May 6, 2010
re: Kerouac, Whitman, Merry Pranksters, Hip-Hop
Dear Hank,
I’ve been reading and, as you know, that can be a dangerous thing. I picked up a book call Why Kerouac Matters. As you know Kerouac wrote On the Road, an epic tale of traveling across America after World War II and before the Interstate Highway System. As the author of Why points out the story is much more than a travel log or a good tale. It is the distilled teaching of Kerouac and what he was trying to tell people. In a time when people were trying to get a job and settle down he was on a quest. He was growing up and On the Road tells of that journey.
He finished the book in 1951 after working on it for several years. The final draft was done in scroll form that is to say he mounted a roll of paper and typed on a manual typewriter. In this way he didn’t have to keep putting in new sheets of paper. What I didn’t realize was that the book didn’t get published until 1957: 1957, the birth of Rock and Roll, of Elvis, the DA, the hot rod. Although Kerouac was a depression age child of a working class father and mother his book was introduced in another era and was taken, along with James Dean and Marlon Brando, as part of a new page in the epic American tale. Kerouac thought he was rediscovering Whitman’s America Leaves of Grass and all that. He was not rebelling like those in the late 50’s; he was trying to find his place in the world that made and did stuff. He rejected the work a day world of the management briefcased ad man. In 1957 the two biggest selling books were Peyton Place and The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit; they are bookends of each other: one tells the tale of suburban bed hopping and the other the lament of a washed up salesman, a person who worked all his life and for what? That is the question Kerouac raises in On the Road.
The foil in On the Road to the protagonist Sal Paradiso (i.e. Kerouac) is Dean Moriarity who in real life was Neal Cassidy. Neal Cassidy ended up driving the Merry Prankster bus in their epic journey across the continent to tell everyone about LSD which ended on the west coast and started the hippie movement. One of the people on that bus was Ed McClanahan who wrote The Natural Man, which extends the American vision yet again.
James Burke in his book and PBS TV series Connections pointed out that when Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America in the early 1800’s, said that America was in a race between its vitality and its decadence. I think he was right. And Whitman and Kerouac and Woody Guthrie and the others I have mentioned were trying to chronicle, praise and rediscover that America which they envisioned it to be. Yes, that’s a circular definition but it is what they did. They told the story and the tales of their America and painted it on a larger canvas that more could connect with.
Why people still read On the Road is that it still resonates. It still has something to say, to teach and that is what makes it a classic American tale.
I gotta go,
Bryce
re: Kerouac, Whitman, Merry Pranksters, Hip-Hop
Dear Hank,
I’ve been reading and, as you know, that can be a dangerous thing. I picked up a book call Why Kerouac Matters. As you know Kerouac wrote On the Road, an epic tale of traveling across America after World War II and before the Interstate Highway System. As the author of Why points out the story is much more than a travel log or a good tale. It is the distilled teaching of Kerouac and what he was trying to tell people. In a time when people were trying to get a job and settle down he was on a quest. He was growing up and On the Road tells of that journey.
He finished the book in 1951 after working on it for several years. The final draft was done in scroll form that is to say he mounted a roll of paper and typed on a manual typewriter. In this way he didn’t have to keep putting in new sheets of paper. What I didn’t realize was that the book didn’t get published until 1957: 1957, the birth of Rock and Roll, of Elvis, the DA, the hot rod. Although Kerouac was a depression age child of a working class father and mother his book was introduced in another era and was taken, along with James Dean and Marlon Brando, as part of a new page in the epic American tale. Kerouac thought he was rediscovering Whitman’s America Leaves of Grass and all that. He was not rebelling like those in the late 50’s; he was trying to find his place in the world that made and did stuff. He rejected the work a day world of the management briefcased ad man. In 1957 the two biggest selling books were Peyton Place and The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit; they are bookends of each other: one tells the tale of suburban bed hopping and the other the lament of a washed up salesman, a person who worked all his life and for what? That is the question Kerouac raises in On the Road.
The foil in On the Road to the protagonist Sal Paradiso (i.e. Kerouac) is Dean Moriarity who in real life was Neal Cassidy. Neal Cassidy ended up driving the Merry Prankster bus in their epic journey across the continent to tell everyone about LSD which ended on the west coast and started the hippie movement. One of the people on that bus was Ed McClanahan who wrote The Natural Man, which extends the American vision yet again.
James Burke in his book and PBS TV series Connections pointed out that when Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America in the early 1800’s, said that America was in a race between its vitality and its decadence. I think he was right. And Whitman and Kerouac and Woody Guthrie and the others I have mentioned were trying to chronicle, praise and rediscover that America which they envisioned it to be. Yes, that’s a circular definition but it is what they did. They told the story and the tales of their America and painted it on a larger canvas that more could connect with.
Why people still read On the Road is that it still resonates. It still has something to say, to teach and that is what makes it a classic American tale.
I gotta go,
Bryce
Labels: Kerouac, Why he matters
posted by Rick Kinnaird at 8:22 AM
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