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City turns on its bookish charm

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published February 24, 2007

A tall, lanky fellow in a gallon hat stopped his car on the wrong side of the road and came over to us; he looked like a sheriff. We prepared our stories secretly. He took his time coming over. "You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?" We didn't understand his question, and it was a damned good question.

Jack Kerouac, On The Road

ORLANDO - Go into the College Park neighborhood northwest of downtown, go to the one-story, wood-frame Cracker house at 1418 Clouser Avenue at the corner of Shady Lane Drive, go into the back and into the cramped converted-porch apartment with the tiny rectangle windows and the uneven floors and the 10-by-10 bedroom, and here is where Jack Kerouac became the voice of a generation with the publication of On The Road and here is where he wrote the sequel called The Dharma Bums in 11 Bennied-up days and nights.

"This is it," Marty Cummins said one afternoon earlier this month. He's the president of the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando.

"There's something about this place," Brad Kuhn said. He's a board member for the project. "Ideas collide here," he said.

The Kerouac House, the headquarters for the nonprofit group, the home to its three-month rotating writers-in-residence, is also a tangible challenge to the notion that this city is nothing but strip centers and Disney. It is a mind-changer. The house has that something that almost always in Florida is found off the Interstates and away from the beaches and theme parks.

Authenticity.

Now shift to Brooksville.

Sunday afternoon Cummins is scheduled to be there to meet with folks in the most important step yet in a continuing conversation that ultimately could alter the overall image and the financial reality of the long-dormant business district in the small Hernando County town.

Cummins and his wife want to start a series of "booktowns" in Florida and then around the Southeast and even around the country. A booktown could have bookstores, book-themed coffee shops, restaurants and bed and breakfasts, and readings and film and literary festivals. Brooksville could be the first.

"Brooksville could do it," Cummins said. "It will be a cultural paradise."

"I have a feeling," Rising Sun Cafe co-owner Lisa Johnson said, "this is going to be a good thing."

A literary legacy

Kerouac, of course, is one of the most important American writers of the 20th Century. He was called the king of the post-World War II "Beat Generation." Social critics called the "beats" unstable, un-American early versions of hippies, but Kerouac had a different definition that had more to do with the beauty and the beat of a different kind of life, the beat of the rhythm of the road, the spirit of searching for more.

He wore jeans and flannels and scribbled in small shirt-pocket notebooks and wrote in fast fits at night in keen, free-form, mellifluous, foot-tapping prose he likened to bebop jazz.

He liked people, he wrote in On The Road, "who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars ..."

He was from Lowell, Mass., and lived at times in New York City and on Long Island, but he was at 1418 Clouser from July 1957 to April 1958, when everything "exploded," he used to say, and he died as a drunk in 1969 in St. Petersburg. All of which is to say Brooksville's location might be uniquely suited to Cummins' booktown idea.

Cummins says a book-themed Brooksville could draw people from Ocala and Orlando and Tampa and St. Pete and beyond.

Bob Kealing, a reporter for WESH-TV in Orlando who is also the vice president of the Kerouac Project and the author of Kerouac in Florida, says it could be "the crossroads of his literary legacy."

Booktown, a draw?

They know about Brooksville because of Brian Brijbag. Cummins the other day on the phone called him a "soul mate." Brijbag, the city's redevelopment coordinator since July, looks at the downtown area and sees not boarded-up buildings and going-out-of-business sales but art galleries and second-story lofts - a new brand in an old place that has a rustic, hickish reputation that sticks in spite of Hernando County's changing demographics.

Demographics come first.

Minds come later.

It's not what it was, Brijbag believes. He thinks the city could be a regional destination. There just needs to be a draw.

Late last year Cummins sent an e-mail about his booktown idea to community redevelopment directors around the state.

Brijbag jumped.

"May I suggest the City of Brooksville for your consideration?" he wrote in a letter in December.

Over the last month, Cummins and his wife have gotten to know more about Brooksville and have become more and more excited. He likes its location, he likes the small downtown and the historic homes, and he likes that Hernando has no chain bookstores.

But he hasn't been to Brooksville yet.

He hasn't seen the place. He hasn't met the people.

That happens Sunday.

Culture, commerce

At 1418 Clouser, the Kerouac Project gives its writers a bike, a food stipend, a library card, a place to stay rent-free - and time. To think. To write.

The project is debt-free now, Cummins said, and the booktown is his own idea but would benefit the Kerouac project by spreading the word and ultimately creating other spots for its writers to live and work. Cummins would provide consulting services for a fee, and he says he has investors ready if necessary to buy properties and start book-themed businesses, but the first priority is to have enough local merchants buy into the idea to make it happen.

"The key is to use the book as a magnet to create profit elsewhere," Cummins said. "People that buy books are interested in a lot of things. They're a very appealing demographic. So you use the book to get them to you and then sell them other things.

"It's a celebration of culture and commerce."

"Ideas come cheap, but reality costs money," longtime local historian Bob Martinez said earlier this month. "But this could be the shot in the arm, finally, that this town needs."

"You're not seeing money come from anywhere else," Realtor Jeanne Gavish said. "The economy is hurting all over Florida. Outside money with a theme is exactly what this place needs."

Sunday's meeting is scheduled for two parts. Brijbag is giving Cummins and his wife a tour starting at 1 p.m. At 3, they'll be at the Rising Sun for an informal get-together with merchants, property owners, members of the Brooksville Mural Society and the Hernando County Fine Arts Council, and anybody else who wants to come.

Then Cummins will leave, Brijbag said, "and he's going to be hashing it all out in his head, and he'll come back and say, 'Okay, we have X, Y and Z, but we need 1, 2 and 3."

At the Kerouac House one recent afternoon, Darlyn Finch, the last writer in residence, said the house had a "sweet spirit."

The historical record on that Kerouac spirit is quite clear. It wasn't meant to stay in one place.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

If you go

Selling Brooksville

Marty Cummins of the Kerouac Project in Orlando will be at the Rising Sun Cafe at 3 p.m. Sunday for an informal get-together with merchants, property owners, members of the Brooksville Mural Society and the Hernando County Fine Arts Council and anybody else who wants to come.

[Last modified February 23, 2007, 21:00:45]