Kerouac is Back

I’ve been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac again.  For one thing I stumbled, a year or more back, on an audio book of On The Road.  Now it seems there are actually three audio books of that novel, plus an audio book of the “original scroll,” the version that Kerouac famously typed onto a single long roll of teletype paper, with no divisions into chapters or even paragraphs, using the real names of everyone who had inspired the novel.

I’ve now listened to all four of those audio books, several times each.  They each have their own personalities in part, of course, because of the different personalities of the readers.

One reason I’ve been so interested in these audio books is because On The Road has finally been made into a film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and was then released in much of the world—but not yet in the United States.  It is scheduled for release on December 21^st “in selected theaters” (is this why some people believe the world is ending?)  Hopefully “selected theaters” includes at least one theater in San Francisco—and hopefully one in the San Jose area.  I don’t really want to have to fly to Los Angeles or even further to see it.  Of course, I could simply wait…  But what would Dean Moriarty do??

Meanwhile, several women who knew Kerouac have written memoirs—I haven’t read any of them yet.  How wide should I let my Kerouac obsession roam?

New films and books inspired by Kerouac say something about a writer who many people had written off by around 1962.  Kerouac is enjoying a renaissance, including publication of several early works—novels that turn out to be more interesting and well-written than I’d anticipated.

And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, co-written with William Burroughs, is now available not only in print but as an audio book itself.  That’s pretty good for a novel written in the early 1940s, unpublished for over sixty years, and dismissed by one of its own co-authors (William Burroughs) as a “not very distinguished work.”

I was expecting it to be “not very distinguished,” found myself surprised at the quality of the writing, and listened to the audio book twice.  Very enjoyable.  I was only a little disappointed at the abruptness of the ending.

Kerouac’s very first completed novel, The Sea Is My Brother has now also been published.  Written only a year or two before Hippos, it is not nearly as well written; but it is enjoyable and interesting enough that I have started reading it for the second time, almost immediately after my initial read.  Certain stylistic points annoy me, and, like Hippos, it ends rather abruptly; but enjoyable all the same.

I originally intended to review them immediately.  I did have initial gut reactions.  “Stylistic patterns in The Sea Is My Brother annoy me.”  “The Sea is My Brother simply stops; it doesn’t really end.”  But I’m reevaluating my initial reactions.  It’s true:  If it hadn’t been Kerouac, or Kerouac and Burroughs, I wouldn’t have read them.  But these guys had something that continues to appeal to me.

Hang on for those reviews (I’ve also just read Naked Lunch)—and watch for that U.S. opening of On The Road, the film.  Only eighteen more days.