The singer and songwriter for Death Cab For Cutie wrote songs for the band’s upcoming album, Narrow Stairs, at a cabin in Big Sur—the same spot Jack Kerouac wrote his book “Big Sur.” For its most recent issue, Paste magazine sent Gibbard back to the cabin, where he filed a cover story about his love for Kerouac and the impact of the writer on his life, particularly his book “On the Road.”

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During my four days in Austin for the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, I’ve seen a lot of this:

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Couldn’t resist another couple links to late-arriving pieces about the 50th anniversary of “On the Road.” The first one’s a chuckler from New York Times columnist David Brooks. He imagines how the book’s protagonist, Sal Paradise, would act if he were alive now: “He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.”

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Just when you thought our celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” was (finally) over, here we go again. Only briefly, though. This week Kurt Andersen‘s excellent radio program Studio 360 featured newlyweds Hillary Frank and Jonathan Menjivar—he had a scribbled-in copy of “On the Road” he’d read when he was 17; she’d never read it—debating the merits of the book and, as the promo says, provoking “a little marital tension in the process.” It’s an interesting look at a book that, as World Hum readers know, has been examined every which way during the last month. 

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Let us count the ways we paid tribute on the 50th anniversary of “On the Road”:
* Marking 50 Years of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’
* Essay: The Distance Between Then and Now
* ‘On the Road’: The Original New York Times Review
* ‘On the Road’ Sites, Including a Mexico City Sanborns, Then and Now
* Essay: Kerouac! Kerouac! Kerouac!
* Will ‘On the Road’ Ever Be Made Into a Movie?
* Essay: We Don’t (Really) Know Jack
* How to Road Trip Like Kerouac (And Stay Out of Trouble)
* ‘On the Road’ at 50: Ferlinghetti, Kirn, Cassady Weigh In
* Q&A with John Leland: Sex, Art and Spirituality in ‘On the Road’
* Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’: 22 Great Links
And finally, lest we get completely carried away:
* Enough Already With the Kerouac!

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

We’ve spent the week celebrating the 50th anniversary of “On the Road.” By now, some have had more than enough. Actually, some had already had enough 50 years ago when the novel debuted. Herewith, a sampling of what Kerouac naysayers have been saying:

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Slate joins the 50th Anniversary celebration of “On the Road” this week with coverage that, among other things, addresses this question: How did Sal Paradise, the protagonist of “On the Road” and the No. 1 pick in our list of 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers, influence Ryan Bingham, the main character in Walter Kirn’s “Up in the Air” and our No. 9 greatest fictional traveler? In an e-mail conversation with Meghan O’Rourke, Kirn points to his personal absorption in Kerouac’s classic. 

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Exactly two years ago today, we noted that actor Billy Crudup had been cast to star in a movie version of “On the Road.” The producer would be Francis Ford Coppola, who has owned the movie rights for decades. It was to be directed by Walter Salles of “The Motorcycle Diaries” fame and production was to begin in 2006. So what happened? Where’s the film now? An Aug. 17 Cincinnati Enquirer piece claims production on a Salles-directed “On the Road” film is set to begin next year, and that the cast has not been announced. According to the paper, “Scouts for American Zoetrope, Coppola’s production company, have visited Cincinnati and photographed potential location sites for the movie.”

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Dwight Garner, Paper Cuts blogger for the New York Times and senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, calls Gilbert Millstein’s Sept. 5, 1957 review of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” “probably the most famous book review in the history of this newspaper.” The book, Millstein wrote, “is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and who’s principal avatar he is.” Kerouac saw the book review shortly after midnight that day, accompanied by Joyce Johnson. In a Vanity Fair piece that recalls that night, Johnson writes that Kerouac had a “weirdly flat response” to the review. 

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Fifty years after the publication of “On the Road,” the Los Angeles Times’s Christopher Reynolds observes how a number of places depicted in the book have changed—or not—from Sausalito to New York City. Among the places he includes is Mexico City’s famed blue-tiled Sanborns (pictured). 

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Tomorrow is the official 50th birthday of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” a novel that has inspired countless wanderings. We can’t limit our tribute to a single day, so we’ll be celebrating the book all week with Kerouac-related features and blog items. For starters, we present The Distance Between Then and Now, Bill Belleville’s reflection on a pivotal road trip of his own. Fans of Sal Paradise can see where we think Kerouac’s fictional stand-in ranks by checking out our recent list of the 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers.

Related on World Hum
* The Distance Between Then and Now
* 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers

While Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, Jack London’s road trip book, The Road, celebrates its 100th anniversary—albeit with much less fanfare. Yet, writes Jonah Raskin in a terrific piece in The Nation, “London’s account of his wild, eye-opening journey across the country by railroad, boat, on foot—and even barefoot, when his shoes fell apart—remains a pivotal work in the cultural history of America’s long obsession with road travel, roadside attractions and road books.” Not only did “The Road” inspire Kerouac to become a writer, Raskin notes, but it was “a Beat memoir before the advent of the Beats, and an existentialist narrative before the arrival of existentialism.”

Related on World Hum:
* Video: Steve Allen interviews Jack Kerouac
* Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ Scroll Enjoying Super Bowl Press