Desolation Peak
Finished Desolation Peak today with Jack Kerouac's attempt at translating the Diamond Sutra.
So a bit about what Desolation Peak is: in 1956 Jack Kerouac took a two month seasonal gig wit the Forest Service as a fire lookout in the Cascades. His plan was to use the isolation to work on his writing. Desolation Peak is an exhaustive collection of all of that writing that has survived right down to his shopping lists and paycheck tallies.
It is certainly not great literature although a lot of it went on to be incorporated into Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. Most of the book is a daily journal, various poems and haikus, various sketches, the start of two abandoned novels, and the aforementioned Diamond Sutra.
If you're interested in the process of writing then this is a treasure trove. It shows how Jack would move between prose and poetry. His haikus would find their way into the speech of his characters. Inconsequential journal entries were fleshed out into chapters in his books.
There's a constant musing about what to write or how to write. How much spontaneity to allow into the work. How much deliberation and consideration for publication.
It's also pretty shameful just how good those two rough draft books are for hand written prose scrawled on the backside of government forms. No wonder people still think he wrote On the Road in a single unedited go.
External References
- Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Peak. Rare Bird Books, 2022.