Happy birthday, 'On the Road'!

The New York Times's papercuts blog alerts me to an exciting anniversary: this month is the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road! Along with an image of the original NYT's book review, which I for the most part heartily agree with, there's a link to an interesting Guardian article on the impact of the novel on (young) readers today. The anecdote's from the author's neice, from Hari Kunzru, on missing on something, old-fashioned in the sense that the book belonged to a time when meaning was attainable, or at least the American psyche could be convinced that meaning was out there to be attained, is telling to me, and makes me almost afraid to pick the book up again.

It's been over ten years since I first read it. I had read books for pleasure, for aesthetics, for philosophy. But On the Road was the first book I read, at the tender age of sixteen or seventeen, that I really connected with both aesthetically and emotionally. The aesthetics of the novel, the friability of the prose, matched in tone and tenor whatever was spooling out of my own brain at the time. That meaning could be a path was a pretty cool idea for me.

I know it has its detractors. And unlike other tropes from my mid-teens (smoking pot out of Mountain Dew cans, The Doors, skateboarding) I've since put away as being just too juvenile, I think I'd still love the book.

Random Kerouac/Minneapolis fact: In a letter to John Clellon Holmes, Kerouac writes, "you dullpoke old Minneapolis St. Paul, you lakey crakey flakey Mineeapolakey..."