Jack Kerouac Bobble Head

[Mingus]

August 21st is "Jack Kerouac Bobble Head Day" for the Lowell Spinners, single A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox.

Discuss...

[Root Doctor]

I think handing out copies of his books would have been a better idea.

[Gary Sisco]

What the fuck is a bobble head?

[Mingus]

Originally posted by Gary Sisco
What the fuck is a bobble head?

Time to come down off the mountain, my friend.

[Monte Smith]

I admire the exploitation of literature.

[shrugs]

Did anyone see the Stanley Crouch bobble head?

[Gentle Giant]

I just read about this a little while ago. I'm psyched, I think it will be cool. Spinners games are supposed to be a good take. And what a nice souvenir! I'll put it above the dash in my car. Then I'll get a Faulkner one and put it on the liquor cabinet.

[shrugs]

Only if there's Jack Daniels in it.

Here's your Santy Claus!

[Brian Olewnick]

Originally posted by Gary Sisco
What the fuck is a bobble head?

What kind of American are you, anyway?!?

[frankpop1]

i have to disagree root doctor this is an excellent idea. I would die for a ferlinghettii.

[bostontricky]

I suppose the Buffalo Bisons could swing a Robert Creeley bobblehead...

The Detroit Tigers could quadruple their attendance next year if they offered a different Motown bobblehead each home game. They could probably do that for a couple of seasons, or at least until the team approaches semi-respectibility.

[mke]

Originally posted by Gary Sisco
What the fuck is a bobble head?

[Ron Thorne]

[Ron Thorne]

I promise to stifle myself.

[Gary Sisco]

Brian -- No kind of American. I am one with the universe.

After seeing what a bobble head is, I'll stick with the drinking birds. My friend Michael Hurley once told me that as long as you own one of those, you never have to drink alone.

[Mingus]

What the Fuck's a Drinking Bird?

[Gary Sisco]

You'd better get out of Chittenden Co. once in a while, Ming.

[Brian Olewnick]

[Mingus]

Thanks Ole. (beats drinking with Gary... :-)

[Gary Sisco]

Nice chatter. At least the drinking bird doesn't talk back (a lush's best friend...).

[mke]

The only other person I know to have a drinking bird is Homer Simpson.

[mke]

Never two without three:

What the fuck's a lush?

[Gentle Giant]

Sounds like these are going to be hard to come by:


On the road for a bobblehead

By Donovan Slack, Globe Correspondent, 7/31/2003

It was just a promotional gimmick, another in a long line of gimmicks dreamed up by the Lowell Spinners to coax a few more fans out to the ballpark. But this one has caught fire in a way that the cow-milking contests and performing chimpanzees never did.

Jack Kerouac bobblehead dolls that the team plans to hand out to the first 1,000 fans at an Aug. 21 matchup with the Williamsport Crosscutters has ignited a nationwide storm of collectors, beat-era nostalgics, and fans of the 1950s prophet of wanderlust.

"One lady said, `I'll buy a standing-room ticket, and I'll give you as much money as you want for shipping and handling if you just send me one,' " said Jon Goode, the Spinners' public relations director, who came up with the idea and worked with the UMass-Lowell English department in the promotion.

"We blew up a map of the United States, put it up in the office, and every time we get a call from somewhere, we put a tack up there in the state," Goode said. "Our map doesn't include Canada, though, so we had to put some tacks above the map."

The flood of Kerouac bobble seekers shocked officials of the Spinners, a Class A baseball team that has tried some outlandish promotional stunts in the past. The team has hired a descendant of Michael Jackson's pet chimpanzee to wear a Spinners uniform and throw out the first pitch. And then there was "Birth Day" in 1999, when pregnant women were given free seats behind home plate, near an obstetrician. A fleet of ambulances idled nearby. The first to give birth won a year's supply of diapers.

Goode, who said he likes crazy ideas, said he originally thought he would try to rent the 120-foot scroll that is Kerouac's original manuscript of "On the Road," written in a benzedrine haze in 1951. Then it hit him, Goode said. Bobbleheads.

"They looked at me like I had 10 heads," Goode said of his first meeting at the UMass English department, where he went for help.

With the unexpected demand, UMass is hatching plans to auction off the 30 or so extras that came with the order, thinking they might make enough cash for a scholarship.

Not everybody is so enthusiastic, however. "We would never carry a thing like that," said Scott Davis, who for 23 years has worked at San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, a Kerouac hangout and epicenter for the beats. "It trivializes the legacy of an important contemporary author in American literature."

Kerouac, who was born and raised in Lowell, has been credited with inspiring a generation with his tales of cross-country road trips, sex, and drugs. He often wrote in a way he called "spontaneous prose," in which he would sit and write for days and weeks, mostly uninterrupted and, some say, without revision. He published more than a dozen works before he died in 1969.

"Kerouac was a funny guy," said Hilary Holladay, the UMass English professor in charge of the project. "I think he would have said, `Why not 10,000 bobbleheads?' He wanted literary acclaim, but like all writers, he loved the celebrity. He loved the fact that people knew who he was, and this is another way to say, `Look, I made it.' "

Holladay keeps her Kerouac bobblehead on a shelf in her dining room.

"When I walk past him, his head nods up and down, nodding in approval, no doubt, at this bobblehead craze," she said. "If you get his head really going, it looks like he's listening to some great music or he's listening to someone tell a story."

With the overwhelming response to bobblehead Jack, Holladay expects the 8-inch likenesses to show up on eBay before long.

"They're in my dining room right now," Holladay said of the English department's allotment of 30 dolls. "But maybe I should get a vault."

[Mingus]

Thanks GG. Pick one up for me while you're at the park (er, pahk)

[Dr Dave]

City Lights Bookstore is obviously run by people in serious need of an enema.

I could go for a Jonathan Edwards bobblehead, especially if it had a little voice chip that would recite "There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." It would be a comfort while driving on the Mass Pike.

[frankpop1]

it really doesnt look like kerouac, but i think this is kewl. i had my $4 money order ready to go at ebay, then i saw the bids riding from $76-$150. sheeesh! americans do not understand the value of money.

[frankpop1]

from on the road

"And now we shot in inky darkness through the scream of insects, and the great, rank, almost rotten smell descended, and we remembered and realized that the map indicated just after Gregoria the beginning of the Tropic of Cancer . . . No towns, nothing, lost jungle, miles and miles, and down-going, getting hotter, the insects screaming louder, the vegetation growing higher, the smell ranker and hotter . . . and I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it . . . The atmosphere and I became the same . . . The sky was starless, utterly unseen and heavy . . ."

[frankpop1]

" . . . the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

[Gordon B]

When's the Tim McGlasson bobble head coming out?

[moneyp]

$76-150!!!! Holy cow! I'd sell mine if it wasn't so cool.