KEROUAC SELF-DISCOVERY

[Slide 1]

I initially thought this project would be a fancy frill that I could add to my thesis — pretty pictures that would serve as decorations for the beginnings of chapters or something. My plan was to base my collages on the chapters I had already written, have the pieces correlate somehow to the topic or theme of them.  It was a safe, and selfish, objective. I’ll just pretend to have this profound artistic process, I thought to myself.  I balked at the notion of “arts-based research” for I already knew everything there was to know about my subject — Jack Kerouac.

[Slide 2]

I discovered, though, that what required study was the connection between the researcher and the researched.  I was asked early on in the process, “Why Jack Kerouac?” I believe my answer was, “Oh, well, I was really obsessed with him in high school and I guess I still am.”  Too easy.

An insect would be drawn to any light, they don’t have the capacity to choose. Any light will do.  But as humans we’re attracted to specific people, drawn to specific lights. Why Kerouac’s light?, I asked myself.  Why am I a moth to his light? Why I have bumped against the glass of his kitchen window for the last ten years? Why does it seem like every particle inside me is drawn to his story, his persona, his tragic legacy?  The answer to these questions, in part, are forthcoming. I will retrace my journey for you.  I’ll let you know what I’ve found out. You let me know what you see.

[Slide 3]

The first time I saw Kerouac and heard his voice, I was fifteen.  Earlier that year, over the summer, I found a copy of “On The Road” in a bookstore.  I liked the cover, the title rang a bell, and I read anything I could get my hands on.  Instantly, the way he wrote — long sentences, lily-padding from thought to thought — spoke to something inside me.  I read “On The Road” and then spent weeks carrying the book around with me. It took me months, until that winter, before I thought to search the internet for him.  

I found a video of a man playing piano and Kerouac talking about “On The Road”. I was a flower being inhaled. Every one of my petals rustled in his wind as his voice articulated those long stumbling lines of verse.  I was gone then, completely. An empty wishing well, rushing with both hands.

[Slide 4]

Rediscovering that clip this last weekend after over ten years felt… satisfying.  It created, not a livewire feeling like the first time, but a warm towel feeling, a comfy chair feeling, a long hug feeling.  I listened and watched with pencil in hand, writing down what I heard. Here, listen for yourself. What do you hear? [play video]  

[Slide 5]

Two identical listenings provided two unique artistic results.  In the first, I filled the page then went back to fill in the gaps.  In the second, as you saw in the video, I doubled back two separate times into the middle of the page.  Though this method of arts-based research isn’t my own, it has proven fruitful. Watching the recording over I ask myself, Why did I pause those times while I was writing? What was I listening for? Why did I write down what I did?  When Kerouac said the words “the father we never found” it was as if he was talking about the two of us.  

Fathers are important to those of us who never have found theirs.  I mean this figuratively in our case (look, now Jack and I are a “we”, an “our”, an “us”).  This piece represents the time in my life when I let Kerouac be my father.

[Slide 6]

That’s me. In the car. With the man, myth, and legend Jack Kerouac.  We’re on the road, cruising. I daydreamed this scenario constantly. On my sixteen birthday I took a group of my friends up a mountain and as we reached the top and looked over the land, I read them passages from “On The Road”, “Dharma Bums”, and Kerouac’s published journals.  One of my friends asked me, “Why Jack Kerouac?” Later in my tiny green pocket notebook (just like Jack’s) I copied down what I’d said. I believe that it is extremely unfortunate that I will never meet anyone like [Jack Kerouac] in my life. The world is not capable of bearing such children from her womb anymore. I will satisfy her by molding myself in his image… I wish I could write and read until I was fully satisfied.

As the molding took place, my mother didn’t understand — just like Kerouac’s mother didn’t understand him.  He and I were restless, ready to pick up. And our mothers hadn’t strayed farther than the town they were born.

[Slide 7]

He unlocked something in me.  He made me look to the sky and want to roar.  I would sit in bed for hours reading his journals and then responding in my own.  A conversation across the decades. The fact that Kerouac had died in 1969 did not deter me in the least. He was as real and as present as I was. He was my king and I kissed his ring.  He unlocked me and released my caged doves to the sky.

[Slide 8]

When I first started this project, I made this. NY NY.  Collage has always been my artistic medium and I’ve collected clippings from everywhere over the years. I intended for this to decorate the chapter of my thesis about Kerouac’s time in New York City. [play video] [as video plays]

Should she run?  Immediately I noticed how taking away that square orange sunset would reveal too much. So much so that I put a piece of tape on it while I arranged so I didn’t have to think about it.  I tried so hard to take myself out of it, make it objective, make it “research”. But I could not erase my own feelings about this City. Could not tamp down my own dissatisfaction. In fact, I realized as I continued arranging, I had to draw on it because we felt the same way. We felt pins and needles. Saw the enlarged dullness of it all.  Feel like mere pawns in this city’s game. We were not the kings or queens we thought we’d be. We were restless, we needed to go, drive off into the sunset in our green convertible.

[Slide 9]

[read the poem] It was at this point that I started thinking about the connection between us.  Did I feel these things because he did first? I asked myself. Am I manufacturing experiences to feel the novelty of connectedness?  Or is this a strange coincidence? And why I haven’t I ever thought about this before?

[Slide 10]

My second piece, a few weeks later.  Again I recorded. But this time, in an impulse to get “back to business”, I tried to connect the art back to “text evidence”.  I found a passage from Kerouac’s less well-known book “Maggie Cassidy” to voice over the video. At the time it felt really really wrong, but I couldn’t pinpoint why.  Now it feels nostalgic, even though it was just a few weeks ago. [play video]

[Slide 11]

For now I realize that, despite how hard I tried, despite the fact that this was meant to be a simple timeline of the first decade of Kerouac’s life, this was still about us.  It was becoming harder to deny that I was the I in Him. I was the tissue on his wind’s whim. Again, for the second time in my life, I had lost myself in him. I wore him like bones.

[Slide 12]

Finding that video of Kerouac at the piano this weekend took me down a rabbit hole.  Not much video footage exists of him, but I watched everything I could find. Even the ones in French with English subtitles.  This one in particular spoke to me because, in it, the interviewer asks Kerouac about his childhood. You can see him slightly furrow his brow when the topic comes up. Or maybe it’s something only I can see because I do the same thing when anyone asks me about my father.  Look, see if you can see it. [play video]

[Slide 13]

I watched that video three times, transcribing what stuck with me each time.  From that I tried to write a poem. A villanelle, actually. A very complex form, with strict rules. Too square for Kerouac, but you can see how square he was when he lived in Lowell, Massachusetts.  [read poem] I tried with this one, like maybe the repetition would represent how many times I watched the video. Haikus would have been better.

[Slide 14]

As we come to end of my journey, I would be remiss to not show you what was created that doesn’t belong.  This black and white silhouette of a town at sunset was going to be the base of my third collage. As I pasted the paper into my sketchbook, a poem just rolled out of me.  It wasn’t about Kerouac, not at all. It was about me and one of the earliest memories I have. [read poem]

This is a good place to end because it represents how this journey was really a path from Jack Kerouac to me.  In some places we walked together but, on the other side, I’m on my own. I know more about myself and my connection to my subject.  And, though this work, I’ve discovered what my thesis needs to be. Now I just need to find an advisor.

(The powerpoint presentation is linked below.)

Kerouac Presentation (2)

I found Victoria Restler’s dissertation and accompanying website incredibly informative and inspiring. I found myself reading her dissertation with fervor because it was so interesting and relevant to me; I was about seventy or eighty pages in before I remembered that I should be exploring the website she created while taking this class last semester.  Obviously, the subject matter of her research resonates with me personally as I am a teacher whose care-work frequently goes unnoticed.

What felt so compelling about Restler’s writing was how personal it felt.  Usually academic writing feels distant and unrelatable.  Hers was honest, understandable, and even creative.  My favorite parts were in “The Digital Assemblage”, the first few paragraphs of each page.  They feel like memoir or even poetry.  For example, the beginning of the “research in helvetica” page is so beautiful and evocative:

The pale gray surface like molded glass, tight cross-hatches and the vaguest sense of a prism—pale pinks and blues if you let your eyes soften. The vertical “I” of the cursor blinking in time, waiting as if tapping toes, and then almost at once—sounds and letters. The soundtrack of fingers on keys, the emphatic note of the space bar. Words seem to appear magically on the screen, and as I watch, I find myself keeping pace, willing the type to keep up with the sound. A sense of relief in the moments where the visual and aural words are in sync—so many, perspectives, study, and a bit of agitation when the cursor falls behind or when the red underline announces a typo—gflancing, direcytions, obliques, extanding. There’s a game in the watching, a competition between eye and ear. My two pointer fingers hunting and pecking for the keys, not quite fast enough.

This type of writing does not just exist in Restler’s website–it is also sprinkled throughout her dissertation. (Specifically it can be seen on pages 24 – 26 when she describes “some of the perspectives and experiences that orient [her] to this work”.) I find this procedural, experiential type of reflection very inspiring, in that I wonder how I could apply it to my own work for this class.  I have been filming myself making collages, but I wonder if I could “transcribe” what I “see” in those videos as a method of reflection on the creation process.  Restler even used this description technique when the piece wasn’t a video. She described (and coded/catalogued) what she saw in each art piece to find overarching themes.  That is also something I could try with my project–describe what I see in each of my collages.  I like the idea of presenting my work (and writing?) in website format, as well.

Overall, the biggest source of inspiration I took from Restler’s work wasn’t methodological, but conceptual.  In the first chapter of her dissertation she laid out every aspect of her project, her conceptual frameworks, and her research questions. And while I assume this is a specific requirement for the dissertation, I do think knowing those things are important. For instance, have I really asked myself why I am doing this collage project? What do I hope to accomplish? What are my specific research methods? What frameworks am I using?  What questions am I hoping to answer?

And the last, most important, question of all: Is this project about Jack, or is it about me?

When I went to the American Art Museum in Washington, DC, I saw this huge art piece of a map that I think about every time I hear about your project.

Here is an article about it.

Here is a video about it.

I can’t tell if my sentimentality is holding me back or enhancing my work. As I thought back to my prep work before making this collage, the process of sorting through my collection of images, I realized that the images I gravitate toward–and eventually use in my collages–are the ones that hold a deeper meaning to me.  For example, with this new collage, I started with over thirty images and only five made it into the final piece.  (I’m not counting the numbers. They’re just how I’m marking chronological time across my collages).

This collage–to me–symbolically tells the story of the first eight years of Kerouac’s life. And in a way, it also tells the story of my own childhood.  It seems like when I get into the meditative space of arranging images, I tell Kerouac’s story as well as my own. I choose a composition of images that speaks to our similarities. It’s more than just biographical art-based research now.

We have to think about who our research and art is supposed to serve. Who is my audience? This question doesn’t hold me back from creating my collages, but it does keep me from sharing them. I’m not sure if another living soul would understand what this collage is saying.  And that makes me wonder if the time and energy I’m putting into the creation of these is more for my benefit than for my audience’s.

I recorded myself “laying out” my first collage. The original video was over 15 minutes long, so I increased the speed 4x and the video now is about 3 minutes.  I’ve uploaded the video to my YouTube channel.  A photograph of the finished product is below.

Before I began recording, I sifted through the hundreds of clippings I’ve gathered over the last ten years. It is important to me that each collage includes images from my “current” self and from my “past” self.  I started collecting images around the time I discovered Kerouac so these collages should be about me just as much as they are about him. Like a dialogue between the three of us.

I selected the clippings that felt like they went together and could help me make a cohesive message.  It was more of a feeling thing than a calculated thing. I like the idea of recording myself laying out the collage because it makes me less worried that I will miss something, or forget something that happened. I also like the process of “laying out” the collages because they’re not permanent yet and I’m not tethered to one particular composition.

I liked reading about Wendy Luttrell’s research because it was done in such a formal and controlled way.  This is not how I will be doing my research–so it’s nice to see the other side!

I think the variety of data she collected during both her photography ethnographic study and her “Fertile Bodies” ethnographic study were what made both so informative.  Not only did she have the work products of all participants–she also had video and audio recordings of interviews, conversations, and work sessions.  Her articles features transcriptions of these conversations or dialogue more heavily than the actual art products, and that seems really telling.  It must have taken so much time to record and transcribe every class session, but it’s what allowed her to come to such rich understandings.

These articles made me think about how art is just a conduit for understanding. Like, art is more about how someone makes the art because it helps you understand trends (data) and make meaning of their experiences (ethnography). Luttrell was paying attention to what the students talked about while making and presenting their art. This discussion of the art is just a different phase of meaning-making.  I’m struck by how much meaning can be gleaned (or has been gleaned) from just watching someone make art.

Overall, I think I have two next steps: 1) I’m going to be to film myself making my collages.  I can see the arranging and rearranging process as potentially being informative.  I would like to film it from above and have just my hands and the paper in the frame. 2) I need to start thinking about my students as human beings who have a completely separate life outside of school.  The articles about Luttrell’s photography research made me realize that there’s a whole lot about my students that I don’t know.   And changing my thinking could help me become a better teacher.

The Meredith Mendolsohn article about Derrick Adams and the Green Books helped deepen my understanding of arts-based research.  I appreciated that it traced his project from the very beginning. This helped me understand how an artist/researcher might happen upon something that inspires them and then weave that into their own pre-existing ouvre.

I found it enlightening when Mendolsohn called the Green Books a “creative point of departure” for Adams.  And how they merged with subjects that were already “continuously percolating in his work”.  I like the idea of making art out of research that you are already knee-deep into.  It seems like sifting through archives and writing for months about a subject might not be as illuminating (or fun) as creating art around it. In the caption on page 6 of the article there is a quote from Adams: “I’ve thought a lot about barriers, and accessibility, and obstacles, and perseverance.”  Perhaps he was thinking about those things before he embarked on this project, but now is able to see how they interact and intersect.  A single piece of his, for example “Come on by Mr. Hoodwrench” (9), evokes different objects/subjects all at the same time which shows how he combines big ideas into complex themes.

I’m inspired by how he physically used the Green Books. He “includes wallpaper printed from pages of the Green Books, but that’s about the only literal reference to the guides” (8). But also how he imagines walking with or taking a journey with African Americans who actually used the Green Books.  This hearkens back to the Pink article we read last week.  While she described recording a literal walk, Adams uses his imagination and visually represents what he “sees”—with collage, painting, building, etc. In my project I could include text from Kerouac’s books in some part of my collages.

Lastly, I thought it was cool that Adams includes parts of his own personality in his work. For instance, “Hats, too, appear frequently in his work, in performances, videos, painting and sculpture, and he is rarely seen without one” (11).  Having your own interests represented or reoccuring in your work is not something you can do with typical research.  And as someone who has a hard time “keeping it formal” in academic writing, this is a welcome relief.

P.S. I’m so excited to share my project ideas on Wednesday!

My initial thoughts for my project were to turn my archival research about Jack Kerouac (which is for my thesis) into a novel for young adults. I thought the challenge might be how to make his life appropriate and relatable to young people.  However, in the light of this week’s readings, I’m starting to have new ideas.

The Jordan article about Gordon Matta-Clark–specifically the discussion of social sculpture–inspired me in that it made me want to do something political and provocative, tangible and meaningful.  It made me want to “respond directly to real people and the issues that affected them” (Jordan 37).  And the “real people” that I’d respond directly to could be Kerouac’s fellow young people who felt boxed in by society’s expectations of them.

Then I read the Pink article about using sensations to help people understand and process my work. And since words are “nearly empty of meaning” (Pink 265) I had the thought to add images to my project.  And while I cannot walk around with Kerouac, I can take photographs of the places he went in New York and use images of advertisements that he would have seen.

Now I am thinking that I could make a picture book of Jack Kerouac’s life–using collage to make the “illustrations”.  I could find and cut up tons of different images from his era (WWII, the Cold War, Civil Rights) and arrange them together to fit the narrative.  I might want to find a theme or a moral his life teaches, because that’s the nature of picture books. That might be what I discover along the way.

The photo I shared with the class last week was of my students. It was taken during field day at the end of September.  Before this day, these students weren’t friends with each other but they came together for this pyramid.  I love the picture because I see so much joy in them. They’re all just a bunch of weirdos that found each other!  Plus, it’s nice to see my students as they are–instead of as a series of data and standards, struggles and strengths.

I spoke in class about how I might be more comfortable producing writing-based art for this class.  I envisioned writing poems around a certain topic. It made me happy to see Barone and Eisner mention Death of a Salesman and The Godfather as examples of arts-based research.  And while I realize that these might not be where the field is in 2018, I still feel drawn to creative writing.

Over the last two years I have been doing archive research about Jack Kerouac. My plan for my thesis was to combine all my papers about him into one big… thing. Recently, I’ve been tooling with idea of doing something less straight-forward.  Maybe making a graphic novel biography about him? Maybe writing a young adult historical fiction story about him? I have a lot of ideas! I think it would be nice to explore these ideas in this class and see where they take me.