On The Road with Kerouac and Cassidy
For 14 hours during Oct. 20, more than 100 people
who had gathered at Beyond Baroque took to the never-ending road with Jack
Kerouac and his pal, Neal Cassidy, as they madly careened through the post-World
War night in search of “It.”
The occasion was, perhaps, the first
complete live reading in the world of Kerouac’s original manuscript for On
The Road. About 70 readers participated in the marathon event. Kerouac’s
originally typed the book on a long scroll so he wouldn’t have to break
his train of thought to add paper.
That
version was too raw, too stream of consciousness for 1950s book publishers. The
book that many of us read over the years was a refined and edited version. But
even that version was enough of a break with the past to create a new literary
style, and a new way of living, which became the Beat Generation. Venice was a
center of this new consciousness which spawned a creative outburst of poetry,
painting and lifestyle.
The scroll
– with real names like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and others
replacing the fictionalized ones – was only published this year, about 57
years after it was written. Whether the original scroll stimulates a new upsurge
in excitement and non-conformity remains to be
seen.
During the reading, Food not
Bombs activists posted flyers on the outside bulletin board at Beyond Baroque,
which pointed out that if Jack Kerouac, and others living his lifestyle, would
be banned from Venice if they intended to sleep in their vehicle because of an
effort to outlaw overnight parking in
Venice.
For that matter, Jesus and his
friends would not be able to sleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, if it happened
to be in Venice.
Posted: Thu - November 1, 2007 at 02:13 PM