Brianland

the Best in Kerouac & the Beats, Adventure, Politics, Music, Movies, Poetry & other Lifejoys

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Kerouac’s 100th birthday celebration in Lowell

March 20th, 2022 · 25 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats, Real-life Adventure Tales

. Everybody’s known for ages that Jack Kerouac’s 100th birthday was coming up on March 12th, 2022, but it was still the dark Covid times, and I hadn’t been On The Road in over two years — not since the New Hampshire Democratic primaries in February 2020 — plus I was really in no mood […]

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Beat Versus Beatnik

March 3rd, 2021 · 29 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats

21st Century Beatniks versus Hieroglyphic Caricatures . There’s long been a debate about the word “beatnik” — originally coined by a sensationalist San Francisco gossip columnist in 1958, playing on the Yiddish suffix “nik” and the first Russian satellite launched in September ’57, colloquially known as “Sputnik.”  Jack and Allen & company hated the word […]

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Ken Kesey at The Jack Kerouac Conference

April 19th, 2015 · 11 Comments · Hitchhiker's Guide to Jack Kerouac, Kerouac and The Beats, Merry Pranksters, Real-life Adventure Tales

Then Along Comes Kesey . .  Excerpted from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” available now.   I was well into Jack — and this whole conference kicked that up a few dozen notches — like it did everybody else — but The Chief and The Boys (the Grateful Dead) — those were the magic […]

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