Last weekend, in a sad, sweet remembrance of Kerouac, who lived in Northport between 1958 and 1964, a procession of readers recited from his 1962 novel, "Big Sur," before a full house in Northport's village hall.
Yet the plunge into primal expression ("SAD") and schematic remembrance ("home") has occasioned not only satire directed at Oracle Ranch and its language but also a rueful acknowledgment of the elementary nature of feeling, no matter how elaborate its eventual transmutation into art.
Thousands of people gathered in the hot July sunshine: dignified, sad, a ceremony of memorial, of remembrance and, of course, of grief.
Even the weather was unco-operative.But the biggest shadow over the event was the remembrance of two sad stories from recent years.
In imagining that they were once familiar and wanting them to be so again, we've entered the sad and pleasurable twilight feeling of remembrance.
Saturday is International Day of Transgender Visibility, a day created – in part – to balance out the sadder tone of Trans Day of Remembrance in November, when the trans community remembers those among us lost to murder and suicide.
"Today we were supposed to have a solemn remembrance for the martyrs of 1984, so what has happened is very sad," Prem Singh Chandumajra, a spokesman for SAD had said after last week's incident.
The Church of England has criticised the National Secular Society's call for Christian ritual to have no role in the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph, dismissing the organisation as "rather sad".
The organisation's chairman, Sir Evelyn Webb-Carter, said: "We are very sad that he will not make the 200th anniversary, particularly the service of remembrance [at St Paul's Cathedral] on 18 June.
