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curl https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-accidental-book-review-that-made-jack-kerouac-famous/2019/12/13/23e94230-04b3-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html?outputType=amp |tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' |sed 's/</\n</g' | sed -n '/./{/<p class=.font--body/,/<\/p>/p;}' > 1.htm
firefox 1.htm
A few further findings:
1. WashPo delay curl requests by about 8 seconds. Changing user-agent to anything other will defeat this.
2. The size of the actually-useful bits of the page is about 3% of just the primary HTML page transferred. That's excluding images, external CSS/JS, and prefetched content.
That's a pretty considerable chunk.
As a shell script, feeding w3m directly (it will read stdin, as will lynx):
#!/bin/sh
set -e
curl -s "${1}" |
tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' |
sed 's/</\n</g' |
sed -n '/./{/<p class=.font--body/,/<\/p>/p;}' |
/usr/bin/w3m -T text/html
The argument is the URL you want view.
If you're a stickler for well-formed HTML, you can add a pipeline for tidy as well ;-)
tidy -i -w 120 --quiet |
And if you want to retain the title and dateline, use this version:
w3m, nice! forgot I had it installed
If you're calling from the EU, this gets stuck in an endless loop of GDPR consent redirects.
Nothing in the filtered output that could cause a redirect.
If HTTP 3xx redirect, maybe try using a cache URL instead, e.g.,
curl http://web.archive.org/web/20191214075242/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-accidental-book-review-that-made-jack-kerouac-famous/2019/12/13/23e94230-04b3-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html?outputType=amp |tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' |sed 's/</\n</g' | sed -n '/./{/<p class=.font--body/,/<\/p>/p;}' > 1.htm
firefox 1.htmWhat I did was:
1. Visit the link until it complains about adblocker
2. Disable JS for washingtonpost.com (using NoScript)
If I block JS directly I just get a GDPR (almost) blank page.
nice! any way to make it work in Lynx/Elinks?
There is little need for this if one is using a text-only browser such as links/elinks that does not process Javascript or CSS. AMP look great in links/elinks, without any filtering. This is for folks who do not use text-only browsers and prefer to leave Javascript enabled.
lynx will read direct from stdin.
<command> | lynx --force-html -stdinthanks! it worked
curl https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-accidental-book-review-that-made-jack-kerouac-famous/2019/12/13/23e94230-04b3-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html\?outputType\=amp |tr -cd '\11\12\15\40-\176' |sed 's/</\n</g' | sed -n '/./{/<p class=.font--body/,/<\/p>/p;}' | lynx --force-html -stdinPublic Service Announcement: Read This Book.
More specifically, read this book in one sitting, then immediately book a flight to Southeast Asia or South America or Africa where the world is still equipped to handle this sort of low budget wandering and filled with young people doing so.
It can only make your life better.
Am I only supposed to book the flight or board the plane as well? I'm all for making my life better but I'm not sure what would my family and employer say if I were to leave on a whim.
Leaving on a whim without caring about what the employer or the family would say is the sort of expected behaviour
I can sympathize with the cape diem sentiment, and gp might have practiced what they preach, but safe to say getting fired and getting a divorce in quick succession is probably not for everyone including me.
I'm undecided whether to complain about the extreme point of privilege it is speaking from, personally I never had that kind of disposable income / safety net so this could have been actionable for me, but it is possible I'm a minority in that regard.
Jack Kerouac was not privileged and lived in poverty most of his life.
Safe to say you’re not very fun at parties.
> On the Road is a terrible book about terrible people. Jack Kerouac and his terrible friends drive across the US about seven zillion times for no particular reason, getting in car accidents and stealing stuff and screwing women whom they promise to marry and then don’t.
> But this is supposed to be okay, because they are visionaries. Their vision is to use the words “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic” at least three times to describe every object between Toledo and Bakersfield. They don’t pass a barn, they pass a holy vision of a barn, a barn such as there must have been when the world was young, a barn whose angelic red and beatific white send them into mad ecstasies. They don’t almost hit a cow, they almost hit a holy primordial cow, the cow of all the earth, the cow whose dreamlike ecstatic mooing brings them to the brink of a rebirth such as no one has ever known.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-roa...
This is one way to read On The Road, I guess. I was infatuated with the book when I was 18 but later came to some similar conclusions about the whole premise of the book. But this review kind of assumes that Kerouac was stupid and incapable of thinking critically about himself or the subculture he was a part of.
I can't help but believe that Kerouac must have had some misgivings about his lifestyle. Yes he writes about everything being angelic and awesome on the road. But the story also takes on a Sisyphean vibe as they continue to wander across the country over and over and over again. The characters are led back to the road again and again to constantly chase the next ecstatic revelation in hopes that they will find some meaning somewhere. It's like the harder they look for enlightenment, the further they get from it - a theme which coincidentally is very Zen and something I think Kerouac must have been conscious of since he was a pretty serious student of Zen buddhism.
Reading the book as a self-critical, partial satire of the Beat lifestyle introduces a lot more nuance and helps to appreciate the counterculture while also realizing that they weren't so stupid as to not acknowledge the flaws in their own philosophy and lifestyle.
A highly relevant read, to accompany “On the road” is “Hell’s Angels” by hunter s Thompson. I read them as a pair of books that examine both sides of that era. “fear and loathing in Las Vegas” pretty much closes the door on the Beat Generation, but, I think Hells Angels offers more insight into the times.
The author of Slate Star Codex is perhaps the exact opposite of Jack Kerouac, so it’s not particularly surprising he didn’t like the novel.
Authors response to a comment in the discussion below the article:
“I’m betting that Scott went to university straight after school and then went straight into medicine after that. He might have benefited from a year off experiencing promiscuity, drug use and even petty crime. It worked for me.”
I think you’re joking, but in case not – between my junior year of college and the time I started medical school I took two years off and several different trips, during which I (for example) crossed Great Britain entirely on foot, travelled to about thirty different countries, hiked the Himalayas and got lost and had to be rescued by Sherpas, learned to scuba dive amidst poorly explored weird undersea ruins, starred in a Mongolian-language music video, taught elementary school English in Japan, got arrested twice and spent a night in a foreign jail, biked across Italy, and did various other ill-advised things.
When I say there’s nothing wrong with taking some time off in your early twenties to be a bit crazy and see the world, I’m speaking from experience. I swear I wasn’t always as boring as I am now, and if I ever decide to write my own version of “On The Road” it will be at least as interesting as Kerouac’s – as it is, my old blog is about fifty times more worth reading than this place.
But it doesn’t include any carjackings. My point isn’t that you shouldn’t explore, it’s that you should do it without being a jerk and without fetishizing exploration as the be-all-and-end-all of life.
I’m not sure what that answer is supposed to prove. Kerouac stood for things that made (and still make) the consumer bourgeois middle class tremble.
The fact that the author lists his early-twenties experiences as some sort of “checklist before becoming a real adult©” illustrates exactly that he just doesn't get it - the Beats in general represent a sort of life that is alien to your average person today. It’s about a mindset and a different approach to life than the fundamentally consumeristic one that is taken for granted in 2019, where counterculture has more-or-less been entirely destroyed or co-opted by people selling stuff.
Isn’t wrecking luxury cars for funsies and treating women like a sort of livestock that you can beat and leave to raise your kids really super-consumerist underneath the shock factor? There’ll always be more stuff and more women (and bonus, you can get other people to do the work to make the stuff!), just consume and destroy them, move onto another part of the country where there’s still more stuff, keep on doing it cause the abundance will never end... sounds exactly like the ‘consumerist’ global economy.
I think analyzing Kerouac and his books as a series of actions is to somewhat miss the point, and to bring a contemporary consumeristic / experience-focused attitude to the work. He doesn't really do anything important. The insightful part is the mentality, the thought process, the philosophy. Kerouac was pretty big into religion (not organized religion, mind you) particularly Catholicism and Buddhism, and to describe his works as "bad people travel around nowhere for no reason and do bad things" is to completely misunderstand the context and purpose of them.
Most of Kerouac's other works deal with this pretty extensively (see The Dharma Bums), but since the Slate Star Codex guy (and most middle-class technocratic people like him) often have a real aversion to anything that isn't strictly scientistic, they end up missing the forest for the trees.
Finally, I should add that reading literature from the past and dismissing it because it doesn't fit your contemporary moral worldview is both deeply ignorant and just plain unfulfilling. You don't need to think Kerouac was a good person to think he had something important to say.
"On the road" is all about consuming. Consume alcohol on a bar. Consume music (literally dancing to other people's tune). Consume women (literally paying for them as well). Consume drugs.
There's very little production at all on the book. "People talking shit fruitlessly on drugs to each other" is the closest it gets to it. Oh yeah sorry, there's the production of a few babies, treated mostly as nuisances to get rid of.
If your counterculture consists of spending money on the hospitality sector and petty crime, well, good luck.
I think it works pretty well as a warning, though. Maybe I'm just old?
Have you somehow missed the fact that the reason we're discussing the beats at all is that they collectively produced some of the most influential works of 20th century literature?
The point of the beat movement, if it's reducible to a single idea, was to escape the prison of an expected life - to be and to experience the possibilities inherent in the final gasp of [white imperialist patriarchal] freedom in colonial America, and then to create art that successfully articulated and perhaps even evangelised that experience.
I don't think anyones denying the misogynistic, sociopathic elements of their behaviour (or indeed of artists throughout history from Carravagio to Cosby). To advocate for the importance of art as cartography of experience is radically different to suggesting the lifestyle of the artist should be one to emulate.
Part of the seductiveness of art is as escapism, as confrontation with darkness, as elegiac vision. There is little space in our contemporary culture for exploring the contradictions inherent in our shadow selves - let alone how they are necessary for light to thrive. It's exactly this resonance: with irresponsibility, with self destruction, with the truth of the moment (irregardless of consequences) that makes the work of the beats still so seductive.
I do intend to read the book again, but probably the scroll version. My impression from the last partial read-through is that Kerouac, at least his narrator, wants to take everything de novo. Of course you're my greatest one-and-only-forever love, I'm sure of it. Yes, she was last month, but this time I'm sure. (Repeat ad lib.)
I think you greatly overrate the trembling tendencies, or maybe the sincerity of the trembling among the consumer bourgeois middle class. I am about as bourgeois (well, petit-bourgeois, as a Marxist acquaintance once told me) middle class as you can get. I wear the flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes, once the transgressive costume of the Beats, to Starbucks, and guess who surrounds me there? Middle class folk in flannel shirts, jeans, and work shoes.
The revolution will not be televised? Sorry, it will be televised, but it will only look revolutionary.
Yes, it still outrages people now.
Can you imagine how revolutionary it was in 1957?
I would assume the commenter's point was that the book has deep moral issues and shouldn't be used as some sort of travel poster for "book[ing] a flight to Southeast Asia or South America or Africa where the world is still equipped to handle this sort of low budget wandering".
But I am not the commenter, and thus might be completely wrong . . . :-)
Kerouac represented the counterculture back in 1957, and out to upset the squares, and welcoming to most anyone who rejected mainstream values. Now it's the left that holds the podium and deems what is and isn't acceptable, and it's the Alt-right who are out to own the libs, and consider and weirdo or outsider who rejects mainstream society to be an ally. The poles have flipped.
Alt-right who are out to own the libs and [are?] consider[ed] and [a?] weirdo or outsider?
Yeah, all those dreadfully underprivilideged white college boys who want their racism, sexism and anti-sex stances to be acceptable again.
I agree that society is changing, but the basic foundations of perception are very difficult to change, so it’s quite clear why this can offend society even then and now :)
I'm guessing that it must be On the Road.
The Washington Post is sure as hell locked up tight.
Thanks. But ...
> Something went wrong
> We're sorry. This page failed to Outline.
Maybe because I'm using Cloudfront DNS?
Check Privacy Possum/Badger. The tracking headers are being blocked, which seems to break Outline.
Nope, it wasn't that for me.
It was Smart Referer. If I disable that, the Outline link opens fine.
But not the Washington Post article, itself.
But thanks :)
nice! For WaPO and all other paywalls, you can try either of these paywall bypassing extensions [1], but for me, I find that simply disabling scripts through uBlock Origin does the trick.
I got the same error and I don't use CF DNS.
My favorite review of this book is:
> That’s not writing, that’s typing.
( it was written in 2 weeks, on a typewriter, on a single roll of paper. )
(( kind of like a speed fueled nanowrimo attempt, but successful. ))
Capote wasn't talking about this book in particular when he said that, he was talking about Kerouac's method of never rereading or editing something once he had typed it.
I only mention that because it changes the meaning of the quote- it's not necessarily about quality, but it's very much about methodology
Kerouac influenced me a lot when I was 18/19 yrs old, though Thoreau did push me even more on the path I chose. And that as a teen living in Bavaria! First I read from Kerouac was Book of Dreams, a bit ironic because I can never remember the dreams I have.
A quick listen to Jack himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jej5d2kYjuQ I actually put that track onto the sampler that our class made when we finished school. Couldn't care less how my classmates reacted to that after lots of music :D
Also have a listen into that first Kerouac conference. https://archive.org/details/On_the_road__The_Jack_Kerouac_co...
oh, and one more tip: Buckley, Kerouac, Sanders and Yablonsky discussing the so-called "Hippies".
What an incredible little story - I didn't know this and I'm from Lowell, Mass., Kerouac's hometown. The imprint he left here is palpable - Lowell is now considered a culture/arts/music destination and there's even a park dedicated to Kerouac with granite pillars with his writing etched on them.
Always good to see him mentioned on HN. (My username is the protagonist from one of his other works, The Dharma Bums.)
No paywall link: https://www.heraldnet.com/life/the-accidental-book-review-th...
Dharma Bums > On The Road IMHO