In a Car, Quickly, on Cape Cod
In a Car, Quickly, on Cape Cod
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A note from the author:
[In a Car, Quickly, on Cape Cod] is a selection extracted from a much larger work, a 33,000-word prosodic novella based on an 1,800-mile New England roadtrip adventure, written in the immediate calm of returning home, having gone out ostensibly to recreate and pay heartfelt tribute to the big Jack Kerouac, Al Cohn & Zoot Sims “Blues & Haikus” session — now this time with Kerouac’s friend and musical collaborator David Amram and his quartet, at the Caffe Paradiso in the Beat heart of Lowell, during the October “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac” festival, and with brand-new original on-the-road composed haiku too — but also to drive the entire coastline of New Hampshire, explore on up to Maine, seek out lost and faded tiki-bar relics in Boston, haunt roadside diners, grasp the mystic heart of old Cape Cod in one long moonlit evening, and so on.
It seems eminently true that certain prose literature has a voice and is literally meant to be heard — not just frozen words on a screen but sounded out, in time, laying down its lyric human rhythms, like good music, all rich and colorful, almost like a great symphonic tone poem — that’s my approach to writing, anyway, and this particular spontaneous recording was made in a single take, with no overdubs or fancy editing, keeping blemishes and all, and afterward I’d felt that it was an honest, intimate presentation of the original text, just two and a half minutes of timing and breath.
