Jason Jadick’s The Uncreative Subterranean was submitted as his final project for an “Uncreative Writing” course with Kenneth Goldsmith, which dealt with strategies of literary appropriation, plagiarism, and piracy. Aside from the author’s photo and name, Jadick’s cover imitates the 1994 Groove Press edition of Jack Kerouac’s novella The Subterraneans (1958), whose text he also adopts in full. He had “marathon retyped” (blurb on Lulu) it on the computer in a twenty-four-hour performance on November 30, 2012. In the process, Jadick recorded himself and the growing Word document and streamed this live on YouTube (including a computer crash, hangouts, dinner break, etc.). He also posted the produced text hourly on his Tumblr blog, so the progress of the project could be witnessed live. Typing speed varied from 2,188 words in the first hour to 1,317 words in the fifteenth hour.

The non-stop performance, with its accompanying sleep deprivation, mirrors the restlessness of the Beat Generation and Kerouac’s rapid-fire writing style (The Subterraneans is said to have been written in three days); posting on a blog to be scrolled recalls Kerouac’s famous original typescript of On the Road, created on a typewriter on a roll of sheets taped together, and his “spontaneous prose style.”

Jadick then transitioned the typescript back into book form, with each hour forming a chapter, even if this means it breaks off mid-sentence: “Typos were edited only if noticed during the performance. All conditions were at the mercy of the technology” (blurb on Lulu). The videos, blog, and typescript are still available online.

As the blurb reveals, Jadick’s book has another predecessor: Simon Morris’s blog Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2009/10) where he retyped and posted, for almost an entire year, one page per day from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, as if he had taken Truman Capote’s famous dictum about the author of the Beat Generation literally: “That isn’t writing; it’s typing.” Afterward, Morris also transformed the digital text back into book form. In doing so, however, Morris appropriated an idea from Kenneth Goldsmith, who reports in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age that he once instructed his creative writing students to copy Kerouac, according to traditional art education, which usually begins with copying the old masters.