A question worth asking

• Alison Flood wonders how much effect Word would have had on Kerouac at the Guardian Book Blog.

Kerouac wrote the novel fast because the "road is fast". He'd delete unwanted phrases by crossing them out with a pencil or typing over them.

These days, the computer is the writing implement of choice. It allows us to delete, shift sections around and continually edit, in the way that Kerouac, writing on his lengthy scrolls, could not.

The typewriter/computer/notebook are, of course, just the instruments of the trade, but it's possible they have more influence on the eventual product than we think. Paul Auster, for example, writes by hand in notebooks, revising each paragraph until he feels it works – and I think his polished, elegant prose reflects this.

It would be different, that's for sure. There's a quality to handwritten stories that's unique. But whatever the mechanism you choose, you have to make your story work, and moving the words around until they do is what matters.

The fact behind the myth

• Rolf Potts discusses the legacy (dubious and otherwise) of Jack Kerouac at World Hum.

Amen:

Sure, spontaneity is good and holy, but there is something unhinged and aimless about Sal and Dean’s Benzedrine-addled wanderings. Dean is a compulsive hustler with serious attention-deficit issues; Sal is a boozy brooder who rarely exudes any lasting satisfaction with his experiences. Granted, Sal’s solo adventures early on in the book vividly portray the joys and challenges of hitchhiking—and one can feel the ecstatic energy of his house party with Ray Rawlins and Tim Gray in the mountains above Denver—but once Dean fully enters the story, the pair’s travels turn sloppy.

Indeed, Sal and Dean cover a lot of miles between San Francisco and New York, but their adventures along the way are rarely more remarkable than what one might encounter in the freshman-pledge wing of a fraternity house: booze is swilled and dope is smoked; money is borrowed and hoarded, then frittered away on dumb indulgences; women are longed for, seduced and abandoned. In the third section of the book, which starts off with Dean leaving his pregnant wife in California, Sal and Dean repeatedly fantasize about running off to Italy, strangely oblivious to the American surroundings racing past outside the car window. When the pair later travels down to Mexico, their sojourn ends up less a quest for beauty and discovery than dope and hookers. Along the way, the Sal and Dean experience occasional moments of jubilation, but, as Why Kerouac Matters author John Leland and others have pointed out, “On the Road” is at heart a morose book, laced with refrains of disappointment and sadness.

Why, then, does “On the Road” remain such a potent romantic metaphor for the joys of travel? I’d reckon this has less to do with its actual content than with the myth that surrounds it.

An interview's treacherous waters

• Bookforum looks at a quartet of writer-interview collections.

Featuring choice soundbites from Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack Kerouac and others:

Interrogating writers for publication is indeed an adversarial experience (Twain thought it a kind of "torture"). Authors, as they are wont to do, wish to control their words—something easily done on the page, not so much so in conversation—while the interviewer strives to elicit something newsworthy or at least fresh. It is this tension between desire for control and the spontaneity integral to the situation that constitutes the literary interview's chief draw. Interviews with filmmakers, composers, and painters may be of great interest, but since their jobs aren't deploying just the right word in just the right place, there's less at stake. The interview is a particularly high-wire act for writers—sentences they might otherwise rewrite a dozen times turn up in print they way they fell from their tongues. And even though writers seek to impose intentionality on their spoken text, to craft their self-presentation as a director might stage a play, nevertheless there's always the possibility of a misstep, maybe even a tumble. Remarks may not be literature, but they are often a prelude to amusement or distress; daily life makes this all too plain to us.

The bad and the great

With best-of listmania sweeping the land, the inevitable inverse is becoming popular. (See here and here.) So here's my dos pesos on some books that didn't ring my bell over the last year.

• On the Road by Jack Kerouac: Meh. Egomaniacs on drugs. Repeat for 250 pages.
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: Gorgeously written, yes. But goes way overboard on melodramatic plot twists. And it stops just when it's getting interesting.
• Sunset and Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale: Terrific opening sequence [heroine shooting her abusive husband as a tornado wrecks their home]. Sloppy patchwork mystery plotting for the remaining time, replete with corny Texas-twang dialogue and oh-so-odious bad guys. Energetic but sadly nothing new.
• The Sea by John Banville: Gonna have to agree with Book World on this. Pretty language does not a compelling tale make.

Not to be too negative... here's my favorite reads from this year:

• Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: Harshly beautiful; prose like a diamond knife. Sad, haunting, and hard to forget.
  
• Beasts of No Nation by Uzodimna Iweala: What a debut. A prose voice like none you've ever read.
  
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Sholokov: What great fun. Gogol on acid; freakishly inventive, fearless.
  
• M31: A Family Romance by Stephen Wright: Incandescent. For my money, Wright's one of the best writers working today.
  
• Out of the Woods by Chris Offutt: Short stories with incredible clarity, precision and control. Not a wasted word, not an unfelt moment.
  
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: The head, the tail, the whole damn thing. It isn't hype; it's everything, and more.
  

The road goes on, and on, and on, and on...

• An uncensored edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road will be published in the near future.
  

John Sampas, executor of the writer's literary estate and brother of Stella Sampas, Kerouac's third wife, said he has signed a contract with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group USA. He hopes the work will be out by the end of next year, the 50th anniversary of the publication.

"Incidents in the original were edited out of the published version because of the censorship of the time," said Sampas, who noted that some of the edited sections refer to drugs and sex. "On the scroll, entire paragraphs are crossed out and not included in the published version."

Somehow I doubt it will be any more readable. This book has its fans but it drove me up the wall; three hundred pages of blather about two drug-crazed, egomaniacal morons. I suppose I can see the appeal -- it does have its moments -- but overall it made me want to shoot myself. Maybe that was the point. Anyway, yay for an uncut edition, et cetera.