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ON_JANE

                                           March 16, 2004

Hints of Joan Vollmer, from Kerouac's "On the Road":


Section 1, Chapter 1, p.10:
                           
   "All my other current friends              
   were 'intellectuals' -- "                  Translated: 
                                                                        
   "Chad the Nietzschean                      Hal Chase           
   anthropologist,"                           
                                              
   "Carlo Marx and his nutty                  Allen Ginsberg      
   surrealist low-voiced                      
   serious staring talk,"                     
                                              
   "Old Bull Lee and his critical             William Burroughs   
   anti-everything drawl"                                         
                                              
   "-- or else they were slinking             
   criminals like Elmer Hassel,               Herbert Hunke       
   with that hip sneer;"                                          
                                                                  
   "Jane Lee the same, sprawled               ... and Joan Vollmer
   on the Oriental cover of her  
   couch, sniffing at the _New   
   Yorker_."                     
                                  

                               (He appears to have classified      
                               Joan Vollmer as a criminal 
                               rather than an intellectual, 
                               but let's chalk that up to       Maybe he meant 
                               "spontaneous" sloppiness.)       that her sneer
                                                                was much like 
                                                                Huncke's?     

Section 2, Chapter 6 p. 146:    
   
  "His relation with his wife was one of the
  strangest: they talked till late at night; 
  Bull liked to hold the floor, he went right on in
  his dreary monotonous voice, she tried to break
  in, she never could; at dawn he got tired and
  then Jane talked and he listened  ... "   
                                            
None of this talk is 
recorded or described.  
   
   
There's an incident at the racetrack where
Burroughs and Kerouac decide that Kerouac
had been recieving a message from his
deceased father:
   
  "We told Jane about it.  She sniffed.         
  'It sounds silly to me.'" -- p. 154           Contrast that with her
                                                reported claim that   
                                                Mayan priests were    
And that, is pretty much it.                    telepathic.           


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