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Jack Kerouac’s book, “The Dharma Bums”, was written in the fifties. Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder were character’s based loosely on Jack Kerouac and the poet Gary Snyder, Fact and fiction joined to leave a forever glimpse of the Beat Generation. Free love, free spirits, and free loading.
Kerouac’s free thinking style is compelling. He lived on a shoestring, usually someone else’s string.
Deep thinker, heavy drinker, wild dreamer,nature lover, zen meditator, seeker, rebel of normality, believer, hiker, poet, story teller, friend, lost soul, and passionate observer.
I'm thinking the realities of life were to much for him, he was looking for a better way, a way out.
He was a wild man, candid writer, and beat generation icon. I enjoy his haiku and stories. A backward glance and inside track to a “far out” time. This book was fun, intriguing, I could "feel" this book in my soul.
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“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!” ~ Jack Kerouac
“The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarities to this feeling.”
― Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums
This paragraph is in part, the way I feel when I am in the woods. The right words never came for me.
San Francisco
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Janet Michelle "Jan" Kerouac was an American writer and the only child of beat generation author Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac.
He denied her for years. Blood tests confirmed him the father.
She saw him only twice. Dead at 44 from kidney failure. Drugs and a wild lifestyle affected her physical health.
She loved to travel. She was a published author. Her first book, Baby Driver, published in 1981, and her second, Trainsong, published in 1988, were praised by critics and fans.
I believe the absence and his denial of being her father was consuming, and she was unable to face this reality.
Two souls cut from the same cloth, candles burned out, gone too soon.
4 comments:
i never knew about his daughter. i loved that guy!
I didn't know he had a daughter either. How tragic. This was a quick, fascinating read.
One of my all time favorite books. I read it during my second year in college (not as part of a class of course) and felt that I had finally found someone who was talking sense, a true kindred spirit. Dharma Bums was definitely one of the most influential books I've ever read.
Incidentally, years later when I met J he turned out to be a relative of Jack Kerouac (on his mom's side)!
I had no idea that Kerouac had a daughter!
I read "The Dharma Bums" while in High School. It came to me in a group book order, from an English class, where students could order paperback books from a student oriented book club. I fell in love with Gary Snyder and continue to follow his poetry, essays and attended his lectures and poetry readings. His life has a certain tragedy to it, but through nature and love appears to have found a resolve.
Of course, i loved "The Dharma Bums" can usually be attracted to anything that speaks of them. So, I've followed Uma to he blog place, "Secret Notebooks~Wild Pages.
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