On the Road

I read On the Road again several years ago with some trepidation. It seemed like one of those books that might not live up to one's youthful love for it. But it did, oh how it did. My kneejerk inner feminist bristled, but my language-loving, road-loving inner Beat overcame her, and I reveled in the riffing madness. When I saw it on the cover of the NY Times Book Review I thought, oh, I should read On the Road again, but then tonight I read the actual review and now what I really want to read is the original scroll. (And Dharma Bums, which I think of every single time I walk down a mountain or run down a hill: You can't fall off a mountain!) (Except that you can. My friend J did, and when I heard of his death, it was one of the first things I thought: Kerouac was wrong.)

(Also in the Sunday Times, and this I did manage to read on Sunday, is this must-read op-ed by seven soldiers in Iraq [whose names reflect a diversity the Times op-ed page rarely evokes]. I didn't see the news much this summer, maybe two or three times a week, which is rare for me, but it seems like all that is happening is the war, going endlessly and disastrously on and on.) (No, the campaign does not count as news, because nothing really happens.)