Jack Kerouac

"some of the dharma," by Jack Kerouac. Viking. 416 pages. $29.95.One of the most trenchant commentaries on the phenomenothat was Jack Kerouac was contained in an episode of "The Rockford Files." The long-suffering private investigator meets up with Jack Skowran, the seedy, once-celebrated author of a best-seller called "Free Fall to Ecstasy" that neither Rockford -- nor anyone else he interviews in the course of his investigation -- was Never able to get through.If Jack Kerouac hadn't really existed, he would probably have been invented by whoever or whatever it is that manufactures cultural icons.

Sept. 5 1957 The novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, was first published by Viking Press. 1997 Mother Teresa died in Calcutta, India, at age 87.

Jack Kerouac helped create a literary myth and a persona, but by the end of his life, he was rejecting both. When he died in 1969, at the age of 47, he had been living quietly for more than a decade, his years of free-wheeling escapades "on the road" long behind him. And he was weary of talking about the Beat Generation, the term he had coined two decades before.Destroying a myth, however, may be more difficult than creating it. As these two volumes reaffirm, there's still something alluring about the image of writer as free spirit, the restless seeker of truth.

Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again. - Jack Kerouac Well, lackadaddy, come to Baltimore to show any young or old hipsters what Jack Kerouac was first thinking when he uncoiled a burst of a story about a man who "likes too many things and gets all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another" until he drops. Written over three weeks in 1951, the first frenzied draft of Kerouac's On the Road left the Midwest this week, where it spent time under glass at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. All 120 tip-to-tip feet of Kerouac's famous scroll were on display.

In a cast-off school bus painted green, fitted with a sunken velvet sofa and complete with three guitars, eight heady twentysomethings are going on the road. They're driving into one of those perspective pictures from middle school art class, where the edges of the road converge at a dot on a horizon that keeps receding. They're following that point for a month on a trip around America, from Cockeysville to New Orleans, Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon, through San Francisco and Seattle, to Mount Rushmore and then home again.

Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again. - Jack Kerouac Well, lackadaddy, come to Baltimore to show any young or old hipsters what Jack Kerouac was first thinking when he uncoiled a burst of a story about a man who "likes too many things and gets all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another" until he drops. Written over three weeks in 1951, the first frenzied draft of Kerouac's On the Road left the Midwest this week, where it spent time under glass at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. All 120 tip-to-tip feet of Kerouac's famous scroll were on display.

Sept. 5 1957 The novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, was first published by Viking Press. 1997 Mother Teresa died in Calcutta, India, at age 87.

New Orleans. -- My driving teacher is Mr. Carney.Yes, I've gone ahead and done it. After 25 years as that rarissima of advises in America -- the pedestrian -- I am going to be a driver. I'll drive a car and I'll have an ID to cash checks with.Mr. Carney says, ''Being a good driver is like being a good Christian, you have to practice every day.''OK, I'll be a good driver. I will signal before I turn. I will look before I pass. I will stop before the sign. But I've got problems. Mr. Carney says, ''Turn right,'' and I turn left.

More previews from The Weekend Watch:THE RACIAL QUESTION -- Blunt talk on touchy issues was the agenda of today's Baltimore Summit on Race Relations at the Convention Center, and WJZ-Channel 13 is doing a half-hour special on the event tonight. "Baltimore in Black and White" is scheduled at 7:30 p.m., with host Debbie Wright, the station's education reporter.A CULTURAL CONNECTION -- Who says entertaining television cannot also teach? Tonight's scheduled episode of "Quantum Leap" (at 8, Channel 2)

The ice-skating onslaught continues, as TBS airs its first of four consecutive nights of competition featuring some of the world's most talented amateurs.* "The Emperor Jones" (8 p.m.-9:30 p.m., WHMM, Channel 32) -- This month's Black History Month celebration has unearthed a treasure trove of films featuring some woefully neglected African-American stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Tonight, Paul Robeson, who was not only a fine actor but had one of the world's great singing voices, stars in Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones."

You must understand the idea is Beat. Dig? Beat as Beat itself. Beat as Jack. And who was as Beat as Jack? Ginsberg, maybe? Burroughs, possibly? Everyone wanted to be like Jack. All those cats and chicks be-bopping and freight-train hopping; all those beret-wearing-hipsters in fog-induced hazes. Jack was Beat. Beat in life and Beat in words and, you know what, my incense-burning-cigarette-smoking-and-wh atever-else-you're-rolling-in-that-button-down-peacoat, friends? Beat in baseball.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Jim Irsay's appearance in the wood-paneled library of his palatial mansion is an event, and not just because he is two hours late for an interview at his own home. There's his look: The owner of such items as the Indianapolis Colts, one of Elvis Presley's guitars, and now the legendary scroll upon which Jack Kerouac typed On the Road is tall and beefy, with the shoulders of a linebacker and the pale, shiny suit of a hippie loan shark. There's his voice: a Dylan-esque drawl that lingers, lovingly, on words such as "c-o-o-o-l" and "a-u-u-u-ra."

In a cast-off school bus painted green, fitted with a sunken velvet sofa and complete with three guitars, eight heady twentysomethings are going on the road. They're driving into one of those perspective pictures from middle school art class, where the edges of the road converge at a dot on a horizon that keeps receding. They're following that point for a month on a trip around America, from Cockeysville to New Orleans, Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon, through San Francisco and Seattle, to Mount Rushmore and then home again.

Last Tuesday, the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" was sold at auction by Christie's in New York to a football team owner for $2.46 million - a record for a literary work. The novel itself was certainly a landmark, but the odd look of the manuscript and the story surrounding it are the real reasons for its high value. That nearly transparent, passionately typed roll of paper is worth every cent of its auction price. The best known symbol of an important moment in our history, it is the high-water mark of the Beat Movement that inundated our literary lives in the late '50s, coaxing us out of the study and into the street, telling us we were free to drop everything and go. If indeed, as William Blake said, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, then for a few years Kerouac was our driver and America gladly went along for the ride.

"some of the dharma," by Jack Kerouac. Viking. 416 pages. $29.95.One of the most trenchant commentaries on the phenomenothat was Jack Kerouac was contained in an episode of "The Rockford Files." The long-suffering private investigator meets up with Jack Skowran, the seedy, once-celebrated author of a best-seller called "Free Fall to Ecstasy" that neither Rockford -- nor anyone else he interviews in the course of his investigation -- was Never able to get through.If Jack Kerouac hadn't really existed, he would probably have been invented by whoever or whatever it is that manufactures cultural icons.

The ice-skating onslaught continues, as TBS airs its first of four consecutive nights of competition featuring some of the world's most talented amateurs.* "The Emperor Jones" (8 p.m.-9:30 p.m., WHMM, Channel 32) -- This month's Black History Month celebration has unearthed a treasure trove of films featuring some woefully neglected African-American stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Tonight, Paul Robeson, who was not only a fine actor but had one of the world's great singing voices, stars in Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones."

Los Angeles--At the American Booksellers Association's annual convention here, you can watch the Beatles' movie "A Hard Day's Night" on a computer screen, reading along with the script if desired. Or listen to Jack Kerouac read from his classic beatnik work "Dharma Bums," or hear Art Spiegelman discourse on his "Maus" and "Maus II" Holocaust books.You could even help Bill Gates write his new book.Mr. Gates, the reclusive, fabulously wealthy founder of Microsoft, is writing his memoirs for Viking.

THE PORTABLE BEAT READER.Edited by Ann Charters.Viking.635 pages. $25.Shortly before Christmas 1946, Neal Cassady, freshly discharged from the New Mexico State Reformatory, but apparently unreformed, departed Sidney, Neb., with a stolen car, hTC a 16-year-old child bride and $300 of her aunt's money.This cross-country jaunt (car abandoned in Nebraska snow drift . . . trip continued via Greyhound) would end in New York City. There, in a cold-water flat, Mr. Cassady would meet Jack Kerouac (and later Allen Ginsberg)

Jack Kerouac helped create a literary myth and a persona, but by the end of his life, he was rejecting both. When he died in 1969, at the age of 47, he had been living quietly for more than a decade, his years of free-wheeling escapades "on the road" long behind him. And he was weary of talking about the Beat Generation, the term he had coined two decades before.Destroying a myth, however, may be more difficult than creating it. As these two volumes reaffirm, there's still something alluring about the image of writer as free spirit, the restless seeker of truth.

Los Angeles--At the American Booksellers Association's annual convention here, you can watch the Beatles' movie "A Hard Day's Night" on a computer screen, reading along with the script if desired. Or listen to Jack Kerouac read from his classic beatnik work "Dharma Bums," or hear Art Spiegelman discourse on his "Maus" and "Maus II" Holocaust books.You could even help Bill Gates write his new book.Mr. Gates, the reclusive, fabulously wealthy founder of Microsoft, is writing his memoirs for Viking.