Kerouac?

[telesteve]

I recently had the chance to read "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. I have been hearing and reading about it for 25 plus years, and was looking forward to the experience.

While it may have been revolutionary in 1957, I found it boring and the writing wasn't that good. The phrase that came to mind was "Hemingway Lite". I quit 48 pages into the book.

I was also looking forward to Castenada. Is he a bunch of hype too?

I hope I haven't offended anyone, and I would like to hear any responses.

[BLACKCAT69]

Don't bother with Castenada if you didn't like Kerouac. I think it may be a bit late to get into 35 year old "counterculture" titles. I've never read "A Catcher in the Rye" as a kid and now at 34 years old I'm not going to bother. I don't think it will be as good a read at this point in my life as if I'd read it at 16 years old. I was thinking about Kerouac the other day and it occured to my that his work may not be as fresh now. I'd last read "On the Road" when I was 17 and loved it. If you are looking for something "Beat" related, have a look at Charles Bukowski's "Women" or "Factotum". I don't consider Bukowski "Beat" but he is often lumped in with those writers. Good easy reads.

[Chris S.]

Everything in its historical perspective. [shrug] Chaucer was pretty racy for his day. (Still is, in fact...) ;-)

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/chaucer.htm

CS

[BLACKCAT69]

Originally Posted by Chris S.

Everything in its historical perspective. [shrug] Chaucer was pretty racy for his day. (Still is, in fact...) ;-)

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/chaucer.htm

CS

Chaucer is a lot of fun. I took a class where we learned middle English to appreciate all the real dirty nuaces of Chaucer.

[mark norwine]

I read "On the Road" in the 70's when I was a teenager....it was the "in" thing to read, perhaps just to be cool, I'll never know.

Being an avid Grateful Dead fan, and knowing that "Dean" was, in fact, Neil Cassady, I simply had to read it.

I plowed through it, allthewhile waiting for "something to happen". Nothing ever did.

~~~~

Now that I'm older, I figured it was all due to my then-immaturity & lack of worldly knowledge, so I decided to read it again about 2 months ago.

It's on my nightstand, next to my bed....I'm 7/8 of the way through it, and I'm waiting for something to happen...again. I haven't picked it up....can't pick it up...in weeks. This book is said to be such an important piece, that it bothers me that "maybe I'm the problem".

But I have to be honest & raise my hand, too: I don't get it. Fair writing {at best}, and a plot wherein nothing ever happens.

If nothing else, this post makes me feel a little better......I'm "not the only one!"

[rosett]

well, i guess "to each their own". i still love kerouac, kesey, etc. what i don't get is the popular culture that 99% of the world is totally facinated with.

[gtrwrks]

Jack's prose in "On The Road" is much like the bebop he was digging at the time - long rolling lines dense with twists and turns; not each/every line, but plenty. Might make it a difficult read, or you may just not dig the style - much like bebop itself. When I made that particular connection (and I guess you could make others), it was much easier to digest and parts of it are quite musical in nature.

The fact that 'nothing happens' in the book is how life can be, and that book is fairly autobiographical in nature; sometimes nothing much happens. However, the story is one of stuff happening all the way thru it; lots of small stories like someone might tell you when they get back from a trip: 'visited some friends, partied a lot, hooked up with some chick, ran out of gas', etc.

To me, the book is full of mournful sadness, but I'm given to that proclivity anyway. It's most definitely not your average novel with some sort of climax (good guy gets the girl, gets rich, et al).

[mark norwine]

I adore Kesey....

[Dana]

Originally Posted by rosett

what i don't get is the popular culture that 99% of the world is totally facinated with.

Ditto.

[telesteve]

I'll agree with that. I guess I'm neither shallow enough to get "pop culture" nor pretentious enough to get Kerouac.

Well, I get it, I just don't like it.

[Oster]

My first Kerouac was Dharma Bums which didn't do much for me and was cast aside for more of the Sci Fi I avidly read in those teenage days.

Some years later, I thought I'd check out 'On The Road' and I certainly clicked with that one. It had the pacing and the beat of exciting jazz, which was - as I understand it - the whole point. There are certain passages from it that stand as memorable, living prose and I think it is a book that will continue to withstand the tests of time - Even if our world is one where adventures of the sort depicted therein are on the verge of extinction.

I don't think you have to be pretentious to enjoy 'On The Road'; a bit of a dreamer, maybe but there are scores of better books to appeal to one's pretentious self. By all accounts, Kerouac was the complete antithesis of the beret-wearing goateed hipster. He was an athlete; a star football player who had a genuine gift and an intense, uncontrollable calling to write.

[Skully]

Don't bother with Castenada if you didn't like Kerouac.

Yeah, and there's also a scary cult built up around Castaneda. It's like Scientology or the Hotel California. You can check out...

I think it may be a bit late to get into 35 year old "counterculture" titles. I've never read "A Catcher in the Rye" as a kid and now at 34 years old I'm not going to bother.

"Catcher in the Rye" isn't just hipster doofus hype or a you-had-to-have-been-there thing. It's a great book, plain and simple. Of course, one might enjoy it more as a teenager, when one is close to the protagonist's age.

At the moment, I'm reading a book called "Can't Find My Way Home," about the history of recreational drug use in the United States. It covers the rise and fall of The Beats pretty thoroughly, so I've been thinking of pulling that never read copy of "On The Road" from the shelf and trying to read it.

[Johnny Glow]

I'll agree with that. I guess I'm neither shallow enough to get "pop culture" nor pretentious enough to get Kerouac.

Pretty pretensious statement.

Anyway, Kerouac is a huge influence on me. I guess with most everything it is time and place. I was 21 years old and just moved to San Francisco from New England. I moved to North Beach and suddenly a new world opened up to me.

"There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket."

I credit Kerouac, as much as anything else, to opening my eyes to a bigger world than my New England upbringing exposed me to. His early writing had such youthful energy and excitement. Go go go! dig it! was his mantra. What is more appealing to a 21 year old than that?

----------------------------------------------------------

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live with, 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 and then in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes 'AWWW!'"

Kerouac

[telesteve]

Good one Glow!

I'm fairly sure I'm past the age for such things. My big influence in my late teens/early 20s was Hunter S. Thompson. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "The Great Shark Hunt" were the big ones.

I guess it IS a matter of time and place. I was stuck in the middle of Missouri in the Air Force and Thompson opened a window for me.

I also discovered Vonnegut around that same time. I thought he was great. Maybe some feel the same about him as I do about Kerouac.

[Mickey]

At a certain age, and I guess a certain stage of reading, you stop reading things because you're 'supposed to.' Same with music and everything else. After years of experience, you know what you like and that's enough.

I recently just barely got thru "Crime and Punishment" and basically was bored after a couple dozen pages but plowed through because of the 'classic' status (and because my favorite writer loved him, specifically Crime and Punishment). So I thought "there's GOT to be something here." But for me there was nothin'. Whatever. I wasted a bunch of sleepless nights on the SOB when I could have been cruising the net for some real insight.

[fakeocaster]

I read on the road when I was 17 and really enjoyed the phrasing and sense of wild adventure.I read it again at 40.It was still good but I didnt relate to it anymore.


It lot depends on your frame of reference when you approach it

[jhundt]

he's 20, she's 23. They both read On The Road and thought it was very good. I read it years ago and can't remember. I guess if it still works for them it passes some sort of test.

[chipl]

When On the Road was written, America was a different place. The American landscape--both the physical land/scenery/cultural landscape--were far different than today.
To Kerouac and the Beats, the possibilities for an adventurous, joyously lived life on the edge were more wide open, as if they were on the brink of a exciting new world, one that went beyond the conformist, cookie cutter culture of the 50s, one that promised freedom, liberation and a massive dose of hedonism, all played to a bebop jazz beat.

It may not have played out that way in the long run, and On the Road has become somewhat dated, but looked at in the context of its times, it was an important and eye-opening book. Kerouac wrote it on amphetamines, on long rolls of paper, like he was jamming on a theme.

I find it ironic that Kerouac eventually descended into alcoholic-fueled bitterness, cynicism, and loneliness, retreating into his mother's house, just waiting to die. Sad.

Did you ever hear how Truman Capote derided On the Road? "That's not writing. It's typing."

Some books age better than others. I remember being in college and being utterly captivated by Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe. The story portrays a boy/man's coming of age in America in a different time, too. I read it recently again, and some of Wolfe's writing now seems a bit overblown and perhaps grandiose. But the passion was still there, and the scenes of an America that was vanishing even then, still conjure up powerful pictures in my imagination.

I can see how On the Road might strike modern readers as
less than thrilling. But in its time, it was a bold statement about being on the road in America. When I was in college 35 years ago, we were or thought we were searching for freedom, fun, a life with exciting new possibilities, new meanings/lifestyles/ and personalities (like Dean Moriarity/Neal Cassidy), and On the Road spoke to that I think.

Incidentally, the book had its share of critics back when it came out, some of whom said the same things critics here have.

[moondoggie999]

I read On the Road and then Dharma Bums (which I liked better) and both clicked with me. The story the characters and the 'stream of thought' writing style all worked for me.

"Blah :) "

back to the world now...

[eryque]

I've read On The Road twice, once when I was 19 and this year (30). I can honestly say that I think that the lore surrounding the Beats is more culturally important than most of the work they produced. I don't see the "disembodied poetics" that he's so famous for, nor do I see anything particulalry Buddhist in his writing. But he and the rest of the Beats talked about this sort of thing, wrote essays about it, and opened up new worlds of popular writing and philosophy.

I enjoyed OTR both times I read it, though I didn't see it as the holy grail that it's supposed to have been. It was neither as spiritual of an experience as it was supposed to be, nor was it as revolutionary as I thought it would be. However, for 1957, there's a lot of revolution happening there. And it's definitely not a page-turner. And I think that "Hemingway-lite" is a fair description, though I really don't like Hemingway either. (And in two months I'll be a bonafied English teacher. Gotta remember not to mention my distaste for Hemingway in job interviews!)

Ginsberg is a totally different experience to me, particularly in his late 50s works. After 1968 I think he became irrelevant, though he remained active and influential.

[Tele295]

I first read On The Road when I was 17, and have re-read it on many occasions.

If you're waiting for a plot to develop and resolve, you won't like it. Reading Kerouac is a lot like listening to instrumental music - there's no message or story per se. Just enjoy how the notes or words are put together and the beauty of the lines. Read it out loud, with feeling, and maybe you'll catch a glimmer of what I think Kerouac was trying to do. YMMV

[Johnny Glow]

Just enjoy how the notes or words are put together and the beauty of the lines. Read it out loud, with feeling, and maybe you'll catch a glimmer of what I think Kerouac was trying to do.

Yes! Well put. Listen to the recordings of Jack read his own stuff. His inflections, breathless pace, it's exhilirating.

In chapter 4, he's blowing the sax and pounding the drums with his voice. He captures, for me, that tingling, wide-eyed, excitement of live music in a small club when everything is clicking.

EE -de-lee-yah!

[cody420]

I read On the Road about a year ago and loved it. Kerouac wrote it in three weeks on one long scroll of teletype paper, which was later bought by the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay, for $2.4 million. It was revised before press, however, and was also largely autobiographical.

Oh yeah, I'm only 20 so I don't think it's a period piece (I do love jazz though).

[Smokin' Joe Picante]

I got "On the Road" and "Fear and Loathing" at the same time. Kerouac was great, and Hunter S. Thompson is...you know! I was surprised because most "hip" counterculture literature escapes me.

Another great read is "The doors of perception" by Aldous Huxley. That stuff is banana's.