Sunday, July 15, 2012

What would Kerouac do?

As faithful readers of The Daily Beat know, a working title of The Beat Handbook was "What Would Kerouac Do?" That was in the early going, before I coined the term "Kerouaction." Once that neologism struck me (Google the term and you will see that it is indeed my word - even the Urban Dictionary entry was posted by yours truly), I felt compelled to use it in the title of my book. A "Kerouaction" is the answer to the question, "What would Kerouac do?" Below is an excerpt addressing the term.




Since I've posted about this before, why this post? Several reasons. First, every once in a blue while moon someone new happens upon my blog, and it's an opportunity to bring them into the fold, so to speak. Second, it never hurts to remind folks that my book is available here on Amazon (maybe someone's birthday is approaching and you need a unique gift). Finally, it gave me a chance to use ScreenHunter, which is just the slickest, easiest way ever (on a PC - Macs have this feature built in) to capture screenshots like the one above of an excerpt from The Beat Handbook taken from the Look Inside feature on Amazon.

But back to Kerouactions. Here's a screenshot (thanks to ScreenHunter, available here) of the Urban Dictionary entry.



One might posit that hawking my own book is not something Kerouac would do, given his angst in real life over self-promotional activity such as interviews and the like. No matter, because I am not arguing that all behavior must fit this heuristic. My argument is only as articulated in my book:


So today, right after you order your own copy of The Beat Handbook, take Kerouaction by doing something Jack Kerouac would do. Icing on the cake? Write about it afterwards.

Happy Sunday or whatever day it happens to be where you are.

1 comment:

Rick Dale, author of The Beat Handbook said...

I see someone has written a poem titled, "Kerouaction" (http://www.poetrysoup.com/poems_poets/poem_detail.aspx?ID=300060), and there's this stupid Tweet about it (https://twitter.com/mahoney_d/statuses/110468163652681728), and there's this blog post (http://geri-digiorno.blogs.petaluma360.com/10116/kerouaction/), but that's all there is through 5 pages of Google searching.