in college, as a pleasure read versus an academic one, i read john leland's "hip: a history", sadly i wasn't too familiar with majority of the social movements or time periods it discussed. i remember reading about the beats but hadn't read "on the road", "howl" or "naked lunch" so the impact of their hipness didn't really reach me. since then "on the road" has kinda haunted me. whenever i went to a bookstore, the back of my mind told me to finally pick up "on the road" but i never did.
what forced me to finally pick it up was an ed rusha exhibit at the hammer museum. on display was ed rusha's book version of "on the road". (the plaque next to his piece also taught me that kerouac wrote it all on one scroll. i can't remember if that scroll was on display, hmm). i can sadly admit that there were a series of pieces that i loved in this exhibit that i thought were solely ed rusha but turned out to be "on the road" quotes when i finally read the book. (yeah i am quite the poser.)
after reading "on the road", i reached one conclusion about myself. i have always been labelled a "flower child" by my family and though i do have hippie tendencies, i think my nomadic life is more on par with the beats. there is a rawness and grittiness to their lifestyle that is more attractive to me than putting flowers in my hair in san francisco.
if i was a male during the 1950's, i would have been a beat. i would have hitchhiked across the country, got drunk, got high and slept with girls and boys. and at the risk of sounding sexist, i would have to be male, there really wasn't a place for females in this movement; unless you wanted to end up used or abuse (not like physically or sexually though this did happen but also as a source of income as seen in the book) or dead like williams s. burroughs' wife (as in real life). as a female, i am not offended, these men were jaded by the war. did anyone actually survive the weird tension in the us caused by the cold war? all the creative spirits we recognize now were all tormented by it but that led to their genius. as i explained recently to darlene, i have a greater tolerance for communists and socialists in that historical context because society was so static that you had to believe in the extremes to have any hope for change. so i don't hold anything against the beats. they did let their women drink, do drugs and have sex so in a way that is liberating. their women were equal in their access to life's vices.
"on the road" is on flavorpill's 30 before 30 and it will probably be on my list too. it would make my list due the great quotes in it. what i loved most about "on the road" was kerouac's poetic style. he had a chaotic and beautiful way of describing life (surprisingly at times, my life.)
my favorite quote of course was:
"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 center light pop and everyone goes "awww!""
i also enjoyed:
"people change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal."
(why i am a foodie)
"she threw down drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last."
(how i drink)
"...and like the prophet who walked across the land to bring the dark word, and the only word i had was 'wow'!"
(how i feel at coachella)
one quote that stood out, was kerouac's nostradamus moment. he wrote:
"dean has a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. he said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up new york."
random, right?!?! i googled to see if at then time of 9/11, anyone drew a parallel to this. they didn't. but i did find an article about a professor who noticed post-9/11 that his students normally wrote their class papers on that excerpt.
but what i loved more was his descriptions of the city i love the most, los angeles:
"LA. i love the way everyone says ‘LA’ on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done."
"on corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot sauce on newspaper napkins"
while in LA, sal eats at what i assumed was clifton's cafeteria downtown, so i emailed "ask chris" from los angeles magazine on the topic and he said possibly though there were multiple clifton's back than.
i love this book because of its carefree spirit. sal just went with the flow of life. and sometimes it worked for him and sometimes it didn't. sometimes he lived like a king and other times he had to scrape and scramble to get life together. the importance was the experience of life versus living by society standards.
i will admit that "on the road" made me romanticize a time period that was not as glamorous as it read on paper. it made me nostalgic for something that i never lived or could have ever live or even survive. i realized that today, i can not travel like sal paradise did, especially being a female. i can even admit that at the end i started to get a little bored and found the lifestyle tedious. being on the road would be exhausting however like the saying goes, it isn't the destination but the journey. and kerouac proves that to a t by making the destination obsolete. and i think this is why i would be a beat, it's about experiencing life instead of where you end up.
ps here is one of the pieces from the ed rusha's exhibit. it reminded me of delano, which is why i initially loved it.
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