Jack Kerouac was an alcoholic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, racist, insensitive, self-destructive, childish, mother-dependent, almost terminally adrift writer & an extreme political conservative; he was however also a gifted writer fully capable of expressing an age that he helped to personify, with On The Road composed on a single, long scroll of paper without breaks. In his work, there are elements of Easy Rider, early Brando & James Dean, iconic figures of the counter-culture, with Kerouac's own controversial brand of dissent labeled "the Beat Generation".



In reading a few reviews of Kerouac's On the Road, it is clear that he has perhaps as many detractors as fans, with some of the former concentrating on the author's character flaws, of which there were many, while absenting themselves from any consideration of his very expressive prose. To be sure, the Beat Movement also included literary figures such as Allen Ginsberg & his book, Howl and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, while Neal Cassady (who is a key element in On the Road), Greg Corso and others were players within the post-WWII cadre that embraced Jazz, sexual freedom, drug use, Buddhism & Daoism, while rejecting the status quo & economic materialism.

What can be enticing for at least some readers is Kerouac's attempt to translate movement as absolute freedom. Thus, the high speed cross-country trips stand as exuberant motion, vitality, physical energy or "life force" that lifts the participants beyond the restraints of time & space, with booze, sex & drugs of course as component fuel. Along for the ride with Sal Paradise (Kerouac) is Dean Moriarty, patterned after Neal Cassady, a character who was said to have lived one third of his life in the pool hall, one third in jail & one third in the public library, someone Kerouac designates as a "western kinsman of the sun." There is a reference to the geometry of following the lines on the open road but also zig-zagging on occasion, "which is all right because its just kicks & we only live once."



Here is a sample from one of the road odysseys portrayed in On The Road:

Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out along the curb, others milling in the doorways of saloons & alleys. Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food & beer in the air, neons winking--"We're in the big town, Sal!" First thing to do is to park the Cadillac in a good dark spot in a redbrick alley between buildings with her snout pointed to the street & ready to go.

Proceeding to the downtown area, we came upon a gang of young bop musicians carrying their instruments. We followed them into a saloon where they set themselves up & started blowing. The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-mouthed tenorman with a sports shirt draped loose, cool in the warm night, self-indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn, frowned into it & blew cool & complex, stamping his foot to catch ideas & ducking to miss others. He said "Blow" very quietly when the other boys took solos.

Then there was "Prez", a husky, handsome blond, like a freckled boxer, meticulously wrapped inside his sharkskin plaid suit with the long drape of his color falling back & his tie undone for exact sharpness & casualness, sweating & hitching up his horn & writhing to it with a tone just like Lester Young himself.

The 3rd sax was an alto, an 18 year old cool, contemplative young Charlie Parker-type Negro with a broadgash mouth, taller than the rest, grave. He raised his horn & blew into it quietly & thoughtfully, eliciting birdlike phrases & architectural Miles Davis logics. These were the children of the great bop innovators.

For Kerouac, Jazz is more than a musical idiom--it is a concrete but very personal statement, an evocation of life itself. And so, the author catalogues Jazz for his readers, beginning with "Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans" but before him there were Souza marches drifting into ragtime. Then, "there was swing with Roy Eldridge, vigorous & virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power & logic & subtlety, leaning to it with glittering eyes & a lovely smile, sending it out to rock the Jazz world."

He was followed by Charlie Parker, who learned from Count Basie & after moving to Harlem from Kansas City, from the mad Thelonius Monk & the madder Dizzy Gillespie. Kerouac tells us, "here were the children of the American bop night." Eventually, the listeners "staggered out of the club into the great roar of the Chicago day to sleep until the next bop night". But, it was now time to return the Cadillac to its owner, who lived in a swank apartment on Lake Shore Drive & to find transportation to some new port of call.

One doesn't use On the Road as a guide to behavior but as an exploration of where hedonistic excess can lead, much like reading Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil or any of the other so-called "Decadent Poets", Christopher Dawson & his Days of Wine & Roses among them. Thus, when Kerouac speaks of "getting hung up & confused running from one falling star to another till I drop", it may be best to just consider the stars seen en route in a big speeding Cadillac while imagining the quest to transcend time & place.



Kerouac was called the "latrine laureate of Hobohemia" as well as "ambisextrous & hipsterical" in a Time magazine article. Fellow Beat Generation figure, Allen Ginsberg, referenced his work as "spontaneous Bop prosody", comparing it to Walt Whitman.

Kerouac has been embraced, vilified & parodied by countless folks over the 50 years since the book's publication, with Garrison Keillor among the better parodists. And Kerouac's books continue to sell well in spite of so very many cultural & literary shifts during the intervening years. In fact, On The Road is #4 among Apple's literary apps, ahead of the Bible and T.S. Eliot's epic poem, The Wasteland.

*There is an excellent biography of Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats, by Barry Miles. **Online, is a wonderful 1959 videocast of an televised encounter with Steve Allen, who plays Jazz on the piano as Kerouac reads from On The Road, oddly enough a very apt pairing.
***Among the images within my review are two of Jack Kerouac & the middle one of the 1949 Hudson automobile used in the madcap journey westward.

The other day I was talking to someone and he said, “Well, I’m 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! That’s 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 you’re 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 isn’t 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 multi-vitamins because we felt terrible. We would stop and camp out by the road, eating pie and drinking beer with multi-vitamins.

“We got to my girlfriend’s house, and we looked like shit. We hadn’t 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, cult-leader types. He’s pretty hot, though, and he does have correct opinions about pie.

I think this book, which launched Kerouac's career and gave him insta-fame, has to be seen as a product of its time.

I found it a chore to read, a long dull boast about a series of road trips. It's populated by vacuous largely despicable alcoholics with zero impulse control and an unshakeable belief that they are deeply profound observers of the human condition.

One saving grace of the book is that Kerouac has an unusual writing style with a strong voice that he uses well, especially when describing the landscapes and cities as his avatar rushes to and fro across America.

The other is that the 'shocking' nature of the book back in 1955, immersed in drugs, alcohol, and sexuality, five years before a court case finally allowed the rather tame Lady Chatterly's Lover to be published in the UK, 32 years after it was written, has been replaced with a certain historical interest in the modern reader seeing how things worked over 60 years ago.

The book garnered so much interest because it was said to capture zeitgeist of the beat generation - it variously explained and/or titillated with an under the hood look at the youth movement of the late 40s/early 50s that led into rock and roll and on into hippydom. We also see the young white male characters mixing with African Americans and Hispanics decades before the civil rights movement.

Kerouac's avatar, Sal Paradise, follows Dean Moriarty, a hollow messiah of the age, and together they haunt jazz and bop clubs trying to capture "it" and waxing ecstatically about saxophonists blowing.

We see several years of the pair's directionless lives, Dean oscillating between three women, spawning and abandoning children, dropping everything repeatedly on a whim to cross America east to west or back again, and finally to Mexico City.

The pair cheat and steal their way while claiming to savour the goodness of those they encounter. Dean has to be warned off the 13 year old daughter of a friend, and later in Mexico they sleep with 15 year old prostitutes.

In a manner familiar in Dickens and Dostoevsky, and more recently echoed by Rothfuss, our characters are always penniless, generally because if they get money they spend it at a ridiculous rate until they have none.

Dean and Sal are characterised by a refusal to look beyond the next hour. The consequences of their actions are of little concern to them because they feel no responsibility for them.

I realise that I sound like a scolding schoolmarm, the epitome of everything this book was likely a reaction to. But after hundreds of pages of having their reaction forced down my throat I have my own reaction back against it. No, I don't dig it.

And it being a travelogue based on real experience there is of course no plot and as it turns out no real sense of progression, which led to the book feeling rather samey after a while. It was apparently hand written on a roll of wallpaper and it really does feel rather like a long list of "and then and then and then".

I was moved to try Kerouac back in the 80s by a line in a Marillion song, "read some Kerouac and it put me on the track to burn a little brighter now". Yes, this is a book about living at full throttle (and much of it is spent shooting across the States at 110mph), about burning the candle at both ends, about not living a milk toast life, it shouts at you "what are you saving yourself for?" and those ideas of course hold a certain appeal. But then again, when you look at the sad sacks in this book ... maybe not.

The second star is for the quality of the prose. In fact both of them are.




Join my Patreon
Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizes



...

n  n    “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”n  n

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 On 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 Jack Kerouac, I succumbed to peer pressure. And I am rather glad that I did.

n  n    “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.” n  n

If you must know one thing about On the Road, is that it doesn't stand out because of its mind-blowing plot. In fact, it is not a plot-driven 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 half-finished 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.

n  n    “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 stars...” n  n

When you read On 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 apple-pie with ice-cream, 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 stars, or constitute a constant and reassuring presence. But all of them, without exception, are pieces of the puzzle of our existence.

n  n    “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!” n  n

And this is On the Road.

بعید هست توی زندگیم آدمی شبیه دین ببینم
اگر هم ببینم قطعا نمیتونم باهاش دوست بشم
در نتیجه
این کتاب تجربه بسیار خوبی بود
مدتی با این جماعت بودم و تا حدودی با فکر و راه و رسمشون آشنا شدم
اما
من خیلی اینجور ادمارو درک نمیکنم
ادمای بی مسئولیت که اخلاقیات رو رعایت نمیکنن و عربده جویی میکنن و نمیدونن چی میخوان از زندگی و احمقانه و افراطی فقط خوشی میکنن

با توجه به شخصیت خود کِرواک توقع چنین توصیفات بسیار زیبا و ادبی رو نداشتم

خیلی وقتا وقتی به فردی میرسیدن فقط درباره اون شخص به این جمله اکتفا میکنه "که داستان زندگیشو گفت"
اما ای کاش برای ماهم میگفت قضایارو
نمیدونم شاید برای خودش این چیزا اهمیت نداشته
اما من دوست داشتم بیشتر بدونم
گاه میگن کناب فلسفی هست و یا کرواک نگاه عمیقی داشته
اما من که توی هیچ جای داستان نگاه عمیقی ندیدم
بالاخره 7 سال سفر کردن
تجربیات خیلی خاصی داشته
اما کرواک بیشتر به توصیف تکراری پمپ بنزین و جاده و آسفالت و کلوپ و ساز زدن میپردازه

نمیدونم کجا ,اما یه جایی این جمله رو درباره کرواک خوندم
که به نظرم خیلی درست و دقیق شخصیتشو توضیح میده:
Kerouac was a really dark soul on the inside and tried his best to stay clean on the outside .


____________________________

تغییر امتیاز از 3.5 به 5 : بعد از ده روز از اتمام کتاب متوجه شدم تمام این روزها به دین فکر میکردم و اینکه چقدر شخصیت اصیل و اورجینالی هست در نتیجه باید سر تعظیم فرود بیارم مقابل قلم کرواک...
این کتاب بیشک شاهکار هست.

Here’s the thing : there’s a time to read Kerouac, and it’s not your thirties. I first read “On the Road” when I was 19 and I loved how meandering and crazy it was… and in retrospect, I know it’s because I was similarly scattered and unhinged. When one’s in that headspace, it’s natural to appreciate that there’s a classic out there that captures the sort of spontaneous madness that most people only experience in the first half of their twenties. I re-read it when I was twenty-two, and I still thought it was brilliant. Reading it at thirty-three made me cringe way more than I had imagined it would…

In historical context, what Kerouac did with this book was revolutionary and it’s important to remember that: the book is dynamic, it threw caution and literary standards to the wind and ran as far and as fast as it could from what Jack considered to be “establishment”. And on that basis, it's worth checking out.

Of course nothing that goes on in this book makes a lick of sense to me now. The lifestyle these characters have is beyond unsustainable and their carelessness with each other is actually quite distressing. And while obviously, the way male characters handle female characters infuriated me, the ladies in this book don’t have much in the way of redeeming qualities either: being “free” is all nice and good, but it should never ever mean treating other human beings like garbage. And there is a copious amount of that in “On the Road”, which made me really sad. It’s no secret that this is a roman à clef and that most of the events described in the novel are a version of something that actually happened, and these people creating so much suffering for themselves and those around them weighs the book down like an anchor. The idolization of Dean Moriarty – who is an epic douchewaffle – is definitely the part that was the hardest to digest this time around. Not to mention the glaring hypocrisy and pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness.

The hallucinatory descriptions of trips, both physical and psychological are still entrancing and often poetic, even when they are incoherent. As an ode to freewheeling youth, it has moments of inspiring and lyrical bravado. But I can’t escape the knowledge that all of Sal Paradise’s promises are empty, and that Kerouac never truly found what he was looking for.

I’ll be revisiting his other books eventually, to see if they hold up on their own, but do yourself a favor: if you read this book when you were young(er) and loved it, leave it alone.

Este livro é um marco da literatura, e com Howl de Allen Ginsberg e Naked Lunch de William Burroughs, considerado um dos livros essenciais da geração Beat. O movimento ou geração Beat , tendo origem na literatura, tornou-se um fenómeno cultural de grande influência, sendo considerado o embrião da geração hippie.

Retrato de uma geração desiludida com o estabelecido, com uma sociedade materialista e sem valores, os jovens que fazem parte desta história são os heróis do contra poder. O livro relata uma "road trip" louca, de vários amigos pelos Estados Unidos, numa viagem de descoberta e procura do prazer. Uma história de rebeldia e de hedonismo, recheada de aventuras e acção.

Dito isto, infelizmente a leitura deste livro foi para mim uma desilusão. Consigo compreender o seu valor literário e histórico, mas pessoalmente foi um livro que não me tocou. A leitura tornou-se até um pouco penosa.

Nunca um livro, tão repleto de acção, que apelidaria até de "frenético" no decorrer dos acontecimentos, captivou tão pouco o meu interesse. Não conseguí nutrir qualquer empatia ou afecto por nenhum personagem e a forma como o livro está escrito também não me agradou. O facto de o autor descrever situações reais trocando apenas o nome dos seus amigos para transformar a narrativa em ficção, assemelhou-me muito com o livro anterior que dele tinha lido. É como se "Orpheus Emerged" fosse uma espécie de exercício para este livro, nada tendo acrescentado à minha opinião sobre Jack Kerouac enquanto escritor.

Reflectindo sobre a minha falta de interesse pelos acontecimentos narrados e pela filosofia de vida que lhe está na base, penso que isso terá talvez a ver com a minhda idade . Lê-lo agora aos quarenta anos talvez lhe tenha amortizado um pouco o fascínio pela rebeldia narrada. Julgo que se talvez o tivesse lido na minha juventude, a minha opinião pudesse ser diferente. Agora, assemelho a liberdade a que estes rapazes dão asas, não a uma liberdade fundamentada, não a uma verdadeira contra corrente ou a um hedonismo saudável, mas àquela pseudo liberdade que se ambiciona aos 18 anos. Fez-me pensar assim os comportamentos auto destrutivos, o abuso das drogas e do álcool, uma liberdade que longe de ser inconsequente os leva num caminho autodestrutivo contrário ao hedonismo advocado.

Faço esta auto reflexão, uma vez que as opiniões são maioritáriamente favoráveis a este livro, o que me faz pensar que talvez alguma coisa me tenha escapado. Continuo no entanto curiosa pelos restantes livros considerados essenciais do movimento Beat e pelos seus autores. Gostaria também de ler qualquer coisa de Jack Kerouac num registo diferente que não o do relato baseado em acontecimentos reais, ou pelo menos que os seus amigos não figurassem como personagens, como aconteceu nas duas leituras que fiz até ao momento. Penso que só depois disso poderei formar uma opinião sobre o autor. Até agora, deixa-me muito a desejar este estilo adoptado.

Em resumo: clássico da "Beat Generation" de leitura "quase" obrigatória, mas que pessoalmente não me agradou.

This is the book which has given me anxiety attacks on sleepless nights.
This is the book which has glared at me from its high pedestal of classical importance in an effort to browbeat me into finally finishing it.
And this is that book which has shamed me into feigning an air of ignorance every time I browsed any of the countless 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die lists.

Yes Jack Kerouac, you have tormented me for the past 3 years and every day I couldn't summon the strength to open another page of 'On the Road' and subject my brain to the all-too-familiar torture of Sal's sleep-inducing, infuriatingly monotonous narration.

Finally, I conquer you after nearly 3 years of dithering. I am the victorious one in the battle in which you have relentlessly assaulted my finer senses with your crassness and innate insipidity and dared me to plod on. I can finally beat my chest in triumph (ugh pardon the Tarzan-ish metaphor but a 1-star review deserves no better) and announce to the world that I have finished reading 'On the Road'. Oh what an achievement! And what a monumental waste of my time.

Dear Beat Generation classic, I can finally state without any fear of being called out on my ignorance that I absolutely hated reading you. Every moment of it.

Alternatively, this book can be named White Heterosexual Man's Misadventures and Chauvinistic Musings. And even that makes it sound much more interesting and less offensive than it actually is.

In terms of geographical sweep, the narrative covers nearly the whole of America in the 50s weaving its way in and out of Los Angeles and New York and San Francisco and many other major American cities. Through the eyes of Salvatore 'Sal' Paradise, a professional bum, we are given an extended peek into the lives of a band of merry have-nots, their hapless trysts with women, booze, drugs, homelessness, destitution, jazz as they hitchhike and motor their way through the heart of America.
Sounds fascinating right? (Ayn Rand will vehemently disagree though).

But no, it's anything but that. Instead this one just shoves Jack Kerouac's internalized white superiority, sexism and homophobia right in the reader's face in the form of some truly bad writing. This book might as well come with a caption warning any potential reader who isn't White or male or straight. I understand that this was written way before it became politically incorrect to portray women in such a poor light or wistfully contemplate living a "Negro's life" in the antebellum South. But there's an obvious limit to the amount of his vile ruminations I can tolerate.

n  "There was an old Negro couple in the field with us. They picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama."n

Seriously? God-blessed patience?

Every female character in this one is a vague silhouette or a caricature of a proper human being. Marylou, Camille, Terry, Galatea are all frighteningly one-dimensional - they never come alive for the reader through Sal's myopic vision. They are merely there as inanimate props reduced to the status of languishing in the background and occasionally allowed to be in the limelight when the men begin referring to them as if they were objects.
Either they are 'whores' for being as sexually liberated as the men are or they are screaming wives who throw their husbands out of the house for being jobless, cheating drunks or they are opportunistic and evil simply because they do not find Sal or Dean or Remy or Ed or any of the men in their lives to be deserving of their trust and respect, which they truly aren't.

And sometimes, they are only worthy of only a one or two-line description like the following:-

n  "...I had been attending school and romancing around with a girl called Lucille, a beautiful Italian honey-haired darling that I actually wanted to marry"n

Look at Sal talking about a woman as if she were a breed of cat he wanted to rescue from the animal shelter.

n  "Finally he came out with it: he wanted me to work Marylou."n

Is Marylou a wrench or a machine of some kind?

And this is not to mention the countless instances of 'get you a girl', 'get girls', 'Let's get a girl' and other minor variations of the same strewn throughout the length of the book and some of Sal's thoughts about 'queers' which are equally revolting.

Maybe I am too much of a non-American with no ties to a real person who sees the Beat era through the lenses of pure nostalgia or maybe I am simply incapable of appreciating the themes of youthful wanderlust and living life with a perverse aimlessness or maybe it's the flat writing and appalling representation of women. Whatever the real reason(s) maybe, I can state with conviction that this is the only American classic which I tried to the best of my abilities to appreciate but failed.

I’ve never had so many mixed feelings about a book....



I have no clue as to how to rate this, so it’s going to sit at 3 stars for now.

in september, this book will turn sixty years old! while i do not care for it personally, and the celebration of a couple of self-satisfied pseudo-intellectual doofuses and their buffet-style spirituality traveling across the country, leaving a number of pregnancies in their wake and exploiting underage mexican prostitutes makes me wonder why this book endures, endure it does. so i have made a road trip booklist with less ickiness and more cannibalism. enjoy!

https://www.rifflebooks.com/list/237494

”I think Marylou was very, very wise leaving you, Dean,” said Galatea. “For years now you haven’t had any sense of responsibility for anyone. You’ve done so many awful things I don’t know what to say to you.”

And in fact that was the point, and they all sat around looking at Dean with lowered and hating eyes, and he stood on the carpet in the middle of them and giggled – he just giggled. He made a little dance. I suddenly realised that Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot.

“You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.”

That’s what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF.

Hmn. Thought I reviewed this after finally reading it last year. Or maybe the year before. Or possibly before the before.

Damn, but time gets more slippery by the hour. Just ask Jack. His silence will speak volumes (as ours will someday, too).

Anyway, underwhelmed. And, seems to me, not his best book, even though it's his most famous book. It gets tricky with Jack, though, because of the cult thing. And the read-it-young vs. read-it-older divide, which seems particularly divisive with writers like JK.

Recommend his letters, esp. to Ginsberg. Particularly entertaining, insightful, and akin to Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Me, I like epistolary badinage, and Jack was in his logorrheic element in that quarter. It bled into his books, too, so it all boils down to how forgiving you are of that.