We at the Kerouac Project are grateful for the passion Jonathan Miller and Phillip Deaver have shown to establish a new home for this one-of-a-kind typescript at the Olin Library. Our goal is to see it displayed and shared with students and scholars as an example of Kerouac’s indomitable creative spirit while living in Orlando.

We hope the Rollins community will further embrace and support our 501c3 charity, now in its second decade of hosting up-and-coming writers from all over the world. We believe more great things will come from our small, grass roots endeavor and our growing partnership with Rollins College.

See The Dharma Bums at Rollins College Library Archives.

“You see,” Mrs Whatsit had said, “If a very small insect were to move from the section of skirt in Mrs Who’s right hand to that in her left, it would be quite a long walk if it had to walk straight across.”

Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together.

“Now, you see,” Mrs Whatsit said, “It would be there without that long trip. That is how we travel.”

Without Mrs Whatsit guiding me through higher dimensions, I had to stop every few sentences to draw brackets around scientific language or to write in curlicues in the margins. By the end of the introduction I read that light could be wave-like and particle-like, but could not behave as both a wave and a particle at the same time. I read that there was no compelling theoretical reason why neutrinos had to be massless, a notion I committed to memory and used later that year on a high school field trip to Fermi Lab. “Why are neutrinos massless?” I asked, to which the responder raised an eyebrow and answered simply that there was no theoretical proof regarding the masslessness of neutrinos, why had I asked?

I read about the so-called lepton, the unstable muon, the heavier-but-still-unstable tauon, and a branch of mathematics called topology, that involved stretching and shrinking, but not breaking the form of a geometric object. By the time I entered the math program in college and was asked to prove that any discrete topological space was Regular, the number of string theories had begun to shrink. What had, all along, been thought of as differing theories, were turning out now to be different ways of looking at the same thing.

Beth’s first book, Lay the Favorite: A Memoir of Gambling
was published in 2010. Welcome home, Florida’s very own, Beth Raymer.

Excavators strip-mined the surrounding hillsides. Bulldozers pushed aside broken timber. Rigs drilled holes through boulders, which miners filled with nitrogen fertilizer and then detonated. Acid and silt leaked into the creeks. Sometimes people’s front yards caught on fire. Coal combusting flammable gasses, gasoline rainbows stretching into the sky.

A light coat of ash settled over Adena’s 585 people, four bars, filling station, funeral home, and fire hall where, on a clear and frozen February night, Chickenwater and the Shiftin’ Shantys, all red faced and gasping, belted out the local favorite, “Throw Her Down The Mineshaft (So I Can Be Single Again).”

And from beneath a card table weighed down by whiskey bottles and elbows of old men playing euchre, I watched my father polka.

Dad was tall and handsome and strong. When he punched people, they went down. At thirty-five, his muttonchops and thick, tousled hair had already turned completely grey. He said the ladies liked it that way. He gave the dim patches a sparkly boost by shampooing with a rinse called Frivolous Fawn.

Fall 2011
Beth Raymer
Gemma Green – Alternate

Winter 2012
Bernadette Esposito
Katy McAulay – Alternate

Spring 2012
Leslie Parry
Maya Sloan – Alternate

Summer 2012
Chloe Honum
Vishwas Gaitonde – Alternate

When Dad was a teenager, he and his buddies used to beat the crap out of each other every weekend inside a makeshift boxing ring in the basement of his boyhood home. Using his mother’s ball of clothesline, Dad roped off a square section of the cracked and uneven concrete floor. He put old wooden folding chairs in two of the four corners, drew a big X in the middle of the square with white chalk, and laced-up a pair of black leather boxing gloves. Three neighborhood buddies would take turns pummeling each other until their bare-chested bodies glistened with sweat. There was rarely blood, but plenty of bruises, and Dad and his friends wore the contusions like badges.

Dad never had a formal lesson. Instead, he learned the basics from listening to boxing on the radio. The Cavalcade of Sports broadcast Friday night matches on the NBC Radio Network in the late 1940s. St. Nicholas Arena in New York City was the venue for the earliest bouts. To a 14-year old boy from a working class family outside a Pennsylvania steel town, New York might as well have been New Delhi, Amsterdam, or Emerald City. And the announcers calling the punches were Dad’s faraway boxing teachers, describing each mighty wallop, each cutting blow with vivid words in hyper- pitched detail, drawing diagrams in my father’s head. In his mind’s eye Dad couldsee the quick in-and-out action of a left jab, the perfect angle of a devastating right cross, the gloves-against-the-chin technique of defending yourself from an opponent’s ferocious flurry to the head. Dad sat alone on the floor just a few feet from the cloth-covered speaker of the family’s big Philco console radio, developing black-and-white mind photographs of dangerous punches and dancing feet. His eyes stayed closed, his hands punched at the air, and he swayed and jerked his head as if in a tango with the
announcer’s words. When the weekends came Dad would reenact what he imagined, delivering strikes to the bodies of the boys who stepped inside his homemade ring. Dad was not a big kid. He stood only about five-and-a-half feet tall. But he had a stocky, muscular body, and broad shoulders with biceps and forearms that had been hardened by the routine of daily push-ups. It was what was between the ears that seemed to separate him from the others. Dad was not a strategic, competitive fighting genius. But he had demons rattling in his head, stirring in his gut that had nowhere else to go but straight out through his gloved fists.

Dad’s father never asked for a divorce. His mother never would have agreed to it anyway. So when his father left to live with the woman in the house a block away, he was still married to my grandmother and he was still, at least biologically, Dad’s father. And before his father moved out, during the early rounds of basement boxing, Dad must have sensed the widening distance between his father and mother. He must have suffered the inner numbness that comes from sitting at silent dinner tables, trying to block out the arguments that rumbled through the house as he lay on his bed at night with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears. And in a house where stoicism was revered, crying not permitted, and the daily discipline was based on the basic rule of do-what-I-say, Dad must have had nowhere else to release his emotions than inside a boxing ring. He let all the anger, resentment, fear, and sorrow gather in his gut and then it let it burst out in the controlled violence of a basement brawl.

Dad stopped boxing in the basement after a few years, but he never lost his love of a good fight.

Still, as much as Dad loved listening to what gave him a musical kick, what he really wanted was to be able to play an instrument well enough to be called a musician. He’d listen to the big Magnavox console hi-fi stereo in our home, point to the speakers and say, “I want to be able to do that.” That was usually the twinkling sound of piano keys, the strum of a banjo, or the snappy sax or horn in a Rat Pack melody.

It wasn’t as if Dad was ignorant about musical instruments. He could knockout a pretty solid version of Chopsticks on the piano and he knew a one-handed, ten-note ragtime lick. He could also blow a little Chicago-style harmonica, playing the same simple blues notes over and over. But his best performance came from an unlikely instrument: a four-string ukulele. It was a beat-up dark brown soprano version, the smallest kind made. I don’t know how Dad came to own the ukulele. Maybe someone gave it to him; maybe he bought it. But the uke, as he called it, was always within arms reach, leaning against…<--read more @ Shaking Lit –>

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