« From the good ol’ days of Christian Rock | Home | Racism is everywhere »
What I’m reading right now
By jmb | September 9, 2006
Right now I’m reading The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which has been a delightful (yet occasionally disturbing read). I’ll post more thoughts on it later when I finish it, but let me go ahead and post this little snippet that I found particularly delicious…
“Give me another slug of that jug. How! Ho! Hoo!” Japhy leaping up: “I’ve been reading Whitman, know hat he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that’s the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanders, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the genral demand that they consume prodcution and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least fancy new cars, certain hair oils and deodoratnts and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack reovlution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountain to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures…”
(This is from p. 97-98 of my edition of the book)
Topics: Literature |
Ads by Google...