Jack Kerouac
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
Interesting article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksbl ... ck-kerouac
Misremembering Jack Kerouac
Thanks partly to his miserable end 40 years ago, Kerouac has lost some of his lustre as a counterculture icon. But that was never what he wanted to be
'Forty years ago today, Jack Kerouac died. Not for him the glorious blaze that's the proverbial price of a life lived too fast. At the age of 47, he may have died relatively young, but he didn't leave a good-looking corpse. Kerouac had retreated into the philosophical if not actual loneliness of the writer's life, and died in hospital after vomiting much of his vitality out into the toilet of the home he shared with his wife and mother in Florida, America's sunshine retirement capital.
Bloated, reactionary and guileless, his was a painful and undignified death, brought on my too much drink and dissolute living, played out in the presence of the mother whose apron strings he couldn't seem to cut, and the wife who didn't understand him. Venerated by his fans and dismissed by many critics (Truman Capote was probably the most memorably sniffy about his spontaneous prose-poetry, "That's not writing, that's typing", but he did not want for detractors), Kerouac has divided opinion as to his literary merit since his ungainly demise. But has his time finally come round again?
The evidence against Kerouac is, on the face of it, overwhelming. As joyful as his lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose could be, it wasn't, we are reminded, proper writing. For a counterculture legend, he could come across like a grumpy old man from a US sitcom; while his foil and pal Neal Cassady moved seamlessly from the 1950s Beat Generation to the hippy revolution of the 60s, Kerouac couldn't or wouldn't understand this brave new world. When Cassady, by now running with the new generation epitomised by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, visited him in 1964, Jack doubtfully took LSD and ended up silently beating himself up over the perceived failings which saw him kicked out of the Merchant Navy.
But to accept all that as criticism of Kerouac is to misunderstand what he was all about. He never set himself up as the champion of a nation-changing revolutionary counterculture - he was just a kid from a blue-collar background who longed to write. While contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Gary Snyder seemed to have an innate "otherness" that set them apart from the rank-and-file of post-war American society, Kerouac refused to fully excise the connections that hooked him to his fairly average working-class upbringing. Ginsberg was the bearded, dark-eyed nightmare ready to subvert the American dream with his shouty poems and alien sexuality; Kerouac seemed to remain the type of square-jawed college boy you could take home to your mother for Sunday lunch (assuming he was going easy on the sauce that day). Few of us could aspire to be Ginsberg, but we could all hope to be Kerouac. The fat, depressed, apparently antisemitic Jack Kerouac who died after throwing his guts up in the toilet in St Petersburg, Florida – that's not the Jack we like to remember. That's not the Jack buried beneath the flat headstone in the cemetery just outside the town of Lowell, about 30 miles outside of Boston, where Kerouac grew up.
Back in the late 90s I found myself in Boston and struck out for Lowell. It's a pretty, spacious red-brick former mill town, which honours Kerouac in a non-flashy kind of way. There's a small sculpture park comprising half a dozen monoliths on which were etched passages from Jack's work. The man in the tourist information bureau, upon selling me a couple of Kerouac books that I hadn't found in British bookshops, gave me a photocopy of a hand-drawn map showing some important sites – his old house, his school – and the location of his grave in the municipal Edson Cemetery.
It was a blazing hot July day, and I walked the few miles from the town centre to the cemetery, past white picket fences and well-tended yards. I found Jack's grave in the deserted cemetery. "Ti Jean", it said on it: his childhood nickname in Canuck patois, Little Jack. Previous well-wishers had left gifts of beer-bottle caps, unsmoked joints, key-rings, scrawled notes. When Kerouac was returned to his home to be buried on 24 October 1969, there were allegedly two old Lowellians outside the church. One asked whose funeral it was. "Jack Kerouac," said the other. The first ruminated for a moment then said, "Who's Jack Kerouac?"
Who was Jack Kerouac? Not the best writer in the world, but a writer nonetheless. Perhaps not the revolutionary hero some people think he wasn't very good at being, but which he wasn't actually trying to be. An ordinary guy thrust into sometimes extraordinary situations, trying to straddle the abyss between what was expected of him and what he wanted to be? An incredible humanist, wide-eyed at the possibilities of life? A man of confused but deep spirituality? That's what I got as I sat beside Jack's grave on that hot July afternoon.
A long-awaited movie adaptation of Kerouac's breakthrough book, On the Road, is due out next year, with Sam Riley, who played Ian Curtis in the Joy Division biopic Control, slated for the role of Jack's alter ego, Sal Paradise. Whether it reconciles the duality of Kerouac the legend and Kerouac the man – both of which have been found wanting in many regards – perhaps it does signal that we're on the road to a new and overdue appreciation of Jack Kerouac.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksbl ... ck-kerouac
Misremembering Jack Kerouac
Thanks partly to his miserable end 40 years ago, Kerouac has lost some of his lustre as a counterculture icon. But that was never what he wanted to be
'Forty years ago today, Jack Kerouac died. Not for him the glorious blaze that's the proverbial price of a life lived too fast. At the age of 47, he may have died relatively young, but he didn't leave a good-looking corpse. Kerouac had retreated into the philosophical if not actual loneliness of the writer's life, and died in hospital after vomiting much of his vitality out into the toilet of the home he shared with his wife and mother in Florida, America's sunshine retirement capital.
Bloated, reactionary and guileless, his was a painful and undignified death, brought on my too much drink and dissolute living, played out in the presence of the mother whose apron strings he couldn't seem to cut, and the wife who didn't understand him. Venerated by his fans and dismissed by many critics (Truman Capote was probably the most memorably sniffy about his spontaneous prose-poetry, "That's not writing, that's typing", but he did not want for detractors), Kerouac has divided opinion as to his literary merit since his ungainly demise. But has his time finally come round again?
The evidence against Kerouac is, on the face of it, overwhelming. As joyful as his lyrical, stream-of-consciousness prose could be, it wasn't, we are reminded, proper writing. For a counterculture legend, he could come across like a grumpy old man from a US sitcom; while his foil and pal Neal Cassady moved seamlessly from the 1950s Beat Generation to the hippy revolution of the 60s, Kerouac couldn't or wouldn't understand this brave new world. When Cassady, by now running with the new generation epitomised by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, visited him in 1964, Jack doubtfully took LSD and ended up silently beating himself up over the perceived failings which saw him kicked out of the Merchant Navy.
But to accept all that as criticism of Kerouac is to misunderstand what he was all about. He never set himself up as the champion of a nation-changing revolutionary counterculture - he was just a kid from a blue-collar background who longed to write. While contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Gary Snyder seemed to have an innate "otherness" that set them apart from the rank-and-file of post-war American society, Kerouac refused to fully excise the connections that hooked him to his fairly average working-class upbringing. Ginsberg was the bearded, dark-eyed nightmare ready to subvert the American dream with his shouty poems and alien sexuality; Kerouac seemed to remain the type of square-jawed college boy you could take home to your mother for Sunday lunch (assuming he was going easy on the sauce that day). Few of us could aspire to be Ginsberg, but we could all hope to be Kerouac. The fat, depressed, apparently antisemitic Jack Kerouac who died after throwing his guts up in the toilet in St Petersburg, Florida – that's not the Jack we like to remember. That's not the Jack buried beneath the flat headstone in the cemetery just outside the town of Lowell, about 30 miles outside of Boston, where Kerouac grew up.
Back in the late 90s I found myself in Boston and struck out for Lowell. It's a pretty, spacious red-brick former mill town, which honours Kerouac in a non-flashy kind of way. There's a small sculpture park comprising half a dozen monoliths on which were etched passages from Jack's work. The man in the tourist information bureau, upon selling me a couple of Kerouac books that I hadn't found in British bookshops, gave me a photocopy of a hand-drawn map showing some important sites – his old house, his school – and the location of his grave in the municipal Edson Cemetery.
It was a blazing hot July day, and I walked the few miles from the town centre to the cemetery, past white picket fences and well-tended yards. I found Jack's grave in the deserted cemetery. "Ti Jean", it said on it: his childhood nickname in Canuck patois, Little Jack. Previous well-wishers had left gifts of beer-bottle caps, unsmoked joints, key-rings, scrawled notes. When Kerouac was returned to his home to be buried on 24 October 1969, there were allegedly two old Lowellians outside the church. One asked whose funeral it was. "Jack Kerouac," said the other. The first ruminated for a moment then said, "Who's Jack Kerouac?"
Who was Jack Kerouac? Not the best writer in the world, but a writer nonetheless. Perhaps not the revolutionary hero some people think he wasn't very good at being, but which he wasn't actually trying to be. An ordinary guy thrust into sometimes extraordinary situations, trying to straddle the abyss between what was expected of him and what he wanted to be? An incredible humanist, wide-eyed at the possibilities of life? A man of confused but deep spirituality? That's what I got as I sat beside Jack's grave on that hot July afternoon.
A long-awaited movie adaptation of Kerouac's breakthrough book, On the Road, is due out next year, with Sam Riley, who played Ian Curtis in the Joy Division biopic Control, slated for the role of Jack's alter ego, Sal Paradise. Whether it reconciles the duality of Kerouac the legend and Kerouac the man – both of which have been found wanting in many regards – perhaps it does signal that we're on the road to a new and overdue appreciation of Jack Kerouac.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzCF6hgEfto
dharma bums didnt change my life but it certainly gave it a kick in the pants.
when i was 20 i was riding a bus down to melbourne(australia not florida) and the book i was reading was lonesome traveller. tis rare for me to remember where i was whilst reading a particular book.. but i remember that one.
mazel tov jack... ill have a bottle for you tonight.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Lonesome Traveller's the first book of his I read too.
I found 'On the Road' hard-going the first time around but appreciated it a lot more the second time.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/au ... ackkerouac
America's first king of the road
Fifty years ago Jack Kerouac's dazzling novel On the Road became the blueprint for the Beat generation and shaped America's youth culture for decades. It influenced scores of artists, musicians and film-makers, but how does it resonate with young people today?
Sean O'Hagan - The Observer, Sunday 5 August 2007
'On Wednesday 5 September 1957, the New York Times published a lengthy review of On the Road, the second novel by the 35-year-old Jack Kerouac. The reviewer, Gilbert Millstein, called it 'the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat", and whose principal avatar he is'.
In Minor Characters, her illuminating memoir of life among the Beat writers, Joyce Johnson, who was with Kerouac on that day in New York, captures the seismic resonance of that single review. She had gone with Kerouac to buy an early edition of the newspaper from an all-night newsstand in midtown Manhattan. In a nearby bar, she had watched him read Millstein's article, shaking his head 'as if he couldn't figure out why he wasn't happier than he was'.
Afterwards, they had walked back to Johnson's apartment on the Upper West Side where, as she memorably put it: 'Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The ringing phone woke him next morning and he was famous.' Overnight, the Beat generation had gone overground, and the man who did most to define it suddenly found that his book was now defining him. It would continue to do so for the rest of his short life, and for many decades afterwards.
'Challenging the complacency and prosperity of postwar America hadn't been Kerouac's intent when he wrote his novel,' his first biographer, Ann Charters, later wrote, 'but he had created a book that heralded a change of consciousness in the country.' In the few years following its publication, On the Road became a major bestseller. It also, as Kerouac's friend and fellow Beat writer, William Burroughs, witheringly wrote, 'sold a trillion Levi's, a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road'. Unwittingly, and to his increasing horror, Kerouac had written a zeitgeist book, one that would help determine the course of what would come to be known as youth culture over the following two decades.
'It changed my life like it changed everyone else's,' Bob Dylan would say many years later. Tom Waits, too, acknowledged its influence, hymning Jack and Neal in a song, and calling the Beats 'father figures'. At least two great American photographers were influenced by Kerouac: Robert Frank, who became his close friend - Kerouac wrote the introduction to The Americans - and Stephen Shore, who set out on an American road trip in the Seventies with Kerouac's book as a guide. It would be hard to imagine Hunter S Thompson's deranged Seventies road novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had On the Road not laid down the template - likewise films such as Easy Rider, Paris, Texas, even Thelma and Louise.
Remarkably, On the Road was actually written in 1951 when, so the story goes, Kerouac typed the words over three uninterrupted weeks on to a 120ft scroll of teletype paper, fuelled by Benzedrine and strong coffee. The novel recounts, in a breathless and impressionistic style, his travels to and fro across America, often in the company of his friend and prime influence, Neal Cassady, renamed Dean Moriarty in the book.
In the six years it took for On the Road to be published, American culture changed dramatically: Elvis Presley altered the course of popular music; James Dean and Marlon Brando emerged as a new breed of brooding teenage icon; the painter Jackson Pollock came and went, his action paintings and the intense way he lived some kind of precursor to the 'nowness' that the Beats strived for in both art and life.
'The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time,' William Burroughs wrote later, 'and said something that millions of people all over the world were waiting to hear... The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.'
Though undoubtedly ambitious, Kerouac was utterly unprepared for the fame, notoriety and controversy that followed On the Road. He was hurt by the many negative reviews of the book, and by the parodies of the Beat generation that suddenly started appearing on mainstream televison chat shows. In interviews from the time, he is palpably ill at ease, sometimes inebriated. In the most recent biography of the writer, Kerouac: His Life and Work, Paul Mather writes: 'The obscurity that Kerouac by turn loved and loathed had vanished. He began drinking.'
Twelve years later, Kerouac was dead. The physical cause was cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by years of alcohol abuse. Many of those who knew him intimately, though, suspected that he also died of disillusionment.
'He was just so sensitive,' says Neal Cassady's widow Carolyn, who had a long affair with Kerouac. 'Everything hurt him deeply. He had the thin skin of the artist as well as the guilt that his Catholic upbringing had instilled in him. In the end, he was just so depressed about how he was being misrepresented, how his great and beautiful book was being blamed for all the excesses of the Sixties. He just couldn't take it.'
Had Kerouac lived on into old age, he would have been even more appalled at the ways in which his legacy is currently being misrepresented. Two years ago, a range of Jack Kerouac clothing was launched in America. Later this year, the BBC will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road by sending the comedian, presenter and self-styled dandy, Russell Brand, and his Radio 2 co-presenter, Matt Morgan, on a road trip.
Thankfully, the anniversary will also be marked in a more reverent manner by the book's publishers, Penguin, who on 5 September will publish On the Road: The Original Scroll, the full, uncensored text that Kerouac famously wrote in those three frantic weeks. The cast of characters - Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs, the Cassadys - are no longer hidden behind Kerouac's often wonderful pseudonyms, and that famous opening line, 'I first met Dean not long after my wife and I had split up,' now reads, 'I first met Neal not long after my father died.'
Many of the sex scenes, straight and gay, removed at his publishers' insistence, have been reinstated too, though they are tame by today's standards. The attraction that Ginsberg felt for Neal Cassady, briefly reciprocated, is now acknowledged in the first few pages, though in an almost offhand manner: 'I was in the same room. I heard them across the darkness and mused and said to myself, "Hmm, now there's something started but don't want anything to do with it."'
Fifty years on, the book is being turned into a Hollywood film, scripted by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford, and directed by Walter Salles who made The Motorcyle Diaries, the story of Che Guevara's road trip across South America. Kirsten Dunst will star as Carolyn Cassady.
Nearly 40 years after his premature death, then, Kerouac lives on - though in some odd and often contradictory ways. As is the case with Guevara, his legacy is contested, his cultural meaning blurred. At the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, where the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is housed, they will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of On the Road with a three-day Kerouac festival. The last remnants of the Beat generation, or at least those fit enough to travel, will be in attendance.
One of the organisers, Junior Burke, chair of writing at Naropa, recently described On the Road as 'one of the truly defining works of American fiction', comparing it to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but adding: 'Instead of two guys on a raft on the Mississippi, it's two guys in a Hudson Hornet on the highways of America. I think it's something that young people still relate to.'
For many young people in America, though, the name Jack Kerouac means nothing at all. In an age where youth culture is increasingly defined by consumerism, where the road trip has been replaced by the gap year, and where it is considered radical to be cool but not cool to be radical, whither Jack Kerouac and his beatific vision?
'It struck me when I was in Thailand last year that no one is even pretending to be beat any more,' says the young British novelist Hari Kunzru. 'You'd quite often see white guys with dreadlocks pulling wheelie cases down Khao San Road. The great adventure that was travelling overland in the Sixties and Seventies has become a middle-class ritual. The notion that you would throw yourself at the mercy of the road, and by doing so, gain some self-knowledge or even maturity, is long gone.'
Carolyn Cassady, the last surviving member of Kerouac's closeknit coterie of friends and fellow Beats, now 84 and exiled in deepest Berkshire, is even more scathing about Noughties youth. 'It's all about money and surface now, the clothes you wear, the things you buy, and no one is the slightest bit ashamed of being superficial. I often thank God that Jack and Neal did not live long enough to see what has become of their vision'.
When I was a teenager, though, On the Road was the bible for any aspiring bohemian, a book that was passed on from one generation to the next almost as a talismanic text. I was given a battered copy by an older friend and, even before I read it, knew that it carried within its pages some deep, abiding truth about youth, freedom and self-determination. On the Road instilled in me a belief that, in order to find oneself, one had to throw caution to the wind and travel long distances with no real goal and very little money.
A few years later, I passed the same copy on to my younger brother, and was incensed when he passed it on to a friend who left it on a bus. I can see the irony now but back then I felt that something bigger than just a battered paperback had been lost. It was in this word-of-mouth way that On the Road, even long after its initial publication, became one of those rare novels that was often read by people who do not read novels as a rule. It may be that this is still the case, but I doubt it. Harry Potter is today's zeitgeist book. The Beats and their wild adventures seem light years away.
And yet, for all that, On the Road continues to be read. What was once a zeitgeist book, though, and one that defined a transformative moment in postwar culture, has become a historical artefact. It may even be the case that today's teenagers read On the Road in much the same way that my generation read Laurie Lee's picaresque rites-of-passage novel As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - as a glimpse into an already distant past when things seemed simpler.
When I asked my 20-year-old niece, Lucy, if she had read it, she nodded. 'I liked parts of it,' she said, 'but it seemed so old-fashioned.' Did she connect with it in any way? 'I suppose it does make you feel like you had missed out on something.' This, she added, was a familiar feeling among her generation. What was that something, though? 'Oh, some kind of meaning. It's set in a time when travelling across America and smoking weed or whatever meant something. It was a statement.'
Hari Kunzru, who 'came to the book late and found it almost cringey in its emotional gushiness,' agrees. 'I was aware of its cultural weight in the canon of alternative literature before I read it, and even though I never had an intense love affair with it, there was no denying that the lives these guys lived was properly edgy in a way that my generation's wasn't. They were transgressing in a very real way and doing dangerous things at a time when the risks were high. To me, the lives were often more interesting than the writing.'
While living in New York, Kerouac met the varied bunch of characters and fledgling writers who would later become the Beat generation, the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, who is said to have coined the term, and, most significantly, Neal Cassady. Kerouac had grown up in a relatively stable family. Cassady, on the other hand, had been brought up by an alcoholic father, and sent to reform school several times in his teens for stealing cars.
To Ginsberg and Kerouac, Cassady was the real thing, an authentic free spirit at a time when authenticity - of experience, expression, vision - was all. 'Neal was an energetic and instinctively brilliant, self-educated guy with a photographic memory,' elaborates Carolyn Cassady. 'But, because of his background, a lot of the more academic Beats didn't like him, didn't trust him. Both Jack and Allen were blown away by him, though, his restless energy, his love of life, the way he talked, the way he lived purely for the moment.'
Cassady epitomised the consciousness that Kerouac had christened 'beat' as early as 1948. The word had two connotations for Kerouac: 'beat' as in worn out by the conventions and constrictions of straight American society; and beat as in 'beatific' - blessed, holy, transcendent. The Beat writers had a shared vision that rejected many of the formal values of the accepted canon, and elevated energy, flow and engagement over reflection, refinement and detachment. In doing so, they also reflected the dissatisfactions of America's postwar young.
Willam Burroughs, who was older and colder than the other Beats, saw the Beat generation as a media construct as much as an organic flowering of a shared transgressive vision: 'Those arch-opportunists, they know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one.' Following the crossover sucess of On The Road, Kerouac became the centre of that story, constantly referred to in the press as 'king of the Beats' and 'spokesman for a generation'. And, though he was eager for literary recognition, he was also the most ill-suited candidate for this kind of canonisation, at least until the similarly elusive Bob Dylan came along a decade later. Dylan, though, managed to reinvent himself continually. Kerouac tried many times and failed.
In the end, Jack Kerouac outlived Neal Cassady by just over a year. Cassady, the man who had truly defined the essence of Beat, whose restlessness, amorality and manic energy had so inspired Kerouac to create his freeform, rhapsodic prose, was found dead by a railway track in Mexico in 1968. He had kept on moving, though, had even stamped his personality on another movement, Ken Kesey's LSD-fuelled Merry Pranksters, whose Day-Glo bus he piloted across America and had ended up in another zeitgeist book, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Kerouac died in 1969 in St Petersburg, Florida. He had lived long enough to be blamed for the excesses of the Sixties generation, for whom he felt no empathy. According to Carolyn Cassady: 'Jack was essentially conservative, patriotic even, but not in any heavy-handed way. He was old-fashioned. I never once heard him swear. People who write about him can never seem to get a hold of the consciousness of that time, which was restless and questing, but also oddly reserved and responsible. His intention was not freedom without responsibility, but freedom of expression in art.'
Which begs the inevitable question, does On the Road stand the test of time? Is it a great work of literature? Ann Charters thinks so, comparing it to both Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, as a novel that 'explores the themes of personal freedom and challenges the promise of the American dream'. Likewise the American novelist, AM Homes, who wrote recently that 'Kerouac was the man who allowed writers to enter the world of flow... his philosophy was about being in the current, open to possibility, allowing creativity to move through you, and you to be one with the process'.
Hari Kunzru disagrees. 'On the Road is such a patchy book, like much Beat writing, in fact. The whole heart-on-the-sleeve romanticism is off-putting, even embarassing. Apart from some really brilliant descriptive passages, it just does not stand up. It's become a different book now, a historical artefact rather than a living, breathing work of literature.'
When I re-read On the Road recently, it did indeed seem to me to be a different book from the one that I had so connected with as a teenager. The gush of emotionalism was apparent, and the narrative no longer held my attention in the same way. And yet there were moments of great descriptive prose about America, about jazz music, about the sheer joy of being young and alive, and about the fleeting freedom of the open road. More surprisingly, there was an undercurrent of great sadness and disillusionment that I had not picked up on, or chosen to overlook, first time around. It seemed, in its final part, to be an elegy for Kerouac and Cassady's youth, for their friendship, which ends in a kind of betrayal, and for the fabled road of the title that had promised so much but, in the end, delivered so little.
Kerouac: On the record
1922 Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian parents.
1939 Entered Columbia University on a football scholarship but dropped out in 1941.
1944 Arrested for helping Lucien Carr dispose of the body of David Kammerer, whom Carr had stabbed to death. Released on bail, put up by girlfriend Edie Parker after he agreed to marry her.
1950 Published first novel The Town and the City to respectable reviews but poor sales.
1951 Wrote On the Road
1957 Hailed as the voice of the Beat generation, after On the Road was finally published to ecstatic reviews.
1960s Moved to Florida to escape media attention and care for his mother. Wrote a series of lesser-known autobiographical novels.
1969 Died aged 47 from internal bleeding caused by cirrhosis of the liver.
They said 'Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my language.' (Bob Dylan)
'That's not writing, that's typing.' (Truman Capote)
He said 'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones 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 Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.' (From On the Road)
as ive said elsewhere if it werent for allen ginsbergs tireless efforts in wanting to see his friends' writing published, and thinking that they absolutely deserved to be read, the beat generation would not have existed... or at the most may well have found itself as just a footnote in literature.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/au ... ackkerouac
'...Penguin, who on 5 September will publish On the Road: The Original Scroll, the full, uncensored text that Kerouac famously wrote in those three frantic weeks. The cast of characters - Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs, the Cassadys - are no longer hidden behind Kerouac's often wonderful pseudonyms, and that famous opening line, 'I first met Dean not long after my wife and I had split up,' now reads, 'I first met Neal not long after my father died.'
Many of the sex scenes, straight and gay, removed at his publishers' insistence, have been reinstated too, though they are tame by today's standards. The attraction that Ginsberg felt for Neal Cassady, briefly reciprocated, is now acknowledged in the first few pages, though in an almost offhand manner: 'I was in the same room. I heard them across the darkness and mused and said to myself, "Hmm, now there's something started but don't want anything to do with it."'
Apparently it's better than the later revised edition:
From a readers review on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Original-Scr ... 8X0YGR1N79
'I've read the published (Sal Paradise/Dean Moriarty) version of "On the Road" at least three times since the early 1970s, but I find that this original 1951 scroll transcription with no paragraph breaks, unexpurgated expletives, and the real names of Kerouac and Cassady and Ginsberg and Burroughs hits harder, moves faster, and is much more immediate in its impact than the traditionally-edited novel. But even though it predates the publication of the finished book by six years, most of my favorite, most memorable, lines and events were there in this first draft. It's a revelation.'
well steve thats cause youve been living in asia. not exactly a hotbed of beat literature i imagine.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
True.
Is that a good Kerouac book to start with or should I try another?
"Life to the Deathist Pig"
I read dhama bums for the first time 10 years ago I too was 20 at the time and i read it on trains traveling around europe for three weeks. I had read on the road already and it was a nice read for what i was doing.
I'll always have fond memories of that book because of that trip.
Charlotte 03
Asheville 04
Atlanta 12
Greenville 16, Columbia 16
Seattle 18
Nashville 22
You could do worse than start with 'On the Road'.
His books are perfect, but only for those who really feel lost and out of touch, restless. Those people who lose a little part of themselves as each second ticks away, while we whittle away and waste our time at some menial and meaningless job.
If you are content with yourself, and with your life I dont think Kerouac is for you.
Kerouac speaks to the child in all of us. On the Road and Dharma Bums are essentially 2 books about feeling modern life is meaningless and trite. Books that deal with wanting to fully LIVE every single second, to really live. Books about feeling trapped, and tied down, and that the only solution is to wander around, to travel, to find your place in the world.
Kerouac is a godfather of Krakauer, and of Chris Mccandless. The godfather of the lyrics ed wrote for the ITW soundtrack.
I think it's more a case of people expecting too much from his books. I imagine a lot of people expect to find sex, drugs and rock 'n roll from someone that helped kick-start the 60's, and they're disappointed to find none of these things in Kerouac's books.
and that is cause they listen to the media too much and dont go into reading with a blank slate. they hear the stories(which are usually false) and either dismiss the author outright or come away disappointed cause the book didnt live up to their expectations, which werent theirs in the first place but the medias.
personally id take dharma bums over on the road any day.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
And I'd take 'Big Sur' over 'The Dharma Bums'.
http://www.kerouacfilms.com/onefastmove/index.html
lol..I bought it when it came out and have yet to read this version.....I'd take 'Big Sur' over 'The Dharma Bums' too...big fan of 'The Town and The City!' Also enjoyed the new one 'And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks.'
put on a slow, dumb show for you
and crack you up
so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain
god I'm very, very frightening
and I'll overdo it'
'On The Road' is good but i liked
-The Subterraneans
-Dharma Bums
-Desolation Angels
better. I would say Kerouac is 1 of my 2 favorite authors on a consistent basis (meaning his work as a whole)
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
don't read 'Requiem For A Dream' if ya don't like that haha
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
aaah selby.... what a genius.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w71t2lFXDU
2012 Missoula (9/30) 2013 Chicago (7/19) Pittsburgh (10/11) Buffalo (10/12) Baltimore (10/27) Dallas (11/15)
2014 Austin (10/12) Memphis (10/14) St. Paul (10/19) Milwaukee (10/20) Denver (10/22)
2016 Ft. Lauderdale (4/8) Miami (4/9) Hampton (4/18) Philly (4/28,4/29) NY (5/1,5/2) 2018 Seattle (8/10) Missoula (8/13) 2022 Nashville (9/16)
E.V. - 2008 Berkeley (4/8) 2012 Austin (11/9,11/12)
Temple of the Dog - 2016 Upper Darby
Oh man, if only I could be transported by to the late 40's through early 60's and be in Big Sur...the people who hung out there-- Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Edward Weston, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Orson Wells, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton... wow!
It's amazing how people don't really look back at a lot of these authors/writers/poets/etc and realize what great stuff they were writing. Of course everybody knows about HST the most, he was more visible and vocal and became more famous in his day and after, but those before him were just as fucked up on drugs and life like the next person which led to some great stuff published, just a different era on how to express it...
2012 Missoula (9/30) 2013 Chicago (7/19) Pittsburgh (10/11) Buffalo (10/12) Baltimore (10/27) Dallas (11/15)
2014 Austin (10/12) Memphis (10/14) St. Paul (10/19) Milwaukee (10/20) Denver (10/22)
2016 Ft. Lauderdale (4/8) Miami (4/9) Hampton (4/18) Philly (4/28,4/29) NY (5/1,5/2) 2018 Seattle (8/10) Missoula (8/13) 2022 Nashville (9/16)
E.V. - 2008 Berkeley (4/8) 2012 Austin (11/9,11/12)
Temple of the Dog - 2016 Upper Darby
Oh, for sure. Really an amazing, fertile, creative period. Yeah, these people paved the way for HST just as F. Scott Fitzgerald (just finished reading his heart-breaking Tender is the Night), D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Jack London, and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and others paved the way for them. And most of them were also fucked up on booze and drugs and life. The "tortured genius" thing is overstated sometimes but maybe only because it's so true.