As I’ve noted in the past, from the ages of probably 9 to… well let’s say 14… I spent a fair amount of time playing imaginary sports, drawing goals in notebooks, filling up cricket scorebooks with make believe games, etc, etc. It sounds daft of course, but this was before the internet and before computers became much of a distraction and imagination was all. This is where mine took me.
Jack Kerouac was the same, and here are some drawings to prove it.
Ace.
Rich, I don’t think it is daft at all. Very creative. I have no evidence of it anymore, unlike yourself, but I remember a period of time when I was……in 3rd and 4th grade, so I must have been 9 or 10, where I had made up an entire American football team and league. I had a notebook, like you, and I drew pictures of many of the players, all ‘made up’ of course. I still remember my favorite imaginary player, his name was Bob Hathaway. He was a running back, probably #30 (modeled after my favorite REAL player) can’t remember the team I created or the uniforms my imagination dreamed up, but it we very detailed, much like yours.
Thanks for sharing, brought back some memories from that time. Kind of wish I still had all that art work like you did.
Comment by RR — May 23, 2009 @ 9:31 pm |
are you referring to the drawings I posted before or those above, Jack? These are Jack Kerouac’s!
Comment by weltmeisterclaude — May 23, 2009 @ 9:39 pm |
Good point Rich. I guess reading and understanding is handy sometimes. ;-)
I see now these were all his above, for some reason I thought the first two were yours……fatigued from a very long day in the saddle I guess. I wouldn’t have imagined Kerouac did the same. Only read one of his books, don’t remember him being a big sports guy but memories fade.
I guess were in good company Rich. :-)
Comment by RR — May 23, 2009 @ 9:57 pm |
Kerouac was a star college football player who broke his leg and turned to other things.
I was discussing him with one of my daughters last night. The epitome of 50’s cool who in truth was an angry, right wing, mother fixated alcoholic.
On The Road, Dharma Bums and Big Sur were revelationary books for me in my late teens.
Comment by Tony Gilroy — May 24, 2009 @ 8:16 am |
I wish I’d read Dharma Bums in my teens. That and Ed Abbey’s Desert Solitaire would have really made an impression on me. As it was I read The Silence of the Lambs and decided to study psychology! (On the Road never really did it for me, although I hve the original scroll here somewhere to catch up on one day.)
But yes, I read a Kerouac bio a couple of years back and you’ve hit the nail on the head – strange man in many ways.
Comment by weltmeisterclaude — May 24, 2009 @ 9:36 am |
And the crazier thing is I glanced at the pictures and thought they looked an awful lot like baseball, but I know so little about cricket, I thought huh….well maybe the games are more similar than I ever knew.. silly me
Comment by RR — May 23, 2009 @ 10:02 pm |
Thanks for the images of Jack’s baseball game. As a kid I played cowboys and indians in the street, and also on paper at school with my mate (when the teacher wasn’t around). Then in my early twenties I used to imagine that the rock groups I fancied could have produced better L.P.’s and invented track listings to fit those L.P.’s. I put all this down on paper, and still have some of it. Any Beat fans out there? you might like to join a couple of threads that trade ideas in Kerouac and the Beats: Search via Yahoo! Groups to Subterraneansgroup or Beat_Happening.
Comment by Kerouac fan — May 24, 2009 @ 11:19 pm |