On the Road- Kerouac

:) Didn't realize you were asking for feedback/commenting further. Had just figured I wasn't clear. I should read more carefully :).

Interesting about beat writers. I was never exposed to any until I took a small publishing class. Their stuff made me realize I'd missed a lot re: modern poetry. Though as far as jazz goes, I think it's so varied - like you have the fat, smooth sounds of trumpets and saxaphones, or the more phrenetic fast paced stuff. I like how it's so individual, but only like the slower stuff personally. Not as far as beat literature goes - this in reference to music. I really liked how the varied tempos lived in the book.

Well I'm into bop basically, Miles Davis and John Coltrane stuff. I don't know if I listen to hard bop or not but I do like my jazz fast paced and lively. Theres also avant garde jazz which is really eccletic but I haven't gotten into it as much.

I listened to Coltrane when I was little, falling asleep. Will have to find out the name of the album. It was/is blue and beautiful, had "My Favorite Things" on it. (Maybe? that's the title.) He was on the cover facing his right. Never payed attention to the names of the other songs, just knew that one from the movie. Wish I had...
...have to backtrack on not liking fast-paced stuff. Saw one guy on the sax - a friend of a friend's. Had never seen fingers literally fly before that. I was just stunned. :)

I wish I had that kind of connection with music when I was younger, my taste for jazz is hardly a year old. Theres a cafe downtown that has a jazz blues jam every week and I listened and asked the musicians about what jazz they liked. I do like the slower stuff, "So What" by Miles Davis is a great song and so is Dave Brubeck's "Foggy Day".

Used to think of Jazz as "wrong note" music. Strangely though, the older I get the more I dig it. (to borrow a verb from Moriarty) Coltrane's "Blue Train" seems to keep finding its way into my CD player.

I know I'm joining this fight late, and its been quite a few years since I've read "On the Road," but I have to admit my initial impression of that text was much the same as Faye's. Here's the wierd part though. "On the Road" is one of those rare books that I have continued to think about with surpizing frequency since reading it.

I followed up "On the Road" with Tom Wolfe's "Electric Coolaid Acid Test." A difficult but interesting piece of literature for me. I've never in my life done a drug stronger than Advil (and supposedly neither has Wolfe) but there's a description of an acid trip in that book that made me think I had. Thought it best not to drive a car for a while after that chapter.

Then I listened to a bunch of Grateful Dead records -- but that's another story.

Hehe, well I was turned off by the drug use in On the Road, I was thinking about reading The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test but if its one long trip I'm not so sure. Then theres Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I've seen the movie and I'm not sure how easy to read such a book could be.

I've never read "Fear and Loathing..." either but it is on the list. Its just not very high on the list. It was primarily the style that made "Electric Coolaid Acid Test" interesting for me. Took me about a hundred pages to tune-in, but once I had, I was bouncing along in the magic bus with everyone else. The other interesting element in the book was just purely the history - the recording of the event by Wolfe. Fascinating.

That being said, I'll never reread "Electric Coolaid." I will however reread "On the Road." I think it was Faye earlier in this string who wrote that the book may speak to her when she's fifty (bad paraphase I know - Lo siento mucho Faye.) Well, that made me sort of unofficially decide to revisit Jack Kerouac's book on its fiftieth anniversary just to see if it had changed for me. Think that's next year.

Between now and then I plan to travel the other direction and read "Augie March" Has anybody been there?

Cheerio!

If I recall correctly, isn't Burroughs' Naked Lunch a big weird, zany, psychedelic drug novel?

I sure remember thinking it was one hell of a drug feast.

Big weird, zany, psychedelic, and metaphoric.

Or was it metamorphic?

Ahhh the sixties.

Born too late.

Tragic.

-Tootles

I just read "Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and if drug use turns you off, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! All it is is drugs. There is VERY little plot other than what these two guys are thinking on this crazy drug binge. That being said, I loved it. I thought it was a great book.

heh crazy drug binge. Is Mr. Thompson dead now? I'm very antidrug straightedge so while I'll read about it I won't ever condone it. I guess I admire the achievement of being able to express the farout effects of drugs to someone who is tuned out.

I don't know what Thompson is doing now. With the amount of drugs he does, I'd be surprised if he's still around, but than again so is Keith Richards.

Conventional weapons cannot kill Keith Richards.

(plagiarized that from a bad movie I saw a while back)

As far as I know Thompson is still alive although not necessarily all that well. Saw him in an interview on public television last year after the release of his latest book, "Kingdom of Fear." He did not look good.

He's probably in his 60s by now. Most people who took drugs like that would be dead by now so he should consider himself lucky. Actually the protagonists of On the Road, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac died in the mid and late sixties, Jack from alcoholism and Neal I'm not sure of.

I just finished this book last night and after reading this post I searched the internet to find out more about the Beat Generation. The book makes more sense after I found out a little more about this group of people. I respect the book because it gave insight into a different time and place, but I'm finding I don't really like the book because I don't really like any of the characters in the book. None of them seemed to have any qualities to make me want to know more about them or care what happens to them.