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You'll have thoughts on this one: "I have a confession to make: I could never actually finish Kerouac's On the Road. I found it unreadable and shallow, but continued to cite it as the best book of all time and carry it around in my pocket to keep up my beatnik image."
Way to go, Schwarzenbach.
something something not made of cop killer instinct something
Perhaps by way of an apology, the author closes with the following addendum:
"Apparently, Disney are thinking about cutting Keith Richards out of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film after he wrote about taking drugs in Life, his new memoir. Two questions. Did the film company really need a book to tell them that Richards has been abusing drugs for decades? And are they genuinely worried that children will see a gnarled rocker who resembles a Medjool date and think drugs are cool?"
Apology accepted!
The Movement are my Beats, so preach it.
Not his best, I guess. (That'd be Lonesome Traveler [= Auden x Wolfe?] or Visions of Cody [= Burroughs - psychosis].)
At least when I read a book to impress someone sexy, I actually read the book. DD:1; Telegraph writers:0.
"Catcher in the Rye" was the one that I could never finish. Though I don't give enough of a fig about anyone's opinion of my literary sensibilities to lie about it to keep up my cred. Now you all know!
Catcher on the Rye was ruined for me by a well-meaning teacher who made us psychoanalyze Holden Caulfield, and then made us watch \"Dead Poet\'s Society\".
So between the character I identified with who was mentally ill and the character I identified with who blew his brains out, it was not a good unit.
(I totally hated Catcher. Read it too late, I think.)
I haven't been able to finish 3 pages of Franzen.
You are not alone.
Have not been able to feel compelled to try to read 3 pages of Franzen.
Well I couldn\'t bestir myself to read a review of a Franzen book. So there!
Since I paid like $1 for it, I don't feel especially guilty.
The least I could do is pay 33 cents to read a one-paragraph precis. Is there one around somewhere?
Confession: I couldn't finish an article that misspells Allen Ginsberg's name in the first graf and calls his writing "Benzedrine-fueled," when speed was hardly ever Ginsberg's drug of choice. Branding Kerouac "the emperor of Haight Street" is rather like calling Warhol "the wizard of the Lower East Side" — that is, North Beach is across town and of another decade entirely. C'mon, Awl — while the snark quotient may feel satisfying, this piece is rubbish that deserved obscurity.
I probably haven't made this clear, but links do not necessarily constitute endorsements of what the linkee is saying. Sometimes they seem like something that will generate an interesting discussion from the intelligent readership of a site whose members might not always have the time to surf the whole Web. I'll let you decide whether that's the case here.
@Alex Balk: You're kind of sexy when you're bitchy!
You can't trick me into reading a stupid article with a stupid premise written by a stupid person, just so I'll get all infuriated and post a long, infuriated comment here and then come back a bunch of times to see if anyone responded to it!
Oh. Shit.
But seriously, Howl is a beautiful poem in any era, and Lucy Jones is an idiot who doesn't deserve the English language.
I used to read 'Howl' out loud to my kid when he was three months old and sitting in his swing.
I've tried to read 'On The Road' twice and gave up on the same spot. I think I took one character's dig on liberalism too seriously. More than once.
Never made an attempt with "On the Road", but speaking of self-indulgent rambling, I did have a go at one of the "Fear and Loathings". Didn't get very far.
Honestly I couldn't agree more. I tried to read "The Subterraneans" but spent most of it waiting for the part where Kerouac learned how to use punctuation like someone who can speak the English language. It never happened.
I recall being tremendously disappointed that Trout Fishing in America was about trout fishing in America.
Stay away from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance then.
I've always loved Trout Fishing in America, but I prefer In Watermelon Sugar, which is just beautiful.
I read somewhere that each of RB's books was an experiment in a different genre. Not sure what genre either of those were supposed to be, but I wonder if this is why his work is somewhat (in my opinion) uneven.
As someone who spent the last four days reading six Georgette Heyer novels, I won't pretend to have literary pretensions. I will say that 'reads beat lit' shares the same list with 'libertarian', 'has white leather couch', and 'allergic to cats'.
We dreamed of swapping Chelsea for San Francisco…
TWIHCT
I never even started "On The Road" b/c of the number of fellow high school ne'er-do-wells who wouldn't shut up about it.
I'm surprised nobody's made a film of On The Road. This would help all these Squares who don't dig the book to like, get hip to it.
Hmmm, what's Shia LeBouef doing these days?
Willie Nelson already made the sequel.
FF Coppola tried and failed. Sadly, no one made a "Hearts of Darkness"ish doc called "Off the Road" about it.
http://www.amazon.com/Off-Road-Cassady-Kerouac-Ginsberg/dp/014015390X
If I read "On the Road" correctly, of which I'm not certain, the book eventually concludes that after a while all this wandering is a form of being too long at the fair and that people eventually need to settle down in some way, lest they be stuck in perpetual adolescence. That issue seems to be left out of lots of discussions.
People who get really excited about ON THE ROAD tend to either lose steam when they read Kerouac's horrible, embarrassing poetry or when they learn he ended up living in his mother's basement in Lowell, MA. Beware anyone over the age of 17 who is STILL really excited.
The way Kerouac ends "On The Road" makes it so worthwhile. It's like James Patterson. Plus the plot twist is way better than anything M. Night Shyamalan could dream up.
So, we have only two categories of books: the best of all time, and unfinishable? I think at some point it's best to give up on trying to grow up and just go back to playing video games instead.
I have a confession to make: I found Mega Man 2 unplayable and shallow.
I dunno if I could re-read "On the Road" now, but I remember being 14 and getting into it, amongst a long other list of things – all of which because they were in the chorus of Rent, which a cute theatre dork girl (I was far worse until the age of majority – av geek) was really into.
What seems immature overwrought and whatevs now brought not just me but thousands and thousands of blue-collar daughters and sons of the suburbs from a life of reluctant acceptance of the banal, to pretentious gradiosity, to a kind of happy medium where we realize life has choices.
Basically, On The Road was like my marker-sniffing. A gateway drug I don't wish to return to that taught me to love the wonders of, ya know, stuff.
I liked On The Road when I read it because I did so at exactly the right age (20). But then I read the rest of the 4-part saga it supposedly kicks off (The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur) and liked those more.
The Dharma Bums especially is more satisfying, maybe because it centers around Japhy Ryder/Gary Snyder, who was way more spiritual and well-adjusted than Kerouac. Also Big Sur is satisfying in a really depressing way, because it finds Kerouac reaping what he sowed in terms of his hedoism/alcoholism.
Yeah, agreed on all counts. Actually, I haven't read Big Sur, though I own a copy. I picked it up the other day and read the first few chapters, but wasn't in the right mood. That said, you seem dead on with your description of Kerouac reaping what he sowed. When he wrote that book, he wasn't even 40 yet, and in pictures from the time, he looks like a bloated old man.
And by the way, the writer of this article doesn't like Howl? What the hell? When I saw that she distinguished the first dozen or so lines from the rest of the poem, I went back and reread it to remind myself what changes after the dozenth line. Nothing–it's great, and I got caught up in it and read the whole thing over again. By the end, I was in tears, as I was the first time I read it (but then, friends of mine will tell you that it's not hard for me to get overwhelmed), and I thought "That woman hates this poem? She can go to hell!"