Jack Kerouac, "Good Blonde & Others"
I was really scared about this one. I hadn�t heard of it, nobody who had seen me reading this had heard of it, a friend of mine who likes all sorts of Kerouac � even the poetry for god�s sake � hadn�t heard of this.
That covers all the signs that this is something released after a person dies, trying to squeeze every last drop out of an author with economic viability. And Kerouac would certainly achieve that. Hell, they could print his shopping list and people would buy it.
I�m not one of those people. I checked before I bought this to make sure there was no poetry and only then did I decide to pick it up. But I was prepared for it to suck, and suck hard.
And surprise! It didn�t. This is a collection of articles published in various periodicals, and fortunately, the editors of the magazines had more discerning tastes then, and wouldn�t print some of the crap they put out now. As a bonus, from what I can tell, this was before he became a babbling alcoholic. There�s even his stab at the science fiction genre, and it�s not bad � sort of like Vonnegut, only without the irony, cleverness, and skill.
But it�s still not solid from start to finish. Kerouac loved baseball, which I couldn�t give two shits about, so when he prattles on about certain athletes I became very bored very quickly. And while I said he hadn�t started his style of incoherent babbling yet, he was getting pretty goddamn close, even offering a warning to people in a non-fiction piece about how he approaches writing. In it, he states, �There�s a fine line between bombast and babble.�
Apparently, editors forgot to remind him of that quote as he got older, richer, and drunker.
