Sunny Chanel over at Babble hands over the blogging mic to her 6-year-old daughter and lets her judge classic novels by their covers.
Atlas Shrugged:
This is about Daydis (her spelling it’s actually – Daedalus). He is an ancient god guy who prays a lot. This book is about him crying. He is crying because he doesn’t like himself at all, because he hates himself. It looks like a saddy, saddy, saddy bookie.”
Note: she loves Greek Mythology at bedtime hence the Daedalus reference. And really, who doesn’t?
Animal Farm:
It looks like a book for kids. I think it’s about a donkey and a pig that do not like each other and they both live on a farm for animals. The same farm. It looks like it would be a funny book with a good really nice ending.
On the Road:
I think it’s about a car. A car that goes to Mexico, Indonesia and other places. It’s about a car that goes on all sorts of adventures. The guy on the cover is a teen, he likes to drive people places a lot. And he’s French.
Fahrenheit 451:
I think this is about a gigantic robot who goes on fire and he doesn’t like himself. It has a sad ending. It looks like a book for teens. The title means fire, a really really really big fire since the number is 451, that would mean it was really hot. So the robot must get really hot. Maybe that is why he is so sad.
Denver-based street artist Theo has only been working since February but already he’s getting a lot of attention. Inspired by his love of beat writer Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road and the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, Theo and other members of the Kerouac Project, have taken to stenciling pensive looking “Kerouacs” around various locations in Denver where the writer was known to have visited or that he mentioned in his book. It’s also a protest of the fact that the upcoming film adaptation of the book is being shot in Canada. From the Denver Westorld:
Sixty years after Jack Kerouac filled a 120-foot scroll in a haze of lust, creative ambition and amphetamines that resulted in the original On the Road, producer Francis Ford Coppola is actually making a movie of the book — his third attempt. But while On the Road is a distinctly American classic, he’s filming the entire movie in Canada.
That snub is particularly egregious considering that Denver factors prominently into the action — in fact, you could argue that our fair city is a main character in the book. While, sure, some of the action takes place on either coast, Denver is like the meat of that literary sandwich, providing the book with a prodigious amount of its soul, not to mention its hands-down best character: one Dean Moriarty, known in real life as Neal Cassady, Denver boy and Beat god.
And in the rabble-rousing spirit of Cassady himself, at least one team of “elite street thugs” is not taking the slight lying down. For the last few months, cloaked in secrecy and carrying a copy of On the Road and a handful of stencils, this group has been visiting known Kerouac hangouts and doing the writer a favor he may or may not have gotten around to himself: tagging them with a likeness and the words “JACK WAS HERE.”
“I got the idea when I heard about the film adaptation coming out,” explains the artist and ringleader, a shadowy figure who calls himself only Theo. “The filmmakers substituted Gatineau, Quebec, for Denver. I’ve been a Kerouac addict for years, and I’ve always wanted to pay tribute to the author in some way, but it only recently hit me just how this could be done: It’s just a simpler reminder that Kerouac was here in Denver and not some small town in Canada that no one’s ever heard of. I think it’s an appropriate gesture to celebrate one counterculture with another.”
There is a very cool Tumblr blog dedicated to the “Jack Was Here” Kerouac Project.
Above, outside of Neal Cassady’s favorite bar at 15th and Platte Street in Denver. Below, Kerouac interviewed in French on Canadian television, 1967.
