I’m reading “The Dharma Bums” these days. I’ve started it a few times over the years. We’ll how it goes this time.
The story kicks off with a nice train-hop up the CA coast and then a big reading/party where Ginsberg first reads Howl and where the Beat scene actually started.
I’m up in the air about what the writing is supposed to do. I suppose it’s just dated. It’s detail-oriented and back then the details of a laid-back guy inspired by Zen who’s living in a room without furniture in a cottage behind a house might’ve been “far out.” I do find I can get into it more if I transport my ownself as reader back to when I hadn’t encountered such things, either.
I’m now far enough into it — about 50 pages — that he and Japhy (Gary Snyder) and Morley (named after Montgomery, who I don’t know) are on their goofed-up way from Berkeley, CA, to climb Matterhorn Peak, near Bridgeport and Mammoth Mt. I almost viscerally felt pain when I read that Morley forgot his sleeping bag as they prepare to camp out their first night in the mountains. …DOH! I’ve screwed up and have been with screw-ups but that takes the cake. (Hmm, I’ve hiked hours into the mountains and had friends hike in later who assumed we’d carried their gear in since it had been in our car. We’d done the ‘leave the key on the tire’ routine and their stuff was visibly in our car. They then didn’t have bags or tent, either!)
Anyway, I wondered about this “Matterhorn” that K mentions so I google it. Here’s a fellow’s nice report with pics on his own attempts to overcome dharma…
thbecker.net/hiking/in_the_footsteps_of_jack_kerouac_on_matterhorn_peak/page_01.html
