Six years later, an edited, vastly shortened version of the manuscript (with the characters' real names changed to fictional ones) was published by Viking Penguin ("in mutilated form," Allen Ginsburg once said). In 2007, to mark the book's 50th anniversary, Viking Penguin published the original single-paragraph "scroll version" of On the Road, complete with creative spellings (and containing the sex scenes that had earlier been deemed too controversial), with original character names intact and no attempt to "correct" anything other than the most obvious typos. (The original scroll is today owned by sports magnate Jim Irsay, who paid $2.43 million for it in 2001.)
The 2007 scroll version is the edition I just finished reading, and it's the only edition of On the Road anyone should ever read, because the single-long-paragraph nature of the book and the use of real names for real people are crucial elements of the work, in my opinion.
Like Jack himself (both in the story and in the writing of the manuscript), I got off to a bad start with the book, reading the first 40 pages in one sitting, then making the mistake of letting it go cold for several days. In a book with no plot that's told completely experientially, that's printed as a single 300-page paragraph with no breaks, you have no structural reference points to hold onto, whether typographically or in the story line, which means that if you walk away from it, you forget where you were almost instantly. In my case, I found myself starting again at page one after the first false attempt. And I made damn sure to keep movingfrom that point on, stopping only to eat, bathe, attend to bodily needs, etc. before resuming the trip.
I got through the book with difficulty. Kerouac's language is suitably mellifluous and inventive, his reportage sincere and seemingly accurate. But the nonstop parade of nonsensical events, leavened by the tragicomic personal-life misadventures of the womanizing Neal Cassady, is ultimately tiresome. Happily, after 135 pages or so, the travelers arrive at the Burroughs ranch in Algiers, Louisiana, and the writing style pivots ever so slightly as Kerouac launches into a loving, carefully crafted portrait of the enigmatic Bill Burroughs. From there, it's back to a meandering series of road trips to New York and San Francisco (always by way of Denver), with various side trips thrown in.
The Great Depression had long since ended, of course (this was 1949), but you couldn't tell it from the indigence of the characters. Jack's monthly $18 checks from the Veterans' Administration seldom went far, what with Neal Cassady's constant need for booze, cigarettes, gasoline, weed, and bail money. What they couldn't afford to buy, they often stole. (In Cassady's case, that sometimes included cars.)
At one point in the story, Kerouac inexplicably comes into a sizable (for those days) sum of cash: $1,000. It's never explained that this was, in fact, the advance for Kerouac's first novel, The Town and The City. He uses it to move his mother from Long Island to Denver. The woman finds Denver not to her liking and moves back to New York. Money gone, Jack hits the road again.
The story accelerates and acquires an almost Hunter Thompson-like feel in Book Three (the "book" breakpoints are unceremoniously noted inline in the text, without indents or spacing) when Cassady and Kerouac agree to deliver a two-year-old Cadillac limousine from Denver to Chicago. They put over 1,000 miles on the car in 23 hours, breaking the speedometer cable after exceeding 110 mph. Along the way, they suffer various mishaps and end up turning the car over to the owner in ramshackle condition. Miraculously, the owner never sends the police after them.
Arguably the best storytelling comes in Book Four, when Cassady and Kerouac, having exhausted America's highway system, head to Mexico. The writing is vivid, piquant, engaging, endearing—unforgettable.
Of course, there is never any hint of a plot, dramatic structure, etc., and that's exactly the point of the book (and of life); the journey is itself the point. It's also why On the Road couldn't possibly find a major publisher (as it did in 1957) if it were written today. It doesn't check the checkboxes of agents' and publishers' "minimum requirements" for a novel. In fact, it quite deliberately gives the finger to all such requirements. Which is why On the Road stands virtually alone among bestselling novels of the past 70 years as being truly experimental yet also truly a quintessential piece of Americana and American literature. It would be fun to submit the book, in manuscript form (as a single paragraph) under a pseudonym, to agents and publishers, just to collect the rejection slips generated by the legions of interns and editorial assistants and self-appointed arbiters of the literary status quo who would never dare take a chance on anything as proto-gonzo as a plotless, one-paragraph, 125,000-word road diary centered around an itinerant womanizer/con-man and his urbane college-dropout buddy. Noo noo nooo, we shan't have any of this.
Today, Kerouac (if he were starting anew) would have to put out his own print-on-demand and e-book editions of his work and then go about the grim business of gaming the Amazon rating system, maintaining a blog (and Facebook page and Twitter account), and doing all the other must-do activities of writers who want to rise above the background noise of what today passes for literature, all without a hope of ever getting a review in The New York Times (much less the kind of review On the Road got from Gilbert Millstein in 1957).
We should all be glad that Kerouac and On the Road came along when they did, at a time when a quiet, humdrum, thoroughly racist, excruciatingly conformist America needed the kind of wake-up call Kerouac provided, and the kind a New York City publishing establishment was still able to give. Those days are over, of course. We're on a different kind of road now. And if you also wanna know Various educators teach rules governing the length of paragraphs. They may say that a paragraph should be 100 to 200 words long, or be no more than five or six sentences. But a good paragraph should not be measured in characters, words, or sentences. The true measure of your paragraphs should be ideas.
How many sentences are in a paragraph?Your childhood teacher did not wrong you when they taught you that there should be three, or four, or five sentences in a paragraph. It is important to understand, however, that the aim in teaching this was not to impart a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, drawn from an authoritative-but-dusty book. The true aim of this strategy was to teach you that your ideas must be well supported to be persuasiveand effective.Hello, everyone! This is the LONGEST TEXT EVER! I was inspired by the various other "longest texts ever" on the internet, and I wanted to make my own. So here it is! This is going to be a WORLD RECORD! This is actually my third attempt at doing this. The first time, I didn't save it. The second time, the Neocities editor crashed. Now I'm writing this in Notepad, then copying it into the Neocities editor instead of typing it directly in the Neocities editor to avoid crashing. It sucks that my past two attempts are gone now. Those actually got pretty long. Not the longest, but still pretty long. I hope this one won't get lost somehow. Anyways, let's talk about WAFFLES! I like waffles. Waffles are cool. Waffles is a funny word. There's a Teen Titans Go episode called "Waffles" where the word "Waffles" is said a hundred-something times. It's pretty annoying. There's also a Teen Titans Go episode about Pig Latin. Don't know what Pig Latin is? It's a language where you take all the consonants before the first vowel, move them to the end, and add '-ay' to the end. If the word begins with a vowel, you just add '-way' to the end. For example, "Waffles" becomes "Afflesway". I've been speaking Pig Latin fluently since the fourth grade, so it surprised me when I saw the episode for the first time. I speak Pig Latin with my sister sometimes. It's pretty fun. I like speaking it in public so that everyone around us gets confused. That's never actually happened before, but if it ever does, 'twill be pretty funny. By the way, "'twill" is a word I invented recently, and it's a contraction of "it will". I really hope it gains popularity in the near future, because "'twill" is WAY more fun than saying "it'll". "It'll" is too boring. Nobody likes boring. This is nowhere near being the longest text ever, but eventually it will be! I might still be writing this a decade later, who knows? But right now, it's not very long. But I'll just keep writing until it is the longest! Have you ever heard the song "Dau Dau" by Awesome Scampis? It's an amazing song. Look it up on YouTube! I play that song all the time around my sister! It drives her crazy, and I love it. Another way I like driving my sister crazy is by speaking my own made up language to her. She hates the languages I make! The only language that we both speak besides English is Pig Latin. I think you already knew that. Whatever. I think I'm gonna go for now. Bye! Hi, I'm back now. I'm gonna contribute more to this soon-to-be giant wall of text. I just realised I have a giant stuffed watching nothing but fursuit unboxings. I think I need help. This one time, me and my mom were going to go to a furry Christmas party, but we didn't end up going because of the fact that there was alcohol on the premises, and that she didn't wanna have to be a mom dragging her son through a crowd of furries. Both of those reasons were understandable. Okay, hopefully I won't have to talk about furries anymore. I don't care if you're a furry reading this right now, I just don't wanna have to torture everyone else. I will no longer say the F word throughout the rest of this entire text. Of course, by the F word, I mean the one that I just used six times, not the one that you're probably thinking of which I have not used throughout this entire text. I just realised that next year will be 2020. That's crazy! It just feels so futuristic! It's also crazy that the 2010s decade is almost over. That decade brought be a lot of memories. In fact, it brought be almost all of my memories. It'll be sad to see it go. I'm gonna work on a series of video lessons for Toki Pona. I'll expain what Toki Pona is after I come back. Bye! I'm back now, and I decided not to do it on Toki Pona, since many other people have done Toki Pona video lessons already. I decided to do it on Viesa, my English code. Now, I shall explain what Toki Pona is. Toki Pona is a minimalist constructed language that has only ~120 words! That means you can learn it very quickly. I reccomend you learn it! It's pretty fun and easy! Anyway, yeah, I might finish my video about Viesa later. But for now, I'm gonna add more to this giant wall of text, because I want it to be the longest! It would be pretty cool to have a world record for the longest text ever. Not sure how famous I'll get from it, but it'll be cool nonetheless. Nonetheless. That's an interesting word. It's a combination of three entire words. That's pretty neat. Also, remember when I said that I said the F word six times throughout this text? I actually messed up there. I actually said it ten times (including the plural form). I'm such a liar! I struggled to spell the word "liar" there. I tried spelling it "lyer", then "lier". Then I remembered that it's "liar". At least I'm better at spelling than my sister. She's younger than me, so I guess it's understandable. "Understandable" is a pretty long word. Hey, I wonder what the most common word I've used so far in this text is. I checked, and appearantly it's "I", with 59 uses! The word "I" makes up 5% of the words this text! I would've thought "the" would be the most common, but "the" is only the second most used word, with 43 uses. "It" is the third most common, followed by "a" and "to". Congrats to those five words! If you're wondering what the least common word is, well, it's actually a tie between a bunch of words that are only used once, and I don't wanna have to list them all here. Remember when I talked about waffles near the beginning of this text? Well, I just put some waffles in the toaster, and I got reminded of the very beginnings of this longest text ever. Okay, that was literally yesterday, but I don't care. You can't see me right now, but I'm typing with my nose! Okay, I was not able to type the exclamation point with just my nose. I had to use my finger. But still, I typed all of that sentence with my nose! I'm not typing with my nose right now, because it takes too long, and I wanna get this text as long as possible quickly. I'm gonna take a break for now! Bye! Hi, I'm back again. My sister is beside me, watching me write in this endless wall of text. My sister has a new thing where she just says the word "poop" nonstop. I don't really like it. She also eats her own boogers. I'm not joking. She's gross like that. Also, remember when I said I put waffles in the toaster? Well, I forgot about those and I only ate them just now. Now my sister is just saying random numbers. Now she's saying that they're not random, they're the numbers being displayed on the microwave. Still, I don't know why she's doing that. Now she's making now. Goodbye! Hello, I'm back once again. I don't know why I feel obligated to say that every time I come back. But I'll keep doing it anyway. My sister stopped blasting annoying songs, so that's good. She's cooking something in the microwave. I'll go check to see what it is right now. Nevermind, it's already done cooking. Right, I remember! It's mac and cheese! Now she just started singing "I have a tongue, you don't, because I cut it off yesterday". I don't know what goes on in her mind when she does stuff like that. I've been messing around with my Elefen dictionary for a while, looking up whatever random words I can think of. By the way, the whole reason I'm doing this longest text ever is because of pointlesssites.com. That's how I found the Flaming-Chicken LTE, which inspired me to start writing this LTE. So thanks, pointlesssites.com! I check that website every day to see what new pointless websites they add. You know, I could double every letter I type so that this text would be twice as long as it normally would be. But nah, that's kinda cheating. So I won't. Also, SUBSCRIBE TO PEWDIEPIE! There, I did my part. Not that anyone will read this, but still. 'Twould be nice if you subscribed to PewDiePie. That's another word I invented. Actually, I looked it up, and I didn't invent it. Someone came up with it before I did. That's pretty sad. Also, LEARN VIESA TODAY! IT WILL CURE YOUR DEPRESSION! Seriously though, learn Viesa. It won't actually cure your depression, but I'm desperate for speakers. I only have one other person to speak it with. I should go now. Goodbye. Hi, I'm back. I just came up with an idea: SIMPLIFIED ENGLISH! Or, in Simplified Engish: Simifid Enis. It's where every group of consonant letters is reduced to the first consonant in that group of consonants, and same goes with the vowels. If a word ends up being just a single consonant with no vowel, put 'a' at the end. So "I like eating my waffles" becomes "I like etin ma wafes". Isn't it the most amazing thing ever? Nah, it's not quite as amazing as Viesa. Actually, Viesa isn't a real language, so it's less amazing then Elefen and Toki Pona, both of which are cool languages. I kinda figured that half of this text would be about languages. Oh well. I just really want this to be the longest text ever, without using copy and paste, keymash, etc. If you remember, my sister did a little bit of keymash in this text a while ago. I would've deleted it, but nah, I didn't feel like it. And besides, it's not like it took up half this text. I have an estimate for how long it'll take me to be the world record holder: about one month. I think I can manage one month of writing this. You know what? I'm just gonna break my rule of not saying the word "furry". There, I said it. Now I'm allowing myself to write "furry" whenever I want. So with that out of the way, let's talk about how I first became a furry. For some reason, I have the exact date when I became a furry memorized. It's May 4, 2018. At that time, I discovered that I was a furry by watching some