I went to  Bangkok's LIDO theatre, a 1960s relic I believe, to watch On The Road. It's a Franco-Brazilian production, strangely enough, which meant it was mostly naked people, great music, and some more or less awkward dialog in between.

This isn't a film review, though, it's contextualization.

It brought back to mind something I hadn't thought about in half a decade, that had really flaked to the dusty bottom of the mind. I think it was New York Maria who told me this story, and though it might have been in a letter, I can hear her soft voice perfectly, shaping the words.

A Professor in a writing class was criticizing (probably oblivious to the irony) this new generation of "classroom" or "textbook" writers compared to the older Authors saying something like:

"I mean, think about it. All these writers, they really lived, they did things, they had seen a part of the world most other people hadn't and wanted to share it." I assume Kerouac was the example with which she was illustrating this, but Conrad sailed the Congo river and Melville actually whaled; Theroux took up a cabin by the lake and Dostoyevski was exiled in Siberia; Shelley and Byron waved their little flags ever so romantically. "But people nowadays sit at home on their computers and think they will write a masterpiece." 

Whaling's a little out of fashion nowadays, and most people think hitch-hiking across the States will end up with you dead or worst, but there you have it: an incentive to do something a little crazy this weekend. If not for the novel you're not going to write, do it for your biographer.

Bukowski, by R. Crumb