Take On The Road Journal Assembled By Jack Kerouac Expressed As E-Text
me while I write a scathing review for this book in the style of Kerouac, the Rambler.
I really don't understand why this book is considered a classic, I think of it as nothing more than a diary written by a man who was soused all of the time and whose brain could not understand structure and the unwritten rules of writing.
It's incoherent, rambles on for days, and the "style" is distracting and annoying enough that reading even a page makes me yearn to kick somebody's puppy.
And I like puppies. But I don't like Kerouac at all and my dislike of his work makes me want to strike infant canines with the toe of my sizeNikes.
Maybe I'll write an entire book with no formatting and make it equally as boring, Yes, that's what I'll do, I'll write a book about nothing really, It will be one giant meandering paragraph with more pages than a David Foster Wallace novel about lots of Jest.
Just thoughts about things like peanut butter, soap liquid and bar, peacocks pretty bird, you cannot fly, Darwinism, toilet paperandply, Jesus, telephones, french fries,pound paper, paperweights, weightlifters, jeans only blue, Kerouac fans as if they exist.
I think it's become fashionable to claim to be a Kerouac fan even though the fans' fauxunderstanding is nothing more than an absurdity.
Yeah, I said it this book sucks, A lot. More than you could possibly fathom, I've been thinking about this book a lot lately, so I figured that I'd go back and write something about it.
When I first read this book, I loved it as a piece of art, but its effect on me was different than I expected.
So many people hail Kerouac as the artist who made them quit their jobs and go to the road, become a hippie or a beat and give up the rest.
When I read it though, I had been completely obsessed with hippie culture for a long time, and it caused me to steer away from it for a while.
While I thought that it would be a rollicking tale of freedom and glory, I found that all of Dean's conquests were tainted by the fact that he had to take advantage of other people every step of the way.
He was a hugely entertaining character, but would have been a terrible friend, lover, or even acquaintance, From the women he married to gas station attendents, right down to Sal Paradise himself, Dean drained everything that he was right out of other people, and it eventually ruined him.
It left him beat not heart beating exhilarated, but beat up, dead beat and alone, Once I stepped back a little from the awe at Dean's greatness, this book was really sad, and it caused me to put away that romanticism for a while.
Now,years later, though, On the Road is coming back to me full on, I didn't escape the total wonder at the Beats and the road, I have been sitelinkon the road myself for the lastmonths and have a long way to go before I get back home, and I am constantly aware that the the way was paved by Kerouac and the rest of the crazy geniuses of his generation.
The road is every bit as romantic as Sal Paradise made it out to be, and its glory far out weighs the short comings of Dean as a friend.
I mean, the road is a lot like Dean, it takes a lot out of you, but you get addicted to it and obsessed with it and can't let it go, and I don't think there's any other way about it.
I am in love with America for the first time, Now that I've seen it, driven across and up and down, around and over America, I find it sublime and incredible.
I think that Kerouac and his friends might've been the first to see that, Maybe not. Maybe they are just part of all of American history, . . they translated the world of Western expansion and canvas covered wagons into the way of the modern world.
America is something to dream about, It is worthy every exuberant and formerly offensive "I'm proud" sticker that's plastered on the back of a pick up truck.
And Kerouac saw that first hand, So, it seems, that there is a certain tragedy in this book, but that it is less important than the unavoidable glory that you come to associate with the road and freedom after following these guys on their crazy adventure.
I think this book should be read by everyone who wants to know about America, You couldn't
pay me enough to reread this baby now, Well, okay, I'd probably do it for, Alright,. Cash.
Kerouac took over from Steinbeck as the guy I had to read everything by when I was a young person.
Steinbeck himself took over from Ray Bradbury, All three American males with a sentimental streak as wide as the Rio Grande,
Whole thing nearly turned me into a weepy hitchhiker who plays saxophone while he waits for a ride, then gets abducted by aliens who are these very kind blue globes, I know it sounds crazy, blue globes, right, amp who take him back towhere he persuades the boss of the local fruit farm syndicate to double the workers' wages and build a school.
The other day I was talking to someone and he said, “Well, Im no pie expert, . . Wait! No! I am a pie expert, I am an expert at pie!”
Another person asked, “How did you become a pie expert”
“One time I ate only pie for an entire week.
I was driving across the country with my buddies, and we decided to eat only pie, ”
“Like Jack Kerouac in On the Road!” I said,
“Yes! Exactly! Thats exactly what we were doing, We were reading On the Road, and we decided he was so smart when he realized pie is the best solution when youre traveling and have no money.
”
“He knew it was nutritious, and of course delicious, ”
“Yes! It has all of the food groups especially if you have it with ice cream.
" He paused. "Except pie isnt as filling as you would think it would be, so we had to drink a lot of beer to make up for that.
And we ate a lot of multivitamins because we felt terrible, We would stop and camp out by the road, eating pie and drinking beer with multivitamins,
“We got to my girlfriends house, and we looked like shit, We hadnt shaved and we had the pie sweats, But, it made me an expert at pie, ”
“mmmm, pie. ”
Other than his advice about pie, I find Jack Kerouac to be one of those useless, narcissistic, cultleader types.
Hes pretty hot, though, and he does have correct opinions about pie, I'm supposed to like On the Road, right Well, I don't, I hate it and I always have, There are a lot of reasons why I hate it, I find Kerouac's attitude toward the world pathetically limited and paternalistic, In sitelinkOn the Road he actually muses about how much he wishes that he could have been born "a Negro in the antebellum South," living a simple life free from worry, and does so seemingly without any sense of irony.
On every page, the book is about how Kerouac a young, white, middleclass, solipsistic alcoholic feels, and nothing more.
But that's only one reason I hate this book, The main reason I hate it is because, for me, reading Kerouac's prose is almost physically painful, I love the ramblings of selfcentered drunks when they're selfdeprecating, ironic, and/or funny, but Kerouac was none of these things.
He was a pretentious, selfimportant bore who produced some of the most painfully bad and inconsequential prose of theth century.
Or any century. I personally can't stand the characters, They cover up irresponsibility and real hurt to people in the guise of being artists, However, I do think there is more to this story,
Sure, they are jerks and they are bums and they are full of a lot of BS but as the book progresses, it becomes clear that they know it.
These guys are also WWvets, and very dissimilar to the hippies who follow them, they do not have any antiAmerican or antiestablishment feelings.
Also, they show a deep remorse and guilt over their actions, There is a shame, because they recognize what jerks they are, After several weeks of living with the mexican girl and her son, the narrator deserts her and he knows that he'll never live up to his promise to come back.
He hates himself for this but it doesn't stop him, While he so desperately seeks to squeeze the wonder out of life, he lets everything really beautifulsuch as love with a woman or any real human relationships slip from his careless grasp.
The narrator as more of a terribly sad man, not just a happygolucky thrill seker,
I do wonder about the real life Dean Moriarty, Did you realize that he was the bus driver in Wolfe's Electric Koolaid Acid Test as well as mentioned in several Grateful Dead songs Something about that guy really insprired the artisits around him.
As for the writing, it is beautiful and I think some of the best writing ever done about America.
Googgle "sitelinkOn the Road Quotes" and reread a few of those, Its beautiful stuff. This is probably the worst book I have ever finished, and I'm forever indebted to the deeply personalitydisordered college professor who assigned it, because if it hadn't been for that class I never would've gotten through, and I gotta tell you, this is the book I love to hate.
I deeply cherish but don't know that I fully agree with Truman Capote's assessment: that sitelinkOn the Road "is not writing at all it's typing.
"
Lovely, Turman, but let's be clear: typing by itself is fairly innocuous this book is so awful it's actually offensive, and even incredibly damaging.
I'd be lying if I said there aren't parts of this book that're so bad they're good good as in morbidly fascinating, in the manner of advancedstage syphilis slides from seventhgrade health class.
Keroac's ode to the sadeyed Negro is actually an incredible, incredible example of, something I'm glad has been typed, For the record. So we can all see it clearly, and KNOW,
Please don't get me wrong! My disproportionately massive loathing for Jack Kerouac has zero to do with his unenlightened racial views.
I mean, it was written in the fifties, and anyway, it's great that he was able to articulate these ideas so honestly.
No, the real reason I hate this book so much is that it established a deeply retarded model of EuropeanAmerican male coolness that continues to plague our culture today.
I could go into a lot more depth on this topic, but it's come to my attention that I've been using my horrible addiction to Bookster to avoid the many obligations and responsiblities of my daily life, to which I should now return.
So, in closing: this book SUCKS, This book is UNBELIEVABLY TERRIBLE, And for that very reason, especially considering its serious and detrimental impact on western civilization, I definitely recommend that you read it, if you have not suffered that grave misfortune already.
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road, ”
I am not really into classics,
I always preferred the fantasy genre, due to an innate escapism, a vivid imagination and a constant longing for magic.
But as you may tell, I didn't cast spells while reading sitelinkOn the Road, I didn't climb the dark wizard's tower, nor heard prophecies whispered in the dark, I set my sword aside for a while, and hushed my heart's desire to experience passionate romances, After a dear friend's raving about sitelinkJack Kerouac, I succumbed to peer pressure, And I am rather glad that I did,
“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt.
The world was suddenly rich with possibility, ”
If you must know one thing about sitelinkOn the Road, is that it doesn't stand out because of its mindblowing plot.
In fact, it is not a plotdriven novel at all, You follow Jack Kerouac's travels throughout America and Mexico, and that's it, What captivates you is his writing style, a writing style the likes of which I had never encountered.
You'll notice a plethora of contradictions: it can be lyrical and so beautiful it makes you hold your breath, and want to absorb every detail, every smell and sound and feeling, and then you'll come across so many traces of oral speech, that you're certain you're listening to a conversation full of curse words and halffinished sentences right next to you you can sense Kerouac's admiration towards his country and at the same time his bitterness and disappointment you can feel his loneliness to your marrow, and then the camaraderie that keeps him going.
You will find your lips curling into a smile, but then a heaviness will settle on your chest, a near sadness because you see those people searching for something, anything, and when they find it, it slips from their fingers.
You contemplate your own morality and mortality, question the meaning of ideals when life is too short and full of misery.
When the road lies ahead full of possibilities, and you're lost and bound and torn,
“Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the.
. . ”
When you read sitelinkOn the Road, at first you're a little judgmental towards the characters.
But as the story progresses, you are envious of their carelessness, their crazy and wild abandon, their desire to live even when they don't know what they live for.
You don't read it for the plot, but you read it for its moments, its vigorous, bright and mesmerising moments, mornings eating applepie with icecream, dirty streets in an alcohol frenzy, a young man on the top of a mountain with the world at his feet, a mexican brothel shaking by the sounds of mambo, cold nights drinking scotch under a crystal clear sky.
In the end, it all comes to one thing: we are the sum of the people we meet.
Some of them are destined to change us, draw us to them like moths to the flame, Other pass by like fleeting, or constitute a constant and reassuring presence, But all of them, without exception, are pieces of the puzzle of our existence,
“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 and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
And this is sitelinkOn the Road.
.