I haven't actually written a review for any of my misnamed 2017 Reading Challenges yet. For some reason, I guess I still thought it was 2016 when I made the shelves. Opps.

Reading challenge 1 is to re-read books that generally other people really like but which I disliked. Will I like these books more now that I'm older?

I didn't like On The Road when I read it as a 19 year old. This is the kind of book that I probably would have enjoyed more at 19 than at 42. I probably liked this book less than my original 3 star rating I gave it in 2007 when I tried to add everything I ever read to Goodreads during my honeymoon period with this site.

I left the rating at 3 stars for this read. It's probably a 2.5. I'm not actually sure what these numbers mean to me anymore.

I hope that you aren't reading this review because you want to find out about the book. I don't want that kind of responsibility of being the first exposure to a 'classic' book. If you are though, here is the plot synopsis... it's about some dudes who travel around the country. It's sort of a true life Peter Pan story of a couple of dudes in search of authenticity by basically acting like tourist frat boys.

Around the time I first read this book I was friends with a 'Dean Moriarity' type. He was an overly excitable 'free-spirit', he lived off of people, did too many drugs, slept with lots of impressionable high school girls (he was only about 18 or 19, so it's not as creepy as it sounds), travelled around a lot, happened to be married to one of my best friends and had a small group of people who thought he was the greatest thing ever. There were also people I knew who couldn't fucking stand him. For some reason, the two of us got along fairly well as friends even though personality wise we were nothing alike and I couldn't stand the hero-worship and schtick that surrounded him when there were more than a couple of people around.

I'm not sure why I wrote that. I hadn't even thought of him for quite a while until I was reading this book. I happened to find that he is on Facebook, when I thought to look him up. It's bizarre to think of a homeless punk/hippie from the early 90's is now on Facebook... he's not a person I can even picture living in the modern world. Times change. At the time I read this book the first time, I had a Neal Cassady type lurking around in my life. I was also around a lot of people saying fuck being normal, and telling me that travelling around the country, going to hippie shit like Rainbow Festival (and I want to say Burning Man, but maybe that came later... in my head Rainbow Festival and Burning Man are sort of one in the same thing) and finding the 'real' world. The enlightenment that these people seemed to bring was smoking way too much pot, sitting around being bored downtown and then smoking more pot. It didn't seem like these people who were telling me that I wasn't really 'living life' because I was going to college and not all that interested in travelling anywhere and meeting other 'weird' people bored in their own little corners of the world were onto any kind of secret I was missing out on.

That's what this book I think felt like to me back then. Another thing telling me that there was something true and real 'out-there' when I can remember thinking traveling was generally a bullshit solution to problems because it's all inside of you... and it's not the place your living at which is the problem. To paraphrase a book that might not have even existed then, but which I can remember thinking, wherever you fucking go you are still stuck with yourself.

That's what my problem with this book was on this reading of it. It's a fucking superficial tourist guide to 50's hipster authenticity. In all of the 'searching' that they are doing, they don't actually see anything. Passing an old African-American on the road during on of their trips, Cassady gets really excited (he always does, I picture him as the human equivalent of a criminally inclined Golden Retriever) about how 'authentic' the old man is, and how what what the old man has seen is so much purer than anything Cassady could have ever seen. Blah, blah, blah.... he's not seeing a human being, he's seeing an idealized stereotype. And this is what they find and get excited about over and over and over again, an idealized Other pigeon-holed into a mythical purity. That purity doesn't exist, people live their lives. They have amazing things about them and flaws. They eat and shit and fight with each other. They do boring ass shit like everyone else. They are good and bad and have their worries and problems and loves... and there is nothing authentic about being some cultural tourist.

I grew up in a tourist town, same town I was friends with my very own Neal Cassady type. I was very familiar with the feeling of being the backdrop for some bullshit image and being around lots of people physically being in a place, but being there as a make believe location filled with some quaint Victorian nonsense. Being from a tourist town I have always been suspicious traveling, especially when you fool yourself into thinking you are experiencing the place and people itself, and not just what you want the place and people to represent.

This is probably only making sense in my head, wheeee!

I feel like the America found by the characters in On The Road is about as authentic as going to Las Vegas and experiencing the locales of the world and history through the casinos and hotels. But Vegas at least is being honest that it's all just a fake, it's window dressing for adults to basically act like Frat Boys... to drink too much, screw too much, and gamble too much. People who go to Vegas at least have the decency to not claim they have discovered any truth and blab on about their decadent tourism as anything more than going off to get their kicks.

On the plus side, I did find a few of the passages about Kerouac's sadness to be quite good, and I got a chuckle every time another character exposed Cassady as an asshole. I probably would have liked this book more if the last paragraph was taken out, it wouldn't have felt ultimately like a love letter to Cassady.

I have no idea what May's book will be. Since I haven't actually reviewed the other ones I read here is a short overview of the project so far....

January: Slaughterhouse Five: Bored by it when I was 19 or 20. Liked it quite a bit this time.

February: New York Trilogy: Didn't get the point of it when I was 27. I liked this one more this time, but I'm still not sure why French people love Paul Auster so much.

March: Walden: For some reason, I had no interest in this book whenever it was I read it in either college or grad school. This time I was torn between totally agreeing with Thoreau and wanting to reach back through history and punching him in the face.

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.

Absolute dreamboat, beefcake, alpha-chad writes a book to make hipsters's vaginas drip with gravy.

And it's fucking awful. Like, digging a hole to the centre of the earth with your balls, awful.

But LOOK AT HIM!! Beefcake mother fucker!!

An unfocused Peter Pan expresses his confused discontent with the purposelessness of his life by drifting back and forth across the country in the company of similarly addle-pated losers. His bone-deep narcissism allows him to remain convinced (despite all evidence to the contrary) that flitting from one city to another while sleeping on a succession of borrowed couches is a glorious life. To his mind, a string of starvation-wage menial jobs, casual petty theft, abusive sexual relationships and escapist substance abuse is noble, heroic and illustrative of something profound... although, sadly, the narrator has no clue as to what that might be.

Some of the turns of phrase are inventive and almost poetic (and kept this from being a one star review), but they don't save this book from being a meaningless jumble of vignettes. First we went here, then we went there, then we went someplace else.

I discovered Kerouac in tenth grade, right when all the kicks seem most dazzling, and I thought yes! This is the crazy bohemian life! And I spent the next ten years trying to be a Beatnik. I hitchhiked from Atlanta to Philadelphia just because according to this book that's the sort of thing one does. No one really hitchhiked, already, in those days; old hippies would pick me up looking bewildered. Well, and racist truckers, too, so some things never change. I would have given my left nut for some benzedrine, or barring that for someone at least to explain to me what the fuck it was. (Just as well that I failed on this front, because it turns out that it is meth.) I even replayed Dean Moriarty's shoplifting scene note-for-note. That's how seriously I took this book.

So you can understand that, as a pushing-40 guy who says things like "Man, it's 11, I'm beat," and means "tired," I was not at all keen to revisit this. It's a young man's book. "That's not writing," Truman Capote said, "it's typing." Oh God, getting drunk and talking about the snake of the world...remember when that felt dangerous?

But it's not totally silly, actually - I mean, it is, but not all silly things are pointless and there's nothing wrong with a snake of the world, intrinsically.

I see it now as a warning. Kerouac was hitting 30 when he wrote it, and you sense a desperation: "Where is my story?" You sense some manipulation, too. Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) is a mentally unstable man, and I think the Beats used him for stories. I was inspired by him when I was young; now I feel bad for him. I see that filthy bandaged thumb. Neither Kerouac nor Cassady lived to 50. (Although Cassady, astonishingly, had one more story in him.) I had a good time when I was young; I'm glad I've graduated to different kinds of good times now.

But this is a young man's book. All you beatniks, go out and hitchhike and be broke and desperate on the snake of the world. It's a kick.

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 n  On the Roadn 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, middle-class, 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 self-centered drunks when they're self-deprecating, ironic, and/or funny, but Kerouac was none of these things. He was a pretentious, self-important bore who produced some of the most painfully bad and inconsequential prose of the 20th century. Or any century.

i love reading red flag books

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.

خب خب خب!
کتاب در راه از جک کرواک از اون مدل کتاب‌هایی هستش که یا دوستش خواهی داشت یا ازش بدت میاد. این کتاب برای کسانی که علاقه‌مند به سفر هستند، اونم از نوع بی‌خیالیش، بدون هدف، مثل اون وقتایی که همینجوری میزنی به جاده و پول زیاد و برنامه‌ریزی نداری و با هیچ‌هایک خودت رو برسونی به هرجایی که ممکن هستش، این کتاب برای این دسته آدم‌ها میتونه یه کتاب مقدس باشه. مخصوصا ساعت‌های اولیه‌ی اولین سفر که مشخصه نویسنده تجربه این کار رو نداره و چند کیلومتر اول ممکنه ناامید شه و برگرده سر خونه و زندگی ثابت و بدون هیجان خودش. همینطور برای کسانی که از زندگی روزمره خسته شدن و فقط دنبال یه بهانه یا جرقه می‌گردن که کار و زندگی رو تعطیل کنن و بزنن به جاده، میتونه همون جرقه رو بزنه.
شاید خیلی‌ها این مدل از سبک زندگی و سفرکردن و اتفاق‌هایی که همراهش هست رو نپسندن و یه بخش‌هایی از کتاب براشون بی‌بندوباری و لاابالی‌گری و بی‌مسئولیتی رو القا بکنه ولی به نظرم هرکدوم از ما توی یه دوره از جوونی‌مون وسوسه شدیم که بزنیم به جاده و بی‌خیال هر اصول و قید و بند باشیم (فقط میزان شدت‌ این بی‌قید و بندی هست که توی آدم‌ها متفاوته)
در کل کتاب رو دوست داشتم البته یه جاهاییش از اون وسط‌ها برام خسته‌کننده بود و تکراری و اوایل و اواخر کتاب رو بیشتر دوست داشتم.
قلم جک کرواک خیلی قدرتمند و جادویی هستش، خیلی خوب حال و شرایط رو توصیف میکنه. من خودم چند جا واقعا از این حجم از دقت و باریک‌بینی توی توصیفاتش لذت بردم. مثلا جایی بود که چند صفحه تمام یه قطعه موسیقی رو از شروع کار نوازنده و فاز گرفتن مردم و عرق ریختن و بالا پایین پریدن رو جوری توصیف میکنه که حس میکنی خودت هم داری اونجا بالا پایین می‌پری. یا یه جای دیگه توی یه شب گرم و شرجی که پشه‌ها پدر آدم رو در میارن میره روی سقف ماشین دراز میکشه تا بدنش خنک بشه و همه اینا رو کاملا ملموس به قلم میاره.
دست آقای نوروزی هم بابت ترجمه‌ش درد نکنه، به نظرم یه کار بسیار سخت و بزرگ رو به خوبی انجام داده. با اینکه مشخصه کتاب خوراک دوستان سانسورچی هست، تونسته با یه سری بازی با کلمات و عبارت‌ها، جوری متن رو دربیاره که خیلی آسیب نبینه.

I told my friend and the co-owner of a bookstore I frequent that I am planning on doing a Kerouac binge just to do it, and we both agreed that I’m a psycho. I told him it’s because I don’t know if I’ll ever be in my late 20s again. He said you never know, anything is possible. I don’t know man… I’m sceptical. Either way, after finishing this one, the binge might be something to delay for a while, but we will pick at it slowly.

By god there is a lot here, and I struggled with the final rating, but I think that there are just enough gratuitous chunks in here that would warrant knocking off a star, so we’ll settle for 4. So there I was, plodding along and reading this, not doing any external research on the book. I was tired of being asked if I had read On the Road. The answer was always going to be no until it was yes, okay? Either way, I finish it and look it up just to see that Dean Moriarty is not Dean Moriarty at all! Why, it’s Neal Cassady. Old Bull Lee is William S. Burroughs and Carlo Marx is the legend that is Allen Ginsberg. And of course Kerouac (Sal Paradise) had gone and used all of their real names in the first draft and had then been told to stop being stupid and change it all up. Some of the shit that’s in there, my god. How could you use their real names? I guess he didn’t care. And I guess that embodies the whole movement.

The real touching moments here that stick with you, the ones that make you get a lump in your throat, are the ones that simultaneously showcase the power of the abandon of youth and the passage of time. There is a fulcrum somewhere in the time we spend with friends and lovers (of youth, anyway), and the scale is finely balanced. It’s not tilted too far back into immaturity, but it’s sure as hell not tilted into boring adult maturity. The characters like Dean Moriarity, they have a way of exerting their influence on you and riding that fulcrum until kingdom come. They’re so charming and represent everything that we want to see in ourselves. We project, we imbue their living beings with what we feel we lack in ourselves, and to us, their lives are everything we wish ours could be. Until it shifts. And then, suddenly, you don’t invite them out anymore. You don’t want them around you and the boys and their partners. They always seem to bring the mood down by trying to inject some faux energy that no one is about anymore. It’s just sad. They’re the ones insisting that the gang gets together again, one last time, for ole times, and then they take it way too far by drinking too much and playing Queen before you’ve even left the house. Makes me feel all blue, if I’m being honest.

Why? I never took a liking to the Dean Moriaritys of my group, though there were a few of them. The rest of my pals? They did, for sure. The guys would hang around them and be enamoured by their charm, and the girls would love the easygoing nature. There is beauty in there. But then there would be a sudden realization that these Moriaritys were rampant alcoholics, nicotine junkies, borderline sociopaths (I’m talking real sociopaths – I’m talking get drunk and try to fuck a friend’s girlfriend sociopath). This realization ended it all, alongside all the reminiscences that came along with their name. And I guess… I don’t know, I guess I just feel like I’m one of the few ones in my group that still remembers a few of them from time to time, knowing that they are still struggling with whatever they struggled with, with the only difference being that we don’t find that cool anymore. Or maybe that’s too self-serving. Maybe we all remember the Deans and all simultaneously feed into this group-wide moratorium that has been placed on speaking about them. Either way, maybe the only thing that is wrong in their lives is that we don’t deem their antics worthy of putting on a pedestal anymore. Is that really their fault?

Sulla strada... che porta alla noia

Caro Kerouac: il fatto che ti abbia affrontato in lingua originale non ha aggiunto fascino al romanzo, quindi stavolta non è colpa di qualche traduttore poco abile: è colpa tua. Le sfumature entro cui si svolge la storia sono purtroppo poco interessanti, in qualunque lingua le si decida di leggere.
Il girovagare senza una meta, un pensiero e un apparente motivo, tipico di questa Beat Generation, mi ha soltanto provocato un enorme fastidio, e non perché non apprezzi i personaggi giramondo, gli spiantati, gli squattrinati, i tossici o che so io. Però sinceramente due coglioni qualunque che decidono di partire per esercitare nella vita la nobile professione del vagabondo, e fanculo tutto, senza uno straccio di contorno narrativo, non è esattamente quello che io definisco interessante. Ogni 50 pagine si ricomincia una traversata verso il Nulla, poi a casa, poi di nuovo in macchina, tutto per star dietro al simpaticissimo Dean, un tizio tanto prodigo a dispensare filosofia spicciola quanto incapace di essere stimolante. Uno che io prenderei a calci nel sedere un giorno sì e l'altro pure.
Si salvano alcuni passaggi, e si sarebbe salvato di più, se il romanzo si fosse concentrato su un solo viaggio, anziché su cento tutti uguali.

Postoji osnovana sumnja da mi nikad ranije nije trebalo OVOLIKO vremena da pročitam knjigu, i moja čitalačka kriza nije jedini razlog za to. Najviše me je nerviralo to što je neko bio u stanju da tako lepo, živopisno i entuzijastično piše o nečemu što me nimalo ne dotiče. Dakle, moje preovlađujuće raspoloženje tokom čitanja je bilo: ok boomer (da, znam da Keruak nije bumer, ali je opštepoznato da su se bumeri najviše ložili i btw i dalje se lože na bitnike).

Tu dolazimo do toga zašto je ipak važno čitati ovaj roman, ako već niste: 1) zato što je Na putu jedan od najuticajnijih romana svetske književnosti i njegov uticaj je, naročito na našim prostorima, i dalje vrlo prisutan, nažalost ne samo na žanrovskom već i na poetičkom planu; 2) zato što sam, koliko god da sam se nervirala i kolutala očima MESECIMA čitajući o tome kako se dva konja od 30 i kusur godina ponašaju kao neodgovorna dečurlija koju nije briga ni za koga osim za sopstvenu guzicu, i pritom se žešće tripuju da su posebni i romantizuju svašta nešto što se romantizovati ne da, kada sam konačno završila bila tužna, i bilo mi je jasno koliko je konstantna prisutnost ove vrste nartiva u popularnoj kulturi i tzv malim književnostima poput naše ustvari simptom, i koliko je priča koju sam pročitala, iako naivna i na više nivoa pregažena vremenom, i dalje univerzalna.

Možda da sledeće čitam Izgubljene iluzije, ne znam...

I najsmešnije od svega, u nekom trenutku sam bila odustala od čitanja, a onda sam zaboravila da sam odustala i nastavila. Toliko o mojim trenutnim čitalačkim kapacitetima.