Someone Needs to take this On The Road
(click to enlarge)Yes, it's a portion of the original On the Road scroll typed frantically by Jack Kerouac back in 1951. With a little pharmaceutical aid, he was able to slam the novel out in three weeks. The scroll, by the way, is on tour and probably lounging around Dublin right about now.
I won't go on and on about Kerouac or On The Road. Most women I know (of a certain age) find the book fairly appalling and Kerouac even more so, but Kerouac is not the point here. The scroll is. It's morphed into an art installation and by the miracle of technological wizardry, a very large typecast.
The thing is, I know a lot of people who can slam out a novel in a month. Maybe they aren't all Kerouacs, but they do it and there's a die-hard group of Luddites blowing the top off the NaNoWriMo word counts via manual typewriter every year. You know who you are.
While taking a little paper-grading break today, I hopped on Ebay and found the perfect ditty for a NaNoWriMo Typewriter Brigader. Or for a Kerouac wannabe, makes no difference. It's a big roll of three-part carbon paper - that's one original copy to keep and two canary copies to send 'round to the art installations in Dublin.
Eighteen days left on that auction, and a chance to make a legend. Who's up for it?
New Machine Fever
A pathetic typecast. 
(Brought to you on a 1958 Tower President named Agnes. Bless her heart.)
Street Poetry at the Arkansas Literary Festival
Despite the spitting rain, the Arkansas Literary Festival was in full swing today at the River Market in Little Rock, and the Great Bear Writing Project was there. We manned (womanned) a booth under the tents to greet visiting teachers from all over and to spread the National Writing Project gospel. It's our site's tenth anniversary, so we had cake and giveaway drawings and books. Oh my.More importantly, we had a typewriter and two reams of manifold paper. Anyone with a hankering to make poetry could sashay by, type a bit, and leave with a finished bit of writing. We strung a little clothesline and hung each poet's copy with a few clothespins. The storm neared, the winded whipped, and the poetry flowed.
Even poet and fractal artist Terry Wright took a break from hawking copies of The Exquisite Corpse to slam out a poem. It's been a while since he's composed on a machine, but I think he awakened the hunger for an old manual machine. Terry says he used to be an Underwood man, so I'll dig under the bed and find one he can use.
The storm we expected at noon failed to materialize, and bought the street poets a couple of hours. Who were our best customers? Young kids and college students. They couldn't keep their hands off the Royal. There's just something about poetry on a typewriter - no laptop can replicate the aesthetic.
A couple of hours and a celebratory sheet cake later, the bottom fell out of the sky there at the River Market. Every author and book seller under the tents scrambled to save copies from the downpour and themselves from the lightning. The Great Bear Writing Project loaded up in a hurry because down here, we don't fool around with the weather and second-guess a storm. Speaking of Fabulous Journals...
Nearly done! from UPPERCASE gallery on Vimeo.
Journals are popping out everywhere. Strikethru is taking submissions for a new retrotech journal that should be required reading for anyone who even wishes they owned an old typewriter. Visit and sign up to submit immediately - you'll want to be a part of this project.
By Tuesday, the Vortex Magazine of Literature and Art will release its 200-page, full color glory on every undergraduate at the University of Central Arkansas. As the faculty adviser to the publication I have to say this is the most stunning issue ever, so get ready for the bragging. This staff headed by editor Abby Wolf is going to redefine undergraduate literary magazines. And more.
The GORGEOUS magazine in the video should be ready to send almost any day now. I'll be watching my mailbox and tapping my good foot in anticipation, because UPPERCASE looks like a visual vacation, dessert, and sweet dream all rolled into one. Here's the description:
We're inquisitive: learning from other artists, illustrators, designers,
photographers, filmmakers and musicians, whether they're upstarts or icons,
famous or shy, verbal or visual.
We're inspired: enchanted by great ideas and strange inventions; by colour and pattern; things fancy and frugal; the charm of vintage in a modern life; the ridiculous and the sublime.
We're adventurous: traveling to destinations both real and imagined, peeking into creative spaces and discovering magnificent people and memorable places.
We're eclectic: curating souvenirs, collecting treasures and celebrating the extraordinary in the everyday.
We're playful: delighting in visual amusements, intelligent distraction, entertaining wordplay and sweet indulgences.
We're UPPERCASE: a magazine for the creative and curious!
Color me completely charmed. How can any of you resist?
If there's a journal or magazine out there that no one should do without, please let us know. This is the Season of Fresh Publications - better than Christmas, twice as good as Thanksgiving, and you don't have to eat mysterious casseroles.
