100%, he would have ended up a neocon like the rest of them had he lived past 40 or whatever
It's like the foil to the MAGA people who are so desperate for some kind of absolute authority figure ruling over them that they project it on Trump.
All of the "little people" in this country are just completely disconnected from the actual structures of authority in this gods forsaken place.
who does this dude think he is? a brooklyn based host of a leftist podcast?
This shit is like saying "China bad" on reddit. Low effort karma grab.
There’s a weird number of famous people who did that. Idk if it was just fire insurance or what.
I remember reading that book in high school and not getting why we were supposed to care about this guy. Dumbass rich kid drives around, tours with actual poor people like an enrichment experience, does extreme camping because he thinks he's some sort of shaman, eats poisoned berries and dies. Like it could be interesting if it weren't framed as some "tragic but noble journey of enlightenment by a romantic soul who never truly fit in this world" or some shit.
He was a dumbass but McCandless at least gave away his entire trust fund to Oxfam or something like that, so I'll take him over Kerouac.
Kerouac grew up in a poor, immigrant family. He was just a contrarian, misanthropic asshole. The original "post-Leftist" as someone on Twitter called him.
Jon Krakauer wrote the book. The kid was Chris McCandless. I used to hate that movie 10 years ago, but actually really like it now. Into Thin Air is a good book by Krakauer.
into thin air is such a fucked book, i haven't read it in a decade and it still sticks out distinctly in my memory
oh come on that's a fantastic soundtrack
also the kaki king song on there is just :joker-dancing:
Lol I get it, honestly. For me his voice just takes me back to a particular personal moment in time. If you don't have that connection he can be a bit... much.
I had a similar reaction initially but I now have a lot more sympathy for Chris McCandless after his sister revealed that their parents were extremely abusive , and letters from him reveal his desire to escape an awful environment at home was the driving cause for going "into the wild".
Nooo, not the contextual information that makes it hard to just shit on someone
In grade 12, my English final was to analyze 10 different text examples of metaphors used in On the Road by Jack Kerouac which we had read earlier in the semester.
I couldn't get through it, so instead I turned in a 2-page essay basically ranting about how vapid and stupid the book is, how there's just endless repetition of the characters driving around, finding some heroin and food, fucking, and then driving around again, and how it was hard to even know where you were because nothing interesting ever changed or happened.
Pretty sure one of the lines was "They're just driving and fucking, fucking and driving across the desert trying to get high, forever and ever."
I don't remember my whole essay, or the stupid book much anymore. I just remember my teacher gave me an A+ even though I didn't remotely do the assignment. She was cool.
there’s just endless repetition of the characters driving around, finding some heroin and food, fucking, and then driving around again,
Idk that kinda sounds like a good time. Maybe not the most interesting topic for a book I guess.
Absolutely. Might as well write a book about jacking off and playing Halo, describing weeks of this in detail.
Johnny and I were splayed out on either side of the hot leather couch, sipping red Mountain Dew and boarding the Truth and Reconciliation. John was at 2 bars after the hunters almost killed him, and I was still holding onto the almost empty sniper rifle because we knew there was an ammo pickup later in the level. "Pass the bowl, man" he said. I obliged, leaning over and handing him the bowl as two invisible elites opened doors on either side of us. They killed off all the marines so Johnny paused and hit load from last checkpoint. For some reason it put us back out of the ship, right before the last hunter fight on the gravity lift.
That's right. Hedonism is fun to do, but when you put it on a pedestal under a spotlight you see its limitations. There's no glory, truth, or justice in it. No community, no future. It's like masturbation - enjoyable in private, but no one will praise you for it.
We all have our own problematic faves. Bill Cosby was a personal wake up call, and the only way to deal with it was taking the same approach. Not buying any pudding pops any time soon...
“America” is pretty fucking based. Plus it’s way shorter and easier to memorize, anyway.
Henry Miller never got popular because his books were banned in the US under obscenity laws, likely because Miller was an active socialist who looked up to black radicals.
I need to get more into his work. I always assumed he was a Kerouac/Burroughs type, but now that I've actually read about him, Miller is definitely more of a "dirtbag left" type.
Idk exactly what he did wrong, but Miller was married about 5 times, each time to women much younger than him, and he was an early 20th century straight male who fucked around, so I'm sure there's some MeToo type stuff going on.
Miller was active in the Socialist Party USA as a young man, and he was a big fan of Hubert Harrison, an extremely influential black socialist.
https://socialistworker.org/2009/07/06/voice-of-harlem-radicalism
he literally wrote it on a scroll of paper taped end to end in a week entirely on a crazy amount of drugs especially speed lmao for keruoac
its cool how he did it, but it made me respect grammar rules and general formatting my god
Yeah I realize in hindsight how problematic some of these guys were, but I can’t deny how important the beat writers, along with types like ken Kesey and hunter s Thompson were for my radicalization
yeah i can't tell you how many times i watched fear and loathing in high school, and that book actually got me back into reading, which I hadn't done for years at that point. as you say, his whole mockery of the system which I at the time understood was fucked up, but didn't really have the words to explain why it was fucked up, was really important
truly the freak power -> left pipeline has not been analyzed enough
haha yeah i guess that's pretty true. i was heading that way myself if I didn't get into anarchism. all my friends are fuckin burnt though, still great people but yeah, the contrarianism without having anything you're really working for really brings one down after a while
It’s the kind of text that initiates, re-organizes, helps to understand an instant, but doesn’t go beyond (well it’s an oversimplification but let’s say that). Much like hedonism, it has a potential in re-centering yourself, for a moment. But AFTER THAT there is a need to go beyond, to follow a strong desire, a revolutionary one, not a loop of pleasure.
It is necessary to break the cage in which you are in. Except there is a need to ask oneself then, what the fuck do we do ?
The New Left and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
I sure the actual new left was against the red scare sentiment. Right? Right?
Kerouac was not new left lol. If he's in it, then it's such a huge category that it's meaningless if it includes everyone from the new communist movements to him.
Kerouac was such a boring freak. Tried reading his garbage like 4 times and could never do it. Glad I saw through his dumbass in high school.
He gets my sympathies. Go watch the interview with william buckley (disgusting) and you'll see how depraved a lunatic he was. He looks like alcohol made flesh. I doubt he was ever very sane.
I don't know why we would judge any random starving insane artist for their political views but maybe i give us too much credit. I guess people think he was a hippie and therefore lefty and therefore smart? Allen Ginsburg was literally a NAMBLA member
But, and this may be trivial and unknown, the hippies were not leftist. Many became Reaganites. Just a reaction to 50s hyperconformity.
Yeah, and his books suck. Virtually any other well-known Beat writer shits on him
Okay tbh, I only read On the Road. It's just that I hated it so much that I never read any other Kerouac. Give me Kesey or Burroughs (although I guess he's more of a proto-Beat writer)
