Tag Archives: Jack Kerouac

On Reading “On the Road” (again?)

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It’s June, the days are sultry, and the wanderlust sets in. But since summer travel is not in my plans this year, I decided to read On the Road. Or re-read. I’m not really sure. Jack Kerouac’s beat novel is so endemic to American culture in the second half of the twentieth century, it’s one of those books we know even if we never read it. I read it recently and I’m still not sure if I had read it previously. It felt familiar.

I know I’ve read other Kerouac, so it only makes sense that I surely read On the Road years ago. An early ‘60s television series, “Route 66,” was inspired by On the Road; I watched it when I was barely in elementary school and, for third grade me, it defined what it meant to be “cool,” for better or worse. So my references for On the Road predate my knowledge that there was a book by that name.

For the record, The Subterraneans is still my favorite Kerouac book. I lent so many copies of The Subterraneans that were never returned that the last time I bought it, I bought two copies so I would be sure to have at least one copy in my library. I did lend out that other copy and, of course, it was never returned.

The impetus for my recent reading of On the Road was a book about the Grateful Dead. Here Beside the Rising Tide by Jim Newton purports to be a biography of Jerry Garcia, but it really becomes a chronicle of the counterculture of Garcia’s time. While reading it, Neal Cassady’s name occasionally popped up and set me to thinking about On the Road. Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in On the Road and other books is a barely disguised version of the author’s buddy, Neal Cassady, who was a muse for the Beat writers and is iconic in ’50s and ’60s counterculture. He drove the bus for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests, for which the Grateful Dead was the house band (bus band?). The Grateful Dead song “Cassidy” is the first song I want to hear when a member of the Dead passes on; even though the song’s namesake is the daughter of a Grateful Dead roadie, Neal Cassady is present in the lyrics.

So, I just finished reading On the Road, perhaps for the first time. And I really like it, again maybe. But I have issues: I have always thought of Neal Cassady as one of my counterculture heroes, but I really got tired and annoyed with Dean Moriarty while reading the book (“Yass! Man! Go! Go! Phew! Yass! Ahem! …”). I knew guys like Cassady, mainly in college and grad school. I enjoyed hanging with them back then, as I recall. You might know the type: frantic, charismatic, a maverick, always on the make and take, womanizer, manizer, pretentious in an aw shucks way, in their seventh year of working toward a B.A. in philosophy. They’re fun but tend to get boring and tiresome and you just want them to shut up sometimes. Or, better yet, go away for a while.

I get the sense at times that Sal Paradise, the book’s Kerouac stand-in, feels that way about Dean. Sal hangs and goes the distance with Dean throughout the book. He misses Dean when he’s not there. Sal clearly wants Dean’s approval, but he doesn’t always present him in the most flattering terms. I’m reminded of a friend of mine who was raised in a very middle of the road Midwest family. Occasionally, though, he tried to take a walk on the wild side, or at least visit it. He told me once that every morning as he looked in the bathroom mirror, he said to himself Don’t be shocked by anything that happens today. I can imagine Sal Paradise doing that, but he’d never reveal it.

From a twenty-first century perspective, it’s hard to know where to even start in terms of On the Road’s treatment of women. It’s staggering to realize that there was a time fairly recently when those sorts of attitude toward women would have been deemed acceptable on any level. You might say Well it’s a product of a different time and a different mindset. But then, you look around and see what’s happening around us today – among the billionaires on private islands, at the Pentagon, on the grounds of the UFC next door to what used to be “the People’s House” – and maybe the mindset hasn’t changed so much after all. I’m sorry to get all wound up: I just read a pastor’s letter “explaining” why women shouldn’t be allowed behind the pulpit. My irritation is deep. I’m keeping the faith but losing my religion.

Perhaps my reaction to Dean Moriarty and the rest is just the collateral damage of maturity. I’m sure I didn’t feel such reservations when I first knew of Cassady and read Kerouac and the Beats. In a recent column, octogenarian Garrison Keillor writes, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas is all well and good when you’re in your twenties but when the Stones come back fifty years later and fans with walkers and canes are dancing, is this something we really need to see?” I see what he means.

But when all is said and done, I really enjoyed reading On the Road. Yes, despite everything.

You dig? Cool! Ahem.

Notes on Cursive Writing

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My great-grandfather John Houston McCarn was born in 1865, the year that Lincoln was assassinated. He lived until 1959. That is significant for me because I vaguely remember seeing Grandpa McCarn when I was a pre-schooler. We went to his house in Cullman “town”; I got impatient that the old gentleman was hard of hearing and things had to be repeated all the time.

When I was older, I realized that Houston McCarn was born the year the Civil War ended; I was impressed that I had known a person with that particular direct connection to history.

Grandpa McCarn was a highly educated man and a school teacher. Based on the amount of land and real estate he managed to accrue in Cullman, Jefferson, and Walker counties in his long lifetime, he was a savvy investor as well. Six of his seven children were alive when he died and the property was split in many directions, so none, I suspect, got a lot.

I remember going to the Cullman county community of Bremen with my mother and grandmother to witness an auction of one of Houston McCarn’s rural schoolhouses, just a few hundred yards away from the “home place” where my grandmother Eula McCarn Harbison and her siblings grew up.

Mother remembers Grandpa McCarn’s large library. We have no clue what happened to his books when he died, but I shudder to think of the probability that they were discarded.

The discipline of clear penmanship was part of every school teacher’s domain in the days when Grandpa was teaching and I would look at samples of Grandpa McCarn’s elegant writing in letters and penmanship exercises in my grandmother’s chests of drawers when I was young.

After Grandmother Harbison died, I came to be in possession of two faded sheets of Grandpa’s writing. One sheet has his stylish rendering of the letter “E” with a few sample words starting with that letter. One of the words, coincidentally, is the name “Edward.” Even though the writing predates me by decades, the coincidence is neat.

The second sheet is the rendering of two images of birds. Grandpa McCarn used these images to teach the basic strokes of cursive writing. I have wondered how his students – farm boys and girls in rural Alabama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – reacted to the rigorous discipline of Houston’s exercises in cursive penmanship.

I had the fading sheets of writing framed and they hang in my bedroom. I know they will seem worthless to anyone who runs across them when I am gone, but they are remarkably valuable to me. Houston would probably be stunned to know that his doodling from a century ago or more is hanging in a place of honor in the home of that 4-year-old boy.

Grandpa McCarn’s son-in-law, my grandfather Leonard Harbison, was a farmer’s son from a large family. He lacked a lengthy formal education, but he had mastered Grandpa McCarn’s deliberate and stylized birds and was still drawing them into his old age. I remember Granddaddy Harbison’s skilled rendering of the birds in the margins of books. He lived to age 93, almost as long as his scholarly father-in-law.

Over a decade after Grandpa McCarn died, those of us in Birmingham city schools had weekly classes in penmanship. I remember that in second grade, when we shifted from printing to cursive, it was referred to as “real writing.”

I have thought of it in those terms ever since.

At that time, Birmingham City Schools employed handwriting specialists – teachers who came to schools to ensure that the students’ cursive writing was up to par. In addition, we took weekly handwriting classes as part of our curriculum and were assigned a grade for penmanship in our report cards.

One time in fifth grade, my straight-A report card was marred by a “C” in penmanship from Mrs. Caskey. I think the shock of that “C” instilled in me a life-long commitment to be conscientious about my handwriting. Over the years, it has changed drastically; as I get older, it loses a bit of its confidence, but it’s still a source of pride.

It saddens me that cursive writing is no longer taught to elementary school students. A “good hand,” as it was called in the past, was once a mark of an educated person. Now, I list cursive writing as a “special skill” on my vita.

Nowadays, when I write notes to young people, I struggle with whether or not I should write in cursive. More often than not, I print the text and sign my name in cursive. I worry that I might insult the recipient either way: Am I insinuating they can’t read cursive? or Am I deliberately writing in a style they can’t read?

Literacy in general is a touchy area in dealing with youth, for whom “literacy” may take on a very different meaning than it did when I was their age. A young friend tactfully put me in my place recently. I was accustomed since her birth to sending picture books to her for Christmas and her birthday. The last time I gave her a picture book, she wrote a polite thank you note with a gentle reprimand, telling me, “I am reading chapter books now.”

I got her point, vowed to gift her no more picture books, and was delighted that she knew to send a handwritten thank you note.

“That’s not writing; it’s just typing” (or words to that effect) was Truman Capote’s catty dismissal of the Beat writers in general, and Jack Kerouac in particular, in the 1950s.

I wonder how he might respond to our age of tweets and posts, blogs and instant messaging, to the obsolescence of typewriters and handwriting in general. How might he and his contemporaries react to the fact that cursive writing has become a lost art?