Jack Kerouac: “I enter my page”

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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