BOOK ONE:- Long before Snyder philosophized on a future Rucksack Revolution and introduced old Jack K. and thus an entire generation to Buddhism, turning him on to his whole post-artist bhikku phase chasing after a newly redefined IT of ecstatic joy for pure being (and yabyum—lots and lots of yabyum), and even longer before Jack abandoned everything he loved in order to drown himself in Catholicism-induced despair and alcoholism over a 10-year span right up to his ugly cross-haunted death, he was hopping along, following (the impressionable, naïve bastard) the care-free and womanizing Neal Cassady across America time after time, living and documenting from his (Neal’s) side—thankfully leaving out his own personal biases and Catholic beliefs, or at least keeping them subtle, on the down-low, and cetera—creating what he’d later (briefly) refer to as his pre-enlightenment story in On the Road. I almost wish now I skipped the original published edition and just waited for the scroll ed. to get an official 50th anniversary release, b/c this thing is a fucking beast, infinitely superior to the bowdlerized, boring mess (comparatively, that is; the original pub. ain’t all that bad—and am I alone on never liking Jack’s pseudonyms?) that’s held such a profound influence over American youth for the past 50 years, which dropped out much of Kerouac’s point, of bringing the reader with him, Cassady & co. “on the road,” you could say—since the text being one massive paragraph with justified alignment creating the appearance of a road, hur hur, and I know my using that for this post is like, super cheesy, but this is how I get my kicks. It's just a bummer they didn't publish the scroll initially, b/c Lucien Carr's fucking dog Potchky ate the last few pages' worth of scroll b/w rejection and final publication, leaving the scroll hanging midsentence. BOOK TWO:- I’m of the school that sees On the Road as a celebration of life and everything in it rather than a depressing elegy; I believe Kerouac was very much aware of his own naïveté, that his own romantic visions at the end of the tunnel—er, road—are always just that: romantic visions: never to be. He’ll always be building up that excitement and heading for another golden opportunity poppin’ bennies and scouring the land for faceless beauties to pick up and live off of like the sexist ‘50s icons they all were and new jobs new opportunities new faces new experiences and jazz-club freakouts, the IT he and his gang are always going on and on about before dropping everything for another dream and another escape down the road. But hey, a guy’s gotta live somehow, and THIS. IS. LIFE. The only part where I’ve always even back in high school felt his seeking of life seemed to slump and hit the rocks, just plain ol’ get boring as fuck, is when he hooks up with the sweet little Latina beauty Bea and settles down working the cotton fields for far too long and dreaming about being a Mexican himself. BOOK THREE:- This time round all the names of Jack’s friends and acquaintances are back to the REAL, the dear old aunt he was always ripping money off of is back to being his dear old mother he was always ripping money off of and all the downplayed (homo)sexuality is now THERE in our faces as much as it was in Jack’s when Neal and Allen loved one another one couch over or when Jack locked himself in a bathroom with Neal banging away from behind some stranger’s rump on the other side—and it’s these scenes I’m happy Jack’s left out his own Catholic beliefs b/c in truth, in actual life he was disgusted by it, so whew! I’m happy Jack took the backseat and just lived through these trips as a 2-dimensional body for the reader to occupy. Sometimes, knowing the future histories for these characters, the truth that’s now ringing so strongly on Jack’s words adds this eerie layer to their interactions, and perhaps I’m mostly talking about Bill Burroughs and Joan Vollmer here, this deep and psychotic love they had for one another. And yeah, yeah, yeah, the sexism is still here, and all the girls are still cardboard sex objects on the sidelines for Jack and Neal’s amusement, to marry and pop a few kids out of—b/c that’s what just how it went in the ‘50s—and I figure that makes this not the most appealing book for ladies altho still a fascinating look at a culture gone-by and the troubled mind of Kerouac before he lost it all coming down off the aptly-named Desolation Peak in ’58 and commencing his Catholic/alcoholic self-abasement and turning into a big fucking asshole of a human being, disconnecting himself from the Beats and from the hippies (and the Beats that became hippies, e.g., Ginsberg and Cassady) that were about to pop up swinging ragged copies of The Dharma Bums and adding a political edge to the Beat way of life, and this copy, this ORIGINAL SCROLL ed. of On the Road is so much jazzier than the one we’ve all known since ’57, it rolls right along so much smoother and the ups and downs of his journey and our journey zoom past and we don’t really care w/out the chapter-break interruptions of before b/c we’re just moving right along with Kerouac on to the next high.
BOOK FOUR:-
Even tho I originally read On the Road in high school and didn’t much care for it (or Kerouac) until I picked up Dharma Bums, it influenced me in such a special way as it influenced so many others, getting me to get up off my lazy bum from in front of the old computer and take the hand of whatever friend I’m near at the time and go off on some crazy hitch-hiking adventure across America once or twice a year since 2007, first waking up early one morning, having never been far from the coop on my own, and saying to a friend very seriously “Hey hey, hey, let’s go to Mexico, check out Boy’s Town?” and as a first trip it went exactly like Kerouac’s always did with a depressing anticlimax waiting for us at the end, disappointment and confusion, but any trip since like when I danced all the way to Arizona and all over getting drunk with a Polish man suffering from diarrhea and an English backpacker and a bunch of students from my college in TX at Lowell Observatory and getting stuck in Mund’s Park for hours sunburned to hell and back and getting on to the Arcosanti hippie commune et cetera, overall a much more exciting trip than my first Kerouac-inspired exploration of life and reality and naïveté, just as my last two have also been a big blast—w/ many ups and downs, yes, but a blast nonetheless. BOOK FIVE:- On the Road’s a book that’s needed to be experienced by everyone at a young age, and I’m hoping now that the ORIGINAL SCROLL v.—THE SUPERIOR VERSION—has been released, it’ll be a replacement for the orig. publication, even if the jazzy famous line about the MAD ONES is much weaker this time around we’re still getting at the TRUTH of the trip, the FREEDOM behind America, on the road, celebratory or elegiac feelings American, however you take Kerouac’s poetic journeys from coast to coast and down into the heart of his romanticism and the Mexican dream and the inevitable and incomparable Old Neal Cassady Letdowns and Breakups, the

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I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing., but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night. ( )

This is one of the most incredible books I've ever read. I fell in love with it from the very first sentence and stayed that way until the very end. What an amazing work. ( )

“Yes!” yelled Neal. “Yes! Dig him! Now consider his soul---stop awhile and consider.”

I have never read the originally published On the Road, so cannot compare and contrast to this Original Scroll version. Here the characters are not minimally veiled with name changes, rather they are who they are. The language propels the journey forward at breakneck speed - multiple journeys across the country in search of IT. Perhaps it is my age at the first introduction to the stories recounted, but I do not find Neal Cassady particularly charming, stimulating, or fascinating - and wonder what spell he cast over Kerouac and others. It became abundantly clear that I would not have fit in well with the Beat Generation crowd. Yet, in the end, there were a variety of passages that proved powerful in terms of how to approach and react to life's journey and the less than straight path taken along the way. It felt, at times, like Waiting for Godot on speed and with a good dose of sex and jazz thrown in. In the end, it provides insight into the all-too-real search each of us has for meaning, for happiness, for IT. Despite all the partying and shouts of joy along the road, it seems a sad book that reflects a less than successful journey - but perhaps with some hope for a better journey moving forward. I am glad I read it, but will not rush out to buy the initial 1957 publicly available version of On the Road. ( )

Very interesting, it allows the reader to see exactly what Kerouac was saying before he had to edit himself for the sake of a constipated american populace of the 50's. No real surprises as to the characters, all were well known before.

I did reread the published version immediately prior to reading this however. I must say that having read and read this in the space of a month, it certainly has lost some of it's romance. Maybe I'm just getting older, but I certainly don't see Jack and Neil as I used to. Maybe it's Neil I don't see the same way anymore. Maybe I finally realize that at the end of the book, Jack didn't either. Kerouac may have tried to turn the page at the end of the story, but we do know that in real life, by even the early 60's he had succumbed to his own fears, and turned from his Buddhist / Zen explorations back into the depressed gloom that is Catholicism. This is what eventually killed him long before the booze. ( )