The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature

Author: Dean Sluyter
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608687708
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku . . . learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass . . . see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite . . . discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye. Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma — authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening — and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.

Blaming Japhy Rider

Author: Philip A. Bralich
Publisher: BalboaPress
ISBN: 1452540535
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Inspired by and responding to Jack Kerouacs Dharma Bums, this memoir details the psychological and spiritual triumph over severe psychological difficulties caused by a series of traumas endured in the Peace Corps in West Africa in 1978. Surveying the spiritual landscape of America through the seventies to the present in Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, New Age and Christian movements, this memoir describes the journey of author Philip A. Bralichs life, beginning as a twenty-something, leftist, married, seventies idealist in the Peace Corps in West Africa, through an accident in the bush that cost his wife her life and himself much of the use of he left leg, and through the growing and debilitating psychological difficulties that were finally resolved through wide reading and personal experience of many of the spiritual and psychological movements of those four decades. The book commences in West Africa in 1978 but also goes back to as early as 1973, just four years after Jack Kerouac died.

Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 (LOA #174)

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Library of America Jack Keroua
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 898

Book Description
Presents Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" along with four other of his autobiographical "road books" and journal entries related to "On the Road."

The Sea Is My Brother

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306821257
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
As a precursor to such landmark works as "On the Road "and "The Dharma Bums," this is an important formative work that bears all the hallmarks of classic Kerouac: the search for spiritual meaning in a materialistic world, and spontaneous travel as the true road to freedom.

Book of Blues

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548800
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

Book of Haikus

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101664886
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy “Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.

Penguin 75

Author: Paul Buckley
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN: 9780143117629
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
A unique exploration into the subtle art of the book cover High standards in art and design have always been part of Penguin's publishing program. Now, on the occasion of Penguin's 75th anniversary, longtime art director Paul Buckley has chosen seventy-five covers that represent the best of what Penguin has produced over the course of the last decade. Giving readers a rare behind-thescenes glimpse into the complex creation of a book's cover, Penguin 75 includes comments from authors, agents, and editors, as well as the designers and artists themselves. This witty and irreverent journey into the book world will appeal to lovers of art, design, and, of course, books. With Contributions By: Paul Auster * Tara McPherson * Daniel Clowes * David Byrne * Elizabeth Gilbert * Joe Sacco * Tana French * T.C. Boyle * Seth * Tom Gauld * William T. Vollmann * Art Spiegelman * Kim Edwards * Melissa Bank * Ruben Toledo * Tomer Hanuka * Jamie Keenan * Roz Chast * Garrison Keillor * Yoshihiro Tatsumi * Sam Weber * Paul Sahre * Tony Millionaire * Nicholas Blechman * Jon Gray and many others!

Big Sur

Author: Jack Kerouac
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
A poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the acclaimed author of On the Road “In many ways, particularly in the lyrical immediacy that is his distinctive glory, this is Kerouac’s best book . . . certainly he has never displayed more ‘gentle sweetness.’”—San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac’s alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur “reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion.”

The Perfect Sound

Author: Garrett Hongo
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375425063
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Book Description
A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.

Still Life with Woodpecker

Author: Tom Robbins
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553897942
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
“Robbins’s comic philosophical musings reveal a flamboyant genius.”—People Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.