March, 2015
I saw this earlier tonight. The thing I found most interesting was that Jack Kerouac wrote a book called The Portable Jack Kerouac in which he discusses how to write. I would like to find a copy of that somewhere. I have read On the Road of course, and now I am reading Desolation Angels. I love his writing style. It is so action-filled and thought-provoking while keeping a free flowing, frenetic pace that is never boring.
I don’t think the guy who made this video will ever come close to writing anything as moving or exciting as Kerouac did. He just seems too much like a “square” to use a Beat Generation term. I think this guy has a hard time comprehending what Kerouac’s writing was about much less understanding Kerouac himself. He just seems to look at the words and not get the meaning behind them. That’s just a subjective opinion of mine though.
I have written lately about reading Desolation Angels and I believe it deserves to be better known than it is. It is a beautiful work in many ways. Sometimes Kerouac will be describing an event or a scene then, at the very end, he wraps it up with a breathtaking denouement of profound depth. To really comprehand Kerouac’s work, at least in Desolation Angels, one must have a feel for the spiritual and spirituality that he is trying to get across. If you have this, then you will see words, per se, as just superficial representations of the spiritual world that Kerouac is portraying. So help me, I cannot think of this YouTuber’s name, but I think his problem with Kerouac is that he sees just the words, the superficial representations, and not the spiritual universe behind them.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 