Tuesday, March 17, 2009

March 17: On Travel Destinations

Today’s Kerouaction

First of all, since Jack Kerouac was Irish, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! I hope you’ll drink a pint to Jack at some point during this grand day.

Speaking of Ireland, that is one of the places Jack said he’d go as a young man in 1941 in his short piece, “If I Were Wealthy,” which is included in Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings.

If we mutate “What would Kerouac do?” into “Where would Kerouac go?”, we get a list of travel destinations (and behaviors) from the piece as follows:

-moil amid the reeking masses of the Orient
-mush to the Arctic
-tramp through the jungles of Brazil and Africa
-have women in Capetown, Singapore, Port Said, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, San Francisco, Havana, Liverpool, Shanghai, Morocco, Sydney, Sumatra
-lope along strawberry roans in Arizona
-stride along little roads in France, England, and Scotland
-loll among the green green hills of Ireland
-yawn whole afternoons away along the Mississippi in New Orleans

You might want to use the above as your beat travel checklist. Just being there is Kerouaction enough – you don’t have to perform the described behavior (unless you want to accomplish a “double Kerouaction”).

Of the 22 locations mentioned, in how many have you been? My answer is “not enough” (real answer = 4).

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