late night thought

I went through this hard core beatnik phase in high school. I'm talking memorized Ginsberg poems and afternoons spent in used bookstores. One of the things I liked most was connecting all of the dots--realizing that these were real people and they all were friends (more or less) and I loved when they all popped up in each others works.

I'm not sure when I 'grew out of' the beats, per se--I mean I think it must have been college, and I just started reading other writers, other poems, poems that I could identify more with than say-- a raging homosexual's adventures with sex and drugs in New York City in the sixties.

So I remember reading On the Road and The Dharma Bums in high school, and I remember loving them.

And then I get to college and onwards and recently now too, with the movie version of On the Road coming out soon, and I hear people talking and I start thinking too, that Keroauc was a huge misogynist, in On the Road the women basically never talk and are expendable props, and ugh! outrage! and how can I look up to this novel now!

(Okay that was all the back story leading up to my thought that I had just now.)

It just occurred to me that I didn't do a "feminist reading" of On the Road in high school, because I didn't need to. I identified with Sal, I fell in love with Japhy. I loved their California, their mountains. I'm over the "intentions of the author". I didn't go to those books to look for a woman role model, I went to them to get the hell out of Chapel Hill High School. And they did that.

Plus, if you think about it, a gender-neutral reading of On the Road is pretty much a feminist reading of it, right?

Anyway I think I'm going to reread On the Road, and then Dharma Bums right afterward. I want to know how much has changed, from high school until now.

(I had to sneak into L's room to find Dharma Bums.)