This was the house of Neal Cassady, inspiration for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road, in the 1950s. Via the link.
The other day I came across this link to The Jack Kerouac Tour of SF, compiled by Paul Iorio. It starts out with the obvious spots like City Lights, Jack Kerouac Alley, the Beat Museum and Vesuvio’s, but then moves into some places I didn’t know about, like Neal and Carolyn Cassady’s home (left), where Kerouac stayed in the attic for several months while writing Visions of Cody. It also includes some other places Kerouac lived, as well as neighborhoods, cafes, and performance spaces he frequented. Pretty cool, and definitely something I’ll be doing when I get back to the city.
I also thought this was pretty funny: Dear Paris Review, What Books Impress A Girl? The list at the end hits pretty close to the mark, I think. When I was 17 I used to write impassioned diary entries about my dream man, who I would encounter on a bus reading Nabokov. He would compliment my pink hair and then we’d go to a coffee shop to talk about Pale Fire. I still love Nabokov, but these days I would probably find a guy who wanted to talk about him on a bus tedious; some potential winners might be Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Steinbeck, Whitman, really good non-fiction, or, yes, Haruki Murakami. (I cracked up at the “worst book of great author” formula suggested in the article, but in all seriousness, A Wild Sheep Chase is totally underrated and when I find someone who agrees with me I will bond instantly with that person. I feel the same way about Anne Bronte, but she’s significantly less sexy.)
Obviously you shouldn’t read just because you think it’ll help you get laid, but just for fun, what books would you like to see members of your preferred gender reading?
Barbary Prose 