Currently I’m reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I’ve been meaning to read it for a very long time, and for the last several months I have also been traveling extensively so I figured now was an appropriate time.
Its very good book, of coarse, and very interesting because just as it was dubiously claimed to have been written in only several coffee fueled bursts of energy; if the reader pays close attention, they will find certain ideas and words and even writing styles floating in and out, never to establish a pattern… Totally betraying the absence of any deeper meaning. Just as one might adopt a certain figure of speech for a number of days until novelty wears off, and then abandon it utterly. If it was a calculated move to emulate spontaneity then it’s a brilliant technique.
Anyhow, it got me interested in learning more about the main characters, being that the book is pretty much taken directly from Jack’s life these were real people. Mostly though, I’d never imagined that someone could write about a pack of amoral reprobates so casually, and in goddamn 1951 no less.
…But that was the beginning of this sterile modern age. And these guys were so alienated by control and conformity and the artificial falseness of civilized life, that they clawed at it’s fabric and stabbed at it and ripped it open to find something raw and bloody and visceral. And that was the whole of their aesthetic. I admire that. But damn, the price amazes me.
So I started actually reading about William S. Burroughs and Niel Cassidy, and among others, Kerouac himself. I am amazed to learn that they were even shadier in life than in the pages of this book. I’m talking DEPRAVED. Too many terrible things happened around this group of highly educated men. Horrors. 
I have had more than my fair share of drug fueled experiments in terror, and I will continue until the day I die (hopefully by misadventure) And I also understand the value of the visionary and the intellectual value of what these men have accomplished. I’m just remarking about how these guys, who are champions of American culture, were totally fucked in the head.
SARACANITE 