I got about five pages into On the Road once. Thanks for keeping me from wasting my time going back to it.

Are Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison remembered all that differently, though?

Yeah, I don’t see much dwelling on his brokenness and sadness. He’s remembered more for being crazy.

I haven’t read On the Road, but according to a friend of mine, in the book, Kerouac calls his mommy whenever he runs out of money.  If that’s true, that is fucking hilarious.

Shorter Amanda:

“Women are better than men.”

I think she’s onto something there actually!

Shorter Amanda:

“Women are better than men.”

I kind of came away with “Real rebellious men either have nothing to do with women, or they shoot them”.

I kid, of course.

Yeah, I don’t see much dwelling on his brokenness and sadness. He’s remembered more for being crazy.

Doesn’t he have the whole “tortured poet killed by his own genius” thing going on that fans use to excuse a musician’s jackass behavior, though?

There’s plenty of broken, delicate flower about Chet Baker, though.

In some parts of the country, Jim Morrison is more known for taking his pants off than anything else he did.

I once had a Frank Zappa CD on which he was recorded administering the Mothers of Invention Anti-Smut Loyalty Oath at one of his concerts. Apparently Jim Morrison had just whipped it out a day or two before, so the Mothers were confronted by shotgun-waving self-appointed decency police who threatened to run ‘em out of town if anything like that went on that night.

(Speaking of someone who doesn’t (seem to?) rebel against gender roles ...)

Yeah, I don’t see much dwelling on his brokenness and sadness. He’s remembered more for being crazy.

Re: Morrison, I agree wholeheartedly with Matt T.’s “tortured poet” element—which goes back to Byron, Keats, and Shelley, with maybe a twist of Baudelaire.  If anything, I’d probably say that the difference between how Morrison is remembered and how Janis Joplin is remembered is that… Janis Joplin isn’t that well remembered, as far as I can tell.  Very few women get to be canonized as that “tortured poet” type, no?  Maybe Virginia Woolf.  (I know some good 18th-century examples, but I also know that they’re not at all well-remembered, even among specialists.)

Raha suggests that female rebels, because they have to rebel against the sort of gender dynamics that you Hollywood classic male rebels would never question, are bigger rebels and more unsung ones.

Makes sense.  There has to be a sliding scale, or a degree-of-difficulty factor, to recognize the guts it requires for many women to make even small acts of rebellion.

Which fictional characters does she discuss?  I’m wondering how Raha handles fictional female rebels created by male writers, or would-be rebels who end badly.

Women are better than men?

That’s what you got out of it?

Man, tweez, the obtuseness burns.

The secret to enjoying On the Road is to realize that it’s the biggest, gayest book ever written.  Seriously, it’s one long homosexual love poem written in an era where even someone like Jack Kerouac wouldn’t admit that he was gay.  All the shallow womanizing is just hilarious bearditry put in to disguise the man-on-man lust that Kerouac has for Neil Cassady.

In defense of On The Road, I don’t think the book is uncritical of Dean and Sal.  The journey into Mexico is different from the others, and it highlights that--at the very least--their methods of rebellion do not work everywhere.  They also never get anywhere on their journeys, both literally and (arguably) metaphorically.

and I meant to continue: “which makes it perverse to view them as role models.

Thanks for the review Amanda-- for some reason which I can’t quite articulate, “Hellions” sounds really interesting to me. I’ll have to look for it.

This book sounds fabulous.

I was a big Beat fan back in high school (Ginsberg was and still is my favorite poet).  I found Kerouac’s writing pretty pedestrian and uninspired, only interesting because it gave behind the scenes glances at the other Beats.  A few years later I picked up a copy of Carolyn Cassady (Neal’s wife)’s book Off the Road, which is essentially a memoir of living with Neal and Jack - or mostly, living without them while they went on their adventures.  It really drove home exactly the point that Amanda makes here, thaht these guys who made their legacies by supposedly breaking societal norms were completely conventional when it came to women’s roles.

I think On the Road does have virtues, but that rebelliousness is not among them was pointed out even at the time, by Paul Goodman (probably not uncoincidentally, a gay man). 

As for Chet Baker, he had the look of a delicate flower but one doesn’t have to get very far at all into knowing anything about him to realize there wasn’t really much of a sensitive core there--hardly anything, in fact, but a mostly insensate void, a nullity.  Maybe James Dean would be a better example.

Very few women get to be canonized as that “tortured poet” type, no?

Does Plath count? 

And in the pop culture world, there’s Billie Hoilday and Judy Garland—different kinds of tortured poets, but I think they could fit into that rubric.

This sounds like a great book. I can’t wait to read it & possibly share it w/my nieces (college age). You (Amanda) always do a great job with these reviews and your enthusiasm has certainly picqued my interest.

BTW, I actually loved “On The Road” (being a guy) for what it is, but it certainly isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. Some things have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Tweez, you’re only managed to confirm that the only people threatened by feminists are people whose reading comprehension skills rank below those of a smart hamster.

I think I recall that Kerouac was actually a huge right winger, big Barry Goldwater and Nixon supporter who wrote letters to National Review. The Right didn’t want anything to do with him though. This seems consistent with the idea that he was basically a priviledged dick.

Quin, you can borrow it when you get to Austin.  It’s right here.

@ Pesto—You’re right, I overlooked Plath.  IMHO Billie Holliday and Judy Garland—as remembered—fall more into Amanda’s category of “delicate, broken flowers.” Marilyn Monroe, totally delicate/broken.  On second thought, Woolf is probably more delicate than tortured.

In the arena of famous men, by my snap judgments, James Dean seems more delicate/broken than tormented by demons; Kurt Cobain is more tormented than delicate.  But it’s a fine line.

Will Zooey Deschanel as Janis in 2010 be bigger miscasting than Val Kilmer as Jim?

Also, I’d gather that 995 of 1000 Americans sampled think Neal Cassady was on the Patridge Family.

It’s not that there aren’t female and male “tortured” poets.  It’s the flavor of their torture that gets gendered.  Women seem more victimized and certainly more passive.  Sylvia Plath, Billie Holiday, Virginia Woolf---all were women who were funny and assertive, but are remembered as delicate, broken flowers.

Lamenter, yeah.  Kerouac wrote screeds denouncing hippies, even as his I suppose former friend Allen Ginsburg became a huge hippie.

Context matters. Certainly ‘rebels’ in their time. Spoiled childish closet-cases in present perspective.

I like OTR a lot, but only if I read it on its own very 1950s terms. Jack & Neal’s world is as pretty much gone and there’s no returning to it. And certainly from a feminist perspective that’s no great loss.

Enjoy as historic literature, like Dickens or Shakespeare (though but a fraction as good as either of them).

FWIW, my chiropractor ‘adjusted’ Kurt Cobain once.  He described Cobain as ‘tiny, polite, and fragile’.

James Dean seems more delicate/broken than tormented by demons

I dunno, I once read a piece about Dean written by a fellow who gave him piano lessons, he observed that Dean wanted to be able to play Beethoven right away, so I get the sense of someone from a small town who wanted to experience it all when he hit the big time. 

YMMV.

Weeeell and there’s a bit of a problem conflating Kerouac with Cassady.  Part of the whole point Kerouac is trying to get across is how futile and self-destructive a lot of Cassady’s/Moriarty’s behaviors are, and how that stems from this smart, weird dude having no recourse but to flail against this rigid social structure.  It’s still part glamorization, sure, but only part.  It’s more “Fight Club” than “Van Wilder.” (Not that there’s not feminist problems with both).

Women seem more victimized and certainly more passive.

Right—women don’t go out in a blaze of glory, they go out like a candle in the wind.  But also there are vanishingly few women who even do that, as popularly considered.

@ Eric—Ooh, great data point.  Was that before or after Cobain was famous, and before or after the suicide?

It sounds as if your reaction to “On The Road” (which I don’t know) was similar to my reaction when I read “The Alchemist”.  Self-indulgent, male-centric bullcrap.  Ugh.

according to a friend of mine, in the book, Kerouac calls his mommy whenever he runs out of money

Haa-ha!

Was that before or after Cobain was famous, and before or after the suicide?

Um, I mean, did he _tell you the story_ before or after fame and suicide.

Hippie chick put out (so I’m told by members of my congregation).

In honor of the spirit of rebellion, I have Wayne Barlowe’s painting of Lilith as my phone’s wallpaper.

Are Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison remembered all that differently, though?

Well, Joplin is remembered as a great singer.  Morrison, not so much.

Flip, after the suicide.

++++

Thlayli, I much preferred JM’s voice to JP.  Nice to hear a low voice instead of, say, Robert Plant.

Plath, Holiday, Woolf ... dare I mention Emily Dickinson? Her birthday was recently.

She’s certainly held up as one of the great unrequited lovers, or at least that’s how my public-school education presented her to me.

And her breathy poesy seems to imply some degree of torture, if only by the words not going down fast enough on the paper.

Rick:

I got about five pages into On the Road once.

Jeez. I didn’t even get that far.

I think I have one of Raha’s books, but I’ve never read it. I’ll see if I can’t scrounge it up and put it back on my reading list.

This is kind of OT, but I always thought that Doors movie was the most convincing case AGAINST drug use that I’ve ever seen. By which I don’t mean that Morrison dies of an overdose, but he just seemed like such a fucking moron.

On topic, I think one reason girls/young women get drawn to these male rebels is that when we’re young, we just identify with the protagonist. And it’s only later, after consuming dozens, if not hundreds, of these stories, that we realize the protagonist is never, ever a woman, and we start to realize that no matter how we see ourselves, there is some significant portion of the male population that doesn’t really see us as people.

Sounds like an interesting book.

In 20th c. American literature, same deal with Ernest Hemingway and Anne Sexton.  Both had fun and got laid a lot before they committed suicide, but he lived the richest possible life and she was a pathetic, mentally ill suburban matron.

Amanda, I definitely agree that “the flavor of the torture gets gendered”—also, the flavor of the rebellion.

Plath, Holiday, Woolf ... dare I mention Emily Dickinson?

Dickinson was a recluse and went crazy as a loon (to quote Lisa Simpson), sure, but I’m not sure if she was exactly ‘tortured’ like, say, Anne Sexton or Sarah Teasdale.

Raha’s book looks great--I certainly wish it was around when I was 15. But I think it’s downright Stalinist of her to dissuade a young girl from reading Kerouac simply because he isn’t a feminist. And to anyone who thinks On the Road lacks “rebelliousness”, I suggest you remember that there was a time in America when smoking pot, hitchhiking around the country and basically just doing whatever the fuck you wanted with your life was not only *not* a cliche, but downright demonic behavior.

Raha uses Kerouac and Neal Cassady as the prime examples of our culture’s romance with a certain kind of male rebel, one who isn’t, if you think about it, that rebellious.  The beginning chapter of the book where she dismantles the myth of Kerouac

Having biked past the Kerouac Birthplace and attended UMass Lowell for several years, it is difficult to see Kerouac as a rebel in any sense of the word.  He was very conventional in any number of ways, other than his refusal to settle down into family life and stay put and remain in a 1/2 mile radius of where he was born.  He was an odd egg, a black sheep perhaps, but a rebel?  Not really.

What if Morrison became a politician and McCain became a rock legend?

I offer a free torture service to people looking to get into the tortured poet/musician/writer business. I’ll give you something to cry about!

he was basically a priviledged dick

Certainly not in the Burroughs sense ... he was born very working class.  Perhaps in the male privilege sense ... but not the economic class sense.  Not at all.

I’ll give you something to cry about!

I’ll tell you about all those women in Muslim countries who really know what it’s like to suffer, and then you’ll beg to shut up and make me my dinner.

Like most creative types, he wasn’t above thinking he had upper-class roots, whatever class he claimed to have been born into:

Kerouac often gave conflicting stories about his family history and the origins of his surname. Though his father was born to a family of potato farmers in the village of St-Hubert, he often claimed aristocratic descent, sometimes from a Breton noble granted land after the Battle of Quebec, whose sons all married Native Americans. However, research has shown him to be the descendant of a middle-class merchant settler, whose sons married French Canadians. He was part Native American through his mother’s largely Norman-side of the family. He also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it back to Irish, Breton, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was the name of a dead Celtic language and in another said it was from the Irish for “language of the water” and related to “Kerwick”.[2] The name, though Breton, seems to derive from the name of one of several hamlets in Brittany near Rosporden.[3]

and this is interesting:

Although the body of Kerouac’s work has been published in English, recent research has suggested that, aside from already known correspondence and letters written to friends and family, he also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. A manuscript entitled Sur le Chemin (On the road) completed in five days in Mexico during December 1952 is a telling example of Kerouac’s attempts at writing in Joual, a dialect typical of the French-Canadian working class of the time, which can be summarized as a form of expression utilising both old patois and modern French mixed with modern English words (windshield being a modern English expression used casually by some French Canadians even today).

Kerouac just ended up a drunk, another victim of the American intersection of drinking/writing, Norman Mailer almost went down that path, FWIW.

Nice to hear a low voice instead of, say, Robert Plant.

Well, what kind of voice do you expect to be able to be heard alongside one of the top 3 guitar virtuosoes of all time?  Someone like, say, Paul McCartney would be drowned out in a song like “Kashmir”. 

/petpeeve

I’d probably say that the difference between how Morrison is remembered and how Janis Joplin is remembered is that… Janis Joplin isn’t that well remembered, as far as I can tell.  Very few women get to be canonized as that “tortured poet” type, no?

To be fair, Jim did write books of poetry and have his bandmates help him record his poetry.

Ahem ::cough cough::, I expect “one of the top 3 guitar virtuosos” AND album producers “of all time” to “make it WORK” with whomever he is creating music with!

>|^P

I was more commenting on Morrison’s vocal range, which, like Eddie Vedder’s and John Kay’s, was down where mortals could comfortably sing along.

Didn’t that guy from “Bad Company” record a buncha stuff with Page?  His voice is reasonably low.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
“I’ll give you something to cry about!”

There’s the marketing motto right there.  AND you get TWO revenue streams: those who long to be tortured artistes, and those who want to beat up on emo kids.  Everybody wins!

But I think it’s downright Stalinist of her to dissuade a young girl from reading Kerouac simply because he isn’t a feminist.

She doesn’t. I do.  And not out of Stalinism, and not because he’s not a feminist.  Because he’s not as cool and amazing as people make him out to be, and the misogyny just makes it painful.  There’s a lot of daring mid-century literature that I’d encourage young women AND men to read, including Beats like Burroughs and Ginsberg.

Nice to hear a low voice instead of, say, Robert Plant.

Mr. Plant is the Jason Statham of rock, DEMONcrap bizarro-head!  Think of how awesome it would’ve been if he’d joined Foghat instead of The Jimmie Page Experience....

I don’t think Kerouac’s literary merits can be judged fairly by that one book. As far as his being patriarchal, well, sure; but keep in mind that he was most certainly a closet case, and his efforts to live up to the macho ethos of the day were prosecuted with pathetic vigor.

He’s easily as good as Salinger or Hesse, neither one of whom were very good, but who eternally exert their influences on disaffected youth. Kerouac’s best works ranks with the middling output of Steinbeck. That’s may not be glowing praise, but at least it’s not based on a grand total of five ruefully scanned pages.

wow dude, that’s like totally rebellious. wicked cool, do drugs, hang out with rockers, tell men and your parents to f-off, have abortions.... wow, cool man…

Burroughs is the only beat worth reading. Never trust anyone over 20 who still thinks Kerouac is kewl. “Visions of Cody’ is an interesting book, though. It comes the closest to being a piece of art. Gary Snyder is silly. Ginsberg is silly, but he gets it right sometimes. Corso & Ferlenghetti are terrible writers but they are important for getting other people’s work out there. How come nobody mentions the San Fransisco Rennaissance? Jack Spicer? Di Prima wrote some books about being a woman with beats, that I think was less than flattering. Anyone ever read Jane Bowles? She was weird one and gets the broken flower put upon her.

Does the book mention Gertrude Stein? A lesbian jew living well in occupied France always seemed odd.

“Burroughs is the only beat worth reading. Never trust anyone over 20 who still thinks Kerouac is kewl.”

Double true.

Did you ever read Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane Di Prima?

I read it; it was described to me as the woman’s On the Road.  What struck me about it is that most of it is about having sex in rooms.  I understand that this was subversive and rebellious in a certain way—but it’s still very limited.

What struck me about it is that most of it is about having sex in rooms.

That’s pretty sick.  Sex is a natural act that should be engaged in under the clear blue sky and bright sunlight of the sheep pen.

None of the Beats impressed me.  Even when they were adequate, they never live up to their billing.

For a cheerful counterexample, I call Edna St. Vincent Millay, who slept with whoever she wanted to*, drank quite a lot, almost certainly smoked marijuana**, and lived to win the Frost Medal. And everyone knew she was a free spirit. 

I have read, but can’t remember where, that she—either her persona or her popularity—just infuriated gay male poets of her era; that they felt she got away with too much, or trivialized free love, or something. (This was either in a biography of hers, or an analysis of the ‘20s-’30s idea of “Flaming Youth”.)

I’ve long thought that the rebellions of the 1920s and 1930s were more interesting and courageous than most of those of the 1950s and 1960s***. I really don’t want to live through the 1930s again, but maybe we’ll get good poetry out of it. Very carbon-thrifty, poetry.

* Male, female.
**Greenwich Village in the Jazz Age.
***The Civil Rights Movement the big exception, not that anti-racists earlier were nonexistent or cowardly

Women can most easily rebel by allowing me to fap on their faces.

Sign up here.

Two of my co-workers are going out. I like the both of them, but I know the male half of the couple adores Kerouac. How snarky a gift would this book make if I wish to buy it for the female half of said couple?

what an odd tapestry here, with such animosity toward poor old dead jack kerouac. i think it is probably a semi-bad move to bring up the 50 year-old classic ‘on the road’ as tho it were the wrong “how-to book” on rebellion.

hellion may be that kind of how-to book, but i doubt it, from the description. 

there’s good reason to read kerouac, i think. he wrote well. he thought deeply about the absurd and tragic nature of life. if yer drawn to buddhism for spirit, you’ll find simpatico with drunk jack-- and some enlightenment.

if you wanna know about jack, read ann charter’s biography—all the way to the epilog when she is interviewing him for the last time, as he is drinking himself to death—and he still tries to hit on her. ann knows his worth, probably better than anyone.

i still remember the story in on the road in which he gets involved with a young woman and joins up with the migrant farmworkers of the era. he fails there as he did everywhere, finally, in trying to have a decent relationship. kerouac had his mom and his bottle. everything else was always third.

Thanks Amanda! I can’t wait.

I hate On the Road and Jack Kerouac with a passion that burns like a thousand white-hot suns.  Four years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, we had to read it and write an essay on how it represents the American dream.  My thesis was, basically, if this is the American dream, I’m moving to Canada before my way-cool hipster boyfriend beats me then drives off drunk at 85-mph to go fuck a little Mexican girl forced into prostitution.  American dream FTW!

Read On The Road from one high school buddy who had a large Beat section on his bookshelf.  It was ok, but nothing really special from what I felt back then. 

Though I never read Burroughs, I heard a couple of his spoken word poem/rants on my friend’s stereo....many funny points...including a call to protest for “evil rights”.  He was a big Burroughs fan and spoke highly of him.

Later, when I came across encyclopedic entries of his bio, I found him to be far less impressive than my friend had said.  His lifestyle after college was quite reminiscent of the overentitled upper/upper-middle class college classmates and co-workers I’ve had the dubious pleasure of studying/working with.  This was underscored by his assumption he was entitled to commissioned officer status merely because he was a Harvard graduate at the beginning of WWII.  Only after the Army decided otherwise did he have his well-off family use their influence and connections to get him out of his enlistment obligations.  Talk about overentitlement, especially during a period when there was a widespread draft in effect.