Several months ago, a friend recommended the audiobook version of On the Road, read by Will Patton. It's the only audiobook I own, and it's well worth a listen.

I'd read the book in college, as part of a course on the Beats taught by Ann Charters, Kerouac's biographer. But hearing it read aloud, I was struck by how much more poetic the language is than I remembered it being.

Ebert: I've heard the audiobook version read by Matt Dillon. I agree. It's as if the novel was written to be read aloud.

Listen to Jack Kerouac in his own language.

http://archives.radio-canada.ca/arts_culture/litterature/clips/126/

Did he shape my life? Maybe not yet. But he shaped my dreams, and someday I shall live them.

In grad school I used to do organic chemistry late at night in the library. Invariably, however, I would end up going to the audio/visual department to check out Jack Kerouac's readings. Every night, for a while. I, too, was struck by how beautiful it was when he read it himself. I thought, "This is what I do every night instead of my homework ... I should drop out of grad school." And: I did. Thanks, Jack.

I have that very same image as a wallpaper in the pc. Kerouac was a drunk god.

Atte: Juan Ramón.

I loved Matt Dillon's impersonation of William Burroughs, whom he knew via Drugstore Cowboy. Overall, a great reading.

Excerpts of a letter to Agnes De Mille from Martha Graham:

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly of the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

I came to reckon it was the quartet of Kerouac, Neal and Carolyn Cassady, and Ginsberg that did all the undamming of the true American Dream. No one of them could have served the purpose alone.

They played the drama as both doctors and patients, both symptoms and cure, "infected" with intense desires for spirituality and sensuality, but at heart never completely trusting either thing, so separated were they. They represented a mass cultural schizophrenia, induced a long time ago by literal-minded religious institutions and their unreasoning Limbaugh-like haranguers.

Carolyn thought Jack was killed by the guilt of his Catholicism, which, despite all else, he never could escape. I noticed Jack was mustered out of the Merchant Marine for having been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Neal, she kept discovering a-new through letters found even in old age, lived one life divided in half.

America still feels guilty about feeling things. Sex is only part of it. Going whole-hog over the top doesn't help, and a pretense at "scientific" repression of feeling can send one into the fragmentary realms of the psychotic, tearing living things apart to see how they live.

True-Crime serial killers says killing people doesn't feel like anything. But somehow, this non-feeling becomes a thrill that needs fed. Perhaps Einstein's quote fits: insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

Neal's one foot on a rail of superego spiritual ga-ga and the other on a rolling id of a blind appetite for the errant jejeune eventually dropped him in the middle of a lonely track on a line to nowhere. Had he lived longer, perhaps he would have been seen as a half-mad, dirty old hypocrite and not the "cowboy angel" husk left behind for young truth seekers, to look upon and despair.

Bookending this quartet are Carolyn and Ginsberg. Ginsberg, a hairy Pagan without Conscience in puritan America, and Carolyn, the very model of a lady, so mythologized, of the best breeding and Yankee Liberal Christian respectability. Her family never did forgive her for joining this gang -- forming it, if somewhat unconsciously.

The proper Christian lady may or may not have forgiven Ginsberg and her husband for their homosexual trysts in the house with the bedroom door open for the kids to see, but years later, she still tolerated hearing the Pagan poet brag to her about sexual "conquests" of boys aged 8, 9, 10. She didn't ask him to quit. She listened politely as he went on his narcissistic litany of fame and fortune besides. She too was star-struck beyond the years one ought to be.

She had her own secrets anyhow, a helpless taste for men young enough to be her son. How come this? To replay the days she played writing goddess to Jack and Neal? I don't know. But I do know that famous roll of butcher's paper wouldn't exist but for her goddessing, and for husband Neal's modeling to write about. She objected, and she said Neal objected, this was not how they were and not how things were. Neal was never such a horndog. Look at all the letters praising and detailing Catholicism he wrote her from prison. But as years wore on, she found other admissions. Wives don't know because they don't want to know.

Somebody oughta do a paper. If Carolyn has anything honest to say about it, it won't be Ann Charters.

Roger, just curious, but how come you're such a magnet for loopy right-wing commentary like Tom Dark above?

Ebert: So that's what he is! Right wing! We've never been sure.

I can't help but view Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady . . . as latter day Karamazov Brothers (Ivan, Alyosha, and Dmitri, respectively).

Their lives ultimately demonstrating that neither Head, Heart, nor Body . . . is ever enough in and of itself.

When together in the late1940s/early 1950s, the 3 Beat friends seemed on the verge of learning from one another how to become whole human beings. Indeed, "On the Road" is one of literature's rare evocations of what an integrated intellectual/emotional/physical experience of life can be like.

But going their separate ways in the late 1950s/early1960s . . . each subsequently died a lonely death characteristic of his type.

I loved "On the Road", but "Dharma Bums" has always been my favorite of his works. There is an utter joy captured in DB that I have found in no other work of literature.

Years ago, at a used bookstore in Chicago, I found an On the Road audiobook narrated by David Carradine - On the Road has never sounded so good!

That's my Lilly Library colleague Jim Canary in the next to last video, the one where he unrolls the "On the Road" scroll. Great stuff. Here's a more recent video with Jim and the scroll: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAVEuEuQ3AY