A great Jack Kerouac quote on the hollowness of pursuing fame:
I can just see the shabby literary man carrying a “bulging briefcase” rushing from one campus to another, one lecture club to another, nodding confirmation with his hosts that he is right, hurrying to the next town . . . This my friend is what I will become if I accept all lecture offers . . . [L]ife is too sweet to waste on self propaganda, I quit self promotion, I enter my page.
The blank page. And speaking of the blank page, and trying to make something of it, here’s a poem that I wrote with Jack Kerouac in it, imagining California in 1957:
Giants
and Dodgers
.
moving west
without
.
Ebbets Field
or Jackie Robinson
.
but with Jack
Kerouac
.
and Holiday Inns
rounding third
.
at the Pacific
and driving
.
not
sliding
.
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