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Jack Kerouac’s Will is a Fake

Jack Kerouac with his third wife, Stella Sampas

A Florida judge has ruled that Jack Kerouac’s 1973 will is a forgery. Kerouac’s estate — which includes unpublished manuscripts, journals, and thousands of letters — is estimated to be worth $20 million.

Kerouac, who died in 1969, left everything to his mother, who died in 1973 and left everything to Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas. At least those involved thought so. According to an Associated Press wire story, Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, challenged the will in 1994, after seeing a copy and deciding the signature was fake. She died two years later, but Paul Blake Jr., the writer’s nephew, continued the litigation.” Kerouac died from alcoholism at age 47, but shortly before his death he wrote a letter to his young nephew, expressing his wishes to leave his estate to his mother — “and not to leave a dingblasted thing to my wife’s one hundred Greek relatives.” And now a judge has agreed.

According to the AP report:

The ruling is sure to please some Kerouac devotees who have objected to the handling of the writer’s estate, including the sale of his raincoat to actor Johnny Depp for $50,000 and the original manuscript scroll of Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road, which was sold to the owner of the Indianapolis Colts for $2.43 million.

Meanwhile, the ruling might possibly turn Blake’s life around. Blake, who has lived a life of poverty and occasional homelessness, currently lives in a mobile home with no toilet in Arizona.

“Checkout” Girl Bags a Bestseller

Sam first began writing about her experiences in a blog, Cassiere No Futur.

On the Web: ‘Checkout’ Girl Cashes In With Best-Selling Memoir

Anna Sam, a cashier in France, has become a literary sensation and in the process has parlayed her experiences in the supermarket into a humorous memoir, whose English title is Checkout: A Life on the Tills.

Sam first began writing about her experiences in a blog, Cassiere No Futur, where she provided a daily account of the goings-on in the world of a cashier. The blog took off and soon attracted a large readership, followed by substantial media attention. Not long after, publishing houses were offering her book contracts.

The most salient fact about her blogging experience, from my point of view as a teacher, is not that she landed a book contract, but that she found her work ungratifying until she began to write about it. Her blogging in a sense revealed her world to herself as well as to her readers and thus validates what I’ve read in countless books on writing: You never really know anything until you write about it.

The store is packed, shoppers rush to and fro — their grocery carts squeak and rattle. A voice over the intercom barks out the latest sales promotions over a backdrop of jangling Muzak. The general brouhaha intensifies. The store is approaching its maximum sound threshold. The squalling of a brat tips it over the edge, opening the passageway to this other dimension.

Listen to some French “Checkout” Girl music.

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The Power of Blogging

Here is the first of four videos featuring Seth Godin and Tom Peters on the power of blogging. Fascinating stuff!

Spend Your Summers with Aristotle

Aristotle

Story: A Summer With Aristotle

Finally the academic radicalism of the past couple of decades seems to be waning as students and their parents demand that educators get serious about the reading curriculum. Book camps like the one at Stanford are springing up all over. Schools such as Princeton, Brown, and Dartmouth have erected centers dedicated to giving students what they’ve been sadly lacking: the defining texts of the Western canon. Robert George, a professor at Princeton, says students have an appetite fort the Great Books: they look forward to “sitting down with Plato, St. Augustine, and James Madison, to think through the perennial issues of politics and citizenship.” In the past nine years Princeton’s James Madison Program has grown to 100 to 125 students on a campus where the average class size is fewer than 19.

Mississippi School in Violation of Desegregation Order

Can't we all just get along?

Story: Justice Department: Mississippi School Is Violating Desegregation Order

The U.S. Justice Department has decided that a small Mississippi school district must end its Jim-Crowish practice of allowing white students to transfer from majority black schools. Although the feds didn’t say it was time Mississippi joined the 21st century, they did call the practice a violation of federal law.

A Concise Guide to MLA Style and Documentation

Cover of my MLA book

Okay, I’ve written a small book to help my students write their research papers. In the thirty years since my undergraduate days in Florida, there has been a seismic shift in the way students conduct research, find primary and secondary sources, gather and store information, and write their papers. I’m certainly grateful I had the MLA Handbook back then, and I cannot imagine completing a research project in today’s computerized world without the careful, concise Seventh Edition.

My experience as a teacher, however, is that many students struggle with understanding even the basics of MLA style. That’s why I wrote this book, and students using it to help them write their research papers can rest assured that it was teacher designed and student tested in the classroom. My eleventh-graders are never shy about revealing their confusion, and their input helped me see immediately what needed improving. Because of their involvement, the strengths of this book are theirs; its weaknesses, mine.

The book should be available by the end of August, just in time for the upcoming school year. And believe me, I fully intend to use it as a textbook in my classroom. When it comes to my students and teaching them to write research papers, I can’t think of a better book to use.

Library Catalogs

The Austrailian National Library (http://www.nla.gov.au/)
A searchable index of the national Library of Australia Web site, including a link to the National Library of Australia’s Online Public Access Catalogue.

Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/)
The Internet Public Library offers an online ready-reference collection, a searchable database, links to over 20,000 books, and reference librarians to answer individual questions.

Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/homepage/lchp.html)
A searchable index to sources available from the Library of Congress home page.

LlibWeb (http://lists.webjunction.org/libweb/)

Berkeley Digital Library’s list of library servers available on the World Wide Web.

Library and Archives Canada (http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.html)
Available in both French and English, Library and Archives Canada is designed to provide easy access to texts, photographs, and other documents relating to Canada and Canadians.

Yahoo!’s List of Library Links (http://dir.yahoo.com/Reference/libraries)
Links to libraries sorted by content area , including lists of academic libraries; music, literature, art, and Native American resources; and maps, special collections, and much more. Many of the libraries offer searchable indexes or online sources.