nypl

I read On The Road and The Dharma Bums years ago. Although I am a fan of Jack Kerouac’s work and knew a little bit about the Beat Generation, I didn’t know anything outside of the writing before my visit to the NYPL. I really wish I could have read everything that was on display, but I didn’t have time. The few things that I examined in detail were some of Jack Kerouac’s personal journals, drawings, the scroll and Allan Ginsberg’s photographs. In one of Kerouac’s early journals that he kept as a kid, he wrote about playing with cardboard cars in class when he wasn’t supposed to be and I laughed. This is how I pictured him being from his books- energetic and mischievous. Then I got to the other side of the room and saw his list he kept of women he slept with. He a) kept track of them and b) rearranged their names every now and then. It was just something I hadn’t really expected to see because I thought of him as a writer and not a regular guy with a personal life. Most of the names were full names, and every now and then he forgot one and wrote down a city and short description of where this was or how they met. I’m still not sure whether overlooking women and being chauvinistic was a personal trait or widespread at the time. There were several glass cases that held his fantasy baseball drawings and notes. He was really obsessed with that stuff and kept lists of teams, traded players and drew players’ positions on the field. Organization is a quirk that I had not expected to find in Kerouac. In one of the YouTube videos in the syllabus, he talked about why he wrote on the scroll. It allowed him to free-write without stopping or rearranging chapters. I noticed that there was almost no editing done to the script on display. It really was written in one train of thought, which is why it flows so well. I didn’t know that Allen Ginsberg got into photography in addition to writing. I liked the images he took because, through peoples’ expressions and gestures, Ginsberg captured the way his crowd was living.