[ExI] ...then suddenly...

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
Subject: Re: [ExI] ...then suddenly...

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 1:20 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>> ...  This really has made me hip.  Even though I read Kerouac's excellent
On the Road, I was so 
>> tragically not hip about "mod" slang that the young hepcats use these
days...


>...after googling your unintelligible use of a body part as an adjective,
hepcat, groovy, hipster daddio I am forced to conclude that one (or
both) of us are horribly out of date.  ;)

Alas it is I.  On the Road was published in 1957.  Furthermore it was
actually written several years before that, but it was so ahead of its time,
it took a long time to find a publisher who wasn't so squaresville as to
recognize it's brilliance. 

Fun story:  I actually read Kerouac accidentally.  I was going on a business
trip soon after I started my career which was in 1983.  I went to the
library to find a suitable book, saw the title On the Road, seemed
appropriate since that is what I was going to do.  The guy who sat beside me
was a technician who actually had a graduate degree in American Literature.
He saw me with the book and explained that when he was in graduate school in
1957 and 58, aaaall the lit students wanted to read Kerouac, but one needed
to be sure never to be caught by any of the professors, who deplored that
book and everything associated with it.  Lit students discussed On the Road,
but quietly, conspiratorially, in small groups or pairs only, off campus,
with a solemn agreement to never tell.

The brilliance of Kerouac is in  shaping a passage to pattern a literary
passage after a musical genre that he loved, jazz.  He has passages in there
that remind one of a blues number, followed by a dizzying frenetic saxophone
riff, with thrumming percussion dazzling from behind the beat, the horns
dashing about on a syncopated cosnapsody, dancing, gyrating, dancing,
gyrating, the melody like a passage of poetry moving, with the hipsters
being carried along with the bliss of the rock and the roll to an ever
ascending ecstasy...

spike