Jack Kerouac’s On the Road has been heralded so many places at the great
American/Coming of Age/Beat Generation/etc. novel, that I refuse to utter such superlatives here. But I will say that I
read On the Road on the way back from living in Thailand, and in those pages I saw myself, to some extent the thing I
wanted to be, and there was an jazz-like artistry in the writing that made me certain, whatever it was I was going to
do with my life, it would somehow involve travel and writing. Lo, ho, what do you know…here I am a journalist in
New York who also writes a travel blog. I suppose that’s close. I have not yet met my own Dean Moriarty, but I
have stared like Kerouac over “the long, long skies over New Jersey and sensed all that raw land that rolls in
one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast”.
And so what’s this all about? Well,
over at
Worldhum, Jim Benning posts about how a yellowing, 36-foot section of the original “On the Road”
manuscript scroll will be displayed at the San Francisco Public Library. The infamous scroll
will be on display from Jan. 14 to March 19, along with Kerouac-related books and photographs. I, for one, would very
much like to see this.