so dizzy i don't know how to get straight
FOR MY OWN REFERENCE: FINISHED ON 31 JULY 2008
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Or, as I came to think of it, 'the stoned and drunk lj entry that never ends.'
I felt like I was reading this forever, so when I came to part five and saw that I had only five pages to go, I said - out loud - "Thank god." And when I finished those five pages I said, "OH my god." Yet again I've read a book where the effort that went into finishing it - to keeping up the necessary concentration levels in a morass of boredom - far exceeded any enjoyment gained by so doing. And I didn't enjoy this even slightly. In fact hurt my eyeeeeesssss.
At the beginning I was mad at this book. Oh, I was so mad. Honestly? I was biased against it just from the blurb - how I hate those things - because I seriously detest literary drug-taking. You could say it's a sure-fire squick of mine. The only druggies I want to see are reformed ones, or ones who die in the end. Nothing about On the Road enticed me over to the side of the druggies. Clearly I have the wrong kind of brain. (No corticobasal degeneration, for one thing.)
Some quote from the cover said: 'It made me yearn for fresh experience.' That's just it: the last thing I'd want, even beyond eating raw eels or setting my hair on fire, is to have the kind of experiences described in the book. The most basic of those - hitching rides to places you're going to for the hell of it - horrified me. I never leave the house without knowing exactly where I'm going, how long I'll be, and how I'm getting back. I certainly have a touch of the OCD about me. But I'd rather be on the highest dose of imipramine than be anything like Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty.
Despite that, my anger fizzled out towards the end. Mainly because I was skimming over the endless Paragraphs of Stupid so I'd finally get it the fuck over with. I've never before read a book where there's so much reference to talking and so little dialogue.
The story is told from a first-person POV, which can be tricky - at least for me, in the sense that I come to equate the 'I' of the narrative with the author, as opposed to the narrator. For all intents and purposes Sal and Jack are the same person.
It's dreadfully written, aside from every consideration about the actual content of the story. There're paragraphs and paragraphs of description about, like, fucking HORN players. At no point does Sal/Jack bother to sell the reader on the amazingness of horn players; it's assumed that of course I love horn players! And jazz! Otherwise I wouldn't be reading this book! Also, he calls music 'bop.' I MEAN SERIOUSLY. There must have been a whole five minutes in history when it was cool to call music bop, after which people woke up from their dope haze and realised their horrible mistake. Jack took those five minutes and turned them into a whole book. I have serious doubts about the authenticity of this book in emblemising everything that was cool about a generation. Any generation.
(don't even get me started on 'tea')
The question that must be asked is: was jazz ever cool? In the way that rock and roll was cool, in the way that punk was cool, in the way that hip-hop was cool? I think not. Mainly because, I imagine, FUCKING HORN PLAYERS. I just don't CARE about their spit, I'm sorry.
There's no effort made to round out any of the characters. Dean Moriarty is a saint and an angel, huh? Excuse me while I BARF. Kerouac clearly graduated from the Stephanie Meyer school of characterisation: I say it, therefore it must be true! Dean was a total dick. I have no sympathy for men who fool around on their wives and have babies with no consideration for their welfare. Granted, the women must take equal responsibility for this, but in the fifties it was probably more of a given that the man you married was supposed to stick around and support you. It's not like the career woman thing was due to take off for oh, another THIRTY YEARS. I'm pretty sure women couldn't even go to Harvard till sometime in the seventies.
Speaking of, though, half the book is a tract to the ideal woman, who waits on her man 'hand, foot and finger' (to quote Charlotte Church, who is clearly a time-travelling alien from Dean Moriarty's BRAIN). The second page started the ball rolling:
Dean [...] decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor.
This, mark you, after Dean and Sal and a bunch of their mates stayed up all night, drinking and smoking and generally trashing the place. I just can't get behind the idea of one person cleaning another person's mess, regardless of who the people in question are. It gave me a good heads-up as to what I could expect from the rest of the book. Halfway through I stopping marking passages of hate to quote and literally gave up in disgust; there are just too many. But here's some of the prime examples:
'You got any money?'
[...]
'I know where I can get some. [...] Anywhere. You can always folly a man down an alley, can't you?'
'Isn't this great?' Tim Grey kept saying. 'Using the opera stars' bathroom and towels and shaving lotion and electric razors.'
I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it. [In his place of work, which he regarded as a free buffet. Riiiight.]
There's this endless sullen sense of entitlement from everyone in the book. They do absolutely nothing with their lives except drink, fuck and get high, yet they expect the world to be handed to them on a silver platter. Maybe I have an old man's perspective on the world, but that shit just don't fly. I tried to figure if I was jealous of their free and easy ways (and sexually transmitted diseases, and cirrhosis, and gynaecomastia, and COPD, and hepatitis). Maybe I'd like my life to be a little more hedonistic, but if the price you pay is becoming Dean Moriarty, then no. These people are the worst kind of scabs on society. It made my blood boil when these fucking scavengers stole cars or ice cream or towels that other people worked their asses off to earn, to buy. This is no Robin Hood scenario. This is stealing from the hard-working to give to the bloody useless.
...always covered with butts and spit and they give a feeling of sadness that only bus stations have.
At least bus stations are cleaner now, I guess.
Sex [...] is beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing.
[...]
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
The thing that horrifies me most about this passage is that people might have read the latter part and gone, 'Why yes! He's so right!' without copping the fact that Sal - the hero - couldn't be arsed to employ that ethos himself. As long as he got his jollies, he didn't care. He felt a tad guilty and tried to justify it as a failure on the part of AMERICA, when in fact his dick was a bit too trigger happy. That's some beautiful projection right there.
He even admits his own denial - too late in the book for me to be pleased, but still.
'Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don't you see that? I don't want it to be and it can't be and it won't be.'
Let me introduce you to this word. It's called NO.
I swear to god, everything is someone else's fault! Look:
I got drunk. I drank so much I had to go to the men's room every two minutes [...] Everything was falling apart. [...] Remi would never talk to me again.
HEY HEY MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE GOT DRUNK ALL OVER HIS BELOVED STEPFATHER? HOW 'BOUT THAT SELF-CONTROL?
The woman prowled upstairs; she threatened to call the police. 'Oh, shut up, you old bag!' yelled Greb. I wondered how he could live with her like this.
I wondered how SHE could live with HIM like this. She owns the goddamn fucking house, she's completely entitled to be annoyed when her shiftless useless loser of a nephew throws a party without her consent or even asking her beforehand.
She was determined to catch up with Ed because she loved him. I went upstairs and told Big Ed. He sat in the chair with a worried look, an angel of a man, actually.
At this point I started wondering if Sal was ACTUALLY delusional - to feel that a man who married a woman to get a hundred bucks off her, then dumped her in a motel when she wanted to spend said money on starting their life together, could be called an 'angel'; or if Jack was, to feel any sane reader could believe it. Either way, I wanted to kill them both. With my HANDS.
All the women in this book do, aside from not give Dean and Sal enough sex on tap, is cook up tremendous breakfasts. Also, no one on the Road is a woman. This is incredibly irritating; I really think any woman with an inkling of feminist ire couldn't and shouldn't find anything that's not totally reprehensible in this book. (On a side note, it really puzzles me when a woman is described as a 'feminist' or a 'card-carrying feminist'. Surely every woman is a feminist, just by virtue of being a woman? Surely every woman appreciates her own value as being at least equal, if not superior, to any given man? Surely? SURELY?)
See here, for the main gauche:
There's real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time.
Yeah, sure, if she's DEAF. I mean, what the fuck? Women are people too. Why aren't they allowed to get annoyed when you act like the shithead you are, Dean? The idea that men should never even countenance the possibility that they are at fault really, really, really ... LOOK, I JUST FROTH AT THE MOUTH. WATCH ME FROTH.
The American police are involved in a psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats.
Huh, or maybe they wants to stop people driving 110 miles an hour because that ENDANGERS THE LIVES OF OTHER ROAD USERS? Just a thought.
Bull got only fifty dollars a week [...] he spent almost that much per week on his drug habit. [...] Their food bill was the lowest in the country; they hardly ever ate; nor did the children - they never seemed to care.
THEY CARE. TRUST ME, THEY CARE. KIDS LIKE TO EAT ROUGHLY FORTY-SEVEN TIMES A DAY. AS DO I. AS DO MOST PEOPLE. BUT ESPECIALLY THE ONES WHO AREN'T DONE GROWING YET.
I SWEAR TO GOD. NOT ENOUGH CAPSLOCK IN THE WORLD.
'I love cats. I especially like the ones that squeal when I hold 'em over the bathtub.'
Darling Sal/Jack FREQUENTLY exhibits this FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING about the world, to wit: if you profess to LOVE cats, you do NOT - repeat, do NOT - hold them over a BATHTUB to make them SQUEAL.
My thought process at that point in time was approximately this: '!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'
Please bear in mind that I hate multiple exclamation marks, too.
I lugged watermelon crates over the ice floor of reefers in the blazing sun, sneezing. In God's name and under the stars, what for?
Um. Let's see.
TO MAKE MONEY, YOU FUCKING DIPSHIT.
The end was insane. It was literally like he said, "Hey, bored of this now," and just had Dean wander off the wilds of ... San Francisco. Never to be seen again, because despite Sal having been to San Francisco a million and seventy-one times, a magical forcefield called 'Kerouac's brain on drugs' stopped him doing it again ever. He should have just written 'and Sal and Dean skipped off into the sunset to have plenty of gay buttsex and mpreg babies that they used as slave labour to roll their joints for them, WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!' C'mon - I can't be the only one thinking that the only reason those two weren't fucking is that they were too stupid and/or stoned to get it.
My final comment: Kerouac, Kerouac, Kerouac. I know you suffer from multiple and varied delusions but - Jesus. You know Jesus? He wasn't born in Mexico. I am not even lying to you, dude. Bethlehem isn't so much as on the same CONTINENT as that.
Since I finished this a week ago, I've been using the phrase 'dig it' waywayway too much. KEROUAC HAS INFILTRATED MY MIND, SEND HALP
Previously, on Book Glomp 2008:
Middlemarch
Invisible Monsters (this I did not hate!)
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Love in the Time of Cholera
Oscar and Lucinda
Kim
Breakfast at Tiffany's (this I even mildly liked!)
Atonement
To the Lighthouse (this I 28% appreciated!)
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Or, as I came to think of it, 'the stoned and drunk lj entry that never ends.'
I felt like I was reading this forever, so when I came to part five and saw that I had only five pages to go, I said - out loud - "Thank god." And when I finished those five pages I said, "OH my god." Yet again I've read a book where the effort that went into finishing it - to keeping up the necessary concentration levels in a morass of boredom - far exceeded any enjoyment gained by so doing. And I didn't enjoy this even slightly. In fact hurt my eyeeeeesssss.
At the beginning I was mad at this book. Oh, I was so mad. Honestly? I was biased against it just from the blurb - how I hate those things - because I seriously detest literary drug-taking. You could say it's a sure-fire squick of mine. The only druggies I want to see are reformed ones, or ones who die in the end. Nothing about On the Road enticed me over to the side of the druggies. Clearly I have the wrong kind of brain. (No corticobasal degeneration, for one thing.)
Some quote from the cover said: 'It made me yearn for fresh experience.' That's just it: the last thing I'd want, even beyond eating raw eels or setting my hair on fire, is to have the kind of experiences described in the book. The most basic of those - hitching rides to places you're going to for the hell of it - horrified me. I never leave the house without knowing exactly where I'm going, how long I'll be, and how I'm getting back. I certainly have a touch of the OCD about me. But I'd rather be on the highest dose of imipramine than be anything like Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty.
Despite that, my anger fizzled out towards the end. Mainly because I was skimming over the endless Paragraphs of Stupid so I'd finally get it the fuck over with. I've never before read a book where there's so much reference to talking and so little dialogue.
The story is told from a first-person POV, which can be tricky - at least for me, in the sense that I come to equate the 'I' of the narrative with the author, as opposed to the narrator. For all intents and purposes Sal and Jack are the same person.
It's dreadfully written, aside from every consideration about the actual content of the story. There're paragraphs and paragraphs of description about, like, fucking HORN players. At no point does Sal/Jack bother to sell the reader on the amazingness of horn players; it's assumed that of course I love horn players! And jazz! Otherwise I wouldn't be reading this book! Also, he calls music 'bop.' I MEAN SERIOUSLY. There must have been a whole five minutes in history when it was cool to call music bop, after which people woke up from their dope haze and realised their horrible mistake. Jack took those five minutes and turned them into a whole book. I have serious doubts about the authenticity of this book in emblemising everything that was cool about a generation. Any generation.
(don't even get me started on 'tea')
The question that must be asked is: was jazz ever cool? In the way that rock and roll was cool, in the way that punk was cool, in the way that hip-hop was cool? I think not. Mainly because, I imagine, FUCKING HORN PLAYERS. I just don't CARE about their spit, I'm sorry.
There's no effort made to round out any of the characters. Dean Moriarty is a saint and an angel, huh? Excuse me while I BARF. Kerouac clearly graduated from the Stephanie Meyer school of characterisation: I say it, therefore it must be true! Dean was a total dick. I have no sympathy for men who fool around on their wives and have babies with no consideration for their welfare. Granted, the women must take equal responsibility for this, but in the fifties it was probably more of a given that the man you married was supposed to stick around and support you. It's not like the career woman thing was due to take off for oh, another THIRTY YEARS. I'm pretty sure women couldn't even go to Harvard till sometime in the seventies.
Speaking of, though, half the book is a tract to the ideal woman, who waits on her man 'hand, foot and finger' (to quote Charlotte Church, who is clearly a time-travelling alien from Dean Moriarty's BRAIN). The second page started the ball rolling:
Dean [...] decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor.
This, mark you, after Dean and Sal and a bunch of their mates stayed up all night, drinking and smoking and generally trashing the place. I just can't get behind the idea of one person cleaning another person's mess, regardless of who the people in question are. It gave me a good heads-up as to what I could expect from the rest of the book. Halfway through I stopping marking passages of hate to quote and literally gave up in disgust; there are just too many. But here's some of the prime examples:
'You got any money?'
[...]
'I know where I can get some. [...] Anywhere. You can always folly a man down an alley, can't you?'
'Isn't this great?' Tim Grey kept saying. 'Using the opera stars' bathroom and towels and shaving lotion and electric razors.'
I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it. [In his place of work, which he regarded as a free buffet. Riiiight.]
There's this endless sullen sense of entitlement from everyone in the book. They do absolutely nothing with their lives except drink, fuck and get high, yet they expect the world to be handed to them on a silver platter. Maybe I have an old man's perspective on the world, but that shit just don't fly. I tried to figure if I was jealous of their free and easy ways (and sexually transmitted diseases, and cirrhosis, and gynaecomastia, and COPD, and hepatitis). Maybe I'd like my life to be a little more hedonistic, but if the price you pay is becoming Dean Moriarty, then no. These people are the worst kind of scabs on society. It made my blood boil when these fucking scavengers stole cars or ice cream or towels that other people worked their asses off to earn, to buy. This is no Robin Hood scenario. This is stealing from the hard-working to give to the bloody useless.
...always covered with butts and spit and they give a feeling of sadness that only bus stations have.
At least bus stations are cleaner now, I guess.
Sex [...] is beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing.
[...]
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.
The thing that horrifies me most about this passage is that people might have read the latter part and gone, 'Why yes! He's so right!' without copping the fact that Sal - the hero - couldn't be arsed to employ that ethos himself. As long as he got his jollies, he didn't care. He felt a tad guilty and tried to justify it as a failure on the part of AMERICA, when in fact his dick was a bit too trigger happy. That's some beautiful projection right there.
He even admits his own denial - too late in the book for me to be pleased, but still.
'Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don't you see that? I don't want it to be and it can't be and it won't be.'
Let me introduce you to this word. It's called NO.
I swear to god, everything is someone else's fault! Look:
I got drunk. I drank so much I had to go to the men's room every two minutes [...] Everything was falling apart. [...] Remi would never talk to me again.
HEY HEY MAYBE YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE GOT DRUNK ALL OVER HIS BELOVED STEPFATHER? HOW 'BOUT THAT SELF-CONTROL?
The woman prowled upstairs; she threatened to call the police. 'Oh, shut up, you old bag!' yelled Greb. I wondered how he could live with her like this.
I wondered how SHE could live with HIM like this. She owns the goddamn fucking house, she's completely entitled to be annoyed when her shiftless useless loser of a nephew throws a party without her consent or even asking her beforehand.
She was determined to catch up with Ed because she loved him. I went upstairs and told Big Ed. He sat in the chair with a worried look, an angel of a man, actually.
At this point I started wondering if Sal was ACTUALLY delusional - to feel that a man who married a woman to get a hundred bucks off her, then dumped her in a motel when she wanted to spend said money on starting their life together, could be called an 'angel'; or if Jack was, to feel any sane reader could believe it. Either way, I wanted to kill them both. With my HANDS.
All the women in this book do, aside from not give Dean and Sal enough sex on tap, is cook up tremendous breakfasts. Also, no one on the Road is a woman. This is incredibly irritating; I really think any woman with an inkling of feminist ire couldn't and shouldn't find anything that's not totally reprehensible in this book. (On a side note, it really puzzles me when a woman is described as a 'feminist' or a 'card-carrying feminist'. Surely every woman is a feminist, just by virtue of being a woman? Surely every woman appreciates her own value as being at least equal, if not superior, to any given man? Surely? SURELY?)
See here, for the main gauche:
There's real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time.
Yeah, sure, if she's DEAF. I mean, what the fuck? Women are people too. Why aren't they allowed to get annoyed when you act like the shithead you are, Dean? The idea that men should never even countenance the possibility that they are at fault really, really, really ... LOOK, I JUST FROTH AT THE MOUTH. WATCH ME FROTH.
The American police are involved in a psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats.
Huh, or maybe they wants to stop people driving 110 miles an hour because that ENDANGERS THE LIVES OF OTHER ROAD USERS? Just a thought.
Bull got only fifty dollars a week [...] he spent almost that much per week on his drug habit. [...] Their food bill was the lowest in the country; they hardly ever ate; nor did the children - they never seemed to care.
THEY CARE. TRUST ME, THEY CARE. KIDS LIKE TO EAT ROUGHLY FORTY-SEVEN TIMES A DAY. AS DO I. AS DO MOST PEOPLE. BUT ESPECIALLY THE ONES WHO AREN'T DONE GROWING YET.
I SWEAR TO GOD. NOT ENOUGH CAPSLOCK IN THE WORLD.
'I love cats. I especially like the ones that squeal when I hold 'em over the bathtub.'
Darling Sal/Jack FREQUENTLY exhibits this FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING about the world, to wit: if you profess to LOVE cats, you do NOT - repeat, do NOT - hold them over a BATHTUB to make them SQUEAL.
My thought process at that point in time was approximately this: '!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'
Please bear in mind that I hate multiple exclamation marks, too.
I lugged watermelon crates over the ice floor of reefers in the blazing sun, sneezing. In God's name and under the stars, what for?
Um. Let's see.
TO MAKE MONEY, YOU FUCKING DIPSHIT.
The end was insane. It was literally like he said, "Hey, bored of this now," and just had Dean wander off the wilds of ... San Francisco. Never to be seen again, because despite Sal having been to San Francisco a million and seventy-one times, a magical forcefield called 'Kerouac's brain on drugs' stopped him doing it again ever. He should have just written 'and Sal and Dean skipped off into the sunset to have plenty of gay buttsex and mpreg babies that they used as slave labour to roll their joints for them, WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!' C'mon - I can't be the only one thinking that the only reason those two weren't fucking is that they were too stupid and/or stoned to get it.
My final comment: Kerouac, Kerouac, Kerouac. I know you suffer from multiple and varied delusions but - Jesus. You know Jesus? He wasn't born in Mexico. I am not even lying to you, dude. Bethlehem isn't so much as on the same CONTINENT as that.
Since I finished this a week ago, I've been using the phrase 'dig it' waywayway too much. KEROUAC HAS INFILTRATED MY MIND, SEND HALP
Previously, on Book Glomp 2008:
Middlemarch
Invisible Monsters (this I did not hate!)
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Love in the Time of Cholera
Oscar and Lucinda
Kim
Breakfast at Tiffany's (this I even mildly liked!)
Atonement
To the Lighthouse (this I 28% appreciated!)