Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable History Breaching Space and Time.

It should go without saying that Frederick is swooning away in the last panel not because he is a female, but because he is Frederick the Great – our at least our version of Frederick the Great.
You have to dig pretty hard to find Frederick saying something positive about the female gender, which is, like everything about Frederick, surprising considering the depth of his intellectual and spiritual relationship with his sister, and that his grandmother, Sophia Charlotte, was one of the most amazing women of the late 17th century, being one of the only people in history to intimidate Peter the Great into mawkish silence. Perhaps because the two principle roadblocks to his expansionist schemes were women – Madame de Pompadour in France and Maria Theresa in Austro-Hungary. Perhaps because his instincts towards ideal platonic relations with men as the purest form of friendship raged at giving way to the confines of a politically opportune marriage. Perhaps it would have been different had he been raised in the female-headed salon culture of Paris rather than the beer-and-snuff-drenched sausagefest of Potsdam. In any case, this is one instance when he did not rise above the standard views of his time, and now, I have a feeling, all of that is going to come crashing down on him… and Voltaire, who was hardly any better, and Newton, who was basically only theoretically aware that women existed, though this is hardly the first time Newton has had to shoulder the sins of his companions.
– Count Dolby von Luckner

Yeah, Kerouac lived pretty hard. After one trip with Cassady (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) to Mexico he was so messed up from drug abuse that he couldn’t even gather himself together enough to put words to page for a while. It’s interesting – while I was rereading On the Road in preparation for Geoff’s inclusion of Kerouac as a character, I also happened to be rereading Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther by way of keeping my German in shape for the coming Berlin trip, and there is a certain affinity in the works. I am sure Kerouac fans find that sacrilege against the Newness of Kerouac’s vision, and Goethe fans against the purity of the master’s work, but there is in both that same Damn The Consequences Call to Life which ultimately walks hand in hand with destruction.
It’s like every generation needs to rewrite this book, just inserting the peripheral things it happens to like for the stuff the past generation happened to like. Instead of Werther sharing bread with the local poor children, you get Sal sharing whiskey with hobos in the back of a truck heading for Denver, but really, in terms of what they are trying to do, it’s the same scene. Whenever we get too comfortable with our disengagement and isolation, a figure is called up from the Earth to shake us up and feel again what we are missing thereby. Shakespeare, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kerouac – and now, in our day of choosing virtual internet existences over difficult genuine interaction, it seems to be time for the next instantiation to emerge – but we’ve been waiting A While Now, haven’t we? I think Winton Rowntree, of Subnormality, is probably one such figure, but in mainstream literature (not that I exactly have my finger on the pulse of the current literary scene) I am having a hard time thinking of a good candidate. Maybe there is one and I just have been too busy reading X-Club comics to know about it…
– Count Dolby von Luckner