Jack Kerouac and the Childhood Art of Fantasy Football
I have always had a difficult and uncomfortable relationship with the work of Jack Kerouac.
Even when I was what observers would have identified and described as an "impressionable" youth prone to literary fads, carrying a battered copy of "On the Road" in my pale, milky hand, a battered copy that was gaining in visibility if it could be waved within the promiscuous radius of half-closed, dreamy, cannabis-occluded eyes of New Age girls.
I forced Kerouac's fake hipster psychodramas and irresponsible brotherhood antics down my throat, balking at the fayre trying too hard to be hip. In fact, by the time I started reading Kerouac, his “counterculture” jitters had long since waned. It now sounded a bit cheesy, a bit labored, like your dad was recounting his first experimental try with LSD.
Art by C harbak DiptaThe zany, soul-seeking goofy figures who posed as characters in the densely packed pages of prose of The Father of the Beat Generation were far too offensively indulgent to my taste - most characters created I want to gouge my eyes out of their sockets: thoughtless wasters spouting pseudo-philosophy, misquoting Nietzsche and Jung to justify their own aimless dissolution and evasion of responsibility. was not that I suffered from a curiously misplaced puritanism, but on the contrary, I was convulsed by the realization that, some 50 years after their compositi On initial, Kerouac and his fellow Beat travelers were just not gratuitously and promiscuously rebellious as I expected them to be. The whole thing felt like a funny parody of something much more racy, much more exotically exciting, but which now existed only as a trace, like the lingering scent of a joint hastily hidden in a studio studio. student.
Nevertheless, I plodded through impenetrable phony Buddhist wedges, hoping beyond hope that maybe it was all really mysterious and abstruse and that if I read enough of it I would discover the key. of mystery. The rosetta stone of spontaneous prose was suddenly revealing to me—spontaneously and without all the algorithmic verbal backtracking of nonsense-talking jazz—the secrets that Kerouac had buried and sown so tightly in his sentences. After all, the cool cat Cognoscenti affected a conscious familiarity with the genius of the man and most of them couldn't even spell Kerouac, let alone read him. It couldn't be so elusive, I told myself, but then I was baffled by the sheer inane mediocrity of the poetry, followed closely by Big Sur's promising beginnings and absurd meanderings. I had to lay down the weapon of my intellect. I gave up on Kerouac and his mind-blowing Hip hieroglyphs.
By pure chance, I came across...
I have always had a difficult and uncomfortable relationship with the work of Jack Kerouac.
Even when I was what observers would have identified and described as an "impressionable" youth prone to literary fads, carrying a battered copy of "On the Road" in my pale, milky hand, a battered copy that was gaining in visibility if it could be waved within the promiscuous radius of half-closed, dreamy, cannabis-occluded eyes of New Age girls.
I forced Kerouac's fake hipster psychodramas and irresponsible brotherhood antics down my throat, balking at the fayre trying too hard to be hip. In fact, by the time I started reading Kerouac, his “counterculture” jitters had long since waned. It now sounded a bit cheesy, a bit labored, like your dad was recounting his first experimental try with LSD.
Art by C harbak DiptaThe zany, soul-seeking goofy figures who posed as characters in the densely packed pages of prose of The Father of the Beat Generation were far too offensively indulgent to my taste - most characters created I want to gouge my eyes out of their sockets: thoughtless wasters spouting pseudo-philosophy, misquoting Nietzsche and Jung to justify their own aimless dissolution and evasion of responsibility. was not that I suffered from a curiously misplaced puritanism, but on the contrary, I was convulsed by the realization that, some 50 years after their compositi On initial, Kerouac and his fellow Beat travelers were just not gratuitously and promiscuously rebellious as I expected them to be. The whole thing felt like a funny parody of something much more racy, much more exotically exciting, but which now existed only as a trace, like the lingering scent of a joint hastily hidden in a studio studio. student.
Nevertheless, I plodded through impenetrable phony Buddhist wedges, hoping beyond hope that maybe it was all really mysterious and abstruse and that if I read enough of it I would discover the key. of mystery. The rosetta stone of spontaneous prose was suddenly revealing to me—spontaneously and without all the algorithmic verbal backtracking of nonsense-talking jazz—the secrets that Kerouac had buried and sown so tightly in his sentences. After all, the cool cat Cognoscenti affected a conscious familiarity with the genius of the man and most of them couldn't even spell Kerouac, let alone read him. It couldn't be so elusive, I told myself, but then I was baffled by the sheer inane mediocrity of the poetry, followed closely by Big Sur's promising beginnings and absurd meanderings. I had to lay down the weapon of my intellect. I gave up on Kerouac and his mind-blowing Hip hieroglyphs.
By pure chance, I came across...
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