See Mexico City! Read a Novel!

“A brief mountain pass took us suddenly to a height from which we saw all of Mexico City stretched out in its volcanic crater below and spewing city smokes and early dusklights. Down to it we zoomed, down Insurgentes Boulevard, straight toward the heart of town at Reforma. Kids played soccer in enormous sad fields and threw up dust. Taxi-drivers overtook us and wanted to know if we wanted girls. No, we didn’t want girls now. Long, ragged adobe slums stretched out on the plain; we saw lonely figures in the dimming alleys. Soon night would come. Then the city roared in and suddenly we were passing crowded cafes and theaters and many lights. Newsboys yelled at us. Mechanics slouched by, barefoot, with wrenches and rags. Mad barefoot Indian drivers cut across us and surrounded us and tooted and made frantic traffic. The noise was incredible. No mufflers are used on Mexican cars. Horns are batted with glee continual. “Whee!” yelled Dean. “Look out!” He staggered the car through the traffic and played with everybody. He drove like an Indian. He got on a circular glorietta drive on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its eight spokes shooting cars at us from all directions, left, right, izquierda, dead ahead, and yelled and jumped with joy. “This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of! Everybody goes!” An ambulance came balling through. American ambulances dart and weave through traffic with siren blowing; the great world-wide Fellahin Indian ambulances merely come through at eighty miles and hour in the city streets, and everybody just has to get out of the way and they don’t pause for anybody or any circumstances and fly straight through. We saw it reeling out of sight on skittering wheels in the breaking –up moil of dense downtown traffic. The drivers were Indians. People, even old ladies, ran for buses that never stopped. Young Mexico City businessmen made bets and ran by squads for buses and athletically jumped them. The bus-drivers were barefoot, sneering and insane and sat low and squat in T-shirts at the low, enormous wheels. Ikons burned over them. The lights in the buses were greenish, and dark faces were lined on wooden benches.

“In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the night. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in a strange tiled Mexican cafeteria with generations of marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba—also wandering singing guitarists, and old men on corners blowing trumpets. You went by the sour stink of pulque saloons; they gave you a water glass of cactus juice in there, two cents. Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole families of them sat on the sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot sauce on newspaper napkins. This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-like at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and holy tour that lasted till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed and chatted with us and wanted to play catch, for nothing ever ended.”

— from On the Road , by Jack Kerouac

First Line Friday: On the Road

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but today’s first line is, in my opinion, kind of a stinker, even though it leads into one of my favorite books. The first two lines, as a matter of fact, are bits of back story we don’t really need, and that don’t figure in the rest of the novel. But that third line , now, that third line is great. If you ask me, it is the rightful heir to the first line throne. And if I were Kerouac’s editor, I would have lopped off the first two and made that one my opener:

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off.”

What do you think? Am I off here? Of course I'm not...

Books on Screen

We hope you're making time for a few literary adaptations in between summer blockbusters, moviegoers. Here are a couple I've recently watched.

On the Road (2012)

I loved this book, and I was really looking forward to the film. After I missed it in theaters, though, it was kind of hard to get a hold of until it popped up on my On Demand offerings—I hoped this scarcity meant that it was just too awesome for the unwashed masses to appreciate, but that I would still love it. Alas, no, it was just okay. And it was a bit depressing. And it was kind of boring. I mean, look, there are moments in the book like this one:

“At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.”

…that clearly show there were some lulls and some downers in Sal’s adventures. But to see those moments pervade the entire film was a bit of a letdown. Here’s the other thing: what excitement there was, was mainly focused on drugs, sex and fast driving, all of which were played up disproportionately compared to the book. But where was the unbridled exuberance? And the sense of wonder? Where was the fun? They tried to sell us on Sal’s and Dean’s friendship with lots of intense, heartfelt man hugs—a constant coming and going where locked eyes and sincere, sullen glances were supposed to communicate everything. They didn’t. I thinkall but the most hardcore Kerouac fans, and even a good number of those, can skip this one.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

Ten years before he became Atticus Finch, Gregory Peck played the role of Harry Street in the adaptation of Hemingway’s classic short story. But while it starts off true enough to the original—the necrotic leg injury, the vultures, the desperate wait for a plane—it takes some liberties that rubbed me the wrong way. For one, the flashback action was just a cheap rehash of Hemingway’s own life story: Spanish Civil War, expat Paris, big game hunting, bullfights in Pamplona. I guess if you’re trying to get Hemingway nuts into the theater, that’s one way to do it. But it cheapens the work of fiction that’s supposed to be played out on screen. 

And while the trail of tortured romances opened up roles for Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward, that’s not what the story’s really about. Snows  is about examining one’s life, finding it wanting, resolving to change and redeem oneself… only to have the chance whisked away at the last second. Bittersweet brilliance. Which brings me to the most egregious crime of all: the ending. Instead of flying off into the metaphorical snows of Kilimanjaro, a peaceful resignation to death and dying, Harry Street (and his romance!) are saved. The plane arrives, the vultures disappear, and all’s well that ends well. I haven’t had a film betrayal like that since The Grapes of Wrath , the movie.

Review: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

A week or two ago I picked up The Sea is My Brother,  the so-called “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, and a thinly veiled account of his days in the merchant marine.

I’ve been told by people who have dipped further into the Kerouac mystique than I have, that while  “good” Kerouac is great,  “bad” Kerouac is pretty terrible. For evidence, I was invited to read Visions of Cody  or Big Sur  —each of which reportedly indulges in drug-induced poetry binges for hundreds of pages. I have not read them, and probably never will. But having loved On the Road  so much, I was intrigued to find out just how an early  Kerouac might read.

Turns out it’s pretty uneven. There are small flashes of the style that would evolve in later years, but he spends way too much time cataloguing how many beers each of the characters consume at a sitting, or letting one of them wax philosophical about life and literature in a way that is pretty obviously a soapbox for the author rather than believable dialogue. Oh, and every tenth sentence ends with an all-too-enthusiastic “, by George!” Not only that, but the story is pretty unbelievable (a college professor is granted a sabbatical to ship out to sea in the middle of the war with about 15 minutes’ notice) and there are lots of little mistakes (a character smokes his last cigarette and then produces another a minute later.)

Even the larger narrative feels unbalanced. With a title like The Sea is My Brother , you’d expect the characters to put out to sea, right? Well, it finally happens seven eighths of the way through the book. The rest of it is just a poor man’s On the Road , a hitchhiking debauch from Manhatten to Boston, where the characters are flat broke, but always magically coming  up with food, liquor, cigarettes and costly government documents out of thin air. And while the principals do manage to move from point A to point B, it’s really more of a loose sketch than a fully developed novel. In all honesty, I kinda wish I had this one back. I’ll bet Kerouac does, too.

Title Chase: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

I've been working my way through Kerouac's first and, until it was released posthumously two years ago, rightly unpublished, novel The Sea is My Brother . The book draws on Kerouac's own brief experience in the Merchant Marine. Or, at least, that's what I thought it would be about. Here's where the title comes from:

“Perhaps the old adage, “We’re all in the same boat” went without saying in the Merchant Marine and seamen resigned themselves to one another quite philosophically. And of course, like the slogan he had heard of—a famous placard above the door of the Boston Seamen’s Club—which said, very simply, that all those who passed under the arch of the door entered into the Brotherhood of the Sea—these men considered the sea a great leveler, a united force, a master comrade brooding over their common loyalties.”

I'll have more to say about the book later on, but I thought the title was a good one. That is, until you consider the make-up of the book:

Perhaps Kerouac's "brief experience" in the Merchant Marine was briefer than we thought. Afterall, we know his active duty in the US Navy lasted all of 8 days before he was diagnosed with dementia praecox and honorably discharged.

On the Road, the movie

In an ideal world, I’d have a babysitter all lined up for tonight so that Mrs. DeMarest and I could go catch the long-awaited movie version of On the Road . Alas, I don’t. And even if I did, the last movie we saw together was Skyfall, which means we’d probably have to veer back to the chick flick side of the spectrum on our next outing. So I may not get to see another literary adaptation this holiday season.

Now, I did see Life of Pi, but since I’d never read the book, I can’t judge it on adaptation merits. (Although the opening credits alone are worth your time- that is one good-looking picture.) Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby was supposed to be a Christmas time release, but it got bumped to next summer, unfortunately. And I’m not exactly dying to see Les Miserables- I’ve never read the book or seen the stage version, and who are we kidding, Susan Boyle has ruined all other “I Dreamed a Dream” renditions for me, so watching a shaggy-headed Anne Hathaway belt it out isn’t going to cut muster. As for a singing Russell Crowe… I’m not sure I’ll ever be up to that (I’m picturing something slightly worse than Pierce Brosnan’s effort in Mamma Mia.)

That’s all a very long way of saying that I have really, really been looking forward to On the Road since I read the book for the first time this past summer. And I’m bummed that I probably won’t see it until it pops up at my local grocery store’s Redbox. Ah well… If you happen to have better luck, fellow movie-goer, or even if you don’t, let us whet your appetite with an On the Road roundup. Here is a smattered assortment of posts we’ve done on Kerouac’s rambling American masterpiece:

• There’s Kerouac in his own words.
• The follow-up post, documenting the Kerouac-Seuss connection.
• Myreview of the book that too many people hate.
• The map of Kerouac’s wanderings.
• A couple posts on his writing style, and how you can do it, too.
• A Kerouac look-alike.
• A medical diagnosis based on literary evidence.
• Some bookish nerd bait from the book.
• And of course, talk like a beat day.

The Food of San Francisco

“In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat, too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths and roasted dry and good enough to eat too. Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu and I’d eat it; let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick red roast beef au jus, or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman’s Wharf- nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market Street chili beans, redhot, and frenchfried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausalito across the bay, and that’s my ah-dream of San Francisco.”

-from Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Talk Like a Beat Day

Today we’re taking a little break from First Line Fridays to remind you that “Talk Like a Beat Day” is coming up on Sunday October 7^th.

Talk like what now, you ask? Like a Beat- as in Beatnik, daddyo. No, it’s not yet the international phenomenon that “Talk Like a Pirate Day” has become, but after finally joining the cult of Kerouac this year, I am heartily endorsing the Guardian’s declaration of October 7^th as Talk Like a Beat Day.

Why October 7^th?

“7 October was the original "Beat happening": the date that Allen Ginsberg first recited Howl in San Francisco, Kerouac beating out the rhythm with a wine jug and shouting "GO!" after every line. The beat movement of the 1950s is so rich in its own language and terminology that it's crying out for its own memorial event.”

Couldn’t agree more. Here is a glossary to get you started quickly:

And here is a collection of videos that might just give you some helpful inspiration. Can you dig it?

The Travel Narrative: In pictures

You thought I was done with this theme? Well, maybe just one more post. Here are a few literary journeys for those of you with a cartographer’s bent. 

From On the Road,  Sal Paradise’s path through the US and Mexico:

Steinbeck’s rambling jaunt from Travels with Charley:

William Least Heat Moon’s roundabout roamings in Blue Highways:

The ill-fated wanderings of  Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless), from Krakauer’s Into the Wild:

The Pequod’s journey on the high seas in Moby Dick:

And Phileas Fogg’s mad race across the globe in Around the World in 80 Days:

What other great literary maps are we missing?

The Travel Narrative

I mentioned the other day that I’m reading Blue Highways  by William Least Heat Moon, a book that was recommended to me 10 years ago in Cuszco, Peru and which has been nagging to be read on and off ever since. Next to it on my nightstand sits Into Thin Air   by Jon Krakauer, a first-hand account of the Everest disaster of 1996. Meanwhile, on my way to and from work I have been enthralled by Melville’s Moby Dick,  a book that nearly circumnavigates the globe before its finish. 

My favorite book so far this year might just well be Kerouac’s On the Road,  and my favorite author of all time, as any regular readers have probably deduced by now, is Ernest Hemingway- chronicler of European wars, African safaris and Cuban boatmen. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it’s becoming crystal clear now, that I am a hopeless sucker for the travel narrative:

“The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re just like us!” or “They’re not like us at all” The traveler’s tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.”

–Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel.

Anyone else?

Bookish Nerd Bait: Vol 7

Author Look-Alikes: French Heritage Edition

It's Independence Day here in the US. And really, what better day is there to focus on the doppelgangers of some prominent French-speaking writers? (We'll say it's in honor of General Lafayette, d'accord?)

Born to French Canadian parents, Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac bears a striking resemblance to Clive Owen.

And with the bags under his eyes and the plump, playful jowels, who can deny that Roland Barthes has got a little Jon Lovitz in him?

Jean-Paul Sartre's prominent laugh lines and funky lips brought Monsieur Buscemi to mind...

Still don't see it? Have a gander at those eyes. Zut alors!

Finally, no single writer has had more artsy, black-and-white publicity stills taken of him than Samuel Beckett. The near flat-top, the sunglasses, the futuristic, otherworldly quality of his portraits- all say one thing to me: This is what an octogenarian Max Headroom would look like, n'est pas?.

Am I wrong?

From the Pen of Jack Kerouac

Well, the first reviews of “On the Road” the movie have arrived from the Cannes Film Festival and word on the street is that it’s… just okay. But be heartened, fellow readers, we’ll always have the book, right? In that spirit, here are some of my “great line” highlights from that read. All emphasis is mine:

My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West.

  

A western kinsman of the sun, Dean.

  

Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

  

Where was his father?-old bum Dean Moriarty the Tinsmith, riding freights, working as a scullion in railroad cookshacks, stumbling, down-crashing in wino alley nights, expiring on coal piles, dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the West.

  

We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets. Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, a poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops-a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?

  

But then they danced down the streets like dingle-dodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after the people who interest me, because 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 yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

  

Of course, half the fun of the novel is found in the short vignettes that are delivered in just a paragraph or two- the amusing cutaways from the main story. Here’s one that takes place on the flat bed of a truck doing seventy miles an hour that really tickled my inner twelve-year old:

…Montana Sliim said, “Ah, pisscall,” but the Minnesotans didn’t stop and went right on through. “Damn, I gotta go,” said Slim.

“Go over the side,” said somebody. 

“Well, I will,” he said, and slowly, as we all watched, he inched to the back of the platform on his haunch, holding on as best he could, till his legs dangled over. Somebody knocked on the window of the cab to bring this to the attention of the brothers. Their great smiles broke as they turned. And just as Slim was ready to proceed, precarious as it was already, they began zigzagging the truck at seventy miles an hour. He fell back a moment; we saw a whale’s spout in the air; he struggled back to a sitting position. They swung the truck. Wham, over he went on his side, watering all over himself. In the roar we could hear him faintly cursing, like the whine of a man far across the hills. “Damn… damn…” He never knew we were doing this deliberately; he just struggled, as grim as Job. When he was finished, as such, he was wringing wet, and now he had to edge and shimmy his way back, and with a most woebegone look, and everybody laughing, except the sad blond boy, and the Minnesotans roaring in the cab. I handed him the bottle to make up for it.

“What the hail,” he said, “ was they doing that on purpose?”

“They sure were.”

“Well, damn me, I didn’t know that. I know I tried it back in Nebraska and didn’t have half so much trouble.”

Diagnosing Dean Moriarty

“I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico.”

-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Neal Cassady was doubtless an interesting character. He was the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road,  as well as Cody Pomeray in some of Kerouac’s other works. He was the inspiration for Randle McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,  was credited by Allen Ginsberg as the ‘secret hero’ of his poem “Howl,” and he figures prominently in Thomas Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That’s quite a legacy. It’s the kind of legacy that makes you scratch your head and ask, “just what exactly was wrong with that dude?”

Now, I’m not a licensed psychiatrist, but as a former pre-med undergraduate, I’m the next best thing this site’s got, so let’s go ahead and diagnose him with Bi-Polar Disorder. 

Yeah, I know I'm not breaking any new ground here- just google Neal Cassady bi-polar for proof, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the symptoms of a manic episode, and see if we can find any evidence for them in the text of On the Road  specifically:

A manic episode is characterized by period of time where an elevated, expansive or notably irritable mood is present, lasting for at least one week. Three or more of the following symptoms must be present:

• Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity-  Check
• Unusual energy, Decreased need for sleep (e.g., one feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep) -  Check
• Excessive talk; racing thoughts-  Check
• Euphoria or irritability-  Check
• Flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing-  Check
• Attention is easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant items-  Check
• Increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation-  Check
• Impulsiveness, a reckless pursuit of gratification (shopping sprees, impetuous travel, more and sometimes promiscuous sex, high-risk business investments, fast driving) -  Check 

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s a pretty convincing  8 for 8. That’s a relatively open-and-shut case, even for amateur mental health practitioners.

In Defense of the Books You Hate: On the Road

I’ve had some fun at Jack Kerouac’s expense here and here, but I have to admit I’d never actually read the man until this past week. The Subterraneans  has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for about 10 years because I’ve always wanted to make that first Kerouac plunge with On the Road.  With the film adaptation of the book coming out this month, I finally got my hands on a copy. Still, the mild curiosity I’ve always held about On the Road  was balanced by a healthy dose of skepticism about a book that seems to inspire more scoffing than praise these days.

Truman Capote once panned Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous prose’ by saying, “It isn’t writing at all-it’s typing.” John Updike famously parodied On the Road  in a New Yorker  hit piece called “On the Sidewalk,” in which two kids on a tricycle and a scooter ride off “into the wide shimmering pavement” through a bed of irises. At the end of the story it is revealed that the childish main character is actually 39- right about Kerouac’s age at the time. Updike’s lambast even got a mention in Kerouac’s New York Times obituary.

But more striking to me than either of these criticisms is the literatti’s collective dismissal of On the Road  as a childish romp fit only for the trash heap- the same one where they’ve thrown their old copies of Catcher in the Rye  and Atlas Shrugged  and any other books that tend to cast a spell on the under-twenty crowd. In their wisdom and erudition, they prove that they've outgrown the aimless, childish exuberance of On the Road  by smiling quaintly at anyone who sees it for more than a youngster’s literary rite of passage.

What a crock. This is a book that left me absolutely buzzing- and I say that as a pretty conservative 34-year-old father of three. Let’s tackle the writing first. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book with such a palpable current to it. I don’t mean to say it’s a page-turner that will keep you up all night, yet each time you wade in, you find yourself swept away in  Kerouac’s captivating river of prose.

His vivid descriptions force the reader to step back and look at things in new and unexpected ways. Instead of putting his finger on Hemingway’s ‘mot juste-’ the one, true word that perfectly describes the situation at hand, Kerouac just hurls a bunch of them at you, each with its own angle, its own color, and its own flavor. So, for example, a simple phrase like “sad characters” becomes “poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness.” Pretty great, right? To me, this style is not flighty or reckless- it’s like gazing through an ever-changing kaleidoscope. And it's downright mesmerizing.

But how about the story? Isn’t it just a loser’s travel log? A bum’s manifesto? Or a hap-hazard, hedonistic attack on American social norms? If you choose to look at it that way, I guess it is. In his New York Times review, David Dempsey wrote: 

“As a portrait of a disjointed segment of society acting out of its own neurotic necessity, On the Road,  is a stunning achievement. But it is a road, as far as the characters are concerned, that leads to nowhere.”

I think he’s right, actually.  But I think that’s the whole point. The book is infused with an emptiness and a sadness that seems to come to a crescendo at the end. Despite Sal’s book-length fixation on Dean (or Kerouac’s lifelong fixation on Neal Cassady, on whom Dean was based), I read On the Road  to be a pretty pointed criticism, at least in part, of Dean’s manic search for ‘IT’ that left friendships, marriages and even children in its ruinous wake. 


And that’s not an accidental message. He foreshadows it in the first few pages, builds on it with MaryLou’s, Camille’s and Inez’s experience, and ends the book with his own abandonment, delirious and sick, in Mexico. That, to me, is what makes On the Road  so much more than a bohemian travel log. It’s equal parts documentation, celebration, and condemnation of the sometimes misguided rebellion of Kerouac’s generation.

At the end of the day, appreciating On the Road  doesn’t make you a shiftless beat generation wannabe, any more than appreciating Lolita  makes you a warped child molester. Read it for what it is, and by all means enjoy the ride.

Write like Kerouac in just 5 Easy Steps

1) Start with any sentence:

I took a big swig.

2) Now add a whimsical phrase to give it some unexpected flavor.

I took a big swig in the air.

3) Now insert about three (but no fewer than two) adjectives in front of your direct object or the object of your prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, blowing, drizzling  air.

4) Now replace at least one of those adjectives with a word not normally associated with the object it describes. Proper place names work well, but really it can be anything.

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air.

5) If you chose not to use a proper place name in the previous step, tack it on to the end of the sentence in its own prepositional phrase:

I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska.

See? Kerouac! It’s easy. Now let’s try it with a more complex sentence:

1) Start with any sentence of your choosing:

I heard a laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

2) Embellish your direct object:

I heard a great  laugh, and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

3) Do it again, and don’t shy away from hyperbole:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world,  and here came this farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

4) Now insert your adjectives:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer wheat  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

5) Now swap out one of your adjectives as before:

I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska  farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner.

Piece of cake. Now you try.

The Kerouac-Seuss Connection, Part II

Sometimes, when you try to be funny, you stumble onto a shred of truth. Yesterday’s post led me to Google, which led me to the Google Books preview for Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, by Paul Maher. Take a look at the following paragraph, which discusses some of Kerouac’s early literary influences:

“Most of Kerouac’s friends sensed only marginally the full depths of his aspirations to write, but one among them perceived more. Sebastian Sampas had grown into a tall, lanky young man with dark, curly hair. He had developed an intellect seasoned by Greek literature, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, and Oswald Spengler. (He introduced Kerouac to all of these, equipping him with his first major writing influences.) Kerouac shared with Sebastian his love of Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Sebastian and Jack also read PM, a New York daily newspaper (founded on June 18, 1940) that Charles subscribed to. PM accepted no advertising and relied solely upon income derived from its subscribers. It vowed to tell the “truth,” was partial to no political party, remained uncensored, and was fundamentally antiestablishment. It attracted some of the best photojournalists, writers, and artists, including Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and cartoonist Dr. Seuss (Dun, dun, dun!!!) . PM’s principles cannot be ignored. Kerouac’s sentiments for freedom of expression and his antiestablishment stance directly paralleled PM’s.”

There’s a doctoral thesis in there somewhere, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

Oh, and here’s this again, ‘cause it’s awesome:

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The Writer's Voice

In the past we’ve explored the jarring disconnect between the literary voice of an author, and their actual speaking voice (see Hemingway and Woolf, for example.)  Today though,  we see how those two types of voice can meld together and accentuate one another perfectly, as Jack Kerouac reads from his rambling beat classic, On the Road:

I’ve never actually read monsieur Kerouac- something I’ll have to remedy before this novel becomes a movie on May 23^rd. But listening to the assonance and rhythm of his writing, one can’t help but wonder if he was influenced by the late, great Dr. Seuss. What do you think?

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So You Wanna Be A Writer? Join the Merchant Marines!

Who among us hasn’t felt the urge to chip paint, swab the poop deck, or keep the midnight watch over a commercial shipping vessel at one time or another? Who can honestly say he’s never heard the call of the sea?

One thing’s for sure, many a great author has been groomed on the high seas. The literary world is replete with writers who have tackled a stint in the merchant marines: Joseph Conrad, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Alex Haley, Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Louis L’Amour, Eugene O’Neill, there are simply too many to name… One could throw in Jack London, who worked a sealing vessel, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a ship's surgeon, or Ernest Hemingway, who hunted U-boats in the Caribbean. They probably all dreamed, like Conrad’s Lord Jim, of a life filled with adventure:

“He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet with the hazy splendor of the sea in the distance and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.

“On the lower deck, in the Babel of two-hundred voices, he would forget himself and beforehand live in his mind the sea life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line, or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men. Always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.”

What’s not to love about any of that? Sign me up! But Conrad quickly follows that passage with this dampening dose of reality:

“After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the region so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magical monotony of existence between sky and water. He had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread, but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet, he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.”

So, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. So what? It still sounds like a nice gig, if you can get it. And the literary merits have been proven time and time again. Like the great authors named above, you could pluck your ideas and experiences from exotic foreign ports and use the long hours at sea to let your material marinate and develop for our benefit. 

So go ahead. Set sail for literary distinction. Be a writer, be a merchant marine.