Would Kerouac Have Blogged?

My inveterate friend Tom Foremski picked City Lights Bookstore at 6 pm for getting together. It seemed fitting. Tom and I are both writers whose styles and perspectives were shaped in the 60s and City Lights, is the last bastion of the stormy renaissance that is usually called “The Beat Era.”

I finished my business in San Francisco earlier than expected. I arrived at City lights at 4:30 with abundant time to kill.  I strolled the shelves of poet-bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s fabled bookstore. I had read a great many of the books being offered and I had read them long ago.

But I’m not big on nostalgia and after a short while I felt like I had been there and done that as far as City Lights was concerned. I had killed less than half an hour.

I wandered outside and watched the amazing diversity of the neighborhood, clicking a few street scene photos. The neighborhood is like a Coney Island of the mind.  City Lights is sort of a cultural island surrounded by diverse sections of San Francisco. You are just a few footsteps from the Financial District, Chinatown and the restaurants of North Beach.

It also abuts the strip joints and porn shops of San Francisco’s small, seamy adult entertainment district. There, just a couple of doors down from a sex toy supermarket I caught a new marquee: The Beat Museum, and I wandered over.

It cost four bucks to get in and what a weird, strange trip it will deliver. If you were on the magic bus of the 60s, its a visit to memory lane. If you were were not, then it educates you that the Beat Generation was a period of enlightenment, a time to explore the hope of peace and tolerance. Yes it was about sex and drugs, but it was so much more than that.

It was a period of art and music, of poetry and challenging conventional truths. It was a period of people bypassing powerful institutions, conventional wisdom and tolerance. It was a time where people exchanged ideas, often with great passion attached to them.

Very quickly, The Beat Museum brings all that back. It looks at the usual nexus of the era: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and the others, but mostly it spotlights Jack Kerouac, but mostly it talks about Jack Kerouac, author of several groundbreaking books, the best-remembered being On the Road.

Kerouac, was my favorite. His style was fast and contemporary. It sounded at times like the bebop jazz that he loved. You felt like you got to know the people he wrote about because his conversations were so, well, naked.

There are so many ties between the roots of social media and the beat era. Many of the thinkers and technologists who have provided us with the tools were shaped in that era.

It seems to me that we of the social media movement are braided and bonded to those of the Beat Generation. We have a love of innovation. We have hope for a future that provides people greater health and safety. We believe that conversation will reveal much and resolve a few differences. We have a distrust of the all-powerful and the institutional. We reserve the right to question anything.

Kerouac used a manual typewriter and wrote books. If he were alive today, I’m sure he’s still write books, but he would use the tools of our time. He would be unquestionably among the most prominent of our bloggers.

The style he pioneered is the style that succeeds the best in the blogosphere, whether you are talking for an enterprise or telling about a traveling adventure.

Yes, Kerouac would have tweeted as well. He probably would also have been prolific with a handheld camera. Kerouac understood, even in writing books, that it’s dialog that matters. He captured conversations in his books.

Just think of what he could do with the tools we have today. Just think of the influence he would have on the young minds of today as he had on the young minds of the 60s.