Pop and Wm S. Burroughs as mentors...
You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think so I'll have to choose Dorothy Parker as my evening's entertainment.
If I can have one other I'll pick Truman Capote.
I'd just sit back and listen.
I would pick Mark Twain, but I would like to go drinking with Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens.
Czech/Slovak philosopher Milan Simecka, lifelong optimist and the most gentle, kindest man on earth. Would love to hear his thoughts on the state of the world today and some positive vision for the future.
<after his death i helped to translate his book:
Letters From Prison>
I would ask F. Scott Fitzgerald to meet me in a neighborhood park. I would want to sit with him on a park bench and converse. I would be listening to see if his conversation is as eloquent as his prose in what I consider the best American novel, The Great Gatsby.
