The Edinburgh Festival (the biggest international arts festival in the world) got officially underway today with a drizzly cavalcade through the town, the first rain at this annual procession for more than ten years. My wife has been rehearsing hard for her part in the Edinburgh People’s Theatre production of The Holy Terror, which opened yesterday – a free adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe into Scots by James Scotland. Details are at the link.Unrelated to this, an excellent article by Sean O’Hagan to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I read On the Road in my twenties and loved it, but haven’t picked it up since. I would fear disappointment, but perhaps bits of it would still resonate? Hard to know what it would mean to young people today. Carolyn Cassady is in no doubt:
Carolyn Cassady, the last surviving member of Kerouac's closeknit coterie of friends and fellow Beats, now 84 and exiled in deepest Berkshire, is even more scathing about Noughties youth. 'It's all about money and surface now, the clothes you wear, the things you buy, and no one is the slightest bit ashamed of being superficial. I often thank God that Jack and Neal did not live long enough to see what has become of their vision'.
But the beat generation didn’t go down well with most of their elderly contemporaries either.
