DON'T MESS IT UP!

Just so that you know how serious I am, here's the list:

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---Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs-

---Offbeat:Collaborating With Kerouac

---Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac l947-l954

---The Dream At the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier

---Off the Road:My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg

---Selected Letters: Jack Kerouac l940-l956

---Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village

---Takes of Beatnik Glory

---Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America

---When I was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School

---Baby Driver: A Novel About Myself (Jan Kerouac)

---Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac

---On the Road

---Minor Characters

---The Dharma Bums

---Naked Lunch



This doesn't begin to include my poetry anthologies which include writings by Ginsberg or my books which feature write-ups about the decades and have items on these people. Anyways, I own all of the above; I felt them important enough to go out and purchase. It could be understandable to have this fixation had I been a literature student, but I wasn't.
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I have read with trepidation that a film is being made of "On the Road." Hollywood has a horrid tendency to screw-up good books. I love Jim Carroll's "Basketball Diaries", and they made a mess of it. The book is set in the l960's, and the studio suits saw fit to mix 60's jargon with a l990's setting. They did the same thing with "The Rules of Attraction", by Brett Easton Ellis. The book was set in the l980's, yet the film featured obvious 90's references (Tarantino and visible tattoos). Things like that ruin it for me. Pick one theme and stick with it.
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"On the Road" is akin to "The Catcher in the Rye." It should not be messed with. The article I read was limited in information, and listed merely Viggo Mortensen as starring. This provided me with some relief, as he is a superb and highly under-rated actor. He is also an artist in his own right and therefore will understand the drive.
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Kerouac inspired a generation to hitch-hike and take to the road. Until his book came out, mainstream America had not heard of Zen Buddhism. It was thanks to him that many people heard their first bit of jazz music, as the radios tended to stick to a very conformist sound. Unfortunately, they highjacked his book at some point and it became about black berets and coffee-houses. Yet, the literature stands to this day.
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I made it a point when I was in Quebec City to go and see the house that carried the plaque "Jack Kerouac Club." His family was from Riviere-du-Loup originally, and with the stupidness that only comes with being seventeen, I one day hitch-hiked on the trans-Canada freeway to that town. I saw the parish church where his family was said to have attended. At this point in my life I was still wanting to study literature, although I had obviously given up my true dream of doing so at Columbia in New York City (Kerouac's school). When in San Francisco, I paid homage at the City Lights Bookstore and ate on a sidewalk cafe in North Beach.
While I never made it as far as Desolation Peak itself (where sanity and time began to slip for him a bit), I did a road trip through the Cascades Loop in Washington State.
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Years later, the road still calls me. Poetry and jazz can surprise and dazzle me. However, I now see that as fine as the literature continues to be, the lifestyle was intolerent of women. They were routinely abandonned, with the exception of Jack's mother, whom he constantly returned to and lived with well into his adulthood. In a game of WillIam Tell gone bad, Bill Burroughs shot his wife in the head. Obviously, a woman could not hitchhike across the country as freely as a man. Some of the women were as brilliant as their male counterparts and graduated from the same schools, yet they could not find a following. Some sank into madness. The double standard prevailed in that alcohol consumption was romantic in a male, but disgusting when done so by a female. Yet, I have to admit that I am still in love with "On the Road." I know that the women's study program of my university would not approve. What can I say? Maybe it's because this was a guy who loved cats----yes---that's my excuse.