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.)
