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i just went to the Sierras and read this book again- the big surprise to me upon opening it up in my sleeping bag Day 1 was that Kerouac starts DBums in Santa Barbara and heads to the Sierras and i thought, "wow, this will be great! that is the trip i am making right now!"

and maybe 20 years ago when i was less judgemental about white boys and how the they believed every thought they had was a pure fucking gold nugget the world can't possibly live without was less offensive to me-- BUT now it's like DB split and became two stories for me this time- 1) the moments of Kerouac prose that bring every second of life alive- i mean some are truly musically breathtaking--and 2)the paranoid twaddle of a child-man who is uptight, uncertain about his place in the world, hung up on his mother, afraid to do the dirty work that having a soul requires, priveleged without self-awreness of that fact, and espousing tons of buddhist blather like a fountain that both stops up and gushes at incalcuable intervals. I never knew for how long i could enjoy it before i'd get some man-child hives from it. And since i've stopped feeling sorry for most white men and their pathetic attempts to get out of their spiritual/social/perosnal responisbilities, i might be just harshing on my usual post WWII literary buzz, but i don't think so...

I still love Kerouac for having an ear for language that is part whimsical, part hummingbird, part jazz and part latin mass and mothertongue but as a man he tried to write about Buddhism but ended up revealing the sad posturing of an unformed masculine self. he was idolizing the western ideal of man though he massgaed it into some Buddhist monk lifestyle and stuck some orientalist wrapper around it and called it Zen. he is eternally hung up and Dharma Bums really isn't about Dharma, the wheel of suffering, it's about small men and big mountains.