It's Not the Kerouac Marathon that Bugs Me...

...but the terrible reporting of it that drives me nuts.  So it's the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's On the Road. Nice. Fans and friends of Kerouac are "marathon-reading" the book in celebration. Fine. All good.

Yet for someone as important, as influential as Kerouac, you'd think we could get a better closing sentence:

"The stream-of-consciousness novel helped generate the Beat Generation."

I think we can all agree that using generate and Generation in the same 10-word sentence isn't ideal. A better word could have been selected.  More to the point, generate, as used in this context, doesn't really make sense. Could a novel "generate" a movement? Start, inspire, kick-off, possibly. But generate?  And since I'm being overly critical (which should no doubt give you an inside view of the wonderful world of wedding planning woes), even if a book could generate a movement, I don't believe that On the Road was it, all by itself. There were so, so many others that came before and after.  Why simplify, distill, mis-report, for the sake of a 50th anniversary reading-marathon?

Bits & Bobs:

• The Naropa Kerouac festival ends today
• The Naropa blog has some outstanding video footage of Kerouac with Hunter S. Thompson, of Kerouac singing On the Road (a douzy) and other Jack ephemera
• It strikes me as particularly odd (funny, even?) that several children's books are also titled On the Road - perhaps I will stage my own Kerouac On the Road tribute in which I will post and examine the other On the Road books that were no doubt generated by the first one...
• Ah, but now I'm just being crabby.

Comments

[Jeff]

Whoa, I thought they had audio of Kerouac and HST together. Ah well. That would have been an interesting meeting.

[callie]

Ah - too true - that's misleading. And wow - if there was video of them together...you are right it would be amazing! Sorry for the letdown. Audio of them both speaking but spliced together isn't quite the same thing, is it?