feeling ravenous

One and a half weeks of summer and I have read the following:

-Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
-On the Road by Jack Kerouac
-some poetry by Ezra Pound
-Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
-reread Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
-reread Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil (I swear that it doesn't get old)
-some poems by Gregory Corso
-The Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac
-Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen by Lesley Hazleton

I am currently working on:
-Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
-The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac


I can't get enough Jack Kerouac. That should be quite evident in my recent devouring of his books. It took me a while to digest On the Road.

Those that know me know that I down books like Pooh bear does with honey. Not this one. It is so saturated with Jack Kerouac. Granted, its his story of his bumming and zipping back and forth from coast to coast with his friend, so it should be very real Jack Kerouac. I don't know if I've ever read such a naked piece of work. I feel as though I come too close to his wild and untamed brilliance and his larger-than-life divinity of spirit.

I see a man who's struggled with his immense capacity for passion for anything and everything and plays like a mad sax player all over his spectrum of emotions. He dug books and learning and writing traveling seeing the sights hearing the sounds feeling his relation to the people and world around him. He called himself "mad" for everything, and I can see that. Your average-day normal person can't register so much feeling of everything. He and his friend Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in the book) were driven by some raging hunger for the present and the unknowable future.

My HUM 5 TA recommended Kerouac to me for some summer reading. I'm glad I listened to him. I wish more people knew his name and were exposed to his schizophrenic and naked prose. It's so damn raw and real that it seems to slam up against you, bruising on impact and obliterating all that you thought was good literature. His writing isn't orthodox, classically learned and Shakespearean in its execution, but it makes you dance and drown in sorrow and feel.