From the Editor

I said, "Hold on just a minute, I'll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter in the book.  Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls.  As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.  He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and "how-to-write," etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care and we got along fine - no pestering and, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.  I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me.  As far as my work was concerned he said, "Go ahead, everything you do is great."  He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories, yelling, "Yes! That's right! Wow! Man!" and "Phew!" and wiped his face with his handkerchief.  "Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all-hung on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears..."

Kerouac's book On the Road is in the news again and just won't go away. Francis Ford Coppola is at work planning a film version of the book to be directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Brad Pitt as Dean Moriarity and Billy Crudup as Sal Paradise. The notable historian and biographer Douglas Brinkley is at work on a new edition of recently released Kerouac letters and a biography for Viking Press.  And in May of this year, John Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, purchased the original manuscript for 2.43 million dollars.  For some reason, many people still value the "spontaneous bop" spirit of the book.

Besides gendering and the American zeitgeist of the 50s, the book also captures something about the writing process and the frittering fractious way any writer attempts to accomplish anything.  The book is about a writer coming of age, but Poor Sal Paradise -- can he really get anything done with all of his mad going-about?  Poor us, can we get anything done except in the process of teaching writing, of being "conned" into thinking we really know anything in the first place to teach or to write?  Often, the inhibitions of form, of correctness, of audience overwhelm the writer into silence.

Fortunately, by the looks of what TCR has to report every month, the pressure pop of the wow and now, of what interests us, still spontaneously and prodigiously bops.

I am pleased to introduce Aaron Carpenter, the new graduate assistant editor of TCR.  He comes to us from Virginia Tech.  Please welcome him into your office and into your e-mail while he goes about collecting information for upcoming issues.