Each spring, around the time the jonquils bloom and the peepers resume their annual chorus, I re-read “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. I started in the spring of 1980. I don’t know why I picked it off my bookshelf back then - just impulse or whatever. I had read it at least 2-3 times by then. It was my favorite book, in fact. I read it that day in 1980, in one sitting, and though my eyes were tired, my mind was certainly not. I felt invigorated, energized and even a slight bit manic. I remember thinking - this is like a mental spring tonic, I need to do this every year. And now, 42 years later, my tradition (obsession?) carries on. I will note that I’ve NEVER SINCE read it in one sitting…that would be nuts.
With March 12, 2022 marking the 100th birthday of Msr. Kerouac, I decided to extend the journey to include his entire canon, even the poetry (not so hot, in my humble opinion, especially when it sits on the bench next to poetry sluggers such as Snyder, Ginsburg and Duncan). It would be fun to revisit old stories and characters, but also to shoot me a double-double dose of spring tonic and get me out of a winter-long creative funk.
I was introduced to the writing of Jack Kerouac during the summer of 1973 by my friend Mike. We were talking during a lunch break at work and he mentioned a cool book about zen backpackers in the High Sierra’s that he thought I would like. That book was The Dharma Bums. From there, I read “The Subterraneans” and was hooked. Funnily, it wasn’t until the third or fourth book that I read “On the Road”. Perhaps I was sneaking up on it because I subconsciously knew that - likewise for millions of young, optimistic, creative bohos - it would change the way I thought of pretty much everything.
Everyone has a coming of age book (or if they don’t, it explains a lot about them) that marks a distinct moment in their lives that the lights went on and some sort of internal calibration completes itself. Suddenly you get it. You even get what IT is, which you didn’t even know that you didn’t know. Anyway, On the Road was, to me, a multi-dimensional story that entertained me in a completely different structure, tone and soulfulness than anything I had ever read before. I understood Jack’s voice and gentle optimism.
That very same summer of 1973, my friend Dennis let me borrow a small brown paperback called “Welcome to the Monkey House” by a writer named Kurt Vonnegut. I devoured every hilarious, cynical sentence in it, and there I went, off into as many of his books as I could find. And he took his place in the curriculum of my youth.
So, it’s only fair that he joins Jack in my summer reading diet. No order or reading strategy - only what comes spontaneously (Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk). At any rate, between the two of them, I hope to gain direction and creative clarity or at least a nudge in the right direction.
