The Dharma Bums (Duluoz Legend)

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
That's a completely nostalgic four stars of course. Has there been a writer whose reputation has plummeted quite so much between the 70s and now as jolly Jack and his tales of merry misogynism? But like Bob Dylan says

While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold
We never thought we could ever get old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

Well that was me and my pals. I know where each of them are to this day, but we don't see each other. The choices multiplied and it became no longer easy to tell black from white.
Back then we built a whole galaxy of heroes up from wild trips to the art house cinema to quarry Bergman or Pasolini from the granite cliffs of existentialism, or raids on libraries and second hand bookshops when we got to hear first about Kerouac and Kesey, not to mention Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, not to mention Emily Dickinson and Captain Beefheart and folk music and Alan Lomax and Alan Watts and John Fahey and Buffy Sainte-Marie. In those days every discovery hit like an express train and every bookshelf held high explosives. Life is not lived at that intensity for too many years. So forgive me for my four stars for Kerouac, the old bum, the old broke down disgraced beat with his typing not writing and every other reviewer on this site liking to put the boot in, and justified too, really, they're not good books - would I recommed any young person with any marbles to read nearly the whole of Kerouac's pile of typing as I myself did? NO!! Read almost anything BUT Kerouac! But my half damp eyes are staring back to that room. It was on Willow Road in Carlton. You can find it on Google Earth but some other people live there now.

Joan

Rating: really liked it
Too much bum, not enough dharma.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road.

Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and "yabyum" in San Francisco's Bohemia, to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950's.

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز ششم ماه فوریه سال2016میلادی

عنوان: ولگردهای دارما؛ نویسنده: جک کروآک؛ مترجم: فرید قدمی؛ تهران، روزنه، سال1392، در312ص، شابک978943344313؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

ژان-لوئی کرواک رمان نویس، و شاعر «آمریکایی فرانسوی تبار»؛ در روز دوازدهم ماه مارس سال1922میلادی در «لوول، ماساچوست» به دنیا آمدند، و در همان‌جا بزرگوار شدند، سپس در دانشگاه «کلمبیا» و در رشته ی فوتبال تحصیل کردند؛ در دانشگاه با «آلن گینزبرگ»، و «ویلیام اس باروز»؛ آشنا شدند، و این سه تن اعضای مرکزی و بت شکنان ادبی «نسل بیت» گردیدند؛ از آثار نام آشنای «کرواک» می‌توان به «در جاده = در راه (سال1957میلادی)» اشاره کرد؛ ایشان در سال1969میلادی بر اثر خونریزی داخلی درگذشتند

قهرمان اصلی رمان «ری اسمیت»، در سالهای میانی دهه سوم زندگی، برای دستیابی به خودشناسی تمرکز می‌کند؛ و به باور بسیاری «ری اسمیت» در واقع همان «جک کرواک» است؛ زیرا که خود نویسنده نیز، دست به سفرهای بسیاری زده، و سبک سفرهای ایشان نیز، همانند سفرهای «ری اسمیت» است؛ «ری» در یک سفر زمستانه، به «کارولینای جنوبی» میرود، و در هر شرایط آب و هوایی، به خویشتنبانی می‌پردازد؛ او سرسختانه نظم خود ساخته‌ اش را، در حیات وحش «سیرا مادره»، در جنگل‌ها، پشت واگن‌های قطار، و حتی در کوه‌های «دسولیشن» نگهداری می‌کند؛ در خلال سفرهایش، با «جافی رایدر»، یکی از فراگیران مکتب «ذن»، و علاقمند به زندگی در طبیعت، آشنا می‌شوند؛ «ری» و «جافی» -در واقعیت «گری اسنایدر»، دوست نزدیک «کرواک» و شاعر آمریکایی- یک رابطه ی دوستانه محکم را، بر اساس تجربیات دو طرفه، و عشق مشترک به فلسفه ی «بودایی»، شعر، و زندگی در کمال سادگی، آغاز می‌کنند، و کمی بعد، با همراهی «هنری مورلی»، که فردی غیرعادی به نظر می‌رسد، به ماجراجویی در کوهستان‌ها می‌پردازند؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 05/02/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 13/11/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Leile Brittan

Rating: really liked it
This was really a pleasant surprise. After making my way through "On the Road" and a few other things by Kerouac, I had come to the conclusion that the dude is a hack, and that the other Beats were really on some way better shit. I just couldn't feel that "rambling" ass style that he writes in, even though I acknowledge that it was a conscious decision of his to write that way.

I get it -- he writes the way he travels, making quick decisions and trying to be spontaneous and spiritual. But to me it's kind of just a garbage decision stylistically...personally, I like writers to show a little discipline and take heed to the laws of grammar and punctuation. Plus I think he was just drunk half the time. I write a lot of stuff when I'm drunk too -- it doesn't mean I would try and get it published unless I sat down and edited the fuck out of it, with a clear head one day. Drugs and booze can be good for the creative process, but at some point you've got to sit down and get serious, whittle down your ideas to a respectable form.

Which is what I think Kerouac did here. There is some great writing in "Dharma Bums", and even when he rambles, it flows with the ease and beauty of a rolling freight train, or a babbling brook. Finally, you feel like one of Kerouac's characters have gained something useful and spiritual from the life of being a hobo. Ray Smith, the protagonist, embodies the strengths and faults of a lot of guys I know, myself included sometimes. I only wish I could have been around in the days where the happily homeless poets would congregate in San Francisco, and talk about the kind of shit that these guys do. Sadly, the days where stuff like this happens in America are pretty much long gone, I fear.

I think I will take a second look at some more Kerouac after being pretty durn impressed by this. Namely, "Big Sur" is now on the list. After taking in "The Dharma Bums" and the fantastic introduction which was included in the edition I read, I feel a newfound respect for what Jack K did and the legacy he left behind. He was far from perfect, and a lot of the writing and relationships he left behind make this more than evident. But more than anything I think Kerouac was honest (about everything including his own self-demise, which he foreshadows eerily in parts of this novel). If honesty was his main goal as a writer, in that respect he was definitely a success.

One last thing I found cool about "The Dharma Bums" - a lot of American cultural references are derived from this novel. Not only from the hippies and the neo-hippies, but this is a very influential work in terms of modern artistry. The Anticon Records rappers/poets collective (including Dose One, Why?, and others) referenced this book heavily in a lot of their stuff during the late 90's/early 2000's Experimental Hip Hop Rennaissance. Lines like:

"Fresh bus station water...and it all ends up in tears anyway"

were lifted directly from the text, and put onto all these weird hip hop records I've been listening to for the past decade. I had no idea these were quotes from "Dharma Bums", but I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Life and art tend to have circular qualities, indeed.

Gabrielle

Rating: really liked it
I was super into Kerouac in college – which I supposed is the time in one’s life where you are supposed to be into Kerouac. Re-reading “On the Road” in my thirties might not have been my best idea, because it served only to show me how drastically my perspective on things had changed in a decade, and how Jack’s freewheeling madness might have been occasionally beautiful, but it had also had tragic consequences I couldn’t ignore. I thought about putting his books away for good, but I found I couldn’t because of how strong an impression he had once left on my young mind. Kerouac’s books are like my first tattoo, a very silly tribal dragon on my shoulder (this was years before Steig Larsson’s books, for the record): I’ll never get that covered up, because it’s nice to have a reminder that there was once a version of me who thought that was the most bad-ass thing… like, ever!

And I kept thinking about “The Dharma Bums”. I was not interested in Buddhism yet the first time I read it (Buddhism was my dad’s thing, and you know how when you are nineteen, nothing your parents do is cool…), but now, after a decade of studying Soto Zen, I wondered what I’d make of Jack’s attempt at meditation practice… I came across this gorgeous untitled poem he wrote for his first wife:

“The world you see is just a movie in your mind
Rocks don’t see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it, nobody listens,
They’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off.
I will try to teach it but it will be in vain,
S’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.”

Clearly, he’d understood SOMETHING, he’d had SOME insight. He’d actually written a biography of the Buddha in 1955 (it wasn’t published as a book until about ten years ago, and which I now I have to read to satisfy my completist curiosity)! So I figured I could revisit “The Dharma Bums”, in the full knowledge it wouldn’t be the book I read fifteen years ago because I am not the person I was fifteen years ago.

After the unexpected success of his novel, Ray Smith wants respite from his sudden fame and popularity. He takes off to California where Japhy Ryder, a fellow writer deeply immersed in Zen Buddhism, takes him under his wing. Ray and Japhy discuss Buddhism and poetry, go mountain-climbing and party hard. He eventually gets a gig as a firewatcher, on a lonely mountain peak in Washington State, and plans on using this isolation to deepen his meditation and attempt at reaching satori.

The novel is fairly episodic, and the pace much less frenetic and disorienting than in “On the Road” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Knowing his books are heavily autobiographical, I often have the urge to give Kerouac the benefit of the doubt: it is possible that he never met genuinely intellectually or spiritually curious women (wince). It is possible that the guys he hung out with and idolized were really good dudes in person (eyeroll) and that the filter of his pen distorted them. But whatever might have happened, the people in the book are often rather repulsive. The best parts are almost always when Ray is alone on the mountain or hopping trains across the country, trying to find a good place to meditate. The way Kerouac wrote about nature, the landscapes he took in, the way food and water tasted on his journey, well it makes me feel like travelling and it makes me hungry. I don’t even like blueberry pie, but the way Ray enjoys it, it seems like the most delicious thing on earth and now I want some.

The Beats were much more interested in what they referred to as Buddhist anarchism (which is kind of a hodgepodge mix of cherry-picked Buddhist practices and ideas and proto-hippie philosophy and lifestyle), as opposed to actual Buddhism: so it’s not really surprising that both Ray and Japhy play very fast and lose with oversimplified interpretations of things like the Precepts, meditation practice and so on, and use words like bodhisattvas, bhikkus and satori willy-nilly. I think their hearts were in the right place, but that a complete lack of experienced guidance and discipline made their earnest and ambitious efforts very scattered and vain. There is no doubt that promising chicks enlightenment experiences through tantric sex was an effective pick up method in 1950s Frisco, but I don’t think either one of those guys knew the first thing about Vajrayana tantra (neither do I, for the record, but I’m pretty sure it’s not what’s going on in the book)... In fact, it comes off as super sleazy! I get that this was when Buddhism was just starting to become an interest in the West, but I can’t help but feel that someone who spend years studying Zen in Japan, as Japhy claimed to have done, ought to know better… Kerouac was also never really able to polish off the Catholicism he was brought up on, and it tinted his spiritual studies.

I think the redeeming grace of this book is really the musical cadence and vividness of the prose, and the self-awareness. You can say a lot of bad things about Kerouac, but its undeniable that he knew how to string a sentence together with all the energy and rhythm a musician uses to play a solo. There are times when I had to just stop reading for a moment, to savor the word-riff he had just thrown at me. As for the self-awareness, it is very clear that Ray/Jack knows he’s not monk-material, that he’s flawed and that it seems unlikely he’ll ever be able to really get over the hurdles that hinder him. But he keeps trying. To be fair, that’s an incredibly important aspect of Zen – perseverance. It’s a shame that his efforts were so misguided, and that he so often hung out with people who brought out the worst in him.

“The Dharma Bums” keeps the 4 stars rating I’d given it before, despite the fact that it made me much sadder this time around than it had fifteen years ago. I will be driving by Lowell, Massachusetts, next month, and I think I might make a small detour to go pay my respects to Jack: he doesn’t hold the place he had in my heart when I was in college, but I can’t help thinking about him with a certain tenderness.

Darwin8u

Rating: really liked it
"Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sitting there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creaturs in that silence and just wwaiting for us to stop all our frettin and foolin."
- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums



I recently started going to a weekly Kadampa Buddhism and meditation class at a local Unitarian church with a friend of mine. I'm far too skeptical to jump into or out of religions easily, but I have been attracted to secular Buddhism for awhile (for years I used to tell people I was a Zen Mormon). Anyway, this recent flirtation with meditation has launched me back into authors I haven't visited in a while. The last Kerouac I've read was 20 years ago, and I never read The Dharma Bums, so I figured it was a good place to start.

The novel is based losely on Kerouac (Ray Smith) and his relationship with Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder). The book was an early shot in the counter-culture movement that included Buddhism, the hippy lifestyle, mountaineering, etc. Having grown up in Utah, California, etc., there has always been a resonance from this period. I remember friends of mine in HS and college hitchhiking, riding the rails, and heading into the mountains to commune, nearly naked, with nature. We were basically just kids playing at Buddhism, and sometimes it feels like Kerouac was too. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not reading a cliché; that these are the guys who really started a lot of this. These are the beats, the generation that helped expand and energize the SF Renaissance.

Anyway, I enjoyed it; for the beats, the bums, the Buddhism, and yes even the bullshit.

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums: "Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara."

Kerouac gives us the rambling masterpiece of a sentence with no punctuation and yet chock-full of description and character. The poverty/liberty of "hopping a freight", the locale firmly rooted in hippy California (Los Angeles, Santa Barbara), the laziness of contemplating the clouds: all of these are central to the narrator's character and his attitude. He is one with the road ("we rolled north") and in a meditative mood and this feeling saturates every page of this rollicking, humorous, orgasmic Beat classic. Just reading the phrase makes me want to throw off all the yokes of society and...ok enough of that...and on to the last one.

Lynne King

Rating: really liked it
Enfant terrible, a unique individual, jazz lover and a poet; this book, was written when Jack Kerouac was thirty-six years old. He was at the forefront of the Beat Generation in California in the fifties, through to his death in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

I kept on telling myself this is not my kind of book and I’m not enjoying myself but who was I trying to kid. Yes, it’s “raw in thought” but spirituality flows throughout, even though the catholic faith is viewed through the eyes of (Zen) Buddhism.

I have no doubt that Kerouac's own unique background, i.e. the “gene pool”, was responsible for bringing to life an individual who loved company, but who could also be more than content to spend time on his own, thinking about nature and the wonders of our planet. I can so readily equate to this fact.

It was interesting to read that Kerouac's parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were immigrants from Quebec, Canada; and that Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at school.

The first paragraph in the introduction to the book could not have been quoted better as to how I came to arrive at my own views about Jack Kerouac:

“When Gary Snyder, the Zen poet immortalized as ‘Japhy Ryder’ in The Dharma Bums, first met Jack Kerouac in San Francisco in the fall of 1955, he sensed about him ‘a palpable aura of fame and death’ ”.

This is indeed a “magical mystery tour” which accesses the innermost recesses of this author’s inquisitive, stimulating but also soul-searching mind and, dare I say it, an individual who was frequently inebriated. This “mystery” is shown in Ray Smith’s (I believe this is Jack Kerouac himself) life, who makes massive treks (3,000 miles) across the United States; his adventures passing through Mexico, back into the US, and then taken by a trucker (Beaudry was his name) back into Mexico; who offered to give him a ride if in exchange he could show the trucker hot spots such as the Mexican whore houses. Ray went along with this as it was all part and parcel of his journey to Rocky Mount, North Carolina where he was planning to spend Christmas with his mother.

“ Roll up, roll up for the magical mystery tour, step right this way.
Roll up, roll up for the mystery tour…
Roll up (and) that’s an invitation up for the mystery tour.
Roll up to make a reservation, roll up for the mystery tour.
The magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away.”

This work had the most profound effect on me both emotionally and spiritually, and with the spectacular suicide of Rosie, caused me to sink to quite a low level of despondency within myself.

Ray was happy in San Francisco and had gone over “to Rosie’s place to see Cody and Rosie.” Cody was worried about her: “She says she wrote out a list of all our names and all our sins, she says, and then tried to flush them down the toilet where she works, and the long list of paper stuck in the toilet and they had to send for some sanitation character to clean up the mess…she’s nuts.”

Believing that she and her friends were all done for, Rosie slashes her wrists and was taken care of, however, she had obviously made up her mind what she had to do because she returns home and dramatically states to Ray:

“This is my last night on earth” and indeed her suicide was truly spectacular.

Ray was always a worry for his friends. This is shown with Japhy’s concerns about his friend’s drinking habits just before he goes off to Japan.

“ ‘You’re just drinking too much all the time, I don’t see how you’re even going to gain enlightenment and stay out of the mountains, you’ll always be coming down the hill spending your bean money on wine and finally you’ll end up lying in the street in the rain, dead drunk, and then they’ll take you away and you’ll have to be reborn a teetotalin bartender to atone for your karma.’

Ray immediately thought, “He was really sad about it, and worried about me, and I just went on drinking.”

Ray also considered himself a “religious wanderer”, who loved to meditate:

“One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there for a long time without biting and then went away without biting.”

There’s humor (yodeling whilst hiking up the Matterhorn with Japhy and Henry Morley, whom Ray found mad and also boring; still the poets were having a great time); wistfulness (Japhy and his meditation: his “Bodhisattvas), sexual expression with free love, depression, beauty, all pervade this book. Knowing though that Ray was partial to his alcohol, I wondered what “spiritual” state he was in when he was writing this.

Thinking about this work brings to mind a reporter I once knew in Fleet Street, London. He best reporting was always achieved after he’d had a “liquid lunch” and the words just poured like “pearls from heaven”. Unfortunately, this literary genius ended with an early demise.

So in conclusion, we have here a highly religious (Catholicism) man, who had a joy for life, poetry and (Zen) Buddhism. It was this religion that was the bedrock of all his ideas; be it in nature, thoughts, friends, families and all the wonders of our universe. So what compelled such a talented individual to cross the final boundary and relentlessly slide and fall towards his own self-afflicted decline to the inevitable, leading to such an early death in his forties? Was the devil within him, I wonder.

Due to this I must read his first book, “On the Road” but I’ve been told that it’s not as good as Kerouac’s second. Well I’ll judge that for myself. It was such a pleasure for me reading this book and such a cause for reflection of our own lives.

Steven

Rating: really liked it

I remember never really seeing eye to eye with Kerouac's 'On the Road', it was a book I only managed to drag myself through thanks to a dogged stubbornness. And I still think it's one of the most overhyped novels of the 20th century. This however was a slightly more positive kettle of fish. Actually, forget the fish, going by what's mostly eaten here it's more like salami, cheese, and crackers.

I have to say not all of The Dharma Bums went down well with me, but I still quite liked it anyhow, especially when the narrator Ray Smith (a fictional Kerouac) takes in the stunning scenery, and there's plenty of that. From Oregon, California and South Carolina, to Texas and briefly Mexico, he simply doesn't keep still. At times the narrative had me all fidgety, where I felt like getting up and going for a walk in the woods, not that I'm likely to find any in the parisian suburbs, apart from the odd tree here and there. But it's a book that really makes you want to escape the city and the hustle and bustle of life. I wondered whether Chris McCandless took inspiration from Kerouac before going off into the wild.

Smith and his new chum Japhy Ryder, ex- logger, mountain climber, college graduate, Oriental scholar, and seer of visions, are not your average Americans, they would rather go awandering, carefree, and refuse to be consumers of all the stuff that makes everyone else tick. Most of the time they are trying to learn to meditate in Buddhist style, their new goal nothing less than total self-enlightenment, the satori of the Zen masters of Japan and China. Smith concentrates hard on attaining self-enlightenment. He meditates daily in all weathers behind his mother's house during a winter visit and with persistence keeps at his self- imposed discipline in the wilds of the Sierra Madres, in hobo jungles, beside train tracks, and, finally, on the mountaintop fire lookout Desolation Peak.

In his often vivid descriptions of nature one is aware of an exhilarating power that seems to run through his body, and again when he creates the atmosphere of lively gatherings for drinking, talking, and horsing around in the simple but stylized dwellings of his Pacific Coast friends: there are rough wooden shacks in the forest, and sagging old houses on side streets. Here when the entire cast of characters do appear in the one place we are presented with that refreshing blend of naivety and sophistication that seems to be this author's forte. And for a book generally about withdrawal and solitude it was rather quite lively and full of zest.

Julie Ehlers

Rating: really liked it
For some reason I recently got it into my head that I should read The Dharma Bums in the near future, so when I spotted a pristine copy on my library's "New Arrivals" shelf it seemed like fate. Now that I've read it, I'm bewildered. What is this book? Are we meant to take it seriously? I was alternately amused, annoyed, disturbed, and edified by it, and there was no overlap in these feelings. I never felt amused AND annoyed; never felt disturbed AND edified. Only one thing at a time. And so I will take these feelings one by one.

I was amused!

Most of The Dharma Bums is written in a casual style and is simply about "Ray Smith" (Jack Kerouac) and his friends "Alvah Goldberg" (Allen Ginsberg), "Japhy Ryder" (Gary Snyder), and other lesser Beats hanging out together. This casual, conversational style had the effect of making me feel like I was there with them. Pretending I was in the room with these obnoxious party people who are somehow some of the most revered writers of the 20th century was fun! I imagined how I would laugh at the way they drunkenly ran their mouths off, so in love with their own brilliance. I pictured myself rolling my eyes when they suggested I participate in "yabyum." I thought about what it would be like to laze around Berkeley and Oakland, bumming rides off people, drinking jugs of port (did people do this a lot back then? There seemed to be jugs of port everywhere), and crashing on other people's floors. It was like a vacation to a world I never knew I wanted to visit.

I was annoyed!

Except for an amusing episode when Kerouac and his friends decide to climb Matterhorn Peak, The Dharma Bums had no narrative momentum whatsoever. Despite the book's appealing elements, it was easy to put down and easy not to pick up again. It was self-indulgent to an absurd degree. And it was pretty sexist and occasionally racist. I was expecting that so it wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but that doesn't mean it wasn't unpleasant. Kerouac and his friends are all about personal freedom, but only when it comes to young white dudes like themselves.

I was disturbed!

Jack Kerouac depicts himself as an obvious alcoholic, yet it somehow doesn't seem obvious to him. He's unable to do anything without the ubiquitous jugs of port, and when his friends and family call him on it, he's dismissive. The poet Gary Snyder is both his best friend and his biggest challenger in this regard, asking him how he expects to be mindful when he's in a near-constant state of intoxication, often wondering why he spends so much time lying around drinking instead of doing things. Kerouac just brushes it off. At one point while hiking with Snyder, Kerouac idly wonders which of them will die first. As of this writing, Gary Snyder is still alive. As of this writing, Kerouac has been dead for nearly 50 years, succumbing to alcohol-related ailments 12 years after the events of this book, at the age of 47. Knowing this cast a shadow over the book that was impossible to ignore.

I was enlightened!

I said "edified" above, because this book doesn't literally cause enlightenment. It is, however, a fascinating document of the way people try to live out their Buddhist ideals. Kerouac often depicts himself meditating and trying to be at one with the natural world, but he's also willing to admit that he's sometimes depressed on his solitary travels and has to take a few moments to cry. The arguments he has with Snyder and Ginsberg about the various tenets of Buddhism and how they should play out in their lives were fascinating, real, and unlike anything I've read before. And Kerouac's compassion for people in general comes through all the time. He laments the way people seem mesmerized by TV ("everybody's thinking the same thing") but also has faith in their ability to be better; while hitchhiking he talks about meditation with a random stranger who picks him up, and isn't surprised with the stranger admits that he's always wanted to try it himself. "Everybody knows everything," Kerouac says approvingly, and as a reader you can really believe it, that everyone is trying to be better, that everyone has the answers deep inside of them if only they can get in touch with them. But it's a process that's full of contradictions. Kerouac spends a couple of months on fire lookout high in the mountains of Washington State, where there's a daily battle between his awed appreciation of the natural world, and his complete isolation. He has moments of sadness and depression but then is shocked awake by beauty: "Okay world," he says, "I'll love ya." These contradictions and battles are at the heart of Kerouac's entire personality, his entire view of the world and his place in it. At one point, Kerouac marvels at a sunset high in the mountains, the light seeming to illuminate a hope that's "brilliant and bleak beyond words." He could just as easily have been describing himself.

Jason Koivu

Rating: really liked it
Kerouac can spin an enjoyable yarn, as long as you don't mind rambling along with him on directionless paths with no real goal in mind but to spin that yarn.

In The Dharma Bums he takes the reader from city-drop-outs to mountain solitude, the mind-fuck excitement and shit of civilization to the glorious simplicity and utter loneliness of a retreat back to nature.

Even though he cheats the reader with some quick-fix adverbs in place of the proper description owed his audience, Kerouac still deserves all the accolades bestowed upon him, and so every now and then when I'm in the mood I don't mind taking one of these long hikes with writers of his ilk.

Slap a few rhyming words together vaguely associated with your intended meaning and call it philosophical poetry. That's my problem with some of the beat poets, whom I blame for the crap classic rock songwriters of the 60s and 70s passed off as lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0iuax...

But I digress.

The Dharma Bums is poetry, even if I do think some of it's silly nonsense.

Jon Nakapalau

Rating: really liked it
For me this book draws the ideas of Jack Kerouac full circle (ensō). A beautiful meditation on the transitory nature of existence. How I wish I could have just hung out with Jack; think he is the kind of person that would have helped you see yourself more clearly from just having gotten to know him.

Michael || TheNeverendingTBR

Rating: really liked it
This novel still retains Kerouac's characteristic style and does not feel heavy with his lamentations about his life as a known author, as what happens in most of his other novels.

It's well written, humorous with good scenes and memorable characters.

I think it's fair to say I really enjoyed this one.

Jessaka

Rating: really liked it
Do No Harm

I read this book 30 years ago. I believed then that his practice of Buddhism was hedonistic. I still believe the same, having read it again.

Kerouac and his new friend Jaffy enjoyed some of the Buddha’s teachings, all but the precepts, which I have been told, by my own Buddhist teacher, to be necessary to follow if you want to reach enlightenment. I no longer believe in enlightenment or even karma or heavens and hells. I only believe in the precepts which come down to this: Do no harm. Perhaps, this is because of all the religions that I had been in, even the New Age teachings, i.e. that of claiming that they do not believe in religion but in spirituality, cause harm. It is just the nature of man to harm, even in the name of religion.

Kerouac loved the flowery part of Buddhism, and its abstract philosophy. I now only like the flowery Zen poetry. That is all I am left with after years in Buddhism, having never given up my believe in a Creator or a soul, but hanging onto no beliefs about either.

When I left Buddhism, I found Han Shan and other Zen poems, and I found some Native American teachings that I love. They are very simple.

And, at least for me, it was nice to realize, that is, after reading “Big Sur,” that Kerouac had once enjoyed his life, and I hope that after his breakdown he had enjoyed it again.

P.E.

Rating: really liked it
Serendipity, or Transient Transcendence



Hozomeen Mountain, seen by Kerouac from Desolation Peak (WA) where he spent two months as a fire lookout in 1956


At the end of the day, this novel proves a tough guy to review.

In a fairly specific sense, the rating doesn't do one jot of justice to the rollercoaster of brilliancies intermingled with more sedate passages with a certain number of wild, memorable dialogues thrown in for good measure, and soulful depictions of the mundane, the ordinary, the ordinarily left out, evincing this keen attention to what is present, this recognizable trademark of Jack Kerouac inasmuch as I can judge after this fourth novel.

However, and in this my heartfelt impression is as well-grounded as they come (to me at the bare minimum :D), this story left me high and dry, waiting for so much more... And I get this is more often than not the fatal flaw of the reader, who stops paying attention to what there is and prefers what he'd rather have instead. But as far as I can tell, I try my darndest and not blame the novel for what it's not: a fair deal of promise was there, there is no denying this. And to me it underdelivered. Can I put words on this feeling of lopsidedness, of inherent-but-not-beneficial coarseness, of incompleteness? Certainly. Śūnyatā. Just joking. And it's not wabi-sabi either...
Too many grandiose vague notions, not enough progression in the story insofar as the story is key to the book as a whole...

In short, too much of everything, not enough of anything, if that makes sense.


Buddy-'read-trip' with Tara :)



Sawtooth Ridge (CA), of which Matterhorn Peak is part

'When you get to the top a a mountain, keep climbing', they say!


----


Finally, as it customary, I would like to recommend a few books sharing common features with The Dharma Bums :)


These two are mentioned in the novel:

The Book of Tea (this one directly mentionned, twice)

The Daodejing of Laozi, (this one, alluded to, especially when it comes to Wuwei (effortless action/non-action))


This one tells volumes about the doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism, while being a melancholy, sorrowful well of ephemeral beauty:

The Temple of Dawn


This one polishes your mind's eye allowing you to pay full attention to what is here and now. At least it offers a full-fledged philosophy along those lines :)

Freedom from the Known


Different Shades of Outcasts:

I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 1
I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 2
Down and Out in Paris and London
Factotum
Women
Love Is a Dog from Hell
A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember



A refill of escapism? Or should I say re-wiring?

Walden
The Doors of Perception
Steppenwolf
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick
Into the Wild


Actual road-trips, sometimes motivated by scientific endeavour:

Par les champs et par les grèves
Memoires Du Large
Le tour de la France par deux enfants d'aujourd'hui
Immortelle randonnée : Compostelle malgré moi
Sur les chemins noirs
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
Tristes Tropiques


OST:
Tout est Magnifique - Jacques