THE AUDIO GENERALIST: NEW POSTINGS

Four important interviews have been added to the Audio Generalist in the last couple of months
for your listening pleasure.

First the two interviews I conducted in 1984 and 1986 with the famous foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski, who I have written about extensively here.

Second, the interview I conducted with Al Gore in 1992 on the eve of the Rio Earth Summit.
Read more abour Gore here

Thirdly, a brand new interview with the poet Michael Horovitz about his major new work 'A New Waste Land.' See previous posting here.

NORMAN MAILER NO MORE (1923-2007)

[Left: Norman Mailer outside the Roundhouse in London. Photo copyright ©Phil Franks. All rights Reserved. Used with permission. From the archives of the underground newspaper Frendz.)

A large tree has fallen in the forest. The seemingly indestructible force that was Norman Mailer has left the planet for adventures in other dimensions. Mailer has been part of my life since reading 'The Naked and the Dead' in my teens (reread a chunk of it recently and it still works). Remember seeing him being patronised by Michael Parkinson on British tv many years later and getting really angry. Mailer to me was an astounding writer and journalist whether it was the crackling reportage of 'Armies of the Night', 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago' and 'The Fight' or the epic retellings in fictional form of the life and death of Gary Gilmore ('An Executioner's Song') and life inside the CIA ('Harlot's Ghost')

[This is a giant slab of a book of which I read 566 pages - roughly halfway through. Its great but I ran out time. The hardback I bought is signed. For some reason I can't really convince myself that the signature is real - see below. Maybe someone out there can confirm.]




Left: A further interesting digression on 'Harlot's Ghost', found in The Generalist Archive.]

Mailer wrote a great book on the moon missions ('Of a Fire on the Moon'), an entertaining and wacky emotional essay on Marilyn Monroe ('Monroe') and a great overheated crime novel 'Tough Guys Don't Dance', which he also directed the film of. His final novel was 'The Castle in the Forest' (2007), an account of the youth of Adolf Hitler, narrated by a devil.

My single favourite piece of writing of his, which I have read time and again and which is a touchstone to me, is a short essay in 'Advertisments for Myself', first published in the UK in 1961.

Written in 1957, entitled 'The White Negro' and subtitled 'Superficial reflections on the hipster', it is a key text for getting an understanding of the feel and mood of those times. Its words ring
out about the psychic effect of the discovery of the concentration camps and the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This short extract will give you a strong taste:

A man knew that when he dissented, he gave a note upon his life which could be called in any year of overt crisis. No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people.

It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist - the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as /'univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing....'

AL GORE NOBEL NEWS

Hot on the heeels of the Nobel Peace Prize, the call is on for Gore to run for President in 2008. Naturally he has categorically denied that he will. Nowhere is this call stronger than at www.draftgore.com where you can buy a signed copy of this poster by Nashville artist J. William Myers








Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' was the subject of a recent court case in the UK, which tried to prevent the film's distribution to secondary schools throughout England and Wales, on the grounds that the film was politically biased and contained a number of significant errors of fact.

The full legal account of the case can be found here

The best overview of the case and the significant points it raised is Convenient Untruths on the Real Climate site. [Posted 15th October 2007]

It begins: 'Last week, a UK High Court judge rejected a call to restrict the showing of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (AIT) in British schools. The judge, Justice Burton found that "Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate" (which accords with our original assessment). There has been a lot of comment and controversy over this decision because of the judges commentary on 9 alleged "errors" (note the quotation marks!) in the movie's description of the science. The judge referred to these as 'errors' in quotations precisely to emphasize that, while these were points that could be contested, it was not clear that they were actually errors (see Deltoid for more on that).'

Who brought the case against the film?

Revealed: The Man Behind Court Attack on Gore Film
[Observer Oct 14th 2007]
Stewart Dimmock, who brought the case against 'An Inconvenient Truth' admitted he had recieved support from the Scottish-based New Party of which he is a member. The party has been funded to the tune of £1m by Robert Durward, a 'quarry magnate' who has also established a controversial lobbying group, The Scientific Alliance with political consultant Mark Adams of the public relations firm, Foresight Communications to promote biotechnology, genetically modified food, and climate change skepticism. [Wikipedia]

Three articles from 2003 in The Scotsman about the New Party and Durward:

New Party's paymaster: I'm no fascist : THE man bankrolling the launch of a new political party branded as fascist by the Scottish Tories yesterday broke his silence to reassure potential supporters: "I'm not a dictator - I just sound off a bit about things that annoy me."

Doubts grow over validity of new party: THE future of what was proclaimed to be Britain's newest political party appeared to be in serious doubt last night, with its plans to contest the Scottish parliamentary elections in May in disarray.

The rich recluse masterminding Britain's new party: WEALTHY, opinionated and with an axe to grind, the man bankrolling the launch of what is billed as Britain's newest political party is hardly the sort of person to keep his views to himself.

Similar efforts and groups are common in North America. The film and Al Gore have been the subject of sustained lobbying and disinformation campaigns by people who wish to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming. This extract from an article on a Canadian website and its accompanying sensitive graphic, is a prime example of the genre, in which the writer proceeds to riddle himself with errors.

Gore Nobel prize a travesty after court finds his film error-riddled

Canada Free Press website on October 17th 2007

'The dust is settling and much cynicism about the Nobel Peace awards has appeared throughout the media. A majority are not very complimentary, particularly about Al Gore who won the prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In taking this action, the Nobel committee have set at least two new precedents.

'Al Gore’s Prize is probably the first in history where the recipient’s work was found seriously deficient and misleading in a courtroom a week before the award. [Ed: Emphasis added: This is patently untrue]

'Some media articles made reference to this coincidence, but missed the more important point. It’s likely the committee had already made their decision when the court decision was made, but the deficiencies and problems were already well documented.

'This suggests either very poor research by the committee, lack of knowledge of climate science, or a purely political purpose to the award. Ironically, this underlines the problems of climate science. Most people don’t understand the science. It is so politicized that the proper scientific method of disproving the hypothesis is thwarted. Gore’s levels of appeal to emotionalism and fear have successfully overcome the facts. The Nobel committee has endorsed this approach.'

The author is Dr. Tim Ball who is Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project.
His bio reads: 'Dr. Ball is a renowned environmental consultant and former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Ball’s extensive science background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition, make him the ideal head of NRSP as we move into our first campaign, Understanding Climate Change.'

Copy on the NRSP website reads in part: 'Impractical and exorbitantly expensive policies directed towards ‘global climate control’, unrealistic emission standards and so-called ‘green energy’, promoted by ideologically-driven ‘environmentalists’, are being widely accepted and vigorously promoted by mass media and politicians at all levels of government. Rational debate on these issues is virtually non-existent and alternative points of view are not given a proper hearing. Many Canadians have never heard ‘the other side’ of issues such as climate change and alternative energy and they have been conditioned to believe the other side is always suspect.'

Meanwhile, the success of 'An Inconvenient Truth' has turned Gore into a media player of substance whose major connections are itemised below.

Al Gore has become a major presence in the Bay Area

San Francisco Chronicle (13th Oct 2007)

'From the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton Hotel room where he was persuaded to make his slide show into the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" to the Palo Alto environmental think tank [Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP)], that will receive his Nobel Prize cash award, part-time San Francisco resident Al Gore has become a major presence in the Bay Area.

'And that's not even mentioning Current TV, the Emmy Award-winning TV network he co-founded that's across the street from AT&T Park; his senior advisory role at Google; or the seat on the board of directors he has held at Apple Corp. since 2003. Or the stock options from both tech companies that have made him wealthy.'

Gore is Chairman of the Board of the ACP and 'has contributed some $5 million in residuals and profits from 'An Inconvenient Truth' to the organisation. He says he will contribute his Nobel share - $750,000 - to them also.

2006 posting on News Hounds
whose slogan is 'We Watch Fox So You Don't Have To':

John Gibson had Susan Estrich on Big Story today (19^th May 2006):
'Gibson brought up Gore's "huge fortune" from his early investment in Google, speculating that he could write a check to pay for the campaign and woudn't need to raise funds. He prodded Estrich for some estimates of Gore's wealth and she at first said "10's of millions" and then speculated that it could be 100 million adding that he has some strong ties in Silicon Valley.'

Read our extensive Previous Postings

I Bought Al Gore Lunch
click on this then scroll down again to this point
- article string will be attached below

Al Gore 2: An Inconvenient Truth

direct link

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: GERARD PIEL'S HISTORY

Scientific American has always been one of my favourite magazines so was delighted to discover in the Generalist Archives - currently undergoing a major overhaul, of which more anon - an interesting correspondence with Gerard Piel, the former publisher and chairman of the magazine, who



sadly died on September 5th 2004, at the age of 89. A true ambassador of science, he traveled widely and was much loved and honoured for his pioneering role in the development of popular science journalism and for his global citizenship.

Read the magazine's own obituary on this important and gracious man.

I say gracious because in 1975, when I was 25 years old and he was 60, I wrote to him regarding our book 'An Index of Possibilities' to ask him whether he could possibly write something for us on the history of the magazine. To my astonishment (bear in mind he did not know me from Adam) he sent me a long three page letter on 29th May 1975, published here for the first time:The reference to the 'boys in the back room' was a suggestion that we might have ideas to contribute to the mag. A number were submitted (at present cannot find copies of the letters I wrote to him - the other half of the conversation). Again Gerard Piel was kind enough to respond as follows:

Links:

What Gerard Piel Knows

Obituary: American Association for the Advancement of Science

Obituary: Global Policy Forum

There is a fairly substantial entry for Scientific American in Wikipedia but just a poor eight-line stub on Gerard Piel. Hopefully someone out there will take this on.

Wikipedia says: The partners - publisher Gerard Piel, editor Dennis Flanagan, and general manager Donald H. Miller, Jr. - created ...the Scientific American magazine of the second half of the twentieth century. Miller retired in 1979, Flanagan and Piel in 1984, when Gerard Piel's son Jonathan became president and editor. In 1986 it was sold to the Holtzbrinck group of Germany, who have owned it since. Donald Miller died in December, 1998. Gerard Piel in September 2004 and Dennis Flanagan in January 2005.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

Above: X-ray portrait of a healthy young woman wearing a necklace. The 'density slicing' is not electronic in this case. The colours were produced by a new kind of photographic paper. A normal x-ray was printed on a special emulsion, using several exposures of different lengths, and gradually building up the various colours according to the shades of grey in the original negative. [Credit: Agfa Gevaert]

Gerard Piel was back in touch on the 26 January 1978 in connection with our newly-published book 'Worlds Within Worlds'.

He wrote: 'You put together a fantastic collection of pictures. It will make a great swipe file for generations of editors yet to come. Will the book have a publisher over here? We cannot tantalise our readers with reviews of books they cannot lay hands on. Especially this one.'

In fact the book was published by Secker & Warburg in London in 1977 and by Holt Rinehart Winston in the States (with a different cover) the following year.

The book was reviewed in the December 1978 Scientific American by the eminent Philip Morrison in his annual Christmas round up of science books for younger readers, alongside a book of Victorian science illustrations called 'Album of Science: The Nineteenth Century.'

I think I can rightly claim 'Worlds Within Worlds' was my original idea, inspired as I remember it, by an advert that appeared in an issue of Sci Am, which showed an early brain scan image. I thought a collection of scientific imagery would make a good book - and so it turned out. The book was produced by four of us - myself, John Chesterman, John Trux and Michael Marten and was designed by Richard Adams.

I believe this book was the first popular survey of the whole range of scientific imagery - heat, x-ray, satellite, hi-speed. micro - to be published. Certainly most of the scientists we contacted were surprised that anyone outside of their field would be interested in their work. What we saw was the beauty and artistry behind many of these images. In the early 1970s the popularisation of science was still in its infancy and such images were not widely seen at the time.

Our book was won an honourable mention at the Eighth Annual Children's Science Book Award presented by the New York Academy of Sciences at a ceremony on April 17th 1979 which we were unable to attend. Philip Morrison was one of the judges.

The book was serialised over six pages in the Sunday Times magazine. New Scientist described it as 'a large, colourful, eyecatching picture book and could be appreciated as a work of art alone on the strength of its pictures. It is supplemented however with a delightful and carefully thought out text which lifts it well out of the coffee-table league. The Observer called it 'one of the most enlightening pieces of pop science publishing in a long time.' Nature reviewed it under the title 'A Talent to Amuse' and concluded: 'An intelligent choice of pictures and words makes this a volume that will fascinate and inspire.'

British Book News (March 1978) said: 'This is a book in which the beauty of the normally unseen world is fascinatingly revealed. Until comparatively recently that world was unseen because our eyes are sensitive only to a very narrow range of wavelengths. However, recent developments in the use of radiations other than visible light for the recording of the world about (and inside) us have vastly extended our knowledge of this world. Within the last ten years, techniques have been perfected which have made visible things about which we could previously only theorise...This is truly a book which demonstrates that science need not be dull but is an excitging 'journey into the unknown' as the book's sub-title so rightly claims.'

One of the legacies of the book was the Science Photo Library, created in the mid-1970s by Michael Marten, which has grown to become one of the premier photo agencies of its kind in the world

Right: Coloured magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of the brain from the side, combined with a coloured neck and skull X-ray.
Credit: SOVEREIGN, ISM / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: OBESITY & HUNGER

This is what I learnt today from the
September 2007 issue of Scientific American.

GLOBAL OBESITY

Worldwide, more than 1.3 billion people are overweight, whereas only about 800 million are underweight.

The arrival of unhealthy Western diets and sedentary Western lifestyles in developing nations has had a dramatic effect, in just one generation,on the diet and health of millions. This is paving the way for a public health catastrophe, leading to an upsurge in diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses.

For most developing nations, obesity has now emerged as a more serious health threat than hunger. Just as in the US, it is predominantly a problem of the poor.

Many governments and industries are contributing to the problem by flooding developing countries with cheap sweeteners, oils and meat while doing nothing to promote the consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Sweetened beverages - Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the like - are one of the biggest contributors to the obesity epidemic in the Third World.

The spread of supermarkets in the developing world has greatly increased the availability of sweetened beverages and processed foods.

The surge in consumption of animal-source foods means that, by 2020, developing countries are expected to produce nearly two-thirds of the world's meat and half its milk.

No country in modern times has succeeded in reducing the number of its citizens who are overweight or obese. In fact, the obesity epidemic is accelerating.

'Unless strong preventive policies are undertaken, the medical costs of illnesses caused by obesity could bring down the economies of China, India and many other developing countries.

GLOBAL HUNGER

More than 800 million people live every day with hunger - "food insecurity" - as a constant companion. Yet the world produces enough food to meet the energy and protein needs of every living person.

It is poverty that renders millions unable to buy or grow adequate food. Although not all poor people are hungry, almost all hungry people are poor. 75% of them live in the rural areas of developing countries. The highest percentage are in Africa; the largest absolute number in the Asia-Pacific region.

Drought is the leading cause of hunger worldwide.

Armed conflicts are precipitating an increasing number of food crises, accounting for 35% of food emergencies.

Hunger and malnutrition affects two groups of people disproportionately - pre-school children, and women and girls.

18% all hungry people are children younger than five.

More than 60% of the world's hungry are female. Every day 300 women die during childbirth because of iron deficiency.

According to FAO statistics, there were an annual average of 854 million undernourished people in our world in the years 2001-2003. Of these, 820 million were in developing countries, 2.5 million in transition countries (eg former members of the Soviet Union) and nine million in industrial countries.

Recent statistics show that in developing countries, 27% of children younger than five are underweight and 31% are stunted.

At the 1996 World Food Summit, political leaders from virtually every country agreed to reduce the number of hungry people by half in the period from 1990-2015. Five years later, they took stock of their progress. China had made strides but over half the countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, had more hungry people. On a global level, the total number of hungry had not changed significantly. Promises were renewed but very little new action has been taken since.

POSTSCRIPT

According to the UN more than 6.5 billion people in habit our planet today. They estimate that by 2050, the population will be between 7.3-10.7 billion people. They anticipate that, sometime after 2200, the world population will stabilise at 10 billion inhabitants.

PLANET NEWS

(Left): Young coal miner in Linfen, China. The State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) of China has branded Linfen as having the worst air quality in the country. Photo: Andreas Haberman

On September 12, 2007 , the U.S.-based Blacksmith Institute, an independent environmental group, in partnership with Green Cross Switzerland, issued their Top Ten list of the world's most severely polluted places which are located in seven countries and affect a total of more than 12 million people. Major pollution causes are mining, the pollution legacy left by the Cold War era and unregulated industrial production. Time magazine has done a good pictorial summary of the Top Ten List here

'The 9/11 Cover-Up: Thousands of New Yorkers were endangered by WTC debris—and government malfeasance', is the title of an article by Michael Mason, in a special issue of Discover magazine on the health effects of 9/11 on the people of the city. Issue also includes interview with Philip Landrigan, the doctor leading the research on this. Extract as follows:

Q: Your department is monitoring the health effects from the collapse of the World Trade Center. When the towers collapsed, two million tons of dust containing cement, asbestos, glass, lead, and carcinogens rained down on lower Manhattan. Yet less than a week later, the EPA said it was safe to go there and breathe the air. Now we know that erroneous assessment may have put thousands of people at risk for serious chronic health problems, and even death.

A: [EPA Director] Christine Todd Whitman's statement that the air in Manhattan was safe to breathe was stupid and ill-considered because she was making a very strong assertion with almost no data. I wondered how she could say this—it's like a doctor telling a patient that the patient is healthy before he's done any tests.'

The disaster site created by Hurricane Katrina covered an area the size of Great Britain. At least 1,836 people were killed and some 1.5m have been displaced - the largest population migration in the US since the dust bowl of the 1930s. Now severe mental health problems in the region have developed among the nearly 70,000 families still living in temporary housing. 'The slow recovery, researchers and clinicians are finding, has bred levels of mental distress unseen in the aftermath of other disasters.'
Source: Emily Harrison - 'Suffering a Slow Recovery' [Scientific American. Sept 2007]

'Beyond the security checkpoint at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, a small group gathered in November for a conference on the innocuous topic of “managing solar radiation.” The real subject was much bigger: how to save the planet from the effects of global warming. There was little talk among the two dozen scientists and other specialists about carbon taxes, alternative energy sources, or the other usual remedies. Many of the scientists were impatient with such schemes. Some were simply contemptuous of calls for international cooperation and the policies and lifestyle changes needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions; others had concluded that the world’s politicians and bureaucrats are not up to the job of agreeing on such reforms or that global warming will come more rapidly, and with more catastrophic consequences, than many models predict. Now, they believe, it is time to consider radical measures: a technological quick fix for global ­warming.' Source: 'The Climate Engineers' by James R. Fleming [The Wilson Quarterly. Spring 2007]

On 26 April 1986, one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine exploded. A concrete sarcophagus was hastily built over the wreckage, but it is starting to crumble and has been leaking radioactivity. President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine has signed a $505 million deal with the French construction firm Novarka to encase the whole Chernobyl plant in a massive steel vault to halt these leaks. The arched structure, called the New Safe Confinement (NSC), will be 150 metres long and 105 metres tall - big enough to allow the existing sarcophagus and the wrecked reactor to be dismantled and permanently entombed.
Source: 'Chernobyl to be encased in steel' (New Scientist. 20 September 2007)
See also: Panoramas From The Chernobyl Zone

This year's Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, which ran from August 27th to Sept 3rd had a Green Man theme. The Organisers stated aim was to try and offset the carbon footprint of the festival, todecrease solid waste by 70% and to switch to local biofuels for the burning (it requires 20,000 gallons). They also built a 30-kilowatt solar array to provide power for the event. As to whether they succeeded in their aims we will have to wait and see until they publish their annual AfterBurn Report.

A NEW WASTE LAND: Mike Horowitz

Wed 20th: The Generalist attended Fine Art auction at the East West Gallery in Blenheim Crescent, Ladbroke Grove, London for the Benefit of 'A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium' - a major poetic work by Michael Horowitz, a ten-year labour. The funds are to rescue the hardback edition which is currently stuck at the printers. A small but enthusiastic gathering were able to bid for works by Hockney, Peter Blake, Martin Sharp and others. Mike read stirringly from his book and made everyone feel at home. Lord Gowrie handled the aunctioneering with the aplomb appropriate for a former Director of Sotheby's. Hopefully a fine total was made.

The book's advance information release describes the work as follows:

'In his most political work to date, Michael Horovitz adapts and extends the structure, music and apocalyptic collage of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land of 1922, to take a hard look at the state of the nation and the planet at the turn of the millennium, and after. Among the soulless forces of darkness deconstructed in the poem itself, and in the abundant notes and illustrations, are Tony Blair’s degradation of the Labour Party; the mega-materialisms of Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch; the macho duplicities of Bull Clinton and Gorge Dubbya Bash; Hypeing Up, Dumbing Down and the “EnterPrize Culture”; the hubristic vacuities of the Greenwich Dome saga; and the suicidal commercial triumphalism promoted by the arms, nuclear, advertising and war industries.

Where 'The Waste Land' of 1922 echoed phrases and lines from the past cherished by T S Eliot, Michael Horovitz mixes more substantial quotations into his update. Virgil, Christ, Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Kipling, W H Davies, D H Lawrence, Pound, Bunting, Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg, Kazuko Shiraishi, Adrian Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Jeni Couzyn, Frances Horovitz, Grace Nichols, John Lennon, Mahmood Jamal, Stacy Makishi, and Eliot himself are among the angels whose insights fuel the text’s lyric fire.

The book also projects a kaleidoscope of telling photographs; images from artists including Bosch, Michelangelo, Brueghel, El Greco, van Gogh, Picasso and Hockney; cartoons by Steve Bell, Peter Brookes, Nicholas Garland, Michael Heath, Andrzej Krauze, Chris Riddell, Gerald Scarfe, Posy Simmonds, Trog, and their peers, at the top of their form.'

The Generalist will be digesting the book and reporting back.

A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium'
is published by New Departures.
Price: £15 (paperback) ISBN 0-902689-18-5 978-0-902689-18-3 (pb)
Publication: October 2007

'ON THE ROAD' IS 50: The Scroll

Left: The British edition of 'On The Road: The Original Scroll' by Jack Kerouac. Edited by Howard Cunnell. [Penguin Classics. £25.00]

Fifty years ago this month (on Sept 5th, in fact) saw the first publication of 'On The Road' by Jack Kerouac, an event that has been widely celebrated in the US and around the world. The Generalist, like millions of others, was first infected with the Beat spirit through reading this marvelous book.

''On The Road: The Original Scroll', which I purchased yesterday at The Travel Bookshop in Ladbroke Grove, is an event in itself. Began reading it in a bar as the light faded into the early autumnal evening, continued on the late-night train home (fell asleep and almost missed my station by a whisker) and read some more late into the night, began again this morning over coffee and croissant and have now reached San Francisco. The book has me under its spell once more.

Some explanation is required here.

Part of the huge myth surrounding 'On The Road' is do with the actual process of writing of it. Legend has it that it was written while Jack was high on benzedrine and that he wrote it all in three weeks in April 1951 on a long roll of Teletype paper, with no punctuation, while listening to bop on the radio.

In fact the story is a great deal more complicated than that, as we discover in this new edition of the book thanks to an excellent long introductory essay by Howard Cunnell (a Visiting Lecturer In Creative Writing and American and English literature in the University of Kingston), the man who also had the responsibility of preparing the 'scroll' for publication. [The book has three other introductory essays by various authors, each of which add something to the party]

To begin: Kerouac had written at least three proto-novels of 'On The Road' of varying lengths - big chunks of long-form fiction - and had myriad notebooks and travel journals and letters in which he can be seen to be developing the work.

During the writing jag when he produced the scroll he later told Cassady: 'I wrote that book on COFFEE, remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks.'

He was writing in a large, pleasant apartment in Chelsea, New York. He did the writing on long, thin sheets of drawing paper but its not known whether he stuck them together first and then typed, or vice versa (typed then stuck). Whichever way, Kerouac shaped and cut the paper into different lengths to fit into the typewriter. 'A long roll of paper,' writes Cunnell, 'like the remembered road that he could write fast on and not stop. So that the paper joined together became an endless page.' The scroll is, for the most part, conventionally punctuated.

Cunnell says something really exciting and inciteful about Kerouac's scroll typing: 'Kerouac's clattering typewriter is folded in with Jackson Pollock's furious brushstrokes and Charlie Parker's escalating and spiraling alto saxophone choruses in a trinity representing the breakthrough of a new postwar counterculture seemingly built on sweat, immediacy and instinct, rather than apprenticeship, craft and daring practice.'

Kerouac's first book 'The Town and the City' had been published on March 2nd 1950. After writing the scroll in April 1951, Kerouac undertook extensive revisions of it and in Oct0ber that year, also wrote his third novel 'Visions of Cody'. Cunnell says intriguingly that 'the scroll is the wildflower from which the magic garden of 'Visions of Cody' grows'.

It would be a further six years before 'On The Road' was finally published in what can now be seen as a bowdlerised version, in which Kerouac changed people's real-life names to pseudonyms and also either took out or altered virtually all the sex scenes and sex talk within the book.

So now finally we have the original version, as typed by the 29-year old Jack Kerouac, lightly edited in ways that are explained but basically intact. It reads like a dream. The actors now have their masks off and the whole book has a rougher and darker feel.

This new edition is a beautiful piece of book making - cover, binding, choice of paper and type, all excellent.

(Right: The cover of the very first edition of 'On The Road', published by Viking in 1957. This comes from a site that shows a marvelous selection of Jack Kerouac book covers from around the world. Also links to covers of works by Burroughs, Cassady et al.)

The beat goes on: Tracing Kerouac's tracks 50 years later: A restless spirit and 'holy' pie endure by Charles M. Sennott [Boston Globe July 15, 2007]. He writes: 'With Jack Kerouac in the rearview mirror, I set out for a road trip. The idea was to retrace the first leg of the coast-to-coast odyssey chronicled in Kerouac's classic 1957 novel, "On the Road." A map drawn by the writer in a notebook unearthed from the Kerouac archives in his hometown of Lowell served as my compass. It showed a crudely sketched shape of the United States and a ragged line that traced the journey due west by Sal Paradise, the novel's narrator and Kerouac's alter ego.' See his animated slideshow of his journey with photographer Dominic Chavez.

'The Scroll of Jack Kerouac' by James Elmont describes how in 2001 he went to see this beat artefact for himself at Christie's in New York, who sold it that year to Jim Isay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team, for $2.43m. Isay told the Associated Press: "My goal all along was to have it and share it with all those who want to see it, whether it's in this country or other countries," After the scroll was intially displayed in a museum in Indianapolis, it set out in January 2004 on a journey of its own - a 13-stop, four year national tour of museums and libraries. It is currently on exhibit in Kerouac's hometown of Lowell at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell National Historical Park until October 14, 2007.

PREVIOUS POSTS

Was 'On The Road' the first 'non-fiction novel' - years before 'In Cold Blood' was claimed to be? See 'Truman Capote: Truth and Lies'

See interviews with 'Allen Ginsberg' and 'William Burroughs'

ON THE ROAD IS 50: Critics, Movie, Lost Play, Estate

(Left): Read the very first review of 'On The Road' in the New York Times (Sept 5th, 1957) by Gilbert Millstein. It's a crackerjack of a review, beautifully expressed and written, very prescient. It's the most famous review in the history of the newspaper. (Right): Kerouac postage stamp.

Not everybody likes 'On The Road'. Check out these criticisms and critiques.

America's first king of the road: ‘Fifty years ago Jack Kerouac's dazzling novel 'On the R oad' became the blueprint for the Beat generation and shaped America's youth culture for decades. It influenced scores of artists, musicians and film-makers, but how does it resonate with young people today?’ Sean O'Hagan [The Observer. August 5 2007]

Road Rules: ‘The novel that launched the Beats, the hippies and designer jeans turns 50. But this legendary 'joyride' is actually the saddest book you'll ever read—even with God on every page. Time for another look.’. By David Gates [Newsweek. April 13^th 2007]. See also Gates' 1999 article in Salon Breaking Up With The Beats: 'Kerouac and company were my firfst literary loves - but I had to get off their road.'

Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think)
by John Leland [Viking]

Amazon.com: In Why Kerouac Matters you make the against-the-grain argument that On the Road is not an ode to permanent adolescent transience and rebellion but rather a guide in moving toward adult responsibility. Could you explain?

Leland: Like any good book, On the Road sustains at least two threads. The one that gets the most attention is the book of Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), the wild, yea-saying overburst of American joy who sounds an irresistible call to adventure. Dean is the circus that every boy dreams of joining. Dean’s road is pure carnal excitement, all speed and jazz and sex. But there's also the book of Sal Paradise, the narrator, who follows Dean out onto the road but then ultimately outgrows him, finishing the book off the road. Sal comes to recognize Dean's road as destructive and limiting--as long as Dean keeps going through the same motions, leaving a new baby and a new ex-wife in every town, he isn't really on the road, he's stuck in a rut. Sal, by contrast, is learning to be a man and a writer, searching for meaning and a home. For all its frantic adventures, the book ends with Sal nesting with his new love, Laura (Joan Haverty, Kerouac's second wife) and ready to write the book we're still reading.

Jack Kerouac's photo from his Navy file

ON THE ROAD: THE MOVIE
The latest news is that the movie (IMDB) is to be directed by Walter Salles based on a screenplay by Joe Rivera (director and writer of The Motorcycle Diaries). Rivera confirms he has written the script. Salles wants the cast to consist of unknowns; Carolyn Cassady says she is to be played by Kirsten Dunst. There is a detailed Wikipedia stub describing the long and troubled road that Coppola has gone down in his attempts to produce the film since he first bought the film rights in 1968 ! Zoetrope have been scouting locations in the Cincinnatti area but the company refuses to confirm or deny whether they will be filming there.

LOST KEROUAC PLAY
Written in 1957 and newly rediscovered in December 2004, this three-act play was first published by Thunder's Mouth Press in the US in 2005 and by One World Classics in the UK in 2007 (Edition pictured).

According to Dan Glaister in The Guardian 'The play recounts a day in the life of the hard-drinking, drug-fuelled life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac's alter-ego. "Kerouac wrote the play in one night when he returned to his home in Florida after the publication of On The Road," said Kerouac's biographer and family friend Gerald Nicosia... Although the play was never published or performed, the third act became the basis for a film, 'Pull My Daisy', starring Allen Ginsberg.

'Kerouac's agent, Sterling Lord, said Kerouac had sent it to several producers but it was turned down…Kerouac even sent the play to Marlon Brando, Mr Lord said. Kerouac was desperate to collaborate with the actor, and wrote a letter to him in 1957 urging Brando to appear in a play adaptation of ‘On the Road’. Brando never responded, and the two only met once, in 1960, when Kerouac enrolled in the Actor's Studio. But his foray into acting was shortlived. After 15 minutes he asked, "Don't they give you any drinks in this place?" Spotting Brando he invited him for a drink. Brando refused.'

THE KEROUAC ESTATE: In August 21, 2001, the Berg collection of the NY Public Library bought the Jack Kerouac Estate for an undisclosed amount of money. The large archive, which was meticulously organized and preserved by Kerouac, contains manuscripts, notebooks, letters, journals, photographs, and personal items saved from the time he was 11 through his death in 1969 at age 47. Selections from the archive will be on display in Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road, an exhibition on view at The New York Public Library November 9, 2007 through March 16, 2008.

'ON THE ROAD' IS 50: A Digital Moment

I thought wouldn't it be good to reread 'On The Road' and draw a detailed pencil map of the journey as I went along and use this as part of my postings. I'd got some miles along the journey, making notes and consulting my Times Atlas when I decided to check a few things on the net and discovered the Google Earth 'On The Road with Jack Keroauc.' A true digital moment of wonder - AHA! I put the pencil aside.

Produecd by Dorseyland, who describes him-or-herself as 'Master Educator' (who could disagree), the site is titled 'A jazz journey through the remarkable life of American novelist, poet, boddhisattva and bebop saint Jack Kerouac in 158 placemarks'. How cool is that.

Here you can not only follow in detail Kerouac's steps across the vast land that is America on his first legendary coast to coast experience, each stop carefully flagged with accompanying pop-up box of text but you can also pull back to a certain altitude and actually see the string of little K flags stretching back, across and over the curve of the earth. A beautiful piece of work demonstrating the huge potential of this software. Already Dorseyland is getting valuable feedback, which has meant shifting the flags. In other words its a wikimap. There are also a simple set of valuable links. Great work.

A LIFE MEASURED OUT IN BOOKS

(Left): 'A Pound of Paper' by John Baxter [Ted Smart. London. 2002]. Jacket illustration by Jackie Parson. Best known for his string of major film biographies on the likes of De Niro and George Lucas, this entertaining book by John Baxter takes us deep into the world of book collecting and book selling and is replete with chance discoveries, major windfalls, bitter disappointments and interesting digressions. A bibliophiles delight. Also highly enjoyable is his 'We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light' [Bantam 2006], full of scurrilous and delightfully indiscreet stories

The Generalist Archive is undergoing a major overhaul at present. As a result, I am once more face to face with physical fact of the sheer volume of books I own - piled, shelved and boxed in more or less every room of my house plus in two storage places. Still have the dream of establishing this magic library in its own premises someday, somewhere and making it available to all.

This led me to think about the fact that my whole life can be measured out in books from the earliest age. Each book is like a memory bubble in the fact that I can most times remember when I first read it and where I was. Thus the memories of the book itself is mingled with my own life and times. Long may it continue.

I buy the majority of my books secondhand and rummaging through the shelves of bookshops, charity shops, boot sales and the like is one of my great pleasures in life. I buy in bulk as often one of the excellent Lewes booksellers has bought up someone's entire library on their demise. Thus my library is made up of sections of many other people's libraries, the books often containing tickets, lost letters and other momentos and page markers. Many are inscribed, underlined and full of notations. Every week brings its treasures.

I have always got my nose in a book. People often say to me they find it hard to read as there are too many distractions in the modern world. The biggest enemy of reading, to my mind, is television. It's too easy just to switch it on and sit back when, without the screen, a book provides an welcome alternative. Paper is softer on the eye than tv and books are more inspiring.

I have books stationed everywhere and am I often reading at least six books at once, each of which suits my differing moods; a more or less equal mix of fiction and non-fiction. A generalist has to read as widely as possible in order to make connections across disparate fields of study and imagination.

To add to all these joys is another that is the best of all - introducing the books you love to others. There must already be several hundred books mentioned or recommended in this blog so far and there are many thousands to come. This virtual library will, I hope, spread the word.A life measured out in books. I wouldn't have it any other way.

(Above): This revised edition of 'Bizarre Books' by Russell Ashe and Brian Lake

[ Jarndyce Books/London 2002]
is a delightful survey of some of the world's most unusual books and authors. It includes 'Dirt: A Social History as Seen Through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt', 'Office Gynecology', 'Our Lady of the Potatoes' by Duncan Sprott and 'The Earthworms of Ontario'.

MANGUEL AND BORGES

Alberto Manguel's 'A Reading Diary' [Canongate Books. Edinburgh. 2004] has rapidly and recently become one of my favourite books for a variety of reasons.

He explains the genesis of the book as follows: 'A couple of years go, after my fifty-third borthday, I decided to reread a few of my favourite old books, and I was struck, once again, how their many-layered and complex world of the past seemed to reflect the dismal chaos of the world I was living in. A passage in a novel would suddenly illuminate an article in the daily paper; a half-forgotten episode would be recalled by a certain scene; a single word would prompt a long reflection. I decided to keep a record of those moments.

'It occurred to me then that, rereading a book a month, I might complete, in a year, something between a personal diary and a commonplace book: a volume of notes, reflections, impressions of travel, sketches of friends, of events public and private, all elicited by my reading.'

Thus the the book is made up of 12 chapters, each centered round a reread book - The Island of Dr Moreau and Don Quixote are two that come to mind. Each chapter consists of brief texts of various lengths which take you variously into the book, intro a connection triggered by the book, into the author's other thoughts, into the landscape the writer is passing through. It includes the quotes and thoughts of others and also lots of lists of which Manguel is quite fond.

In the hands of another writer such a book could be mawkish and pretentious but Manguel brings grace, erudition and style to the enterprise. It is a truly delightful and inspiring book
that I shall return to again and again for inspiration and ideas.

Alberto Adrian Manguel was born in Buenos Aires on March 13th, 1948. His grandfather (who came from Mongolia) kidnapped his grandmother (daughter of one of the Tsar's gardeners) at the age of sixteen. The young Manguel was raised in Israel where his father was the Argentine ambassador. He has lived in Tahiti and England and 1984 he became a Canadian citizen. He currently lives in France. An acclaimed essayist and novelist, he is also a prize winning translator and has edited ten anthologies.

At the age of 16, he was working in a bookshop in Buenos Aires when he was approached by a blind writer and asked if he would be interested in a part-time job reading to him aloud. The writer was the legendary Jorge Luis Borges and 'With Borges' [Telegram Books 2006] is Manguel's beautifully written account of the several years he spent in his company and of the lasting effect Borges had on him. Just 74pp long, its is little masterpiece on the magical mind and memory of one of the world's great modern writers.

UPDATE: Since writing the above piece have also discovered another Manguel masterpiece 'The History of Reading' in the first chapter of which he describes his personal reading history up to and including his experiences with Borges outlined above.







I found the book as a whole too rich a dish to devour in one sitting. I came away, having read the first five or six chapters, with three important ideas to think about.

Firstly, many of the Ancient Greeeks had prodigious memories and were against writing things down as a result Secondly, it wasn't until the tenth century that silent reading became the norm in the West. 'Previously', says Manguel, 'normal reading was performed out loud.'

Thirdly and most interesting of all, it turns out that the act of reading itself is a fascinating and intricate one. Manguel writes: 'How does the act of apprehending letters relate to a process that involves not only sight and perception but inference, judgement, memory, recognition, knowledge, experience, practice?...all these elements necessary to perform the act of reading lent it an astounding complexity, which required for its successful performance, the co-ordination of hundreds of different skills. And not only these skills but the time, place, and tablet, scroll, page or screen on which the act is performed affect the reading.'

A truly fascinating book which requires further investigation.

Footnote: One of Manguel's other extraordinary works is 'The Dictionary of Imaginary Places', co-written with Gianni Guadalupi, a huge encyclopaedic work fully illustrated with charts and maps, more of which anon.