OT: Kerouac archive

[Dave Monroe]

Amomng the items here are "two sets of more than 100
handwritten cards that he devised, at about 7, to play
a fantasy baseball game of his own invention.  Between
1936 and 1965 Kerouac methodically documented the
hundreds of games he played--as well as fictional
football games and horse races--in notebooks and
imaginary newspaper."  

Somewhere along the line today there was a photograph
of some of these cards in one paper or another, did
find the text online ...

"NEW YORK (August 21, 2001 4:35 p.m. EDT) - It sounds
like a surreal, old Bob Dylan song: Pancho Villa
playing center field for a 1930s team called the
Boston Fords, taking on such rivals as the Pittsburgh
Plymouths and the St. Louis Cadillacs.

"But the history books and the record books will lead
you nowhere. Villa never bothered with the big leagues
and the Fords and their fellow franchises were only
legends, roaming the mythic ballparks of a young Jack
Kerouac.

[...]

"If On the Road wasn't the Great American Novel, then
Kerouac can make a fair claim to the Great American
Fantasy Baseball League.  Using blue, orange and
plain-colored paper, index cards and the backs of
business cards, Kerouac invented a six-team league
more complicated than Strat-O-Matic and other popular
games.

"He recruited historic figures such as Villa and Lou
Gehrig, and imaginary heroes such as Homer Landry,
Charley Custer and Luis Tercerero.  Kerouac hired
himself as manager of the Plymouths.  There are few
specific instructions, but the game apparently called
for marbles, toothpicks and white-rubber erasers to be
thrown against a target some 40 feet away. So detailed
was Kerouac's league that he played each game in
virtual real time, not just batter by batter, but
pitch by pitch, down to a foul tip off home plate. 

"He also published the newsletter 'Jack Lewis's
Baseball Chatter,' and produced a broadsheet called
the 'The Daily Ball,' in which he compiled standings
and league leaders and offered summaries of the day's
games.

"'Writers create vast kingdoms for themselves to
control and to let their imagination run loose,' said
Ann Douglas, a professor of American studies at
Columbia University who has written often about the
Beats.

"'Think of William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha
County.  Think of Thomas De Quincey and his brother
making up whole worlds of imaginary inhabitants who
were at war with each other. Writers like to be gods
of worlds where great dramas are played out.'"

http://www.nandotimes.com/entertainment/story/65108p-931597c.html

See also ...

http://cba.website-works.com/jcba19_jksl.html

--- MysteryTramp999 at aol.com wrote:
> New York Times  --  August 22, 2001
> 
> New York Public Library Buys Kerouac Archive
> By THE NEW YORK TIMES
> 
> From the archive: a young Kerouac.
> 
> The literary and personal archive of Jack Kerouac,
> whose 1957 quasi-autobiographical novel "On the
> Road" helped to define the Beat generation, has been
> acquired by the New York Public Library's Henry W.
> and Albert A. Berg Collection, the library 
> announced yesterday.
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/22/books/22KERO.html


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