Jack Kerouac’s Notebooks: Not What You’d Think!

What would you expect to find in Jack Kerouac’s notebooks? Probably not this:

Jack Kerouac — Mr. On the Road, the King of the Beats, who begat the beatniks who begat the hippies who begat the hipsters — Jack Kerouac, the fountainhead of cool — that Jack Kerouac was obsessed with — guess what. Freedom? Alienation? Restless, rootless wandering? Mad pursuit of the beatific vision? Nope. Jack Kerouac’s deepest-rooted, longest-lasting obsession was … fantasy baseball.How obsessed was he? So obsessed that, years before fantasy baseball existed, he invented his own version of the game, with whole teams and leagues named for colors and makes of cars, and series and seasons played out with marbles for balls and toothpicks and matchsticks for bats. So obsessed that he filled notebooks with meticulously recorded stats, made illustrated team rosters, and wrote letters back and forth between his various team-managerial personae, haggling over trades.

From The Huffington Post, who unfortunately have decided that this particular aspect of Kerouac is “uncool.”

3 thoughts on “Jack Kerouac’s Notebooks: Not What You’d Think!”

  1. I guess the author needs to read Jack’s work. He talks about Fantasy Baseball in his books and fans should know that he used to create whole fantasy games. It’s not that big of a secret. Thanks for the article link. Nr

  2. He wasn’t called “Memory Babe” for nothing. His ability to remember baseball statistics, both from real life and from his fantasy leagues, was legendary. If Dean Sluyter at HuffPo was really cool, he would have known about this 40 years ago. This is an endearing fact about Jack Kerouac, not a come-down. So when some square pokes fun at Jack for loving baseball, or at Marlon Brando for being a ham radio operator, it just goes to show: squares don’t get it. Never have. Never will.

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