{"id":9438,"date":"2012-08-20T13:29:59","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T13:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/08\/20\/some-recent-writing-on-kerouac\/"},"modified":"2012-08-20T13:29:59","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T13:29:59","slug":"some-recent-writing-on-kerouac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/08\/20\/some-recent-writing-on-kerouac\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Recent Writing on Kerouac"},"content":{"rendered":"

October is Kerouac month hereabouts and she is still a good six weeks off.  But Danny Lanzetta's In Defense of Kerouac and Other Flawed Literature<\/a> should be noted before it scrolls into cyber-oblivion.  Excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Kerouac's work is undoubtedly sophomoric at times. He is hopelessly na\u00efve about people, which sometimes leads to this<\/a> and other times just comes off as laziness, a selfish desire to write the way he wanted to write and live the way he wanted to live, collateral damage be damned.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The first link is to this OTR<\/em> passage:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones 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 roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!"<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of  Kerouac's scrivening.  But although too often quoted, it is passages like this that grabbed my attention and gave me shivers back in the<\/em> '60s  and that still do now in my<\/em> 60s.  My 'beatitude' is considerably more measured these days, and it's a good thing too: too much 'madness' leads to an early grave.  Jack's prodigious quaffing of the joy juice caught up with him in '69 at the tender age of 47, and his hero Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty of On the Road<\/em>) was found dead on the railroad tracks near San Miguel Allende, Mexico the year before a few days shy of his 42nd birthday.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it is for the hyper-romanticism and the heartfelt gush & rush that some of us read Kerouac still despite his many literary flaws, not to mention the mess he made of his life and the lives of others.  He was no cool beatnik.  He was mad to live, to talk, to feel, to know, to be saved.  He was a restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears & mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa<\/em> of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.<\/span><\/p>\n

More in the Kerouac category<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October is Kerouac month hereabouts and she is still a good six weeks off.  But Danny Lanzetta's In Defense of Kerouac and Other Flawed Literature should be noted before it scrolls into cyber-oblivion.  Excerpt: Kerouac's work is undoubtedly sophomoric at times. He is hopelessly na\u00efve about people, which sometimes leads to this and other times … Continue reading “Some Recent Writing on Kerouac”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kerouac-and-friends","category-literary-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}