His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line.
Interpretation
Embracing the beauty in imperfections can reflect one's identity and personal taste.
This quote by Jack Kerouac highlights the idea that true appreciation of art and life often lies in accepting and valuing imperfections. Bull's fondness for something considered 'ugly' symbolizes a deeper understanding that uniqueness and authenticity can be found in what society may overlook or reject, suggesting that individual perspectives are vital in defining beauty.
In practice
Using this quote during an art critique to emphasize the importance of subjective viewpoints.
Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that cramp they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume.
I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.
My aunt once said that the world would never find peace until men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness.
The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone. In exchange I told her long stories.
Holding up my purring cat to the moon. I sighed.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
I am a company in myself. My repertoire has become a bible for all mimes in the world.
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.
Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.
When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.
The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
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