Let's write about Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!

So, who is tending the Kerouac flame in Lowell?

Opinion echo published in the Sentinel& Enterprise newspaper in Lowell, Massachusetts by Rev. Steve Edington in Nashua NH.

A quick introduction: I am a near 30-year member of the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Committee and have twice served as the organization’s president.

Our current President is Judith Bessette. LCK (Lowell Celebrates Kerouac) was originally formed in 1986, to create the Kerouac Commemorative at Bridge and French streets. 

Moreover, the committee has continued on, producing an annual Jack Kerouac Festival in October, a Kerouac birthday observance in March, and other various Kerouac related events.

Since the time of LCK’s founding, Kerouac has become an internationally recognized literary and cultural figure. As the year 2000, approached, Modern Library ranked his signature novel, “On the Road,” 55 in the top 100 American novels published in the 20th century. Time Magazine rated it as one of the 100 best English language novels published between 1923 and 2005. Kerouac’s literary legacy has become an integral part of the curricula for American literature courses taught at American colleges and universities around the country.

Reflecting on all this, I view my involvement with Lowell Celebrates Kerouac with a mixture of pride and frustration.

I am proud to join with my fellow LCK committee members in keeping the Kerouac flame alive in his hometown. I am pleased at the ways we honor and celebrate his Lowell roots, as shown in the five Lowell-based novels he wrote that portray the city in the 1920s and 30s. I am pleased to host the Kerouac tour requests we get year-round, by way of our website, from persons who want to see his birthplace, gravesite, as well as many other places in Lowell that Jack describes. I especially remember meeting a busload of students from Aberdeen, Scotland, a few summers ago who wanted a Kerouac tour included in their American East Coast visit.

I’m grateful for the friendships my LCK involvement has given me with persons all around the country and world who have been touched by the writings of Kerouac. It is a joy to witness, every October, those who make the trip to Lowell to nurture and replenish their Kerouac Spirit.

Here is where my pride mixes with frustration: The lion’s share of keeping the Kerouac flame and spirit alive in Lowell falls to an all-volunteer group with no paid staff, and no physical base of operation, and who do all we do on a nickel-and-dime budget that we manage to cobble together from one year to the next to keep LCK going. Such has been the case now for the past 30 years even as Kerouac has become a global figure.

Yes, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell has the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for the Public Humanities. I commend the very good work my friends, Professors Michael Millner and Todd Tietchen, do in giving Kerouac his much-deserved standing in academia. But what about Kerouac’s standing in the city of his birth that first shaped his literary consciousness?

I appreciate the fine contributions the Whistler House and its staff make to Lowell’s artistic and cultural life.

I’m also aware that these contributions are done in the name of world-renowned artist who quite vehemently renounced his ties to Lowell. What about a world-renowned writer who devoted five of his numerous novels to his Lowell origins, and honored its Franco-American culture?

But, in the end, it’s really not about my pride or my frustration. It is about the city of Lowell, along with its many historical, cultural, educational, and artistic communities and organizations, coming to a fuller awareness of just what they — what we — have here with respect to the ever-growing legacy of Kerouac. We at LCK have, in recent years, received some modest support for our efforts from the city for which we are grateful. Let’s treat this as a start towards an even greater civic engagement in Lowell when it comes to celebrating Kerouac.

A little over a year from now the Jack Kerouac Centennial will get underway. Jack was born on March 12, 1922,

 in Centralville. I am pleased to be the convener of a broad-based coalition in Lowell that is coming together to make plans for a series of Kerouac Centennial events to take place during 2022. This coalition consists of representatives of the kinds of groups and organizations cited above.

In addition to giving Jack Kerouac the recognition he deserves in his hometown in the 100th year of his birth, my hope is that those of us who are coming together now can show the way forward — in the years beyond 2022 — for keeping the Kerouac flame in Lowell burning even brighter.

Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, N.H. He is the author of The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides and Kerouac’s Nashua Connection.

Echo essay- Let's write about Auld Lang Syne

#2021!

"This old song can tell us something significant about what it means to remember."

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/12/31/auld-lang-syne-meaning-239618

By Christian Lingler, published in America ,  the Jesuit Magazine:

How the forgotten middle verses of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ reveal its deeper meaning on memory and gratitude

As I returned to my favorite holiday traditions over the last couple weeks, I fell again under the spell of “Auld Lang Syne.” It has always seemed to me a perfect song, with words and melody bound together so tightly as to be inextricable, like soul and body.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of auld lang syne?”
The phrase from which the song draws its title, preserved in the lyrics’ original Scots language, is often translated as “long, long ago” or “old long since.” I completely approve of those who left the phrase “auld lang syne” untampered in the modern English version. The wooden English translations do violence to the phrase. Even at the phonetic level, the Scots “auld lang syne” seems to carry a vernacular charm, rolling off the tongue like fog from the highlands.
For anyone who thinks “Auld Lang Syne” was written specifically for the final cathartic minutes of the movies, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” however, these translations do provide a helpful entry point for understanding the song’s history and legacy.
Composed by the poet Robert Burns in the second half of the 18th century, the song rapidly gained popularity across the English speaking lands. It eventually took its place among standard New Year’s Eve festivities, encouraging eager party-goers to reflect upon the year coming to a close before celebrating the year to come.

The song goes on:
We two have run about the hills,
And picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot
Since auld lang syne.
We two have paddled in the stream,
From morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
Since auld lang syne.

As is so often the case with old songs, the middle verses bear the greater load of meaningful content (and are also, incidentally, the first forgotten.) The song’s first two stanzas, paired by a celebratory chorus, seem fit for a cheerful Scottish pub, where members of a merry chorus offer each other winks and drinks for the sake of the “good ol’ days.” Now the song seems to take an odd turn by offering two verses in which a childhood memory is followed up by the admission of some painful reality. This pairing could be taken to communicate a recognition of the balance between happy and sad elements of the past.
I think it more likely, however, that the song intentionally moves from a positive note to the negative in order to emphasize how the passage of time often coincides with increased hardship. 

Indeed, these middle verses acknowledge the reality of sad memories, while insisting on an immediate return to the chorus and its famous affirmation of times “auld lang syne.”

This unflinching and abrupt transition from sad recollection to celebratory affirmation indicates that this old song can tell us something significant about what it means to remember. 

By extension, it gives us a clue as to how we should make sense of our experiences more generally.
We are at the end of a year during which our mettle has been tested repeatedly by onslaughts of anxiety, loneliness, sickness and social upheaval. 

If you are like me, all of these things discourage reflection on the past. Because, I had never before experienced these kinds of difficulties for such a sustained period, I found examining the last nine months uniquely challenging.

Before this year, reflecting on the past usually amounted to taking an inventory of my happy, and sad moments, the ups and the downs, before moving on at the soonest opportunity to declare that “all in all, I have a lot to be grateful for".
I have nothing against maintaining a sense of gratitude. Insofar as we have experienced earthly blessings, it is right and good for us to be grateful for those gifts.
Nevertheless, if we limit our reflection to this sort of exercise, to focusing only on the good, I believe we place ourselves in a precarious position. Why? Suppose that the year on which we are reflecting has been as hard as this last one? What happens when our pain appears to outweigh our pleasure?
Furthermore, what are we to do when we realize that our difficulties carry right up to the present and seem far from abating? In each of these cases, we are forced to realize that if we fail to find meaning in both pleasurable and painful memories, we will not gain the solace we desire. When we are confronted with the pervasiveness of our pain, we realize that the type of reflection that amounts to placing pleasurable and painful experiences on a scale only proves helpful for those who don’t need help. If we only find value in pleasurable memories, then that can only help people whose experience is predominated by pleasurable memories.
Additionally, in troubled times, many of us fall back on the refrain: “Well, it could have been worse.” This is nothing but the sullen sister of the first “platitude of gratitude,” as it, too, relies on relative thinking. 

But, instead of weighing good against bad and coming to the conclusion that we have a lot to be thankful for, we are weighing one bad against another. Things are hard. They could have been harder.
Both statements leave us wanting. 

They imply that life is fundamentally a condition that is either bad or worse. This kind of thinking hardly promises the kind of positive affirmation of life that most of us are after, especially when we reflect on our past.
Yet, there is another approach. If we accept that our pleasurable and painful experiences do not comprise the totality of our lives, but are merely the setting within which our story has been playing out, then all of our experiences suddenly have the capacity to become meaningful. Life is pain, and life is joy, yes, but pain and joy contain a deeper meaning. Like the plot of land in Christ’s parable where a treasure has been buried, our experiences are precious when viewed in light of some underlying value. Our experiences are not what define meaning; they are merely the soil from which we can uncover meaning.
When our experiences are understood as the setting and not the entire story, when they no longer need to define our ultimate value, they are utterly transfigured. They take on an aspect indiscriminately lovely and to be cherished. As with the individual movements of a symphony, some dominated by confident major chords and others by questioning minor strains, so also the strands of our life’s experiences can take on a persistent beauty when understood in light of a theme unifying them.
But what is this unifying theme? What is this dynamic meaning underlying our experiences both joyful and sorrowful? 

In the terms of the song, how can we celebrate “picking daisies fine” alongside wearisome wandering, or raise a glass to paddling streams together alongside our estrangement across broad seas? 

I believe Burns has something to say to this effect as well.
And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give me a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
For auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

After all is said and done, “Auld Lang Syne” points us to relationship as that alone which makes our memories worth celebrating. 

When our past experiences call to mind those with whom we have walked through thick and thin, these memories not only comfort us in isolation, but also draw us together.
I think Burns is entirely right on this score. 

Our supreme task and greatest joy lies in the vocation of friendship, which demands of us what we long for: a life of bearing one another’s burdens and sharing each other’s delights. Friendship is, quite simply, any relationship characterized by that beautiful word which stands out in the chorus like embossed print: kindness.
This season, we remember God’s ultimate act of kindness, when he revealed the self-sacrificial meaning of friendship by creating a way we can enter into relationship with him. Yet our relationship with God and our fellow humans is not only a responsibility, but also an opportunity--even one worth celebrating in song. Friendship is required of us only in the way life requires eating and drinking, for we have been made such that what we need is what we enjoy. 

That which sustains our life can become a feast. For we have been made by the One who desires we have life, and have it abundantly.

--

Reading and writing F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" free of copyright

A literary premonition?  "....cleaning up the mess they made...", The Great Gatsby.

Opinion: 'The Great Gatsby' Enters Public Domain, But It Already Entered Our Hearts- An echo opinion by Scott Simon reported on NPR Weekend Edition:

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), an American author, famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), published The Great Gatsby in 1925. Although it didn't sell many copies at the time, it has since sold nearly 30 million.

The copyright on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby expired on the first stroke of 2021, and the book entered the public domain.

The classic 1925, novel of love foiled, ambitions foisted, class and betrayal sold fewer than 25,000 copies before Fitzgerald died. It has since sold nearly 30 million. Scott Simon gave his daughter the copy he had in high school, when she read it last year. 

In fact, The Great Gatsby has been turned into stage productions, an opera, five film versions, a Taylor Swift song and inspired innumerable prequels, spinoffs and variations.

In the public domain, Gatsby may now become even more familiar. Two new editions are about to come out and who knows what kind of projects — a Gatsby rom-com? Gatsby joins The Avengers? — might now get a green light, which recalls the imperishably eloquent last passage of the book: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us."

Gatsby's Jazz Age Long Island may not look like a microcosm of contemporary America. But then, neither does Don Quixote, The Scarlet Letter, Macbeth or Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

We want young readers to be able to see themselves in stories; but literature can also show us that people we don't think are much like us at all turn out to have some of the same heart, blood and dreams. That can be the power of empathy in art.

As we think of this past, trying, and tragic (pandemic) year, we might all imagine some names, many in high places, of those who disdained wearing masks, and brushed aside guidelines to hold events, when Fitzgerald writes of "careless people" that "smashed up things and creatures, and then retreated back into their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Quote here

Amy Jo Burns, who wrote the acclaimed novel Shiner last year, said she read The Great Gatsby as a high school junior in Appalachia. "[W]e were sons and daughters of roofers, welders, teachers and truck drivers — people who knew what it meant to work hard and receive very little in return," she said. "We all loved that book. More than anything, I think we imagined Fitzgerald himself whispering to us from behind his own words, saying, 'Do you think the idea that you can 'have it all' is a lie? So do I. Let's press on it together and see if it cracks.' I think Fitzgerald wanted to break our hearts so we could remember that they were still beating inside our chests."