Kerouac's journeys beyond Paris were marred by drunkeness: Rome, Paris and Cornwall. Its probably very good that he never rang John Simons. He did make it to Liverpool when he was in the merchant marine in WWII and travelled down to London to see a classical concert.

I got into the Beats when I was eighteen also, 'On The Road' still stands up to me. Many Americans I've met scoff at the innocence of it, digging chicks and composing poetry to waitresses they've just met in bars. Once met a young American lad in Rio who was waiting on illegal alien amnesty and who use to run grass across America for a criminal organisation, he laughed at On The Road and said his adventures would put Kerouac in the shade.  Remember him telling me that the economy of Florida is run on drugs, hookers and guns. No real, he meant it.

The point is, a mere eight years ago, I still would thing nothing of striking up a conversation with Americans I had just met and start to discuss the immensity of the long dark American railroad night. I might not do that today.

I still love the be-bop spontaneous prosidy of Kerouac, the world in an instanteneous panaromic jazz vision. All eternal, and now, now! Now! Now!

Bud Schulberg is not forgotten, he went to Hollywood along with John Fante.

They fell out in the end. Holmes got all the money and stayed sober.

If Kerouac had not been too drunk all the time in the negotiations with the film studios for On The Road, and convinced them that he could write a script with some structure, we would have had On The Road with Marlon Brando in it. 

Instead, Holmes struck a deal to get Go! turned into movie and bought a large house in New England, the film was never made.

Still, we like our novelists and artists mad and preferably burning out on booze and benzedrine.  Anything else is too wholesome. Bukowksi, would anyone have been interested if he was a bank manager or a lawyer?

Just contemplating re-reading 'On The Road' after about forty years.  What am I likely to make of it?  I managed a biography of Burroughs whilst living alone in 2012 but could never really enjoy his fiction.  The misreading of Kerouac and certain others of that generation is endless: some loathed the work-shy, were eager supporters of McCarthy, were almost certainly not enthusiasts for the likes of Adlai Stevenson.  I once owned a tiny piece of one of Kerouac's shirts.  True.  Do the 'beats' go naturally with jazz, certain items of 'Ivy League' clothing, a kind of 'relaxed' attitude to life?  I used to think so.

I'm far from convinced that I'll enjoy it.  My view of the world has changed a good deal in forty years - not to mention my view of what constitutes entertainment, in literature as elsewhere.  It was an impulse buy, whilst looking for more James Ellroy, early Ed McBain, Elmore Leonard or Stephen King.  My Ezra Pound/William Carlos Williams/Robert Lowell reading days are far behind me.

Wrote one of my two final year dissertations on Uncle Ez.  Heavy-going.

I don’t think that I’d like to read that again. So many other novels I’d like to read. Mainly Russian and French ones from the 19th Century.

Only a few contemporary writer I like, Michel Houellebecq is never dull. I also like Philip Roth. I cannot stand Irvine Welsh, all this glamorized sex, drugs, violence stuff gets tedious quickly. Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover are not my thing either.