Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
Good morning everyone and welcome to Tuesday’s Morning Open Thread. Our intrepid dijit (whom you really should follow) is on vacation for a couple weeks so you will have to put up with a fill-in for a couple more weeks. To continue in the style of our fedora-wearing anarchist, I thought we could sit back and listen to a bit more of genuine Americana from the time before punk: On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Although I believe institutional organs like The Times never truly understood The Beat generation at the time, I do think they (like us) have come to appreciate what they were all about—the post-war rejection of mainstream American values, the exploration of different forms of sexuality, the experimentation in mind altering drugs, and the idea that a younger generation actually had something to say.
From a New York Times Book Review essay (published in 2007) on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road:
A writer sufficiently attuned to an idea can find all the materials required for its fulfillment lying around in the street. Kerouac, a working-class French Canadian boy from Massachusetts who won a football scholarship to Columbia but decided before long that he was less interested in sports than in writing, had given evidence of his obsession with the road as early as 1940. Meeting Neal Cassady, though, made it possible for him to write the mid-20th century’s answer to “Huckleberry Finn.” Cassady, with his need to move, his vast yahooing enthusiasm and his insatiable priapic drive, could have stepped out of Western legend. That he compulsively stole cars instead of guiding wagon trains and achieved enlightenment in bebop clubs rather than medicine lodges was merely a function of history. But he wasn’t a primitive, and was rather more than a found object. He read books and wrote sometimes spectacular letters, and he was more on top of the zeitgeist than his big-city admirers. He was a born hero and a euphoric lover of the world, who gave the Beats their soul, saving them — if just barely — from choking on their own mysticism.
If you haven’t yet seen Otteray Scribe’s recent post, Aviator Doc sez, “Be a Hero,” you should.
Cheers everyone and have a lovely day.
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To get a sense of Jack Kerouac’s philosophy, check out his wonderful “30 Rules for Good Writing.”
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?