13 comments

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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Very nice, Lance. And, oddly, this makes me want to go back and re-read Kerouac, whom I haven't read since my own college days. I actually find his flaws, as both a man and a writer, lovable. But flawless people are so awfully un-lovable.
  
  Along with the rest of the world I have a cold, so, casting caution to the winds (knowing I can later recant and blame it on the cold) I will jump right in with a response to your final question:
  
  This past year I decided that I would finally read "Moby-Dick" , a book which I had tried to read a couple of times before many years before but never finished. I was fired up by a long appreciation of Melville I had just read in the New York Review of Books. I bought a great-looking hardback edition and set to work.
  
  Oh, God, I hated that book. I'm not saying it's not a classic, but I just found it so verbose, so obvious, so horribly dull, and yet I forced myself to plow through it to the end. I was totalIy rooting for the whale, and I was never so happy to see the entire cast of a book (save tedious Ishmael) finally bumped off.
  
  If we're talking about reputedly great plays in the same category, for me, hands down, it's "The Iceman Cometh".
  
  Litterateurs of the world, please don't hate me, I have a cold.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  PS
  
  Getting back to "On the Road", here's something from Proust:
  
  "The only true voyage...would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is..."
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  Tom Watson

  1 year ago

  I loved this post and have had the same reax to Kerouac just recently. The flaws the me are fine, and the man is fascinating a a historic literary figure. It's the book I couldn't get through!
  
  Lance to answer your question - Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Dunno why, perhaps the translation.
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  Tom Watson

  1 year ago

  Dan, I love MD - but it is verbose. I read it once when I had to, and once when I didn't - on vacation, at the shore, looking at the ocean. It was the right place. What can I say? Call me Ishmael, I guess.
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  Manny Maher

  1 year ago

  Do colds spread through the internet? Kathleen had it, and now I've got it.
  I can't say "On the Road" ever disappointed me. When I first read it, at age 17 or so, it revved me up so much that I literally walked out to the expressway that cuts through Chicago, put out my thumb, and spent the next few years bumming around North America, reading the entire Kerouac canon. I haven't gone back to it since, but I obviously remember it fondly.
  I am wary of reading "On the Road" again, for fear it would drive home the fact of how much I've aged. I suspect it is a book best read in adolescence, when all you can see is yourself. As Kerouac's later work showed (painfully), he was utterly trapped in his head and desperately lonely. Again, a good book for adolescence.
  You want a reputedly great book that disappoints? "The Sportswriter" by Richard Ford. Yuk.
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  Jason Chervokas

  1 year ago

  Ah Melville, maybe my all time favorite. I re-read Moby every coupla years, but for all it's supposed modernity (discontinuous narration--the first person narrator delivers scenes he couldn't possibly have witnessed), it's a pretty old-fashioned 19th century philosophical novel (but screamingly hilarious too, got a lot of laughs in the early chapters reading it out loud to my wife). For me, a joy to read every time.
  
  If you want some other Melville to check out try The Confidence Man--his most underrated, most modern, and in the end, perhaps his greatest novel (I know, I'm the only one who thinks that, but what the hell...another one I re-read every coupla years). For short stuff try "Benito Cereno." I still don't know why they teach Bartelby and Billy Budd to high schoolers when they could teach Benito Cereno.
  
  Kerouac, well, I adore Kerouac too--he also, clearly a Melvillian. I like his Buddhist poetry best, but try Doctor Sax or the original scroll draft of OTR if you're going back to re-read.
  
  Manny, Watson loves Richard Ford, I'll leave him to defend the man.
  
  BTW, the most fun I ever had in my life was a week at the Naropa Institute in Boulder celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of On the Road w/ Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Abbey Hoffeman, Ted Berrigan, Ken Babbs, and more. A fantastic time was had by all, and I learned a lot about writing too. What a hang.
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  Jason Chervokas

  1 year ago

  Oh, and reputedly great books that disappoint, well, I won't give you a specific book, but I must say I find it nearly impossible to get through any of Dickens' novels.
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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Jason, did you ever read Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall"? At the end, the book's hero, the beautifully named Tony Last, stumbles lost into a remote Amazonian village where he is taken under the wing of the illiterate local boss, Mr. Todd, who insists that Tony read aloud to him the complete works of Dickens, over and over again. Forever.
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  Tom Watson

  1 year ago

  Hey - lay off my main man Charlie Dickens...brilliant, he was. He did ramble on, but they were serialized stories as well, so. Great Expectations is a great novel.
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  OutOfContext

  1 year ago

  I'm going to chime in here about Moby Dick, which is one of my all time favorites, which I find odd because I tend to like short books and stripped down sentences. The best thing, for me, about the book is the long section of whale quotes at the beginning, which is reads kind of like proto-Google search results and sets the theme of obsession (and some may argue monotony).
  I have a lovely mint condition exact reprint of the original edition of On The Road. It is in mint condition because I have started it several times, but never found interesting enough to continue.
  Burroughs is the only Beat era guy I like and I like him a lot. Some of that probably has to do with his reading voice. Once I heard him read his stuff, I couldn't read it without hearing him.
  Finally, I was almost physically repelled by Delillo's Underworld and, while I liked Richard Power's Gain a good deal, I spit out The Echo Maker like sour wine. Usually, though, surprise comes for me when I really like something, not the other way round.
  
  And apparently, Dan's White Whale is a certain Frenchman. To paraphrase Jan Brady, "Marcel, Marcel, Marcel..."
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  Tom Watson

  1 year ago

  O-of-C - we clearly have similar tastes. Any other faves?
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  Jason Chervokas

  1 year ago

  I don't have a major beef w/ Dickens. In fact recently I was reading A Tale of Two Cities and digging the writing very much, but my reading of it petered out, as I find, inevitably, my reading of any Dickens novel eventually does before I get more than around halfway thru.
  
  Someone reading Dickens to me in the jungle for all eternity wouldn't be half the torture of someone playing the Gilbert & Sullivan oeuvre over and over.
  
  One more note on OTR, ol' Lancerooni...although I love your trope of OTR as a static novel, I don't think it's wholly accurate.
  
  It's circular, no doubt, begins in NY mourning for a dead father and ends in NY mourning for a father never found. And Dean is something of a static character, but Sal emerges from a classical journey to conquer death (Sal and Dean as Gilgamesh and Inkidu) with an acceptence of death and a kind of spiritual growth from the dead feelings of the earliest pages to a kind of heart broken super empathy for life in the universe. If the narrative is linear and meandering, well, it's a road story and that's the way the road goes.
  
  Furthermore, although it's outside the text in the wilder Visions of Cody, Sal/Jack emerges with a kind of mission and meaning to his life--go moan for man--and, in the end, conquers death, the way all writers do, by recording and preserving the stories of the people and places he sees around him (I wrote the book because we're all gonna die).
  
  I think the myths surrounding the book's composition (and btw, given the evidence of the recently published scroll, the efforts to turn the spew into a more formal novel only made the book more stiff and stilted, not better) overshadow the stuff that happens in the book itself. Yeah, it's about Jack/Sal, in fact Jack, as one of America's most Catholic writers, was forever composing Augustinian confessions. But I've always been a sucker for those.
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  OutOfContext

  1 year ago

  TW-
  Kobo Abe, Raymond Chandler, Aldous Huxley, John O'Hara, John Dos Passos, Nelson Algren, Humphrey Cobb (Paths of Glory is the only book he wrote and it is great), JG Ballard to name a few off the top of my head.
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