Back-to-Back Jack: Kerouac-Related Readings at the Brattle

The On the Road 50th-anniversary event will be on Thursday, September 6, at 6:00 pm at the Brattle Theatre. Tickets are $5 and are available at Harvard Book Store. You may have heard rumors of a bar at the event, but, alas, the idea was nixed.

Lowell's own Jack Kerouac is getting the royal treatment from Massachusetts now that On the Road is turning 50. Lowell is showing the legendary Kerouac scroll, and authors Joyce Johnson and John Leland and are reading from their works about the man and his book, which spawned the counterculture as we know it.

Joyce Johnson was one of Kerouac's girlfriends and wrote the memoir Minor Characters. In an excerpt available on NPR's site, Johnson remembers what drew her to the East Village and why her mother was mystified by her decision to go there. She praises the Beat lifestyle: "I loved the slums, my slums, the sweet slums of Bohemia and beatnikdom, where sunflowers and morning glories would bloom on fire escapes in the summer and old ladies weighed down by breasts leaned on goosedown pillows in windows, self- appointed guardians of the street, and Tomkins Square with its onion- topped church had the greyness of photos of Moscow."

Leland's primary concern is the impact of book on readers. His title pretty much says it all: Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of 'On the Road' (They're Not What You Think). Some of those lessons are on the cornball side. The New York Times cringes at the self-help tone of Leland's book, not to mention his "Post-It Note criticism," but recognizes Leland's basic argument – that Kerouac may have been much more conservative than his disciples thought he was, and he read "Bohemia and beatnikdom" quite differently.

Leland isn't the only one sees Kerouac's traditional, nearly patriotic side. Douglas Brinkley once said, "If you read On the Road, it's a valentine to the United States. All this is pure poetry for almost a boy's love for his country that's just gushing in its adjectives and descriptions."

Image of Minor Characters cover from Kerouac.com.