It's fun to think that On The Road is the greatest book in the world when you're 20. It would be weird if you didn't, and I know I went through the same kind of beatnik phase so many other teenagers do.
Of course we all contain multitudes, and you can be several things at once - a geek and a jock at the same time. And while they will bury me a punk, I definitely went through a deep and passionate love affair with the poetry and prose of all the beat generation crowd at the same point in my life.
I don't know how much he gets lumped in with the rest of them because he came a little afterwards, but I was always a bit of a Emmett Grogan fan, even though I believed less than 10 percent of his stories. Ringolevio felt like a blueprint for some kind of life, but was too extraordinary to take as a practical guide.
On The Road offered more, and while the endless roads of America might as well have been on the fucking moon for how accessible they were to me, Kerouac's book was full of tiny little truths, and the freedom of hitching a ride in the back of a truck, and watching the cold stars above, is still immensely attractive. And the story about the endless roll of paper going through the typewriter is still one of the most genuinely romantic images in literary history.
I was turned on to all the great writers by smart girls and nerdy co-workers and was soon haunting the bookstores, looking for the most obscure authors (and finding a surprising number of them, New Zealand used to be one of the most literary countries in the world, with amazing proportions of readers, and you could find the most extraordinary books in small town second hand bookstores).
And you follow those threads and get stuck into the spiritual side of thing, and there are all sorts of revelations to be found in the Eastern philosophies that were never mentioned in school.
And while that all gets very zen, following the beat generation means you inevitably read more about the actual writers who put together these extraordinary words, and they mostly turn out to be the worst fucking people, melting down into hopeless drunks, or beating women with absolute gross impunity.
Bill Burroughs could break your brain with his literary mash-ups, but was also a whiny old shit who shot his wife in the face - and then was embarrassingly snide about the horrific incident in later years.
At least we'll always have Ginsburg, who seemed like a decent dude, especially compared to his contemporaries. It's little surprise how majestic Howl still is, and can still be absorbed with few caveats.
By the time I grew out of my beats streak, I was more about Hunter S Thompson, and his truth bombs in amongst the hedonism. He could still be a shit, but was more open about those short-comings, rarely just blaming it on the drugs when he so easily could have.
That infatuation lasted a lot longer, largely because it was just way more fun. But again, if you're in your forties, and still think Hunter's stoned ramblings are all you need to know about the American experience, you've got some way to go yet. Don't we all?
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