ON THE ROAD

April 1, 1787

By three in the morning,  it was blowing a gale.  Half awake, half asleep, I kept thinking about my drama.  On deck there was a great commotion as the sails were taken in.  The sea was high and the boat was tossed and rolled.  Towards dawn the sky cleared and the storm subsided.  Ustica was definitely on our left.  The sailors pointed out a large turtle swimming in the distance, and through our telescopes we could follow its living dot quite clearly.  By noon we could make out the promontories and bays of the Sicilian coast, but the ship had fallen considerably to leeward.  Now and then we tacked.  In the afternoon we came closer to the shore, where the west coast, from Cape Lilibeo to Cape Gallo, lay in the bright sunshine.  A school of dolphins accompanied our ship on both sides of the prow, always darting ahead.  It was delightful to watch them swimming through the transparent waves and often leaping clean out of the water, so that their fins and the spines along their backs made an iridescent play of green and gold.

NOTE:  I picked up another copy of Goethe's Italian Journey  (1786-1788) last week because it's such a wonderful and attractive book in the North Point Press edition and I thought someone I know might enjoy receiving it for Christmas if I don't decide to hoard it.  

I no longer read German without great difficulty and W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer's translation really makes you feel the immediacy of Goethe's road and sea trip across the two hundred-thirty year span.

I thought of it last night while watching Hollywood's rendering of On The Road, Jack Kerouac's novel, from a couple of years ago, which was simply, unbelievably, ghastly.   What on earth were they thinking?  Deader than a doornail and exceedingly unpleasant.  I could have showed them how to make the movie -- no, two movies: an initial Hollywood "beauty treatment" effort (which would get knocked but be popular) and a grittier remake (which would wow the critics and cause them to reconsider and effectively repromote the first picture) -- at acceptable budget and quality levels.  A few years later they could be packaged as a two-in-one DVD set.  

If it isn't too late, I'm available to discuss this, but unfortunately it probably is. Time waits for no-one &c.

Jack Kerouac -- Happy 90th Birthday -- From Boston Daily (March 8, 2012)

by Matthew Reed Baker



    New Englanders have long revered sober, canonical writers like Alcott, Hawthorne, Frost, Thoreau, and Updike. Which may be why we’ve tended to ignore Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation icon and poet, and let San Francisco and New York claim him as their own. Though Kerouac was born in the blue-collar Lowell neighborhood of Centralville, today one of the only remembrances of him in that city is the small and modest Kerouac Park, which sits two blocks off the main drag, Merrimack Street. Kerouac would have turned 90 this month, so as a posthumous birthday present, it’s time we put him in the pantheon of our region’s great authors.


    Why isn’t he there already? Maybe it’s because we like our writing pristine to the point of prim. Kerouac’s was messy, decadent, and urbane, and he wrote about messed-up, indulgent people — or “fornicators and masturbators,” as a Lowell housewife once complained to his face. But the main reason is that most of us know only one of his novels, On the Road, which ignored New England. Instead, it described road trips across the U.S. during the late 1940s, as Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, sought a new way to live that was wild, free, and poetic. On the Road made Kerouac a worldwide pop-culture figure. It was translated into dozens of languages, and has inspired generations of free thinkers ever since.

   Famous as it is, On the Road represents just a fragment of Kerouac’s career. His real life’s work was a series of autobiographical novels — more than a dozen in total — collectively titled The Duluoz Legend. Writing about New England, Kerouac is less the dissolute poet of fame than a simple man reflecting on his insecure youth. He chronicles the death of his nine-year-old brother from rheumatic fever; the 1936 flood that devastated the Merrimack River Valley; high school football games and track meets; and carousing in Scollay Square, Boston’s old red-light district. These memories from the 1930s and 1940s inform the books about his later days, when he’d moved far away. They speak more about modern New England life than Thoreau’s ruminations at Walden Pond. Kerouac’s work also establishes him as the region’s foremost French-Canadian writer, detailing the life of a community long overshadowed by Italians, Irish, and WASPy Brahmins.


     Lowell is honoring Kerouac's birthday with a weekend of events, but let's expand that celebration statewide.  We're declaring March Jack Kerouac Month:  Pick up a copy of The Town and the City — his first novel, covering life in Massachusetts — grab a bottle of wine, and dig in.


See also: (March 8-11,  Lowellcelebrateskerouac.org).