...but the terrible reporting of it that drives me nuts. So it's the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's On the Road. Nice. Fans and friends of Kerouac are "marathon-reading" the book in celebration. Fine. All good.
Yet for someone as important, as influential as Kerouac, you'd think we could get a better closing sentence:
"The stream-of-consciousness novel helped generate the Beat Generation."
I think we can all agree that using generate and Generation in the same 10-word sentence isn't ideal. A better word could have been selected. More to the point, generate, as used in this context, doesn't really make sense. Could a novel "generate" a movement? Start, inspire, kick-off, possibly. But generate? And since I'm being overly critical (which should no doubt give you an inside view of the wonderful world of wedding planning woes), even if a book could generate a movement, I don't believe that On the Road was it, all by itself. There were so, so many others that came before and after. Why simplify, distill, mis-report, for the sake of a 50th anniversary reading-marathon?
Bits & Bobs:
- The Naropa Kerouac festival ends today
- The Naropa blog has some outstanding video footage of Kerouac with Hunter S. Thompson, of Kerouac singing On the Road (a douzy) and other Jack ephemera
- It strikes me as particularly odd (funny, even?) that several children's books are also titled On the Road - perhaps I will stage my own Kerouac On the Road tribute in which I will post and examine the other On the Road books that were no doubt generated by the first one...
- Ah, but now I'm just being crabby.
