what the kids are reading now

I picked up The Subterraneans and was reading it on a bench in the park today. On my way home, I passed a kid on Main Street, sprawled on a bench and reading On the Road. I almost said something, but I didn’t. There are some writers you bond over, and some that you bond over by not saying anything about them.

Everyone is reading Jack Kerouac this summer, and you should be, too. For one thing, everyone is doing it. For another thing, unlike tiered dresses and riding Segways (which are other things that everyone is doing this summer), reading Jack Kerouac is advisable at any time of the year. But it is particularly suited to summer. And here is why…

The heat of summer puts people of all ages back into the mood of cross, irritable angst that dominates an adolescent’s life. Even if you’re a pretty easy-going person of mature years and reliable sang-froid, the summer’s heat will most likely give you acne, and suddenly you will find yourself at odds with the world through no fault of your own, and with no closure imaginable to the unanswerable questions that make you so damn cranky. Your body will expand unaccountably, you will alternate between dull and ravenous appetites, you will be fatigued during the day and sleepless at night, and on top of it all, you will be compelled by the custom of your peers to wear tight and revealing clothes that you tug at all day long, tormented additionally by the uncertainty of how you look and what everyone is thinking of you.

And, as you know, adolescents love Jack Kerouac…almost as much as they love The Catcher in the Rye. In fact, Salinger is practically passé now, left to the middle-schoolers as being far too allegorical, while the jaded upper sets get into the Beat Generation and its contempt for self-analysis. It’s all about expression, man. The great thing about Kerouac’s writing is its immediacy. It’s the tumble of the now now now, never mind what just happened in the last paragraph or even the grammatical progression of the last two words I’m on to something new now, man, because what’s done is done and now is I mean you dig me daddy-o?

Though I doubt this is what he was going for, Jack Kerouac perfectly encapsulates the adolescent experience, by betraying a very touching vulnerability under his insistent bravado and vulgarity. He puts such a strain on himself to be great, to show that he is a great writer of his time and beyond it, that it makes you kind of giggle in commiseration. “Yeah, sweetheart, I thought I was a pretty big deal once, too.”

“The adolescent cocksman having made his conquest barely broods at home the loss of the love of the conquered lass, the blacklash lovely—no confession there.—It was on a morning when I slept at Adam’s that I saw her again, I was going to rise, do some typing and coffee drinking in the kitchen all day since at that time work, work was my dominant thought, not love—not the pain which impels me to write this even while I don’t want to, the pain which won’t be eased by the writing of this but heightened, but which will be redeemed, and if only it were a dignified pain and could be placed somewhere other than in this black gutter of shame and loss and noisemaking folly in the night and poor sweat on my brow—…” (The Subterraneans)

Awww, don’t you want to just give him a hug?

Plus, you have to enter this whole world of slang that you probably left behind once you started working beyond minimum wage. Flip, hep, chick, dig—at least half the words you have to intuit, they will be so often repeated but with no contextual clues.

Finally, the loaded importance of the scene—not really what anybody does or says, half the time the actions are not clearly communicated and when they are, they don’t make sense. But it’s just where everyone is—the Mask or the Red Drum (in The Subterraneans), North Beach or Berkeley or the mountains (in The Dharma Bums), little Bretagne pubs or grey boulevards (in Satori in Paris). The importance is not on the place as a setting, but as a scene in which the characters exist, not really knowing what to do with themselves but painfully self-conscious.

Oh, the grandeur! The weight!
What a responsibility to be so young and so important!

(first published 7.16.07, 9.05pm)