Some Day I Will Read ‘The Sea is My Brother’

The Sea is My Brother is a book by Jack Kerouac which was never published in his lifetime, but it’s coming out now.  I have mixed feelings about this.

His soul was dark, his books were blazing light

First of all, I’m wondering what took so long.  He was famous before he was dead and his literary reputation has only grown since then.  It’s not like he forbade its publication, or had it hidden away or anything.

He did once tell an interviewer that it was a crock of shit.  Then again, Kerouac  said a lot of stuff to interviewers which doesn’t need to be taken seriously.  He was usually drunk and in the last few years of his life he was probably crazy, too.  And it wasn’t a nice crazy.  It was a bitter, nasty, screw the world kind of crazy.  The world’s #1 beatnik, the literary legend the hippies loved, grew up to be a Republican.  Before he finished drinking himself to death at 47.

Also, artists are not always the best judges of their own work.  Like me.  I’ve written a lot of poetry but the stuff I think is my best stuff is stuff that people haven’t reacted to at all, and  people like my short poems, which are basically graffiti except I put them on paper.

So, maybe it’s a great book.  I hope to read it some day.

I love On The Road, it’s one of my favorite books of all time.  The Dharma Bums was great, too.  Satori in Paris, The Town and the City and Vanity of Duluoz all had some interesting bits.  I looked on Wikipedia before writing this, and discovered that what I’ve always remembered as one of his great books, “Mexico City Dream Poems,” doesn’t actually exist.  There was Mexico City Blues and there was Book of Dreams and I’m not sure which was the one I really liked.

But Visions of Cody was an unreadable piece of shit and Pic was absolute proof that white people should not try to write, or talk, or pretend to think like black people.  It just came across phony as all hell.

So, maybe it will be a great book, maybe not.  I’m encouraged by the fact that it’s his early work, before the alcohol had time enough to pickle his brain.

Regardless of its literary merits, though, it is historically important.  It is one more insight into the mind of Jack Kerouac which, dark and twisted though it may have been, was one of the greatest literary minds the world has ever known.