The Dharma Bums

من این کتاب رو در روزهای سخت و عجیبی از زندگیم خوندم. به طرز کاملاً تصادفی هم خریدمش. برای خریدِ «در جادّه» رفته بودم که «ولگردهای دارما» نصیبم شد! و چقدر خوشحالم از این اتفاق!
در ولگردهای دارما یک جک کرواکِ متفاوت رو می‌بینیم. کرواکی که از مهمونی‌ها و خوش‌گذرونی‌های شلوغ و پُر سر و صدا خسته شده و تنهایی خوابیدن توی کیسه‌ی خواب زیر ستاره‌ها رو ترجیح میده!
بی‌نهایت از خوندن کتاب لذت بردم. در لحظاتش غرق شدم…
ترکیب جک کرواک و زک اسنایدر رو دوست داشتم. به دارما و بودیسم علاقمند شدم.
در روزهایی کتاب رو خوندم که خودمم تنها و دور از همه بودم. این کتاب باعث شد که اون روزها رو راحت‌تر بگذرونم.
به سلامتی همهٔ ولگردهای دارما!

Kerouac can spin an enjoyable yarn, as long as you don't mind rambling along with him on directionless paths with no real goal in mind but to spin that yarn.

In The Dharma Bums he takes the reader from city-drop-outs to mountain solitude, the mind-fuck excitement and shit of civilization to the glorious simplicity and utter loneliness of a retreat back to nature.

Even though he cheats the reader with some quick-fix adverbs in place of the proper description owed his audience, Kerouac still deserves all the accolades bestowed upon him, and so every now and then when I'm in the mood I don't mind taking one of these long hikes with writers of his ilk.

Slap a few rhyming words together vaguely associated with your intended meaning and call it philosophical poetry. That's my problem with some of the beat poets, whom I blame for the crap classic rock songwriters of the 60s and 70s passed off as lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0iuax...

But I digress.

The Dharma Bums is poetry, even if I do think some of it's silly nonsense.

Jack Kerouac And Gary Snyder

Following the success of "On the Road", Kerouac's publishers initially rejected his manuscripts such as "The Subterraneans" and "Tristessa." But his publisher asked him to write an accessible, popular novel continuing with the themes of "On the Road." Kerouac responded with "The Dharma Bums" which was published late in 1958. "The Dharma Bums" is more conventionally written that most of Kerouac's other books, with short, generally clear sentences and a story line that is optimistic on the whole. The book was critiqued by Allen Ginsberg and others close to Kerouac as a "travelogue" and as over-sentimentalized. But with the exception of "On the Road", "The Dharma Bums" remains Kerouac's most widely read work. I had the opportunity to reread "The Dharma Bums" and came away from the book deeply moved.

As are all of Kerouac's novels, "The Dharma Bums" is autobiographical. It is based upon Kerouac's life between 1956--1957 -- before "On the Road" appeared and made Kerouac famous. The book focuses upon the relationship between Kerouac, who in the book is called Ray Smith and his friend, the poet Gary Snyder, called Japhy Ryder, ten years Kerouac's junior. Kerouac died in 1969, while Snyder is still alive and a highly regarded poet. Allen Ginsberg (Alvah Goldbrook) and Neal Cassady (Cody Pomeray), among others, also are characters in the book. Most of the book is set in San Francisco and its environs, but there are scenes of Kerouac's restless and extensive travelling by hitchiking, walking, jumping freight trains, and taking buses, as he visits Mexico, and his mother's home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina during the course of the book.

The strenght of "The Dharma Bums" lies in its scenes of spiritual seriousness and meditation. During the period described in the book, Kerouac had become greatly interested in Buddhism. He describes himself as a "bhikku" -- a Buddhist monk -- and had been celibate for a year when the book begins. I have been studying Buddhism myself for many years, and it is easy to underestimate Kerouac's understanding of Buddhism. As with many authors, he was wiser in his writing that he was in his life. There is a sense of the sadness and changeable character of existence and of the value of compassion for all beings that comes through eloquently in "The Dharma Bums." Smith and Ryder have many discussions about Buddhism -- at various levels of seriousness -- during the course of the novel. Ryder tends to use Buddhism to be critical of and alienated from American society and its excessive materialism and devotion to frivolity such as television. Smith has the broader vision and sees compassion and understanding as a necessary part of the lives of everyone. Smith tends to be more meditative and quiet in his Buddhist practice -- he spends a great deal of time in the book sitting and "doing nothing" while Ryder is generally active and on the go, hiking, chopping wood, studying, or womanizing. At the end of the book, he leaves for an extended trip to Japan. (He and Kerouac would never see each other again.)

"The Dharma Bums" offers a picture of a portion of American Buddhism during the 1950s. It also offers a portrayal of what has been called the "rucksack revolution" as Smith and Ryder take to the outdoors, and, in a lengthy and famous section of the book, climb the "Matterhorn" in California's Sierra Mountains. In the final chapters of the book, Kerouac spends eight isolated weeks on Desolation Peak in the Cascades as a fire watchman. He comes back yearning for human company.

Sexuality plays an important role in the book, against the backdrop of what is described as the repressed 1950's, as young girls are drawn to Ryder and he willingly shares them with an initially reluctant Smith. The book includes scenes of wild parties tinged, for Smith, with sadness, in which people of both sexes dance naked, get physically involved, and drink heavily. Near the end of the book, Ryder offers Smith a prophetic warning the alcoholism which would shortly thereafter ruin Kerouac's life.

"The Dharma Bums" is a fundamentally American book and it is full of love for the places of America, for the opportunity it offers for spiritual exploration, and for its people. Kerouac's compassion was hard earned. In his introduction to a later book, "The Lonesome Traveler" he
aptly described his books as involving the "preachment of universal kindness, which hysterical critics have failed to notice beneath frenetic activity of my true-story novels about the 'beat' generation. -- Am actually not 'beat' but strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic." I found a feeling of spirituality, of love of life in the face of vicissitudes, and of America in "The Dharma Bums." The work was indeed a popularization. But Kerouac's vision may ultimately have been broad.

Robin Friedman

amazing. fantastic. run-on sentences galore. quotes that will change your life.

for example:

"one day i will find the right words, and they will be simple."

"i saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and i could do anything i wanted."

"see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume..."

"...all of 'em zen lunatics...by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts, keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures."

i can't believe it took 26 years of my life to find this book.

My introduction to Kerouac came in college, when my New York City internship offered lots of reading time via hours spent riding public transportation. "On the Road" was my book of choice during the transitional phase when spring break in Florida drove home the sad reality that I need greenery far too much to ever live happily in in The Big Apple. Such an unwelcome intrusion of honest self-assessment crushed my plans of making a beeline for the city immediately after graduation, but at least I had Jack's adventures to lose myself in.

I liked "On the Road" enough that I still consider it one of my favorite books, and I hope the frantic scribblings and emphatic underlining my copy boasts are a testament to such things. Which is why it's weird that I never got around to sampling any more of Jack's catalog until my husband's copy of "The Dharma Bums" snagged my attention while organizing his bookshelf after four-and-a-half years of letting it languish in increasingly chaotic spewage.

I LIKE Jack's writing. It's choppy and meandering, yes, but I feel like it captures his exuberance and how easily he got caught up in the adrenalin-fueled frenzy of half-baked adventures. The fractured narrative reminded me of an unusually zen-enlightened kid who wants to try everything and does so by barreling ahead with an innocent (as innocent as anything as saturated with booze as Jack can be, anyway) desire to get swept up in the art of living life to its fullest. The passing epiphanies get as much attention as they deserve -- simply experiencing such truths rather than committing them to memory seems to be the point here.

while we all know Kerouac is a pretentious white misogynist, this book was well written and made me want to drop everything and go backpacking

کتابی خیلی دوست داشتنی. الان که تموم شده و بهش فکر می‌کنم، دلم تنگ می‌شه براش. علاوه بر خوب بودنش، توی موقعیت‌های خیلی خوبی هم خوندمش و خریدنش هم مربوط به یک روز خیلی هیجان‌انگیز بود.

اما خود کتاب چرا خوبه؟
ماجراش، که ماجرای سفرهای کرواکه. مثل رمان در راه. اما این بار کرواک عاشق طبیعت و ذن و مراقبه و بودا شده و سبک زندگی کاملن متفاوتی رو با رمان در راه پیش گرفته. متن ریتم پایین‌تری نسبت به در راه داره و به مقدار زیادی از مراقبه‌ها و طبیعت و دیدگاهش نسبت به زندگی -که‌ یک دیدگاه بودیستی هست- حرف می‌زنه. توصیفات محشری داره و آدمو هوایی می‌کنه که بزنه بره سفر و توی طبیعت تنها باشه. حق می‌دم به همه جوونایی که‌توی آمریکا با خوندن این کتاب زدن به جاده و هیچهایک و به فلسفه و عرفان شرقی علاقه‌مند شدن.

این کتاب برای کسی که به عرفان شرق و ذن و این چیزها علاقه نداره هم می‌تونه جذاب باشه. منظورم اینه که لازم نیست حتمن این چیزا رو دوست داشته باشی تا بتونی با کتاب همذات‌پنداری یا ارتباط برقرار کنی. خود رمان بسیار عالیه و سفرهایی که می‌کنه و کوهنوردی‌هاش محشرن.

جک کرواک، نویسنده جدید موردعلاقه‌م.

ترجمه زیاد بد نبود، هرچند قطعن کلی سانسور داشته و ترجمه سختی هم داشته به علت نثر شعرگون و گاهی توالی صفت‌ها و کلمات به شیوه غیرمنطقی و ناخودآگاهانه، اما گیج‌ات نمی‌کرد. اکثر کلمات تخصصی بودایی رو هم ترجمه کرده بود.

امیدوارم باز هم از کرواک ترجمه کنن!

So this is what started the "backpack revolution". Great. Except it was less backpacking, more Buddhism preaching. The main character (Ray?) comes across as a patronizing nutcase with his combination of drunken bumhood, Christianity, and Buddhism.

So he is a buddhist - correction: he thinks he is Buddha - and he also thinks he is a "crazy saint". He believes he can perform miracles, namely cure his mother of allergies, but then decides he won't perform miracles anymore because that will make him vain. WTF? Because him avoiding his own vanity is more important than curing people? Just a tad self-obsessed, no? One of the many, many things that make him look like an arrogant ass.

He's like that super annoying kid you travel with who thinks he is wise and you can't wait to get rid of in the next town because you KNOW his facial expression is saying that he feels sorry for you, poor you, if only you knew that everything is empty and awake! He's like Holden Caulfield with a backpack turned born-again-Buddhist (there is no such thing but that's the best way to describe it!)

Also, I hate to judge religion, BUT (actually I lie, I love judging religion) I am well familiar with zen Buddhism and I think his version of Buddhism is less Buddhist and more junky postmodernist (i.e. full of shit).

The only reason I gave this book 2 stars instead of one was because of the amazing descriptions of climbing and camping on mountains, especially chapter 33. If I had read that chapter alone I would have thought that Kerouac is the most amazing writer in the world. The rest of the book is tripe.