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Divining the Road In his chapter in Penguin Books' 2007 publication of the original scroll, "Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road," Howard Cunnell writes that, "Kerouac told Cassady that between April 2 and April 22 he had written a '125,000 [word] full-length novel . . . whole thing on a strip of paper 120 foot long . . . just rolled it through the typewriter and in fact no paragraphs . . . rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road." Wildly, this creation of this On the Road, the actual typing of the scroll, this natural Hermes movement in a grander scale of a transformative rite taking place across the...

The Foot Race Isleta, NM, named "Little Island” of the Rio Grande, is like the island of Ithaca in the Odyssey that has revealed so much to me while writing, and this place in New Mexico has yielded resplendent miracles of its own.  Significant of the Hermes trickster always "on the road," as described by author Lewis Hyde in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, like Odysseus himself being "on the road," the pueblo is named after a Native American foot race.  In mythology Odysseus won a foot race in order to choose to marry Penelope.  It is suggestive of his Hermetic character.  Isleta is where John Mayer and I met at a meet & greet on his The...

2020 is the 700th Anniversary of the completion of the Divine Comedy, one of the world’s most transformative texts, and which set off the Italian Renaissance known to the master artists as the revelation of Dante’s illumination through Beatrice, a female human, and not a figment of the Church’s narrative (borrowing ancient symbols and mythology) and along with that, its control over the female body and her eternal spirit.  In a coming together of phenomenal anniversaries, Beatrice passed on 8 June in 1290, Kanye West’s birthdate in ’77--the year of the 500th anniversary of the completion of the Chapel itself. In 2009, at the beginning of this 700 year anniversary of the writing (begun in 1308), Kanye stood up for...