Catching up with my RSS feeds

• Forgot to add this to my recent post about literary-themed movies: Kill Your Darlings is about the 1944 murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, which this article says "helped spawn the Beat generation." Chris Evans will star as Lowell native Jack Kerouac. It's set to come out next year.
  
  
• Maine senator Olympia Snowe is promoting legislation that could lead to the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick becoming part of the National Parks system. The house, where Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin just before moving to Andover, is currently on the National Register of Historic Places, but it's owned by Bowdoin College and was a dormitory at least as recently as 2003. (Andover's Stowe house is also a dorm for Phillips Academy.)
  
  
• This article traces the origins of the North Shore Children's Hospital. Lydia Pinkham's daughter Aroline Gove was a supporter of what was then called the North Shore Babies' Hospital, as was the Salem journalist Kate Tannant Woods. Gove also founded the Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic, still in operation as a women's clinic at 250 Derby Street in Salem.
  
  
• Happened across D. H. Lawrence's description of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a romanticist, in Studies in Classic American Literature: "And what’s a romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it’s always daisy-time… Hawthorne obviously isn’t this kind of romanticist." (via Bookslut)
  
  
• A sonnet by mystical, Shakespeare-obsessed, "divinely inspired" poet Jones Very: "To the Canary Bird"
  
  
• A brief round-up of excerpts from sailor's journals, including Salem's Nathaniel Bowditch, whose book The American Practical Navigator was written in 1802 and is still standard issue aboard all Naval vessels.
  
  
• In his blog about Lowell culture and politics, Richard Howe points to a NYT review of Elinor Lipman's novel The Family Man and mentions that Lipman is a member of the Lowell High School Alumni Hall of Fame.

Newly published Kerouac novel on the horizon

HarperCollins recently announced that they'll be publishing Jack Kerouac's "lost" 1942 novel, The Sea is My Brother. (Penguin published the Kerouac and William Burroughs collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks for the first time in 2008.) It is about, in Kerouac's words, "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." Oh, right, That Guy.

Jessa Crispin of Bookslut writes, with no little sarcasm, "If it's taken this long to publish Kerouac's first book, you know it has to be good." I have to agree with the skepticism, but then I've always been put off by the amount of uncritical adoration Kerouac gets from some corners. Looking forward to Jack Kerouac: The Annotated Shopping Lists.