“My position in the current American literary scene is simply that I got sick and tired of the conventional English sentence which seemed to me so ironbound in its rules, so inadmissable with reference to the actual format of my mind as I had learned to probe it in the modern spirit of Freud and Jung, that I couldn’t express myself through that form anymore.” – Jack Kerouac, 1959
After his first novel, The Town and the City, a conventional family saga, Jack Kerouac tried and failed for years to find a way to tell the next story he wanted to tell. Finally, all the stops and starts got to him and he had to go away to the loony bin for a little while. This seems to have been the turning point for him. If he kept trying to follow the rules of writing not only was his novel doomed but he was doomed, too, so into the typewriter went his teletype scroll and for three weeks in 1951 he let the sentences come out long and gasping and searching and ragged and real, until he had something brand new, so new, in fact, that it would be six years before anyone would be willing to publish it, six years to roam the land with On the Road unpublished, but our October hero though deeply disappointed and hurting in the end didn’t care because he had found the answer, sing your song and rules be damned, and into the hopelessness of the rule-bound world he flung creation after creation, Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, all unpublished until the calamitous “overnight success” of On the Road in 1957, the author in those wandering years a nobody for real, but one who knew joy because he’d found a way to love the world and sing that love in sentences that tumbled and wheezed and collapsed and somehow rose from collapse to stand unsteady but with eyes agleam, like a drunk nobody noticing the tender ache of the soft violet sunset as the railroad cops advance to drag him to the hoosegow, where he’ll weep with thanks for what he’s been lucky enough to see.
Yes, Jack Kerouac loved long unruly sentences. Maybe this love can shed some light on why the author, an avid sports fan, seems to have loved baseball above all other sports, even though one of those other sports, football, had given him renown as a hometown hero and a scholarship to play big-time college football for the famous coach Lou Little at Columbia University. Football, if translated directly into sentences, would be short, blunt declaratives. Baseball into sentences? Something else altogether. . .
If Jack Kerouac were alive today—and he could have been alive today maybe if he’d lived a healthier life, if he had, as aging legendary Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki suggested when Kerouac and Ginsberg came to meet him, laid off the booze and instead went with green tea, he’d be a strong thin old cuss of 86, still a decade shy of D.T. Suzuki’s lifespan of 96 years, but he didn’t heed the advice from Japan which will relate (Japan I mean) in a moment, and so Jack Kerouac has been dead almost as long as I’ve been alive—he’d be watching the playoffs and the Red Sox in particular though I guess it’s possible if he was still living in Florida where he did kick the bucket maybe he’d have migrated to the Rays but I hope not and anyway maybe the green tea would have cured him of his need to lay around Florida waiting to die and he would be living in a monastery in northern California and would have left the monastery to venture down to Anaheim for prime literary lion seats near maybe a vacationing Stephen King and the two could compare notes on weirdo literary groupies while adjusting their scorecards between innings after confusing double-switches, and in this scenario, Jack Kerouac alive, I’d have to think his favorite Red Sox player would be Daisuke Matsuzaka, tonight’s starter, and not just because he was Japanese, like D.T. Suzuki who saved (in this reimagining of reality) Jack Kerouac’s life all those years ago but also because Jack Kerouac loved long ridiculous sentences and Dice-K, if he were not a baseball player but that structural unit of prose called a sentence, would be the longest, strangest sentence in the 2008 Red Sox novel, digressions and misdirections and ballooning parenthetical flowers of ideas within things within ideas within things within ideas until the whole dream of existence is revealed as an infinite loom of wanting and mercy and lightning and gloom interwoven and unraveling all at once and you the reader the solitary lonely alive fanny in the stands begin to wonder if there is even a purpose anymore and all there is left to rely on is the rhythm below the endless looping expansions toward mu (the Japanese word meaning nothing), the sentence possibly doomed, who knows and after all can’t it only ever end in a question? In a jam, bases loaded, full count?
Into the pretzeling contortion the trouble-master goes slow and calm as ever, implacable, and out of his hand comes an unpredictable pitch, impossible to know what will come, same as life, so hang on and rejoice: it’s Dice-K’s turn.
Red Sox at Angels, 6:37 PT, 9:37 ET
Lineups (tonight sadly lacking an echo of Kerouac’s hometown), courtesy of the Boston Globe:
Red Sox
1. Jacoby Ellsbury, CF
2. Dustin Pedroia, 2B
3. David Ortiz, DH
4. Kevin Youkilis, 3B
5. J.D. Drew, RF
6. Jason Bay, LF
7. Mark Kotsay, 1B
8. Jason Varitek, C
9. Alex Cora, SS
SP: Daisuke Matsuzaka
Angels
1. Chone Figgins, 3B
2. Garret Anderson, LF
3. Mark Teixeira, IB
4. Vladimir Guerrero, DH
5. Torii Hunter, CF
6. Juan Rivera, RF
7. Howie Kendrick, 2B
8. Jeff Mathis, C
9. Erick Aybar, SS
SP: Ervin Santana
Cardboard Gods 
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