thinking maybe its finally time to dive into his discog. is he any good? overrated?
>his discog
>>7748594
Hail Eris
On the Road is a good novel but I wasn't able to appreciate it until I'd nearly completed it.
Haven't read anything else from him
On The Road is good but when I was young and somewhat like the characters myself I thought it was shit and only was able to appreciate it years later after I was no longer a pretentious ass.
>>7748594
im sorry, do you also call out someone that says they collect "vinyls"? fucked up a technical term.
it's garbage. r/books tier drivel, like all of the beats
>>7748620
point me to some good authors then? im open to anything here
Novels are lightweight stuff but his spoken word prose is very nice, he's got great delivery
on the road and dharma bums are huge formative novels for me
dharma bums led me to gary snyder's excellent collection of poetry "mountains and rivers without end"
subterraneans is decent as well. His prose style is very much like a manic ernest hemingway. kind of a just the facts style but with some beautiful descriptive passages thrown in. I think Kerouac is worth the read, should also check out Burroughs if you haven't already.
the beats don't get nearly enough credit imo
>>7748594
So I become a pope either way?
Is On The Road 'original scroll' the one with the characters original names, ie. Kerouac is himself and not Paradise etc.?
>>7748625
check out DFW, Joyce and Pynchon.
don't waste your time with the rest of the reddit rabble
>>7748578
overrated. ok reading if you don't have anything else on hand
objectively best review of on the road and kerouac in general and perfectly explains why you should disregard everyone who says on the road is such an inspirational novel
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/kerouacs_on_the_road.html
>>7748639
*slow claps*
*steps out of the shadows*
Heh... not bad, kid. Not bad at all. Your meme, I mean. It's not bad. A good first attempt. It's plenty dank... I can tell it's got some thought behind it... lots of quotable material...
But memeing isn't all sunshine and rainbows, kid. You're skilled... that much I can tell. But do you have what it takes to be a Memester? To join those esteemed meme ranks? To call yourself a member of the Ruseman's Corps?
Memeing takes talent, that much is true. But more than that it takes heart. The world-class Memesters - I mean the big guys, like Johnny Hammersticks and Billy Kuahana - they're out there day and night, burning the midnight meme-oil, working tirelessly to craft that next big meme.
And you know what, kid? 99 times out of a hundred, that new meme fails. Someone dismisses it as bait, or says it's "tryhard," or ignores it as they copy/paste the latest shitpost copypasta dreamt up by those sorry excuses for cut-rate memers over at reddit. The Meme Game is rough, kid, and I don't just mean the one you just lost :^). It's a rough business, and for every artisan meme you craft in your meme bakery, some cocksucker at 9gag has a picture of a duck or some shit that a million different Johnny No-Names will attach a milion different captions to.
Chin up, kid. Don't get all mopey on me. You've got skill. You've got talent. You just need to show your drive.
See you on the boards...
>>7748979
idk dude's theoretically not wrong but the thing about literature is that experience of it is open to interpretation and you can't tell someone they've experienced something wrong so the premise of this review is inherently fucking stupid
>>7748991
>that experience of it is open to interpretation
some interpretrations are more superior than others tho
like saying "ulysses" is a bad book because the writing and the stream of consciousness is occasionally hard to follow, that's legitimately trash interpretration and opinion that reveals more about the reviewer than of the work
>>7749014
true, but saying on the road can't be a formative experience for someone is fucking stupid because the reviewer never lived that person's life. That road trip thing was quintessential for some people, cathartic even.
>>7749024
it can be a formative experience yes, but it's a shit formative experience, that's my point
>>7749037
idk how you can call it shit if you haven't done it or felt those emotions but eh whatever
dharma bums is the better book anyways
>>7749040
how do you think about guys whose formative experience was discovering limp bizkit and linkin park?
>>7749047
should kill themselves desu senpai
I'm reading 'The Sea Is My Brother' at the moment, and really enjoying it, though I am a big Kerouac fan. His important books are 'On The Road', 'Dharma Bums' and 'Doctor Sax', but 'Big Sur' is a lot of fun.
His novels are mostly semi-autobiographical and are great portraits of the time and mentality that accompanied young men in post war America. I think the Beats are valuable reading for that reason alone. Though the recurring themes of alcoholic madness and belonging nowhere are pretty interesting.
Because so much of his work is just him getting fucked up on his way to San Francisco I find his prose and Buddhist realisations carry the story a bit. His major writing influences were Hemingway and Wolfe and jazz and amphetamines, and his prose style really reflects that.
There's no doubt that he isn't 'high lit' and for that reason he gets shit upon by a lot of the people on this board, but he's a lot of fun and indisputably an incredibly iconic American author, which has been helped along by how quotable passages of his books are. So, sure, a lot of his modern fans are 16 girls that think they're special Dean Moriarty snowflakes, but he's still pretty fucking fun to read.
>>7749134
i wouldn't call Big Sur a lot of fun. But it is his best book
Handsome. Alright guy. Not worth reading.
On the Road was a good, fun read if you have nothing better to do/read. I found it very hard to relate to any of the main characters, because they're all completely trash human beings, but I think that's meant to be the point (similar, in that sense, to Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Given Sal is meant to be based on Kerouac himself, I can only assume either Kerouac hates himself, or he's so comfortable in his own skin that he's able to write about all of his personality flaws.
>>7748607
I found the same thing. First attempted On the Road when I was younger, and found it rambling and self-serving. Tried it again years later and actually liked it. I then went on to read more by him, but found his other books patchy. Dharma Bums and Big Sur are solid though.
>>7749210
>using sitcoms as a point of reference in the discussion of literature
>>7748578
I haven't read his books because I don't read existential-style self-obsessed ramblings with no plot. Did read the Big Sur a bit.
But I do like his style. I think it is one of America's gifts to the world. Read his interview in the Paris review and he says that when he was young he would write and rewrite sentences, trying to churn out the perfect prose. Then threw it all away because it was FEELING, and not some smartass wordsmithy, that you conveyed to writers.
I may be biased, but I am deeply partial towards authors who've been able transfer their feelings, turning their readers into imperfect copies of themselves for the briefest time. Sartre is another guy who did that to me - I could see him as the manifestation of all the contempt and melancholy within myself as I read Words. Herzog was another such novel, until it devolved into the life and times of American Jewry in the second half atleast.
>>7749385
>And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4260/the-art-of-fiction-no-41-jack-kerouac
>>7748594
hail eris
He's just a poor man's Henry Miller.
>>7749294
I don't give a fuck what you think is in some way below literature. Pretending literature exists in a separate universe untainted by other cultural practices only serves to devalue literature. The beat generation were a bunch of freeloading hippies, yet here we are discussing Kerouac on a literature board.
I love Kerouac. I can see why some people would dismiss his style as 'bad writing' in the sense that it isn't crafted, but once you manage to 'get' his idea of creating a grand rambling uncensored confession about his life it becomes a lot more interesting and valuable. I can't think of a more sincere and enthusiastic writer than him, even in his pretension he seems endearingly sincere and transparent, like when he suddenly tries to worm in a namedrop of Goethe or Nietzsche or things like that, or how he goes on about Buddhism in a way that is mostly just his own brand of chopstick Catholicism repackaged.
I think anyone who reads Kerouac should at least read On The Road, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur, not only because it gives a good view of different aspects of him but because it describes a character progression that I think a lot of people go through, starting out with the enthusiastic engagement with the world, the late youth idealism and seeking for something greater than it when it rings empty and finally a sort of tender disillusionment.
>>7749515
I think one of the things that makes Kerouac interesting is that he is fundamentally a small town Catholic boy who tags along with all these newly emerging bohemian types, whereas Miller is much more in the middle of it being the loud mouth edgy New Yorker and all. Kerouac has a naivety and piousness that is constantly at odds with the people he engages with, making him sort of a bridge between the 'hip' and the 'square' world.
>>7748955
>DFW
dropped
>>7748938
> Is On The Road 'original scroll' the one with the characters original names, ie. Kerouac is himself and not Paradise etc.?
Yes, it also has the homo stuff added back in.
The scroll is the way to go.
>>7749134
>'Big Sur' is a lot of fun.
Surely you must be joking.
It's extremely depressing.
>woah man 6 billion roadtrips every single day man we are all awful people which pretty much should invalidate any message this book has but were too self absorbed to figure that out
>>7749528
You sure sound miffed for someone who doesn't give a fuck.
I've only read On the Road and I liked it, but I feel like I have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy the style. To me it reads like a blur and I have to be prepared for it.
>>7749611
Right-o. Well i did read that one. It wasn't as great as i expected, but enjoyable.
