Freshly Squeezed Salinger

Nothing beats being panned by the critics! When following your dreams you get sentimentally scorched by lots of overly-groomed seemingly educated Dragons who like to discourage you from creating and producing. Dragons, as Joseph Campbell notes, are people who hoard things, like feeble-wristed PHD candidates:
 
"They hoard heaps of golds (books in their office) and beautiful virgins (Their students) and they don't know what to do with either of them. They just hang on."
 
Here's a quote from the writer almanac for all my lovers and gypsy dreamers out there about J.D. Salinger and how the incendiary Dragon known as the book critic endeavored to scorch his budding career.
 
"Giroux didn't hear back from Salinger for months, and then, one day, Salinger walked into his office. Giroux said, "A tall, sad-looking young man with a long face and deep-set black eyes walked in, saying, 'It's not my stories that should be published first, but the novel I'm working on ... about this kid in New York during the Christmas holidays.'" Giroux said he'd love to publish it, but when it was finished one of his superiors thought the kid in the book seemed too crazy. So Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye with Little, Brown and Company, and it came out on this day in 1951.
 
The New York Times ran a review titled "Aw, the World's a Crumby Place" that poked fun at Salinger's style. The New Yorker refused to run any excerpts of the novel, because they said that the children in it were unbelievably intelligent, and the style of the novel was too "showoffy." But despite the mixed reviews, The Catcher in the Rye reached the bestseller list after being in print just two weeks, and it stayed there for more than six months. It has gone on to sell more than sixty million copies. It has been at one time or another the most banned book in America and one of the most assigned books in American classrooms. "
 
 
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche utilizes the image of the Dragon as the "ultimate" nemesis from which the ever-fluctuating spirit of mankind must devour if it is to be spiritually transformed.
 
According to Nietzsche, the spirit of mankind is always in a state of constant matamorphic flux.
Quick synopsis (very quick)=The spirit of mankind has three stages. The first of that is a camel.
 
A camel is an animal carrying substantial loads and burdens. Think of the young wayward artist cultivating his own aesthetic and ideas.  Traveling by himself. Working for a goal. Spending hours alone in meditation, intriscally seeking. That's camel work.
 
Once the Camel is piled full the camel sets out to the Desert. A desert is a place of spiritual incubation. Numerous Manifestations have at one time or another, been swallowed in the arid sand of the desert. Christ fasted in the desert. The Israelites soaked up a few decades meandering around the desert searching for their collective ethos. Yeah.... the desert is a place, like the womb,  demarcated for spiritual growth and change.
 
In the desert the camel transforms into a LION. The more loaded the camel, the more aggressive and potent the Lion. "If it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert"  Basically, be master of his/her own creativity. That which is latent inside his bones aching to crawl out.
 
The Lion has a job, the lions job is to KILL a golden-scaledDragon whose name is THOU SHALT.  Dragon's, as previously noted, can be seen as individuals who are "stuck" in a certain spiritual purgatory for so long that their soul's become inflated and their hearts transition into sort've a waiting room.  In my profession, the Dragon is the publisher who tells me "Sorry, not what we're looking for" and slips me a bussiness card for a local ad copying agent.  But the Dragon is also the hoity-toity prof. who, as Ezra Pound says, "One avg. mind, with one less average thought each year"....basically prof.'s whose only claim to fame is making a carrer forged from footnotes to other people's genius.  
 
It's stitched in the Dragon's nature to mentally thwart the budding soul of the creative individual in as much that the dreamer will succumb, grow hard cold scales and transition into an inwardly opinionated DRAGON himself.
 
Once the LION kills the Dragon the LION transitions into a child. With the child everthing is new and innocent. A child continues to badger out querries. A child continues to always look at the world as if it were a new creation and everything the child touches feels fresh in his grip.  
 
Keep the chin up on  your crazy heart and keep slicing apart the Dragon, one delicious scale at a time.

children (smiles)