"Give me another slug of that jug. How! ho! Hoo!" Japhy [a character based on Kerouac's friend, San Francisco Beat poet Gary Snyder] leaping up: "I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least fancy new cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures....
...Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamp light of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of wheels. You'll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy...I see him in future years taling along with full rucksack, in suburban streets, passing the blue television windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch. As for me, maybe the answer was in my little Buddy poem that kept on: "'Who played this cruel joke, on bloke after bloke, packing like a rat, across the desert flat?' asked Montana Slim, gesturing to him, the buddy of the men, in this lion's den. 'Was it God gone mad, like the Indian cad, who was only a giver, crooked like the river? Gave you a garden, let it all harden, then comes the flood, and the loss of your blood? Pray tell us, good buddy, and don't make it muddy, who played this trick, on Harry and Dick, and why is so mean, this Eternal Scene, just what's the point, of this whole joint?' I thought maybe I could find out at last from these Dharma Bums."
[from The Dharma Bums (New York: Penguin Books, 1958)]
"In September 1957, On the Road was published and greeted with tremendous media attention--both positive and negative. Unwittingly, Kerouac succeeded in becoming the symbol of a generation. The life of a solitary Buddhist wanderer now an impossibility, Kerouac became increasingly overwhelmed by the pressures of celebrity, and began to take refuge in alcohol. In November of 1957, while On the Road was on the bestseller list, Kerouac, at the urging of his publisher, wrote The Dharma Bums. Again the reactions that his work provoked were extreme. Support from some corners was strong. The American Buddhist, the organ of the Buddhist Churches of America, ran a review of the novel that said, 'As a book The Dharma Bums is an answer to the literature of disillusion, petulant sensualism and indignation against dry-heart bourgeois hypocrisy.... As an alternative to the packaged way of life it should be taken seriously by youth and taken as a threat by our policy makers on the East Coast.' But, by the mainstream press, Kerouac was condemned as an enemy of the American way and his literary talents were dismissed as not writing but 'typing.'"
[from BIG SKY MIND: Buddhism and the Beat Generation, Carole Tonkinson, ed. (New York: Riverhead Books; Published by The Berkley Publishing Group; 1995)]
"...Kurt [Cobain] had written a Vaselines-influenced song called 'Beans,' based on the Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums. 'Beans, beans, beans/ Jackie ate some beans/ And he was happy and naked in the woods' went the chorus."
[from: Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana; by Michael Azerrad (New York: Doubleday, 1994)]