[T]he sun was shining on a happy crowd. It shone on white hats and red faces. It shone on ice lollies and melted them.

Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops.

A rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Rhizome: an Introduction (1976), is the antithesis of a root-tree structure, or ‘arborescence’, the structural model which has dominated Western thought from Porphyrian trees, to Linnaean taxonomies, to Chomskyan sentence diagrams.

In this part, the author presents a prosodic hierarchy describing syllables, moras, feet, cola and a typology for words and stress.