Did it challenge, change, and open new modes of expression for the craft? Yes it did. For that reason it deserves to be remembered even if it isn't considered "great… It shines as a light on the life of people at a place in time, the syntax serves the illumination in its crude fashion, regard it as a mark of the tide, it did would it did as well as it could.

If OtR opened modes of expression, were they worthy ones? Or merely trendy?

The syntax has the run-on quality of a grocery list. JK’s phrases, then his sentences, too long strung together, form an entire work of strung-togetherness. (agreed, it may serve the winding, unmatched series of highways across the continent, but that’s why they built superhighways. But just as the highways of the 50’s must have been tedius travel, so is reading OtR. I submit: editing is useful.) When I was young, that haphazard, run-on quality didn’t bother me. Now it reads as immature and self-indulgent writing. That overall quality is distracting enough but it is the unskillful didactic of angst that, as a grown-up, I find most unattractive:

She didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother's for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear -- something like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender gabardine coat. "What do you do on Sunday afternoons?" I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. "What do you do on a warm summer's night?" She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the road. She and her mother made popcorn. "What does your father do on a summer's night?" He works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he's spent his whole life supporting a woman and her outpoppings and no credit or adoration. "What does your brother do on a summer's night?" He rides around on his bicycle, he hangs out in front of the soda fountain. "What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?" She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

Good Lord. Give me a break. If this opened new modes of expression, it was expression that might have probably been better suppressed-- like farting in public.

When the work approaches a a moment of nakedness, a sense that it might be shedding some heavily indulged and impotent self-consciousness, the writing, while retaining that list-like quality, begins to purify. Here is one of those successful Kerouac ‘moments’ I think:

"Now you're going East with Sal," Galatea said, "and what do you think you're going to accomplish by that? Camille has to stay home and mind the baby now you're gone-how can she keep her job?-and she never wants to see you again and I don't blame her. If you see Ed along the road you tell him to come back to me or I'll kill him "

Just as flat as that. It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers and sisters in a pitiful dream. Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, "Yes, yes, yes," as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT-the root, the soul of Beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he was knowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in as they once tried to do. Then they looked at me. What was I, a stranger, doing on the West Coast this fair night? I recoiled from the thought.

There are far too few of these successful moments. His Big-Story place in American literature is secure for now-- while the Beat generation and the college students they taught in their idealistic days are still reading, retrospecting, reminiscing, or re-enacting. When that’s all done, so will be the halleluiah chorus sung for Jack Kerouac.

waltz

Sidebar to joe nick: The argument “can you write better? What have you published?” is a stupid one. I can’t perform cosmetic surgery, either, but know a botched one when I see it. Does that make me intellectual or semi-intellectual? I know that gauntlet was thrown down to ted burke, but i'll offer answer for myself: In truth, the few places I had published were so bad, that when the pages were used as cage liner, the parakeet was insulted. There is a very real phenomenon as unrecognized genius. You’re reading it. (I’m having damned good fun, now.)

Anyway, mine was a real response addressing the core question: what’s wrong with JK’s OtR? You may disagree with my response, but you’d really be showing your ass if you refused to accept it as a direct address.

But you’re right about this: I'm not a condescending ummmm....asshole. So right, Joe. You’re not condescending at all.