I Read Jack Kerouac

And it made me think about the dichotomy between structure and freedom. On the Road was a masterpiece that got neutered by a publishing house, and it wasn’t until 57 years or so after he wrote the thing that it got published as it was originally intended, the whole scroll. And we know that Jack wrote it on peyote, or was that Ginsberg with Howl? Today we don’t do either, we do L-Theanine, Creatine, Caffeine, some do Modafini and Adderall and Ritalin, but that isn’t smart. The smart people research nootropics and use them to enhance their lives and their productivity and maybe someone reading this thinks I’m talking about something illegal, but they are ill-informed, a quick google search will educate you but they don’t care about that, most people read the headline and form their opinion right there. No matter, either way On the Road was a drug-assisted deluge of prose that came rushing out of Jack and into the American consciousness. And I wonder what the modern day version of it would be? 2023 doesn’t have prolonged prose that weaves and winds its way towards the end goal. 2023 wants to know where it’s going, 2023 wants to fit into a box, 2023 needs to follow the rules. People want you to get to the punchline, now or else they’ll move on to the next thing that gives them IT right away they want IT on a platter and they want IT now. But is that really true? You see long form podcasts are one of the most popular forms of media, a three hour conversation between your heroes is engrossing, as engrossing as hearing a three hour conversation between your friends, which can easily be a podcast now as well. We’ve been freed with technology and maybe the modern day deluge is the hours of content that get produced and published every millisecond, there’s no way to navigate through it all. And is there even any point in producing your own? How many people can write about the romance of the Mississippi River, Jack? How many different viewpoints do we need about the romance of heading “west”. I had my own version of heading west and that was heading inland from the east coast of Australia. Everyone knows that if you’re in Australia you need to be on the east coast, it’s all happening in Sydney and Melbourne, man, Brisbane is ok too and you’re forgiven if you couldn’t bear to leave the warmth. But heading inland? It’s a different world. The people there don’t hop between the three major capitals on a weekly basis, it’s different, their world is different, maybe you’ll go up to Darwin or over to Perth, spend a weekend in the Barossa or Coffin Bay or watch the stars at Arkaroola but most of us don’t remember that the stars exist because they’re blocked out by modernity, by Uber Eats and Negronis, by investment returns and the property market. There’s more to this country than you know and the romance of the Adelaide Hills rivals the Byron Hinterland, although there aren’t any celebrities that live there… if it doesn’t get posted on instagram how would anybody know about it? So I read Jack Kerouac and got inspired. I read Jack Kerouac and respected his commitment to art. I’m not usually a person for maximalism, I’m a lawyer, I like direct prose that says what it means and nothing else. Utilitarian. It matches my taste in architecture which eschews ornament, that was the birth of modernism that lead to brutalism, I forget the architect who said it, one of the famous ones but he said something along the lines of that if a column isn’t bearing any weight then he wants it removed. The classic architects put ornament in, columns without a purpose. Why? But story telling isn’t architecture. We live in structures. Maybe you can’t tell a story in a utilitarian way, maybe it’s the twists and the turns that give the story meaning, maybe if you went straight from point A to point C without detouring through B or G or M you would miss a critical part. And I guess that’s what life is like. And that’s what Jack Kerouac learnt when he realised he couldn’t take Route 6 straight to Denver. He realised that he needed to explore every route, every back street, take the wrong turns and the missteps, fold back on himself. That’s what it means to be On the Road.