ON THE ROAD TO ARMAGEDDON
KEROUAC 100 Happening by chance, yesterday, to catch the news that it was Jack Kerouac’s 100 th birthday, it occurred to me that I can well remember the kind of world in which Jack Kerouac’s centennial would have been a much bigger deal than it is capable of being, today. A full segment on the evening news would have been devoted to his life and literature; he would have been a feature on “60 Minutes”; bookstores (there were more of them back when I was a young man) would have been stocked up with copies of “On the Road”, promoting a Jack Kerouac sale of some kind in the weeks leading up to yesterday. Minus the sex and drugs (although not necessarily the driving), a miniature polity has a thing or two in common, it seems to me, with Kerouac’s celebrated roman a clef . There is a “beat” element to even the most conservative ephemeral realm and rolling these things along their trajectory can often seem like continuously typing on a single roll of paper from beginning to end. Lif