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on the road - jack kerouac

in the uncertain days of the post-war depression the first stirrings of rebellious youth began with the emergence of the beat generation; a collection of young north american visionaries who wanted to travel beyond what their parents had come to expect from the drab suburban world and access new places both in a physical and, in the case of junkies like william burroughs, a chemical sense. along with the infamous heroin addict burroughs and maverick homosexual poet allen ginsburg, kerouac was one of the seminal personalities of a movement that both outraged and transfixed 1950s america.

the semi-autobiographical novel follows sal paradise [kerouac] and the fascinating dean moriaty; in real life a man named neal cassidy who wanted to be a writer but instead would be immortalised by his moriarty doppleganger. following frequent cross-country rides from new york to san fransico, denver to mexico and back again, the story follows the adventures of a rough band of friends which includes renamed versions of both burroughs and ginsberg though the general focus remains with paradise as the narrator and moriarty as the unhinged road travaller, charming womaniser and student of the world looking for the perfect state of being.

colliding with a mryiad of characters from the road, through broken loves, drinking sessions and underground jazz clubs, on the road is the essential guidebook for those of us who are depressed beyond the point of exhaustion with the empty modern world and would die to be a part of keroauc's multi-coloured philosophical travelogue if only for one day. a perfect novel that enriches life with its passion and belief in a better way of living.

junky - william s burroughs

if depression-era america could just about stomach embracing kerouac's ideas of free-thinking and living on the road without money but a simple determination to get to the next town anyway possible, william s burroughs' semi-autobiographical account of life on the fringes of society as a heroin addict crashing wildly from shooting up to prison, rehab, cold turkey and the next fix was too much to bear. when it became widely known that the author not only came from a respectable middle class family but was a harvard graduate, the illusion drug dependancy was a poorman's disease was permanently shattered.

this unflinching and unapologetically graphic account of life as a junky emerged at a time when anti-drug hysteria was just as rampant across the country as anti-communist feelings and the decrying of homosexuality. pre-dating irvine's trainspotting by half a century, this isn't a pleasant read for those of you unfamiliar with the darker side of life and it lacks the lyrical dynamism of kerouac, but there is something preversely attractive about william lee's [burroughs narrating alter-ego] account of his heroin addiction.

I quite liked junky but it did lack something that I couldn't fathom out. It nearly reached the peaks of very good writing but then stopped. I don't know what it was because as a narrative it was good. I would have gone for 3 1/2 Stars but you can't do that which is a bugger.

I am going to be reading On the Road shortly.

howl and other poems - allan ginsburg

'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,' so begins the evocative descent into ginsburg's portrayal of the beat generation and the stained yet vibrant world the movement inhabited. as its chief poet and lryicist, ginsburg doesn't flinch from the task of describing the details of this existence as boldly and beautifully as was demanded, a fact that had the first print run of the collection of poems impounded by the san fransisco police under the obscene publications act and had its openly homosexual author in court to defend himself against the charges handed down by a legal establishment threatened and confused by what the beat generation was expressing. a modern classic and the perfect companion to kerouac's prose