Happy Anniversary - and Congratulations!

It's hard to believe, but on Wednesday this week (10th) Lachy and Merry will have been married for a whole year. They wed on 10/10/06, on the 10th anniversary of their first date, in a romantic late afternoon ceremony in a harbourside park at the end of our street, and we had the reception in a marquee in our garden. Happy Anniversary, darlings!

Last Wednesday we were very excited to read an article on Jack Kerouac that Lachy had published in The Australian Literary Review. He has studied Kerouac and his writings in considerable depth over many years, and wrote his BA Honours thesis on him, so Lachy is something of an expert on Kerouac and the Beat writers. What prompted him to write his current article is the publication of the original version of "On The Road".

Here's what Lachy says:
"As you know, I’ve been reading and thinking about Kerouac and the Beats for many years. I wrote my honours thesis on On the Road and Visions of Cody, and Kerouac is one of my major inspirations. The recent 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road has seen the release of Kerouac’s original scroll – the 120 foot long single-spaced strip of paper on which he wrote the first complete draft of the book in April 1951. The novel we have known as On the Road is actually quite different from the 1951 version, which is more of a memoir, with real names and real events. It isn’t as ‘literary’ as the 1957 version, but in many ways it surpasses it, if nothing else for the experience of that one, relentless, 300 page paragraph. If you haven’t read Kerouac before, or if you haven’t read him in a while, I would thoroughly recommend you pick up a copy of the new edition."

If you are interested in reading his article, click on the link above.