![]() ![]() ![]() Japhy has introduced Ray to Buddhist ideals and much of the book is concerned with the two men working through their beliefs. ![]() Ray arrives in SFO just in time for a pivotal poetry reading, populated by other notables such as Alvah Goldberg (Allan Ginsberg) – Kerouac certainly used his life in his art! The book opens with our narrator, Ray Smith (based on Kerouac himself of course), hopping a train to San Francisco to meet up with the book’s other protagonist, Japhy Ryder (a thinly disguised Gary Snyder). Although I read and loved the scroll version of “On The Road”, DB has always been special so I was worried my view would have changed. Well, Joan was right and she had set me off on a lifetime of reading the works of Kerouac and co.īut it’s an awful long time since I’d read DB, so I did approach it a little nervously. One of my fellow students, Joan Swain if I recall correctly, handed me a copy of DB with the instruction that I should read it because the Beats came first, before the hippies, and she was sure I would love it. When I was in college, in the late 1970s, I had quite an obsession going with the 1960s and hippie culture. I rather hoped that I would have a better experience with this read! To carry on with the Beat theme, I decided to follow up my failure with “The Sea is My Brother” by returning to “The Dharma Bums” as it was the first Beat book I ever read. ![]()
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