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— Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

The FRANCO-AMERICAN WRITER JACK KEROUAC (1922–1969) is one of the most identifiable and branded of his generation. There are already more than half a dozen extensive biographical treatments, and many of his letters have now been published, including Road Novels, 1957–1960, his Complete Poems in the Library of America series (2007, 2012) and The Portable Jack Kerouac (1995). Why do we need a substantial new look at the author now, that largely ends late in 1951 with the completion of his best-known book, On the Road, which did not actually appear until 1957 when his oeuvre was blossoming but his melancholy decline began?

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At 2, I had no idea that my mother had a name of her own. Why would she need one? It wasn’t as if there was anyone else in our house who cooked eggy bread as a treat on Sunday mornings and who knew where the string and the Band-Aids were kept: Surely there could be absolutely no confusion at all. Nor did it seem likely that my mother had been something else, to someone else, before I was born. She, like all things animate and otherwise, owed her existence to me.

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And so my project began. I entered the first line of the book in the text field: "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." At 119 characters, I didn't even have to abbreviate.

For the next three and a half years, I made my way through the book line by line, tweeting it 140 characters at a time. (I'm still on chapter three.) I never explained what I was doing, which has led to some confusion. Somebody once asked me if I was working on a novel, and I said, "Yes." It then became apparent this person thought I was writing the novel myself. This person was very attractive and found the writing quite good. You have no idea how hard it was to tell him the truth.

So, why did I decide to tweet every line of "The Great Gatbsy"? After all, it is not my favorite book. My favorite book is "The Age of Innocence" on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and "The Beautiful and Damned" on the other days of the week. "The Great Gatsby" wasn't even in my top 20.

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Dry began as nothing more ambitious than a journal I started the day I returned to New York City from rehab in Minnesota.

I was feeling nearly electrified with the discomfort of existing with a blood alcohol level at zero. And I had no idea what to do with my sober self.

What did normal people do when they weren’t drinking?

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So we’ve come to this point, as a nation,

Where a white man with money and station,

Is no longer a shoe-in,

So the Right Wing’s now stewin’:

“’Tis the End of Civilization!”

Bruce F. Cole

Kamuela, Hawaii

From Delaware hails our VP,

A fiscal cliff jumper is he.

He'll work on your pecs,

Offer old ladies sex,

Won't someone please put this guy on TV?

Josh Klemons

Madison, Wis.

Where’s Obama’s diversity minder–

His “qualified female” staff finder?

He’s named white guys galore,

To positions top-drawer,

Perhaps he should borrow Mitt’s binder.

Madeleine Begun Kane

Bayside, Queens

Did we have an assault weapons binge?

Just the thought should make all of us cringe.

Can we trust NRA,

To be honest when they,

Are the voice of a lunatic fringe?

Stephen Whitred

Barriere, B.C., Canada

In a tale of pro cycling woe,

Doping brought down a mighty hero.

But one detail I find,

Really frazzles my mind,

Who knew Oprah still had her own show?

Tom Foltz

Fort Wayne, Ind.

Although your new limerick contest is thrillin',

My brain appears not to be willin'

When every new verse

Than the last one is worse.

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As travel arrangements were set,

Rafalca had reason to fret,

When Romney explained,

To get to the Games,

She'd be strapped to the roof of the jet!

Pete DeVriese

Oakland, Calif.

The Romney's were off with a start.

Regrettably, Seamus had farts.

So into the crate,

If he makes it that's great.

If not, Mitt will sell off the parts.

Michael Peterson

Willowbrook, Ill.

Mitt’s not vulgar, profane or salacious.

He would never offend! Good gracious!

But in unctuous perfection,

He seeks his election,

In a manner sublimely mendacious.

Quentin Sullivan

Haverhill, Mass.

Paul Ryan is sure that it's true.

All abortions are wicked to do.

Not for rape, or incest,

Even death - Paul knows best.

For a zygote's worth much more than you.

Paul Bamborough

Norway

RNC speakers begin to assemble,

And their rhetoric starts to dissemble.

From Rubio to Ryan.

There'll be no shortage of lyin'.

Causing fact-checkers all over to tremble.

Jim Brown

Scarsdale, N.Y.

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I share the photo with some friends, and the verdict is universal. “A slightly more effeminate version of Truman Capote,” is perhaps the best summation. I stick with the picture, post it, and release my new website to the world. No one notices, though I fear lawyers from the Capote estate may one day send a cease-and-desist order.

Thus began my life as a published author.

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As my kids got older, approaching the age of the students I taught, a light bulb suddenly went on in my blinkered brain. Most of the kids I taught were just like my kids. They had parents who loved them, came from good communities and schools, had been nurtured and protected throughout their childhoods. Yet plenty of these kids didn’t seem to be happy. They were anxious, they were depressed, they were unenthusiastic about their work, and they were uncertain about their futures. I suddenly realized that happiness is not something to be taken for granted (I can hear you saying “duh!”). When I came to this blinding insight, my parenting aims turned on a dime. I also discovered that my wife had appreciated this all along, and that equipping our kids to be happy had always been part of her parenting agenda.

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It's now known there's a boson named Higgs,

That creates both electrons and pigs.

So it really does matter,

How particles scatter.

Some by zags, yet still others by zigs.

Marilyn Hewitt

Media, Pa.

Though a mister and a mister want to marry,

DOMA made it incendiary.

If a miss and a miss,

Tie the knot with a kiss,

No one's shocked (except maybe Rick Perry).

Shirley Stuart

Berkeley, Calif.

Next week we’ll try something different. Stay tuned!

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Serena, who has been earlier established as a certain type of hungry but unintellectual reader, dismisses this device as a "trick" to be "distrusted." "There was, in my view," she observes, "an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honor. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim."

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Ryan's budget exceeds every quota,

Of upper class' perks,

As the rich get the works.

It kicks the middle-class right in the scrota.

Mike Moulton

Gainesville, Fla.
Rob Portman, you demonstrate well,

The ethic conservatives sell:

When it’s my child in need,

Time to challenge the creed;

When it’s yours, damn those sinners to hell.

Johanna Richmond

Red Hook, N.Y.
Now we've all heard Reince Priebus's case,

That the GOP needs a new face.

But Palin just snorted,

And Limbaugh retorted,

"That's crap - we should play to the base."

Richard B Weinberg

Winston Salem, N.C.
I saw Donald Trump on TV,

At CPAC, at quarter past three.

He never did balk,

And the theme of his talk,

Was “Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me!”

Raymond Cavender

Newnan, Ga.

Will abandoning the weapons ban help gun safety?
The size of the pistol one packs,

Relates, if you must know the facts,

To being devoid,

To quote my friend Freud,

Of that which belongs in one’s slacks.

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I went to Los Angeles to become a writer. I'd written three features before I'd arrived, but they were the bushiest of the bush league. A couple years in, I got lucky and got a job in TV and therefore switched gears to working on TV spec scripts. I wrote six or seven of those, each still quite bush league, and I started getting jobs as a writer's assistant. Knowing I could be called upon to offer material in those meetings (you're always being tested for writerly aptitude), I got nervous and scared, and pretty soon, I was getting more and more bound up, to the point where I could see nothing but crap in my writing and couldn't relax enough to be a reliable contributor in the writers' room. It was like trying to get an erection in public -- the harder I tried to relax, the further from relaxation I got. Miserable yet curious about my predicament, I realized that "going to L.A." perhaps had been a coping mechanism for running away from how crappy I felt about myself. My (now ex-) wife wasn't helping when she told me if I couldn't write (or wouldn't, by this point), that our moving to L.A. had been a waste of her life. So I found myself swimming in a vat of santorum composed of doubt, resentment, fear and, most important, self-loathing. I've been doing Zen for a few years, which has forced me to see that my "ambition" may have been merely the foreground distraction of a much deeper, uncertain and unfriendly psychological background. I've had to leave L.A. because of the relentlessly poor job market and took with me two things: the clothes on my back and the aforementioned santorum. A therapist and support groups are probably in order, but your thoughts would be most welcomed.

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I'm 27, recently unemployed, living in a "cottage" behind my parents' home, single, in a period of "transition" (career-wise), and for some strange reason I'm in an existential funk that seems so reminiscent of the way I felt back in high school 10 years ago.

First, I'd like to mention my aspirations of becoming a writer. It's something I've only dabbled in over the years, have always received positive feedback in, and I've only in the past couple of years come to the realization that this is my true calling. Everyone I know is supportive.

I studied psychology as an undergrad, enrolled in numerous philosophy courses to satiate my ever-curious soul, read Dostoevsky and Maugham fervently, but I've not the least bit of interest in pursuing a career ... in anything! This may seem a puerile way of thinking, but I'm always asking myself: "What's the point???"

What it boils down to is this: I am not the ambitious type. I truly believe that ambition is an exercise in futility; that Milan Kundera was right on the nose in saying: "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."

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The role of the teacher gets bigger,

In ways that I simply can't figger.

Teach reading and writing,

And make math exciting,

But also be quick on the trigger?

Michael Cotler
Maplewood, N.J.

Bill Maher and The Donald are feuding,

For simian parents alluding.

With ego maligned,

Trump wants Maher fined,

When it's really the apes should be suing.

Bink Olney
Spokane, Wash.

There was a was a dreaded sequestration,

That menaced the fate of our nation.

So with courage and grace,

Congress hastened the pace,

Of their mutual masturbation!

John Gately
Cambridge, MA

Send entries to limericks@salon.com along with your name and hometown. The deadline is Friday at noon eastern and we’ll publish our favorites on Sunday. Poems may be edited for clarity or scansion. Good luck!

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Of course, creative writing programs are not a bad thing, but their role in our current culture can make even those who work within them uneasy. The programs provide promising young writers with the opportunity to concentrate on their work in an (ideally) supportive community of writers. But the programs have difficulty imparting to their students a central truth of most authors' lives: Nobody cares about your work. When it comes to books, the supply is much larger than the demand.

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Why? Barnes, in recalling the great sense of liberation following the collapse of the 1960 obscenity case against the publishers of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," said that there was then a great sense of possibility. British fiction could finally emulate the "truth-telling" of French novels. But being free to do something and being able to do it are very different, and Barnes thinks the results were sometimes awkward and implausible. Plus, the effort went unappreciated. "Expect to be laughed at by subsequent generations," Barnes told aspiring authors, before affirming that he personally forges ahead into this veritable minefield despite all the anticipated mockery.

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Amidst litigation galore,
Pope Benedict has said “No more!”
He says he'll pursue prayer,
But I'm scratching my hair,
Asking, "What the hell's changed from before?"

Chad Parenteau

http://www.chadparenteaupoetforhire.com/index.html

I admit I don't care who they pick
For best actor, director or flick.
But here's news: When rude rubes,
Reduce women to boobs,
They'll now earn "a MacFarlane" (Best Prick).

Johanna Richmond

Red Hook, N.Y.

Send entries to limericks@salon.com along with your name and hometown. The deadline is Friday at noon eastern and we’ll publish our favorites on Sunday. Poems may be edited for clarity or scansion. Good luck!

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This letter is super-long even by my standards. In comparison, the reply is not actually so very long but it is all sort of one long uninterrupted piece, which I hope you will examine structurally and see how I am connecting clauses with semicolons and looping recursions and looping recursions and looping recursions, trying to create an unbroken thread even as it meanders and loops and recurs and recurs and loops and recurs.

Hi Cary.

I'm a big fan of your work. I read all your new advice pieces because, regardless of how I relate to the letter-writer, I always find a ubiquitous nugget of beauty and hope in your responses. When I saw your call for more creativity-related letters, I felt like this was my moment to try and write to you myself.

I'm 28 years old. I've been reading since age 2 and began writing not long after that. I love it with all my heart; it is the craft that defines me. I was determined to be the youngest novelist and be published at age 13, and while I did indeed finish a murder mystery novel (I use the term loosely) by then, of course it was not in any condition to be published. But ambitions for my writing have been high since I can remember. And more than that, no matter what trouble I've faced in my life — and I've faced quite a bit — writing has always been there for me, to save me. But suddenly it's becoming difficult in a new and frankly traumatic way.

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There once was a Senator named Lindsey,

Whose reasoning was really quite flimsy.

Obsessed with Benghazi,

He went kamikaze,

Based only on personal whimsy.

Randy Searight

A huge rock blew up over Russia,

If it fell on your head it would crush ya.

And though you might object,

If it fell on your neck,

You can be very sure it would hush ya.

Mark Childress

Key West, Fla.

Send entries to limericks@salon.com along with your name and hometown. The deadline is Friday at noon eastern and we’ll publish our favorites on Sunday. Poems may be edited for clarity or scansion. Good luck!

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