Old Angel Midnight

By Jack Kerouac

Book Overview

"Old Angel Midnight is one of the great delights of the boundless improvisational world. Jack Kerouac's ear is peerless, manifesting structures otherwise impossible. A masterpiece of the mind freed to fly. Read it aloud, for yourself, 'for the sake of reading, and for the sake of the Tongue ... Let's hear the Sound of the Universe, son.'"--Clark Coolidge

Old Angel Midnight is a treasure trove of Kerouac's experiments with automatic writing, a method he practiced constantly to sharpen his imaginative reflexes. Recorded in a series of notebooks between 1956-1959, what Kerouac called his "endless automatic writing piece" began while he shared a cabin with poet Gary Snyder. Kerouac tried to emulate Snyder's daily Buddhist meditation discipline, using the technique of "letting go" to free his mind for pure spontaneous writing, annotating the stream of words flowing through his consciousness in response to auditory stimuli and his own mental images.

Kerouac continued his exercise in spontaneous composition over the next three years, including a period spent with William Burroughs in Tangiers. He made no revisions to the automatic writing entries in his notebooks, which were collected and transcribed for publication as originally written. Old Angel Midnight attests to the success of Kerouac's experiment and bears witness to his commitment to his craft, and to the pleasure he takes in writing: "I like the bliss of mind."

"Old Angel Midnight is the illuminated notebook, the ur-text, of Kerouac vision/voice/language. The golden rule Catholicism of New England mind in kahoots with free time Godhead consciousness. This is true beat pleasure. This is our music."--Thurston Moore

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 087286703X
• ISBN13: 9780872867031
• Release Date: July 2016
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 94 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Brilliance unencumbered by usefulness

Man, this is a hard slog. This is truly a work of spontaneous prose and you quickly realize this as you try to follow any path of sensible thought until you get to the point where you realize `It's not there'. This is not the written sounds of anything that flowed through Kerouac's midnight window, as he has you believe in a letter to a friend. I have never heard anything like that anywhere through any window of my life. This is purely Kerouac's mind at play with words as they pop into his thoughts. There are some beautiful subtle fragments to be found in this work, mixed in with, phew, with umm, all sorts of stuff. It's a potpourri of poetry written upon the meditation of his own mind & quite often very funny. I believe he succeeded in what he set out to do, but that outcome by its nature is not something appealing to most people. Only a hard core Kerouac fan could truly love this book. I read it in one hit. Perhaps the secret is to pick it up & read stanzas at a time, over time. It's very interesting, means nothing, demands concentration & leaves you scratching your head. I liked it but could love it with time. I'd give it five stars for its brilliance & inventiveness but its inaccessibility can only grant it four.

read it outloud

This book is about the time the author just sits in his lonely shack and listens to the sounds around.I guess if you just sit and listen intendly right now to all the sounds coming into your universe you will get the message jack was trying to put across. The best way to read this book is to read a section at a time out loud to someone. The result is quite magical. The words somehow all become clear and the visions and situations become real. This is not an easy book to comprehend in the normal manner of a read but hey delve in deep and it becomes a cosmic comet in the universe of your mind.