Wanderlust Read: On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Default / 22/06/2018

Kerouac’s On the Road has the combination of a poet’s unrelenting free-form lyricism in blank verse—freed from the contrived structure of traditionally staid writing as well as at least some of the formula of conventional storytelling—with the unapologetic mania of youth untethered, unbound by the pages in the present moment of being On the Road, the terrible and terribly beautiful mania of the sleep-deprived, self-medicating, tramp who’s always looking over the next hidden, but beckoning, horizon: IT’s one part Ginsburg Howl, one part Whitman YAWP, and one part Louis Armstrong. And while some plain and plainly busy folk may complain about the overwrought detail, the unfiltered flow of adjectives and adverbs, as well as the sparse use of periods and paragraph breaks, the breakneck pace of the words spilling on to the page like data populating a phone screen many degrees of magnitude too fast to read in real-time—wouldn’t that be nice, even as amazing as our intuitive thinking can be—wouldn’t it be nice to read as fast as a small computer?—while some may complain about occasionally losing the thread of an extended stream of consciousness thought—there is still something piercing and indelible about the writing….even for those who struggle…