/lit/ - Literature

>merit

>all those bitter people who never roll into jazz clubs with a bunch of friends to drink beer and romance arty women and barmaids, dancing frantically and declaring poetry from rooftops unto the sleeping city to the melody of a distant saxophone in the streets below

Stay square.

I liked it. Parts of it are inspiring and it describes in a great way the burdens that western kids find when they try to practice eastern religion/philosophy. The beauty of the book lies exactly in the fact that they're kind of naive and pretentious in a way.

Apart form that, there were some beautiful examples of how the profane can coexist with the spiritual, which gave me some insight in the conflict between my holier than thou tendencies and hedonism the time I first read it.

And the idea of simple living, wandering young people with other ambitions than carving out a successful place for themselves in society was of course both influential and interesting. It's not very new, there have been both alternative religious and bohemian movements before Kerouac, but I think he reinvented and represented it in a great way at the right time. The book can present young people with a way of life they have never considered and does this quite enthusiastically. It changed my perspective of things when I was fifteen years old, and while it doesn't wield the same power over me today, I'm happy and grateful for having the chance to read it.

Japhy was a wonderful archetype to read about, just as Cassady was. Kerouacs puts a magnifying glass on the defining traits of his heroes and thereby tells a tale of how things could be done. When I look back at it, Japhy shares some of his ways with other types I admire, like Diogenes and Ikkyu. He was one of the first encounters for me with that way of life.

[spoiler]Dutchfag here, I started out with Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises) and Kerouac (On The Road). They're stylistic opposites but both are easy to read.</spoiler>

I love it for the youthful enthusiasm and and the way it made me shake of my apathy and have lively adventures. It's very contagious and while the more highbrow frowny 'that's not writing, it's typing' old literary types often ridicule it, it did, and does, convey a way of life and looking at life that's very interesting and beautiful.

The snobs that put it down are actually dealt with already in the novel itself:

"Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.

It's a stimulant in book-form and a potent cure for ennui/weltschmerz—also the glorious em dash—em dashes everywhere!

pics like diogenes,

i dig kerouac,

true and dead.