Whenever I Can Read...

Whenever I Can Read...

Began reading again, The Gunter Grass Reader, which is an encouraging sign. Whenever i CAN read, i know something is passing.

i heard on the radio, that On the Road averages 100,000 new copies sold every year... There's one of the troubles. People don't buy up the old, they don't write for themselves, they're caught up in the past. That's a lot of trees slaughtered! Lots of reading leaving us! But it goes back. He didn't make much cash, comparing it to those annual numbers, BUT he made more than many. More than Melville more than Nietzsche & more than Poe... The Raven gave him a mere $10 return & that took an entire year for him to collect from the newspaper... He made more as a journalist... But we are in a failed system. Creative types always have it bad. Bach wasn't recognized until 50 years after he died. His original manuscripts were used as scratch paper...

It confuses the mind. i now see Kerouac as lucky & as a loser! Why? He had it & gave it away, turning to booze. How many don't have his luck, didn't make his contacts, & weren't able to get published? The vast majority! Us even! And he threw it all away... Fame is no excuse... Being haunted by his dead brother isn't either... He lived with his mother & died of alcoholism in the end. Became a Rightist, throwing away anything of his past... Betraying all those young readers, who were inspired to hit The Road because of his metaphor... Maybe he saw into his true nature & became afraid, was eventually eaten alive by it after working that fire tower on Desolation Peak, but so what? We've all seen into our worse natures & hated what we've seen! It's up to us to go further, to step off into the abyss & do something... We both have done that. Not Jack. Not the loser with all those books on the bookshelves being consumed/eaten yearly by readers...