"As Darkness came Hal drove me into the mysterious night of Denver. And then it all started."

While perusing my copy of John Kerouac's On The Road: The Original Scroll today I was reminded of a neat self-tour the City of Denver offers pointing you to the ever-quickly disappearing remnants of the old Beat hangouts.

These are all day-to-day places where they left their mark in legend if not words. What would Kerouac think now of sprawling high rise residences at the heart of his dusty, seedy streets?

Someday I'll just hop on the scooter and do the tour. I've been to many of the places individually, but with the march of progress, I expect even old stalwarts like My Brothers Bar to eventually succumb to the developers tempation on such a hot block.

Details on this neat free selfguided tour can be found on the City of Denver wesite: HERE

Still got the beat at 50?

On The Road is one of those books that everyone should read at some point.

Jack Kerouac's groundbreaking novel turns 50 this year, and Newsweek has a great piece this week talking about the book's impact and how the book world plans to celebrate.

The image the article paints of the young Kerouac writing this novel strikes me as very real and complicated. Just like people are in real life.

All I know is I want to pick up some of these new editions of On The Road when they come out, as well as some of the biographies. It's been more than a decade since I first devoured my way through almost everything Kerouac wrote. It will be interesting to see how I react to it now.

You can read the Newsweek article HERE.