In its first form, baby driver evolved as a slow process involving the collection of found and sought-after objects as a visual consideration of the novel Baby Driver. Authored by Jan Kerouac (the only child, largely unacknowledged, of beat generation novelist Jack Kerouac) the book describes, in autobiographical episodes, Jan Kerouac’s own quest in search of meaning and self-fulfillment.

As this project evolves, it moves across such iterations as experimental lecture, poetry, and performance; engaging both artistic and academic research processes. Emerging questions relating to the archive and archival processes, the preservation of histories that are obscured, and the unreliability of structures that are rooted in oppressive practices continue to move this project forward.

notes from the experimental lecture component of this project:

I’m obsessively concerned with the production of objects and images and how this intersects with and influences the production of language and meaning. Essentially, I have lately realized that I mostly produce objects so that I can engage in dialogue around them. These things aren’t things, they are points of departure but also simultaneously signposts for arrival.

What I’m talking about now could be a long, long poem that is also a performance that is about the work that was its impetus as well as its object and that exists in reference to and collaboration with the work of someone else:

Jan Kerouac.

This project is called Baby Driver, named for the first of three books that Jan Kerouac wrote.

Originally conceived as a revisionist history, research ultimately revealed a true story that was far more compelling.

I had briefly imagined an alternate timeline in which a woman wrote On the Road, in which the story of self-discovery that’s shaped how the dominant culture views freedom and journeys was told by another voice.

What if Jack Kerouac had had a daughter, and she wrote the book instead?

But after the most cursory initial research it became obvious that I didn’t have to imagine an alternate timeline at all, because actually Jack Kerouac did have a daughter.

And she was a writer.

While honoring the memory and literary legacy of Jan Kerouac, this project also considers the nature of journeys and what is occurring at the periphery, what sorts of damages and detritus reverberate along the edges of the trajectory.

So it’s about the pieces and parts and fragments of things that can be

combined

and recombined

Again.

And Again.

Sometimes I think that what I’m trying to do with this work and why I’m writing here now is so that I can talk about Jan.

Or maybe I’m just trying to tell you about a work that I made that’s about Jan and is also about writing

Writing, which evokes the concept of form from formlessness

which tries to make meaning from what is perhaps inherently meaningless