Books January 2009
Shorter notice
On Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac The Dharma Bums. -->
In the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, the loosely autobiographical story of several hikes he took a year after On the Road, Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) explains to the complaining Ray Smith (Kerouac) that they still have a long way to go: “We got a plateau and then scree and then more rocks and we get to a final alpine lake no biggern this pond and then comes the final climb over one thousand feet almost straight up. …” Honestly, I was ready to stop at the scree.
While Viking Press adorns the edition with a lively cover—an amoebic shape that recalls Jean Arp’s woodcuts—the introduction by the editor Ann Douglas rehearses shopworn tales of the Beat Generation and Kerouac’s Buddhism. Unfortunately, this historical context dates the...
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