I'm in love with another Jack! Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"

[Front-Ranger]

After reuniting with Dean, they are parted again! This seems to be part of the formula for success in buddy stories. Jack goes with a car full of other boys to the mountains. The car is driven by one of the boys' mother, an "enterprising blond" named Babe Rawlins. They take off for Central City, a very historic Gold Rush mountain town where Colorado's first opera house is located. There is a miner's shack that the boys can clean out and use to party in, and they get to work.

The aftermath reminded me of Brokeback Mountain's descent from the mountain:

"In the morning I woke up and turned over; a big cloud of dust rose from the mattress. I yanked at the window; it was nailed. Tim Gray was on the bed too. We coughed and sneezed. Our breakfast consisted of stale beer. Babe came back from her hotel and we got our things ready to leave. Everything seemed to be collapsing. As we were going out to the car Babe slipped and fell flat on her face. Poor girl was overwrought. Her brother and Tim and I helped her up. We got in the car; Major and Betty joined us. The sad ride back to Denver began."

[Front-Ranger]

Why hasn't On the Road become a movie??? Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights many years ago and announced that development would be starting in 2005. He cast Billy Crudup in the role of Jack er, Sal Paradise. But no further news has appeared.

That's my main question regarding On the Road. What are your questions??

[Front-Ranger]

Jack is parted from Dean for years. When they finally get back together, Part II of the story begins. Somehow, they are thrown back together, and Dean decides they must go to New York. Carlo (Allen Ginsberg) arrives and for half an hour, merely observes Dean and Jack, refusing to talk to them. Finally he says he has an announcement: "What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

These are the questions that are echoing in my brain this night.

[Front-Ranger]

Inevitably, the dream appears, the dream that Jack had that haunts him. It is "the one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is hte remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death."

[Front-Ranger]

Some On the Road art:

[Front-Ranger]

Jacks and cats go together!!

[Front-Ranger]

After much wandering through several states, a prolonged stay in California working for a grape harvesting outfit, and a penniless return to New England, Jack returns home and learns that Dean has been waiting for him and writes,

"Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there, waiting for me; spent afternoons talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug wooven of all the clothes in my family for years, which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and as rich as the passage of time itself, and then he had left, two days before I arrived, crossing my path somewhere in Pennsylvania...."

[oilgun]

I just found this on youtube and thought you might enjoy it.  It's Paul Frank's Pull My Daisy, words by Jack Kerouac:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kPtmUI-Aps

[Front-Ranger]

Dang! Video no longer available due to a copyright claim!! I have to jump on these quicker! But thanks for thinking of us, oilgun!!

[Front-Ranger]

About Neal Cassaday, in "A Critic at Large: Drive, He Wrote", an essay about Jack Kerouac's On the Road, by Louis Menand:

Cassady was an uncanny cross between James Dean and W. C. Fields—a screwup with a profile, a stud with an endless supply of goofy gab. There is sufficient testimony concerning his sexual endowment to overcome the skepticism normally advisable on that topic. Some people who knew and liked him called him a con man (and many people, including Burroughs, disliked and avoided him), but this seems misleading. Cassady was a serial seducer, and, therefore, inveterately untrustworthy. He grew up on the Denver streets—his father was a wino—and he learned to cope by relying on his enormous energy, adaptive wit, and good looks. He charmed people in order to get what he needed, and he was generally in need of something. On the other hand, the people he charmed generally needed something from him—sex or companionship or good times. And Cassady had no material ambitions. He was content to get by, and although he had three wives in rapid succession, and juggled his attentions between them and assorted casual girlfriends, he was intermittently serious about all of them. Everything about Cassady was intermittent. He had a kind of sociosexual A.D.D.

The article in this weelk's New Yorker is here:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/10/01/071001crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=2