On the road again

"On the Road" is going on the road.\nSince Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay bought the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's story about a group of intellectual outlaws and their aimless, Bohemian odyssey for $2.43 million last year, it hasn't had much of a public life. Only recently has it been displayed publicly.\nOn Monday, however, letters were sent to 35 libraries and museums asking about their interest in displaying the scroll during a tour expected to begin in January and last five years.\n"I know that the interest level in it is high and the conditions of display are very minimalistic," Irsay said. "I think it becomes a real no-brainer to have an opportunity for it to be seen."\nAmong those contacted were the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Kerouac's hometown, the New York Public Library, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.\nClara Burns, director of the Allen Ginsberg Library at Naropa, said she was excited for the opportunity. As a writer, poet, and graduate of the university's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she has an answer for anyone looking for reasons to display it.\n"If you're actually able to handle the manuscript, you have a kind of contact with the author that you otherwise wouldn't get," Burns said. "At the risk of sounding too obscure, the most advanced physics teaches us that the moment you come into contact with something, it is part of you and you are part of it forever."\nKerouac wrote "On the Road" during a 20-day typewriter marathon in a Manhattan loft, scribbling edits onto the page with a pencil. When it was finally published six years later in 1957, the novel won critical acclaim as an unconventional masterpiece.\nAfter Irsay bought the scroll, it sat on a coffee table in his suburban Indianapolis home before being sent to IU where it was prepared for exhibition. The plans for the manuscript have been many, though.\nIrsay talked of displaying the manuscript in Indianapolis and at IU-Bloomington. There was even discussion of sending the scroll to the New York Public Library to help raise money for victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It wasn't until recently that any plans were final.\nThe fee to display the manuscript for 90 days will be $2,500, though the price is negotiable. The money generated will be given to a charity that has not yet been picked.\n"It was really important to me that this happens," Irsay said. "It was something that was stored away and in hiding, so to speak, and really it hasn't had a chance to be seen"