Big Sur

I’ve been rereading Big Sur the past couple of days. The motivation for doing so is the One Fast Move or I’m Gone DVD Tori got me a while ago. It’s a documentary about Kerouac’s time at Big Sur and, I guess, the writing of the novel. Jeff Tweedy is somehow involved too, don’t ask me how yet. I want to finish the book before watching the movie.

I was trying to remember, and it’s been somewhere between eight and ten years since I last read Big Sur. It’s been a long time since I’ve seriously read Kerouac at all, really, aside from On the Road and some of his poems, though I read Town and the City last year sometime.

It’s satisfying to see how much I still like Kerouac, despite a decade going by since I first grew obsessed. Other writers haven’t had the same longevity with me. See my dwindling interest in Bukowski. See my complete abandonment of interest in Palahniuk. Let’s see how many of these Scandinavian writers I’ve been reading lately will still hold my interest ten years from now…

Lowell, MA

We did a little traveling this weekend and checked out Lowell, MA. It’s about 20 minutes north of Boston. A former mill-town, and birthplace of Jack Kerouac. (Yes, I’m talking about Kerouac again.) Thought I’d share some pictures.

They have a memorial park named for Kerouac there, with these strange granite pillars inscribed with quotations from his various books. According to a sign at the entrance of the park, the pillars are in a mandala pattern, “which symbolizes the universe.” Really, they reminded me of the obelisks from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that’s me.

What really surprised me about Lowell was that we didn’t see any corny Kerouac-tourist stuff. We passed a Barnes and Noble that had t-shirts for sale with his face on them, but that was it. There’s no cheesy Kerouac Cafe. No Kerouac Car Wash.  There are supposedly some bars in the town with signs inside claiming “Jack drank here,” but that’s about it.

Then again, maybe it’s an untapped market. Note to self: Move to Lowell and open the Kerouac Car Wash; become millionaire.

There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito

Back in 2007, Viking published the “original scroll” version of On The Road. I finally got around to reading it this past week, and have been thinking about it a lot, hence this post. Keep in mind, Jack Kerouac saved/ruined my life, depending on your perspective.

Anyway, for the uninitiated: Kerouac wrote the whole book over a period of a few weeks, on one long scroll of paper (some kind of weird art paper that he had to cut to size and then tape together, apparently). He then hands the manuscript over to his publishers, who cut out most of the dirty words and sex/drug references. The 1957 published version is the one we all know and love.

Fifty years later, Viking decides to mark the occasion and make some extra cash by publishing the “original scroll” version of the book. I, of course, have to  get a copy (it was a gift, actually).

It’s different, and it’s not. Obviously, it’s the same story. In a way, it’s like hearing someone tell a story, and then hearing the same story told again, but slightly drunk this time.

What becomes interesting is thinking about the changes that were made from this version to the 1957 published version, and what that means. The extended scene in the Mexican whorehouse was okay to include in the ’57 version, but not the scene in which Neal Cassady’s wife reports that she “loves his big cock.” Feminist interpretation…go.

Something else interesting: the complete original scroll is lost to us. The last few feet of the scroll are missing, ripped off. There’s a handwritten note at the end of the scroll that reads, “DOG ATE (Potchky-a-dog).” Lucien Carr’s dog chewed up the end of the manuscript. The editor tried to piece together what the original ending might have looked like, from other drafts and notes and the 1957 version, but still, you don’t get the real thing, which would seem to be the main reason to be reading this. Not sure how to elaborate on that, or whether I want to.

My favorite part of this, however, is the first line. The editor of this version decided to include the obvious typo, as he felt it “so beautifully suggests the sound of a car misfiring before starting up for a long journey.” The line:

I first met met Neal not long after my father died…

Kerouac in the UK

I stumbled across a British paperback edition of On the Road from 1986 the other day, and was kind of amused. Check out the cover, for example: Dustin Hoffman stars as Sal Paradise. You can’t see in the scan, but his license plate is BOP-651. Clever. The back of the book describes him as “an unholy innocent abroad.” My favorite part, though, is the first sentence of the author bio for Kerouac:

Jack Kerouac was the descendant of Breton Canadians who married with Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians.

Bet you didn’t know that.