#J. Kerouac

[lesondupapillon]

Si solide, notre ignorance —

Si vide, notre substance

et la conscience n'arrête pas

de saigner

et la déchéance est lente —

les enfants grandissent.

Jack Kerouac

[fetusmonkey]

"accesories & shoe flash" kerouac vol. 2 (1998)

[nnaalluuaarxv]

source

Hair Wars section snaps, Kerouac Magazine

[tyin-cherry-knots]

boy oh boy am i fascinated by the beat generation

[audiemurphy1945]

Writers by David Levine, for The New York Review of Books, 1965-1997

[anamericanman97]

Libros en venta $$$

[elsrobertson]

Charlie’s books:

- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

- A Separate Peace by John Knowles

- Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

- On the Road by Jack Kerouac

- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

- Walden by Henry David Thoreau

- Hamlet by William Shakespeare

- The Stranger by Albert Camus

- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

[your-unfriendlyghost]

sodapop patrick curtis thoughts on my desk by the end of the week or ur DONE /j

How I feel about this character

  Uh like he’s perfect and should be my wife i think

  Nah but fr Soda’s one of my favorite characters ever. He’s sweet and all, but he’s so much more than that. Pony says he’s movie-star handsome, that he can go from gentle one minute to “blazing with anger” the next, that he gets drunk just on living, and understands everybody. Soda’s a Kerouac-style “mad one”- “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!”

He’s a guy who’s sensitive but strong, a “bawl baby” who’s tough, he’s probably got ADHD and dyslexia, the school system failed him. His folks died and left him holding his brothers together by a thread. He’s pretty but not pretty enough for Sandy to stay. He might end up dying in Vietnam, and thank God that isn’t canon, but it’s still there. He’s happy to live life simply, behind a white picket fence with a wife and kids- hell, he’s thrilled to. But that’s not gonna happen, at least not for a while, because Soda is a tragedy. But he loves his brothers and his friends so much that he becomes a beacon of hope despite it all.

  I love Soda. Honestly, this barely scratches the surface of how I feel about him. I haven’t even touched on the adrenaline junkie stuff or the ways he’s sometimes so relatable to me that it hurts. 

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Steve, and sometimes Evie. 

  I’ve found I’m a friends-to-lovers enjoyer, so Stevepop scratches that part of my brain lol. To have someone who’s got your back through thick and thin, aware of your flaws but in spite of them- well, ain’t that the dream? The angst of it being the 60s makes it interesting to me too, because there’s a lot of ways to handle that. Man, when I first read the book I didn’t get the hype for them at all, but idk. It clicked. I get it now. 

  And then Steviepop is my roman empire lol. It’s all I love about Stevepop, but Evie adds even more complexity. I like her a lot and I love writing her, and I love writing her with characters who I also love. There is absolutely no canon anything to back this ship up. But dammit that’s the point of fandom.

  I will say though that I like exploring Soda’s dynamic with Sandy, but I don’t really ship them. I think the fact that Sandy left him (and I mean cheated on him, even if that can be read ambiguously) implies that there’s something about him that could be undesirable, romantically. I don’t mean cheating is good or that people deserve it, just that in this case, the idea that Soda’s an imperfect boyfriend adds layers to a character who is mostly just positives. We’ll never know Sandy’s POV on it, and I don’t think Soda will either. Sandypop to me will never have closure. That’s what makes it hurt so much. That’s what makes it relatable

My non-romantic OTP for this character

  I mean honestly? Steve. I know this isn’t really fair, since I like Stevepop and all, but idk, there’s no one else who I think it could be. 

  Steve’s a character who’s cocky and troubled and prone to assholeish-ness, but even he loves Soda. He knows about Sandy and gets angry on Soda’s behalf at Pony for mentioning her, which means Soda can tell him- angry, tough Steve Randle- about sensitive stuff. And Soda, who I think is a little in love with everyone he meets and could have anyone he wants, sees this bastard and sticks with him. He sees the parts of Steve that Pony can’t. Parts that make him worthy of being his best buddy.

It’s been said before, but no matter how you look at it, romantic or platonic, they’re each other’s person. I don’t think I could put anyone else in this slot.

My unpopular opinion about this character

 I have a few lol.

1- I see a lotta fics and takes where the whole “drunk on living” thing is a lie Soda feeds Ponyboy, and while I like that take, I do also think it’s totally possible and even plausible that Soda really doesn’t drink and Pony’s view of him (in that aspect) is right.

  I dunno, I mean, I know firsthand what it’s like to just get drunk on adrenaline/excitement. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and the rush from it is better than any other high I’ve had. Thrill rides make me act as stupid as someone drinking- when I’m excited, I lose all ability to filter thoughts or fight impulses. I’ve done all sorts of dumb moves- climbing onto tables, singing loudly without knowing or caring if it bothers people, play-fighting my buddies so hard we both get genuinely injured, standing up in a convertible going down the freeway... (This is obviously anecdotal and not real evidence or anything, but like, duh. This is an opinion piece lol.)

  I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a lot of interesting things that can still be done with a Soda who genuinely doesn’t drink. (Or at least not much.)

2- I love darker takes on Soda. I love when people dig into his addictive personality, his temper, his relationship with his looks/self image, all that stuff. I love his flaws, and I especially love when they co-exist with his earnest sweetness and genuine sensitivity. In a few of my fics, I’ve explored some slightly darker Sodas- Sodas who are impulsive, pent up, semi-narcissistic and occasionally manipulative. I haven’t delved deep into it or anything, and I usually keep his character wholesome, but I love it when other folks don’t. 

3- I actually really like the Vietnam War storyline. I mean it hurts, but it seems plausible. I hate the idea of him dying there, but I like exploring the idea of him being drafted. Hell, maybe he even enlisted. The military is known for being a good way to earn enough money to pull one’s family out of poverty, and this paired with the flawed ideas of masculinity and strength of the time lead to a really interesting version of Soda’s future.

  I’m real glad it isn’t canon though.

4- This isn’t technically unpopular but brown eyed Soda will always be canon to me. I like Rob Lowe’s Soda a lot but man….he coulda used brown contacts, yk? /hj lol

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

Well I still think it’s a crime his emotional monologue got cut outta the original version of the film. Thank God for the full novel version, but man, still.

Woulda also have been cool to see him mentioned in That Was Then This is Now, but I get that SE Hinton wasn’t trying to make an Outsiders sequel really.

Idk, Soda served his purpose, I think. 

tl;dr- I love him

[magicaltear]

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

As found in the original post I saw by @macrolit

My total: 43/100

[lesondupapillon]

Si solide, notre ignorance —

Si vide, notre substance

/ Jack Kerouac

[fetusmonkey]

kerouac, vol. 9 (1999)

[nnaalluuaarxv]

source

Accessory Flash, Kera Magazine, November 2002

[permanentni-zavist-penisu]

Přemýšlel jsem.

V literatuře je běžné, že příběh má začátek (první dojem), děj a nějaký dopad nebo ponaučení. Dokončený příběh má všechny tyto tři věci, a dokud je nemá, není dokončený.

Poslední dobou jsem ale přemýšlel o příbězích, které nejsou dokončené – nebo nejsou dokončené zatím. Myslím tím například knihu Mag od J. Kerouaca, která nikdy nebyla dokončena, protože Kerouac zemřel. Ale myslím tím tak�� rozkoukané seriály, knihy uprostřed odložené a vrácené do knihovny. Je jedno, v jaké formě konzumujeme nedokončené příběhy, existují v našich životech, ať si jich vážíme nebo ne.

Bylo by tedy možné vytvořit příběh bez konce? Příběh, který nemá ponaučení, nemá závěrečnou myšlenku? Který nemá naplnění? Nebyl by to o to lepší obraz skutečného života, když to neskončí, jak bychom si přáli, protože to konce nemá nikdy dosáhnout?

Co dává příběhu konec? Je to rozřešení konfliktu? Úleva od něj? Konec vnímáme jako neoddělitelnou část příběhu – nebyl by vyprávěn, kdyby někde nekončil. Proč by se s tím někdo sral, kdyby tím nechtěl něco vyjádřit? Připadá mi ale, že je lepší se na nějaký závěr příběhu dívat jako na jeho vlastnost spíše než součást. Deus ex machina dává příběhu vlastnosti, které mu nepatří, zatímco rozřešení detektivky byla vlastnost skrytá, kterou příběh v sobě hledal. Jak by ale vypadal příběh bez vlastnosti závěru?

Jsme zvyklí hledat v textech jejich význam a porozumět jim. Arthur Rimbaud sice zemřel sám a umělecky vyčerpaný, ale jeho básně zůstaly s námi a pomohly vystavět celý nový směr, způsob, kterému říkáme francouzská dekadence. Jeho osobní deník, kdyby jej psal každý den až do smrti, by působil jako cesta, která skončila smrtí muže a posmrtným nanebevstoupením jeho básní. I v tak zoufalém díle bychom nalezli význam.

Když se ale podívám na svůj život, nemá pro mě konce. Kdybych si já psal každý den deník, náhle bezdůvodně přestal a nadále žil, co by byl význam tohoto deníku? Jaké ponaučení bychom si z něj mohli vzít? Byl by to nenaplněný osud několika stránek, ale nic, co bychom mohli nazývat příběhem – protože mu chybí konec. Nic neuzavřel, nic nezodpověděl.

Byl by to experiment a lidem by se nelíbil. O důvod víc do něj dát vše!

[johnnyricks]

2024 Reading Recap

Ding dong! Ding dong!

This year we laughed, we cried, we got a little bit horny. I've read 57 books, smashing the goal of 50 books read. 27474, although a very pretty number, doesn't come close to the goal of 36600 pages read, however. So partial success.

Full list of books read in 2024 with final ratings:

Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself - 4.25 Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged - 4.5 Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings - 3.75 Tessa Bailey, Fangirl Down - 4 Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 - 4.75 Mike Brooks, The Black Coast - 2.5 Jim Butcher, Storm Front - 3.5 Jim Butcher, Fool Moon - 4 Jim Butcher, Grave Peril - 3.5 Jim Butcher, Summer Knight - 4 Jim Butcher, Death Masks - 4.25 Jim Butcher, Blood Rites - 4 Jim Butcher, Skin Game - 4.5 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations - 4.5 M.C.A. Hogarth, Mindtouch - 2.75 Colleen Hoover, November 9 - 2.5 Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love - 1.75 S.L. Huang, The Water Outlaws - 3.75 James Islington, The Will of the Many - 3 Aneta Jadowska, Szamański blues - 2.5 Han Kang, Wegetarianka (채식주의자, The Vegetarian) - 3.25 Jack Kerouac, On the Road - 3.75 T. Kingfisher, Nettle and Bone - 4.75 R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War - 2.75 Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock - 5 Mae Lovette, Guarded Treasure - 1 Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses - 3.25 Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury - 3 Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation - 4.75 Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森) - 3.75 Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places - 4.25 Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education - 4 Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate - 4.75 Naomi Novik, The Golden Enclaves - 4.75 Sarah A. Parker, When the Moon Hatched - 2 J. Zachary Pike, Orconomics - 4.75 J. Zachary Pike, Son of a Liche - 4.5 J. Zachary Pike, Dragonfired - 4.5 Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila) - 4.25 Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites - 4.25 Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six - 4.5 Erich Maria Remarque, Na Zachodzie bez zmian (Im Westen nichts Neues, All Quiet on the Western Front) - 5 Marilynne Robinson, Gilead - 3 Sally Rooney, Normal People - 4 Kate Elizabeth Russell - My Dark Vanessa - 4.5 Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings - 3.5 Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance - 4 Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer - 3.5 Brandon Sanderson, Rythm of War - 3 Andrzej Sapkowski, Rozdroże kruków - 3.75 Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree - 3.75 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein - 3 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion - 4.5 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five - 5 C.M. Waggoner, Unnatural Magic - 2.25 Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing - 1.5 Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow - 4.5

Book read goal for 2025: 57

Pages read goal for 2025: 27475

[bookquest2024]

100 Books to Read Before I Die: Quest Order

The Lord Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Under The Net by Iris Murdoch

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A Passage to India by EM Forster

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

1984 by George Orwell

White Noise by Don DeLillo

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Oscar And Lucinda by Peter Carey

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Ulysses by James Joyce

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Herzog by Saul Bellow

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes

A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul

A Dance to The Music of Time by Anthony Powell

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Little Women by Louisa M Alcott

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

Watchmen by Alan Moore

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Money by Martin Amis

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

[canesenzafissadimora]

Si può sempre andare oltre, oltre non finisce mai.

J. Kerouac