The "journal-y" update.

Well this web log is certainly proving to be proactive in my life. After that kerouac post, I cracked open Big Sur. It's a refreshing read, even if it does deal with delerium tremens quite a bit! Sometimes I need reminding of life through Kerouac's eyes. I feel like even at his worst, he still can (in his own weird way) find God while observing nature, people and most importantly himself. Great!

So I'm reading Big Sur, which is in some ways the end of his big, long, Duluoz Legend. I am reading it while admittingly skipping quite a few of the novels in the legend, and it is inevitably making me want to start from the first book, Visions of Gerard. That's a lot of reading, and Kerouac is kind of hard to swallow in large amounts (at least for me). We'll see how this all turns out, considering I am notorious for abandoning books indefinitely once a new literary interest comes along.

But really, I cannot get enough of Kerouac's naive, innocent, restless worldview. It's quite comforting, actually. His prose is so refreshingly lacking in pretention or literary norms that it is really no wonder that some novelists and professors hate him.

Oh well.

(btw, this post is not really what i envisioned for my web log. It's too "dear diary". I sincerely hope that I have informed my readers about life in general, not just what is pertinent to mine.)

Kerouac, DCFC, and the "meaning of life" (oh my)

I like Paste magazine. If you are a music, film, or literature fan of a certain ilk(read:"hipster-ish"), i think that you would too. Ben Gibbard, the singer/songwriting force of Death Cab for Cutie, recently spent some time in the cabin Jack Kerouac did in Big Sur, Cali. when writing the novel of the same name. i am more interested in this article for the Kerouac elements (not that big of a dcfc fan, but still)

here, read it.



in case you absolutely think that this article is a waste of time, here are excerpts of note:

I pulled On The Road off the shelf and found myself reading it between classes, and at that time in my life it was exactly what I craved, exactly what I needed to hear. I thought, “That’s the way, that’s the ideal life, that’s great. You get in a car and you drive and you see your friends and you end up in a city for a night and you go out drinking and you catch up and you share these really intense experiences.

But then in reading Big Sur, it’s the end of the road. You end up with a series of failed relationships and you end up being an alcoholic and in your late 30s, and not having any kind of real grip on the lives of the people around you. That’s the potential other end of the spectrum when you’re never tied to anybody or anything. I run the risk of losing touch with the people in my life that mean the most to me because I have made the decision to live like this.

And moments in Big Sur are starting to become very analogous to my life, where I show up in a town and call up my friends, and I’m like, “Guys, we gotta go out. Let’s hang out, I haven’t seen you in forever.” And their response is “Yeah, well, our baby needs to be going to sleep and I can’t be out all hours of the night anymore. It’s time to move on in our lives into another phase; we can’t live in this perpetual adolescence forever.”