Brianland

You wake up one day and your whole life changes just by the chance seeing of a picture.

Much the way it might with a chance spotting of a poster on a bookstore wall.

As Jack says, “My books are my children.”  And as Mama always preached — pregnancy can happen in an instant.

Unlike most books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac had a precise Birth Day.

I had no plans to become a parent when I got up on Tuesday, February 19th, 2013, but it was then that I saw a photograph posted to an online Beat group that featured a bunch of the Founding Fathers of the Beat Generation hanging out on a porch at a gathering I went to in 1982.

Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, Carl Solomon, with Robert Frank seated, on the front porch of Allen’s house in Boulder, July 1982.
Photo courtesy Jerry Aronson from “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg” 8 hour DVD set.

It was just like that inexplicable flash vision of seeing the conference poster in the sixth bookstore in Vancouver that prompted the entire adventure.  You never expect your future to show up in front of you, but BAM! there it is!

Everyone in the online group was agog at this large gathering of giants, and how everybody looked so young, and that they were all together, and what an amazing collection of spirits this was.

To me it was just an old picture of my summer vacation.  As it turned out, not a single one of these myriad scholars or fans in the online group had attended this legendary Woodstock of the Beats.

A flow of online comments ensued, and since I’d been to it, people started saying, “I bet you’ve got some great stories, Brian!”  And “I hope you brought a camera!”

“Well, now that you mention it . . . “ I hadn’t looked at those pictures or thought about this thing in years.  But being a conscientious contributor I thought I’d chime in with some memories.

“This’ll just take a few minutes to write,” I thought.

I started fresh the next morning — February 20th, 2013.  “I’ll just whip this off then go run some errands” — even though I didn’t even have an “E” key on my new but broken MacBook!  Had to push the little knobby thing down below!

Somehow I didn’t get it finished that first day.  “Well, for sure I’ll finish it up tomorrow.  Gawd, I can’t believe this is taking so long!”  I started in that second day, but as it kept rolling down the road more and more memories kept coming into focus — and I was transported back to that time, as happens when you write — you begin to live in that world and not the physical one you’re sitting in.

The next day I thought, “For sure this’ll be done by tonight, damn it.”  But more photo albums and cassette tapes and notebooks and such kept tumbling off the mountain onto the path, more doors to open, more surprises, more memory boxes, more road going, until . . . “Well, for sure I’ll have this done in a week.”  Then . . . “Well, make sure you’re finished in 10 days.  It can’t take more than that!!”  And this daily delusion of finishing it “tomorrow” went on for eleven daze, every single one of them thinking it would be done the next for sure.  But it took eleven for the arc to be told from inception to curtain.

Of course, all sorts of other memory triggers and picture painting and fact checking and fine tuning and stuff continued for weeks, … and then months, until it was finally published two years later.

But I had no concept of telling this Adventure Tale when I woke up this February morning ten years ago, and after eleven time-traveling days in labor this baby was bouncing.  And boy, they grow up fast!

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You can order a colorfully signed copy from me (except mailing from Canada is a costly).  You can also order it from Amazon or any place you get books. 

When the book first came out, raving reaction came flowing in from all over the world.  You can read the first batch here.

Then I had to start a second page because the first one grew too large.

Then I had to start a third!

And then I started to perform it all over — from New York to L.A., from San Francisco to Lowell.  Here’s a playlist from several different shows with the clips in the order they appear in the book . . . 

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Update — Here’s a March 2023 interview done by renown British Beat & music scholar Simon Warner about writing the book, and the publishing world in general, the birth of the internet, the eternal nature of art, and shining the light, carrying the baton and passing the torch.

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by Brian Hassett

karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook page if you wanna join in there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada