Excerpt from The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac

The Dharma Bums:: Jack Kerouac

Throughout all these parties I always stole off for a nap under the eucalyptus trees, instead of my rosebush, which was all hot sun all day; in the shade of the trees I rested well. One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree. I noticed how the leaves almost looked human the way they bowed and then leaped up and then swayed lyrically side to side. It was a crazy vision in my mind but beautiful. Another time under those trees, I dreamt I saw a purple throne all covered with gold…

Excerpt from The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

Chapter One:: Oscar Wilde

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As he looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he
feared he might awake.

Poem translated from Latin

Happy The Man:: Horace

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

he who can call today his own:

he who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul, or rain or shine

the joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power,

but what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

“Beat” – Richard Herd

Ginsberg howled in Tompkins Square Park
dogs lifted their legs and listened to Nietsche

Burroughs sat naked eating his lunch
while Corso stood on point

Kerouac danced into the end zone
his Buddha giving high fives
the Giants did not call

Ferlinghetti rode the Coney Island
merry-go-round
dogs trotted freely in the streets

“Just Before Black” by James Franco

MUST READ: James Franco’s short story about how it’s only right before you die that you know you’re living— arguably a modern-day Kerouac. 

“Just Before Black” by James Franco