Jack Kerouac took his "beat" writing one step further with the following passage from a book he
never completed.
|
  |
"Bing, bang and battle the rattle in the fine toothed truth of the daddy-oh mix and match of this
and that. Soothing and filling, the warmth of the birth of the earth inside of the digging daddy's
domain was brash with hash and not a cent of cash. What the hell, Nell, it's not cool for a fool
to bust up the moment with a crippled idea if it don't come near the cerebrum, dumb, dumb, bing,
bat, boom boom and such."
|
  |
Bram Stoker would never be able to top his character Dracula. But he tried with another character
that almost ended his writing career entirely.
|
  |
"I am a ghost and yet I am not dead and I am certainly not able to tolerate the pain which I am
capable of sharing due to my second head. True, I was not born with a deformity, if two heads on
one person is a deformity, but the dentist who cared to expand his medical knowledge with an
experiment which I agreed to be his subject said that a second brain in a second head would not
affect the first brain, the one I am using to write this in my journal which I hope is found and
read aloud to children so that they may learn never to desire a second head upon only two
shoulders."
|
  |
Emily Bronte's books still attract many readers but she tried to escape her own style and failed
miserably when she wrote the following short story.
|
  |
"Renton Stillborn accented the sound of the storm's thunder when his stomach began to rumble on the
porch. Standing before him was his love, the tender Sissfreed. She smelled like after the rain had
fallen upon the gray boulders that supported the porch. He was so in love with her that the trees
with limbs bending in brittle age seemed new and solid and his own disposition, much like a dead
moth, meant nothing to him, for when Sissfreed smiled, all of the sky turned into a yellow panache
and the earth was the center of the universe and he loathed his masculinity if there were a
glimpse of a chance it would be ignored by her umpteenth beauty. Still, on the porch there lingered
the ill will of a moment gone wrong, an imperfect movement between two people with similar, albeit
not identical, purposes and Renton had to submit and admit, like the beaver that jolts from its
dam-making chores, that his life would be worthless if she took him at his word, a word that he
needed to repeat, just as his stomach repeated his dinner, over and over until Sissfreed swore she
would purge the memory of him saying it, like the hawk glides into a spiral beneath the dark
foreboding clouds that promise to stay dry. But, Sissfreed did not care as much as Renton thought
she would care, in fact she did not care at all because she, too, was being eaten away by
self-consciousness, much like the groundhog with no hole to hide within and that is why she
jumped head first off of the porch, even though Renton acted quickly, like the bunny in the hop
dance, to catch her. It was too late. Sissfreed landed on her head. Death won out."
|
  |
Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You
can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.
|