Visions of Cody, with 'The Visions of the Great Rememberer'

460 pp. Includes introduction, 'The Visions of the Great Rememberer' by Allen Ginsberg. "Visions of Cody is an experimental novel by Jack Kerouac, perhaps his most stylistically free and varied. It was written in 1951-1952, and though not published in its entirety until 1973, it had by then achieved an underground reputation... Visions of Cody derived from experimental spontaneous prose inserts that Kerouac added to the original manuscript of On the Road in 1951-52. Parts of the novel is a fast-forward recapitulation of the events described in On the Road, which was also about Kerouac and Cassady. When Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show in 1959, he secretly read from the introduction to the at the time unpublished Visions of Cody although he was supposed to read from On The Road, the book he was holding... The first section of the book is essentially a collection of short stream-of-consciousness essays, which Kerouac called 'sketches', many simply describing elements of Dulouz's (Kerouac's) post-World War II New York City environment, from the texture and smells of a lunch counter to St. Patrick's Cathedral, or minor events like the decision to masturbate in a public restroom - all interlaced with Kerouac's internal dialogue. Along the way through these descriptions, Dulouz meanders towards a decision to go visit Cody in San Francisco. The third section consists mainly of the transcription of taped conversations between Kerouac and Cassady (and occasionally 'Evelyn' - Cassady's last wife, Carolyn) that extended over five nights as they smoked marijuana. This is followed by a brief section entitled 'Imitation of the Tape,' a writing experiment by Kerouac in which he attempted to work from the spontaneity and speech patterns of the tape."