HARVEY MATUSOW 5: 1973-2002

HARVEY MATUSOW

1973-2002

1973: Home from "exile", feeling strong and renewed. Coming home as a working artist, being in the moment - being part of an artistic team. Anna and I began to plan for concerts in the USA. I got Libby Owens Ford to prepare special glass with handmade carrying cases for the Glass Concert Tour. The kick- off was two live broadcasts on WBAI Music Store in New York, and after the second concert Anna and I parted…I left New York.

1974-1975: With the help of my friend Joe Bazer, we got a 1955 Ford school bus and converted it into a poor man's motor home.

1974-1983: I went to visit a large New Age commune in western Massachusetts. The commune had started out The Brotherhood of the Spirit, and when I arrived it was calling itself Metelica’s Aquarian Concept Inc. Michael Metelica was a young teenager who founded the commune sitting in a tree house in the wooded Berkshire Hills. [He] needed help in producing a radio programme. It was mutually beneficial -- I could help them in their radio show, and they could afford me the quiet isolation. [Picture source]

'Cadillac Ranch'

1974-1975: Connect with Boston-based macrobiotic newspaper The East/West Journal and soon found myself on their masthead as ‘Editor At Large’. Representing EW, I began to visit communes all over the country. Arrived in Amarillo in time to help The Ant Farm plant Stanley Marsh III's Cadillac Ranch. Stanley and I had been good friends for a number of years, but he couldn't understand my going hippy and living like a gypsy on the road. Wandered the west, went to my first Rainbow Gathering. Reflection of the Love Family, the Gaskin Farm.

1974-1977: Using the commune as my home base, I started to explore Eastern thought. I had studied a lot of Zen while in prison…Although exploring the East, I did not give up my Mormon beliefs, but stayed away from the Church for two reasons. Firstly, I didn't want to face or test rejection, and felt that my lifestyle was too way out ever to come back into any normal balance with society. I had allowed myself to move further and further away from any mainstream balances. The other reason was that blacks could not hold the Priesthood. I made a vow that when blacks could become priests, I would once again be an active member of my church.

1975-1977: I met, fell in love with, and married Emily. When I met her she had never been in a city in her life; she lived off in the woods far from all neighbors. Emily and I formed a spiritual community, Ammal’s Garden, and took vows of poverty, which Emily insisted on calling "vows of simplicity." Our door was open to those whom society rejected. We financed it all with a small inheritance my mother left me when she died in 1975. But, not before I had taken Emily around the world -- first class. It was an adventure like none I had ever known.

1977-1983: It was this quiet period in Tucson that got me into playing my bells once again. I had stopped and music and sound work after the split with Anna.

It was here that the Magic Mouse Theatre germinated and grew. The Theatre Company was born in a wooden shack that housed a school for mid-wives. I used this space, and the quiet of the early hours of the morning to practice my soft playing. I was alone usually, but occasionally played for a mid-wife on a middle-of-the-night home delivery run.

1977-1983: A strong mystical experience left no doubt in my mind that I must become and active member of my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Driving through the village of St. David, I saw a sign, "House for Rent." I hit the brakes and rented the house. Discovered that the village was…one of the oldest Mormon communities in Arizona. Also found out that a few weeks earlier, the Church announced that blacks could now hold the priesthood. Now the one barrier I had about being an active church member was gone. Still concerned about my lifestyle and the clean-cut Mormon way. They had to clash - and did.

For a time in the 1980s (after his conversion to Mormonism), he was known as "Job Matusow [Wikipedia]

1981-1982: Emily and I enjoyed living in the desert, but our basic lifestyle hadn't changed. Magic Mouse Theatre grows. We got a sponsor, Truly Nolen, and had some economic stability and a brand new motor home in exchange for the old silver school bus. Emily really got into theatre, and pursued her character, the green-haired clown named Sparkles. Our work schedule: 144 school shows in nine months. …In 1980 Emily and I spent an aggregate of 108 days on the road, in our vehicle. Completed 126 five-minute radio programmes on Magic Mouse for local NPR station at the University of Arizona, and signed a contract to do a TV series for the PBS TV outlet. Magic Mouse became the "official" theatre company of the Tucson Zoo, and we performed every Saturday.

1982-1983: Back to Tucson. Soon started to feed the homeless, against the wishes of the City Fathers. Became deeply involved in social issues for the homeless, where we eventually turned our commercial cafe into a free kitchen. We left Tucson in a caravan of vehicles carrying homeless people: American Refugees in America.

1983: The homeless of El Paso, and my attempts to get the White House to help. Finally reached Ed Meese, spoke to him for about 20 minutes; got promised but no real help.

1983: Moved on with the caravan to Houston where we fed the homeless and upset all the neighbors. Actively involved in tent city for the homeless. Failed in attempts to get free kitchen and shelter established. The caravan for the homeless fell apart at the break-up of tent city, and a handful of us continued on to Washington where I registered as a lobbyist for the homeless at Congress.

1983-1986: Emily took sick while we were visiting Massachusetts and the doctor advised that she needed complete rest and caring for. We found and old farm house on a hill in Orange, and I dropped all activities to care for Emily…Applied for food stamps and welfare for the first time in my life. I didn't want to, but needed to know what people get put through.

1985-1989: Emily's health… had improved enough for us to open our house to care-provide for a mentally retarded young man. Both Emily and I felt that a direction of our service should be focused on those who society rejects the most. And, within two months, we had our second young man living with us. It's now almost two years since we began this work, and can only think of ways to enlarge and expand it.

1985-1989: We sold the motor home and bought two old school busses. We began a food and clothing programme in the most economically depressed town in the state. In 19 months we put out over 225,000 pounds of food to about 800 families, and didn't spend a penny of governmental money, local, state or Federal. The life of service grew as I sank the root in Emily's forest. The food programme expanded into New Hampshire.

1988-1989: I was in South Dakota on the Cheyenne River Reservation when I found out that Emily had cancer. She had been wrongly diagnosed three years earlier. Stopped all work, devoted the next year and a half of my life to nursing Emily until she died in July of 1989.

1989-1992: Returned to Arizona. Ran a homeless programme at St. Francis in the Foothills Methodist Church in Tucson. Lived in my school bus at the church for 11 months. Was given an opportunity to run a near-derelict motel on the Ghost Highway that had been superseded by the Interstate. For two and a half years I lived at the motel, serving poverty.

1991-1992: Met Lisa and marry. Changed my lifestyle. Shaved my beard and got a haircut for the first time in over 15 years. Back into show business full-time, as Cockyboo, the storyteller, so as to earn the money needed to do the service work that I still believe in and do as Director of Gandhi Peace Centre. Marriage doesn't work - Lisa and I divorce but remain close friends.

1993-1995: Start to do TV show, Magic Mouse Magazine. Win two Public Access National, Home Town Video Awards, 1993 and 1994 - combine my TV art with my social action work.

1995-1996: Leave Tucson and move to Utah, to Richfield, the town I was headed to back in 1954. Come full circle, finally climb onto my Mountain. Start Utah's first public access TV station.

Matusow houses the state's only public access station in this bus. Photo: Fred Hayes. [Source: 'McCarthyism Revisited: "The Stringless Yo-Yo" shows how a Mormon helped end the "Red Scare."' by David Madison.]

According to Stefene Russell in her article 'Voice from the Whirwind: Footnotes from the Book of Job' (18th June 2001)

'It was the calm haven of Glenwood that allowed him to found Sevier County Access Television, or SCAT-TV, which he still operates under the umbrella of the Ghandi Peace Centre. The Center is so named because the house and the property were a gift to Job from the Ghandi family (Yogesh and Job have done nonviolence work together for several decades). It includes the public access station, an informal animal adoption program, housing for anyone who finds him/herself at loose ends, a program to supply food and clothing to Indian reservations and a prisoner outreach program. This is also where Job makes his "peace bells," which he forges from melted-down munitions shells and bullet casings, with a few aluminum cans mixed in for proper texture.'

In 2001, he moved to Claremont, Hew Hampshire to run the town’s public access TV studio. Harvey Matusow died in New Hampshire from complications from a car accident in 2002.

Sources: Chronological entries: from the ‘Stringless Yo-Yo’ edited to correct mistypings and spellings, to shorten and, in a few cases, to make it read more fluently.

Begun in 1997, neither the book or the online version were completed by the time of Harvey Matusow's death. The website from which the chronological chapter outline notes are drawn, can be found here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Matusow

* Wikipedia says he was married twelve times to eleven women. One wedding was in a helicopter over New York City, another was in a piano factory.

WORLD OF TREES: NEW OLDEST TREE

Left: This 9,550 year old spruce discovered in Dalarna, Sweden.
Photo: Leif Kullman

World’s oldest living tree discovered in Sweden
Seven days ago, scientists announced their discovery in the Swedish mountains, which run from Lapland in the North to Dalarna in the South, of a cluster of around 20 spruces that are over 8,000 years old, One of them has been carbon-dated at being 9,550 years, making it the world’s oldest tree.

(The previously-known oldest trees were bristlecone pines in North America, which have been dated at 4-5,000 years old.)

A single spruce tree trunk can only live, at most, for about 600 years but they are able to clone themsleves and thus survive by pushing out another trunk as soon as the old one dies, says Professor Leif Kullman, Professor of Physical Geography at Umeå University.

Under the crown of living spruce trees on Fulu Mountain in Dalarna, they found the remains of four generations of these same trees, in the form of cones and wood. The genetic material of the living trees matched the ancient remains.

For many years, the spruce tree has been regarded as a relative newcomer in the Swedish mountain region. ”Our results have shown the complete opposite, that the spruce is one of the oldest known trees in the mountain range,” says Prof. Kullman.

As a species, spruce may give us fresh insights about climate change. The trees have survived harsh weather conditions for almost 10,000 years, enduring as bushes maybe only half a meter tall. "But over the past few decades", says Kullman, "we have seen a much warmer climate, which has meant that they have popped up like mushrooms in the soil."

Read original press release and Reuters report

[Right] A reconstruction of how the crown portion of Wattieza would have looked in life. Frank Mannolini/New York State Museum

A year before, on April 19^th 2007, palaeontologists Linda VanAller Hernick and Frank Mannolini described in Nature, their discovery of the first complete fossil of the world's oldest tree - a primitive 380-million-year-old plant, eight metres long, resembling a modern palm or tree fern.

The story began in June 2004, when Hernick and Mannolini of the New York State Museum in Albany, found the fossilised crown of a massive tree in a small sandstone quarry in Gilboa, New York. The site had already been a fruitful spot for retrieving fossils of plants and arthropods. A year later, they dug out a trunk of the same species, extracting it fragment by fragment and reassembling it like an eight-metre-long fossilised jigsaw puzzle.

The find also solves a 137-year-old mystery. A "forest" of fossil stumps were discovered at a site just 16 km away in 1870, and had perplexed generations of botanists ever since. Without the upper sections of the trees, experts were unable to accurately identify the species.

"Now the riddle is solved," with the discovery of a matching upper portion, said VanAller Hernick. "We know what was out there."

Now they confirmed it as the Wattieza species, which dates back to the Devonian period (415 to 360 million years ago), an era in which the world's primitive land plants first developed characteristics associated with modern-day trees - such as taller trunks, more diverse reproductive methods and the first signs of leaf development. This was also the period when the first seed-bearing plants spread across dry land to form forests. Wattezia itself did not bear seeds but reproduced with spores, like today's ferns.

Until this new discovery, the oldest known entire tree was Archaepoteris, a close relative of seed plants, which flourished in the late Devonian period. The Gilboa tree differs from this later species in having a smaller trunk, a more limited root system and in lacking horizontal branches and fully-developed leaves.

Original source: Wattieza is world's oldest tree by Michelle Carr. Cosmos 19 1pril 2007

SERENDIPITY: Earlier today, discovered the full and fascinating story of the rediscovery of the world's first photograph.

ROLLING STONES: PAST AND PRESENT

The happy coincidence of receiving and reading the newly- released paperback edition of 'Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones' by Robert Greenfield [Da Capo Press. £9.99] shortly before seeing the Scorsese documentary 'Shine A Light', at a 4:00 Saturday screening at the Duke of York's in Brighton with friend Manek and son Louis, has filled my heart and mind with things to say.
Greenfield, a class act, old-school music journalist, takes us back in time to the Villa Nelcotte in the South of France where, during the long hot summer of 1971, Keef (with Anita Pallenberg) sets up base to begin recording what proves to be the crucial Stones album -their dark masterpiece if you will - a portion of which was forged in the Villa's basement, which may well have been used for torture during the period when it was a regional Nazi HQ.

Night after night, band members troop over there from a string of surrounding villas, to wait to see whether Keef will emerge from the darkness and junk to come downstairs and make some magic happen. Most nights end in frustration. Mick Taylor is close to a nervous breakdown. Mick gets married and has a pregnant Bianca on his hands. The house is full of visiting junkies (a sad portrait of Gram Parsons here), petty criminals, bagmen constantly ferrying more junk. There are knives, guns, thieves and police. Our of this dark stew, a few flashes of silver are mined.

By now the Stones have become royalty. They can have anything the desire and are already able to marshall powerful political, financial and legal resources to keep their Renaissance court
intact and on the road - despite Keef's best efforts to bring the whole enterprise to its knees. Once more, he faces serious criminal charges, once more he and Anita escape the country by the skin of their teeth and once more, money changes hands, charges are dropped or changed to ones that carry lesser penalties. The entire band follow Keef to LA where the album is finally finished but they cannot tour until Keef (and Anita, now pregnant and using) undergo drug rehab in Switzerland. Not a pretty picture.

Greenfield concludes the saga with an examination of how this album became considered to be a masterpiece and brings the story right up date with a portrait of the Stones of today -mega rich, out-grossing every other music act in the world, earning further fortunes for five-minute photo-opportunities with corporate clients.

Which brings us neatly to Scorsese's movie 'Shine A Light', which eschews the darkness and concentrates on adding majesty and lustre. Marty, of course, loves the Stones from way back and had already made one of the great music concert films ever - 'The Last Waltz'. The documentary of the making of that film reveals in fascinating detail how Scorsese planned his shoot.

In this film, all that material is in the main movie, as his people and their people struggle to find agreement on the staging and the all-important set list. Scorsese plans to shoot two concerts, back to back, in the beautiful old Art Deco Beacon Theatre in New York rather than in a giant stadium, in front of an invited audience which includes Bill Clinton. This long black and white opening sequence builds the tension perfectly. Marty gets his set list but only scant minutes before the band is on stage.

What follows is a classic performance, beautifully and dramatically shot and edited. (According to Philip French's review in The Observer: Scorsese brought in eight major cinematographers using 18 cameras) The lighting is exquisite, the choreography sublime. Apart from brief archive cut-aways, we're there up-close and personal with the Stones and their extended band - backing singers, keyboards and horn section led by long-time Stones stalwart saxophone player Bobbie Keys.

The first thing to be said is the strangeness of the set. Given the size of the songbook, one would have to call the track selection eccentric.

There are three guest appearances: we could have done without Christine Aguilera and possibly also Jim White but Buddy Guy is a real star - what a voice, what magnetism. Keef is so impressed he gives Guy his beautiful back Gibson on stage, a gunslinger's tribute from one great to another.

The film has its genuinely thrilling moments when the blood stirs and small tears began trickling down my cheeks (yes I can admit that). For my generation, the Stones provided the soundtrack of our lives. Most fascinating of all are the bands' extraordinary faces on which their entire history is marked like a road map. Mick struts pouts and prances non-stop, Keef's killer chords set the pace while he gives out secret smiles, Charlie's drumming is crisp, powerful and immaculate and Ronnie looks as cool and taut as ever. At the end of the day - magnificent!

At the post-screening debrief at The Open House, we agreed that Scorsese should just spend the next 10 years filming every important band in this manner - the Zep would be a good start.

See Previous Postings:

The Stone With The Golden Arm, my story on Keef's heroin bust in Toronto, originally published in the NME.

Hear the interview with Nick Kent on the Audio Generalist, which includes some Stones material. Nick has written one of best ever essays on the Stones in his book 'The Dark Stuff.'

Footnotes and digressions:

1. Greenfield has also written 'STP: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones' plus biographies of rock promoter Bill Graham, Dead mainman Jerry Garcia and LSD prophet Timoth Leary.

2. Wikipedia says most of the film is taken from the second of the two performances. Includes complete track listing as follows. Performance begns with Jumpin' Jack Flash and ends with Satisfaction.

3. Short New Yorker piece about the recruitment of the audience for the film.

PLANET NEWS: ANIMAL MIGRATION

A map depicts the migration of 19 sooty shearwaters that were tracked using electronic tags in a recent study. The research showed that the birds (pictured inset) migrated 40,000 miles (64,000 kilometers) a year, flying from New Zealand to the North Pacific and back. It is the longest animal migration ever recorded electronically.
Map courtesy: PNAS/Inset photo courtesy Steve Shunk/USGS
Source: National Geographic

World On the Move (running at 9am, BBC Radio 4) is, apparently, 'the largest radio project ever undertaken by the BBC's natural-history unit: a 40-week series tracking animal migrations, from elephants in Africa to whales off North America. Some species have been tagged and can be followed by satellite; others will be pestered by reporters, conservationists and (you gotta love this term) "embedded zoologists". It all kicks off with an introduction from Brett Westwood and (making her own migration from TV) Philippa Forrester.' This was the entry in The Guardian in February.

I wonder if they mention 'No Way Home:The Decline of the World's Great Animal Migrations' by David S. Wilcove. [Island Press. 256 Pages. $24.95]. According to the New York Times review:

'David Wilcove, a Princeton biologist, warns that “the phenomenon of migration is disappearing around the world.” Despite their huge numbers, migratory species are particularly vulnerable to hunting, the destruction of wild habitat and cliamte change. Humans have already eradicated some of the world’s greatest migrations, and many others are now dwindling away. While many conservation biologists have observed the decline of individual migrations, Dr. Wilcove’s book combines them into an alarming synthesis. He argues that it is not just individual species that we should be conserving — we also need to protect the migratory way of life.'

See full story here

Phenomenal Animal Migration in Sudan Stuns Experts:War-Ravaged Region Sees Massive Resurgence in Animal Migration. By BOB WOODRUFF and CHRISTINE ROMO.March 20th, 2008. ABC News

UNSEASONAL WEATHER

The biggest snowfall of the winter in Lewes yesterday !
Unforeseen effect of global warming: toboganning in April !

AL GORE: FROM ME TO WE

Steven Heller analyses this symbol in the New York Times,

Al Gore is on the move, this time through the non-profit Alliance for Climate Protection, which he chairs.Through the Alliance, he plans to spend $300 million in three years to mobilise Americans on climate change.

[The media background to the campaign is explained in ‘New Al Gore campaign applies ads, media for grassroots effort’ by Ted McKenna [PR Week. April 04, 2008]

The “We” campaign website.

'Gore launches $300M green ad campaign' [Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. April 1st]

'Al Gore is launching one of the biggest public advocacy ad campaigns in history to convince Americans that the government needs to act on climate change.

'The former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner is helping to fund a $300 million campaign from the Alliance for Climate Protection aiming at pushing for action on climate change from Washington.

'Gore, the Washington Post reports, will donate award money from the peace prize, proceeds from the movie and book "An Inconvenient Truth," and his salary from Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to the cause.'

“We can solve the climate crisis, but it will require a major shift in public opinion and engagement,” Mr Gore said in a statement. It added the “technologies exist.” However, elected leaders need a push to enact required legislations. Other right things will follow. Politicians listen when they hear “the American people calling loud and clear for change.”

'The blitz will attempt to convince Americans “a clean energy economy is a win for American jobs.” Options galore exist: wind power, solar thermal to power turbines, solar panels and geothermal power, to name just a few, the Alliance says in its Web site. It then gives examples of so far successful usage of these options.

'For a sweetener, the Alliance argues installation of windmills in a section of southwest United States would meet the country’s electricity needs. Who needs the proposed 100-plus proposed carbon dioxide bellowing coal-fuelled power plants?

Extracts from: THERE AND ABOUT: Al Gore steps up war on global warming by Chege Mbitiru. He concludes; 'Mr Bush might end up being remembered as a warmonger who lived during Mr Gore’s campaign to save the globe.'

Check out: Al Gore's $100 Million Makeover by Ellen McGirt at fastcompany.com

REMEMBERING MARTIN LUTHER KING

[Left]: The original news report from the New York
Times News Service. Click to enlarge. [Right] King lies dead on the balcony.









The world and the media have been remembering the assassination of Martin Luther King, 40 years ago yesterday. and The Generalist is doing likewise. I most wanted to know whether we were anywhere nearer the truth of what actually went down that day.

King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis at 6:01pm, April 4 1968.

His death triggered off riots across America. In the space of four days, 110 Americamn cities were in flames, including Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh. During the riots, 43 people were killed, 2135 wounded and 13,248 arrested. It took 20,800 Feederal troops and 44,000 National Guards to quell the riots.

Dr King was supposedly shot by a small-time criminal named James Earl Ray. Jesse Jackson believes that is a partial truth, at best. He told Vincent Dowd of BBC News: "I'm convinced Ray was not the lone shooter. He didn't have the money, the mobility nor the motive to have done it. The fact that James Earl Ray was able to get out of the city and out of the country means he was a hired hand. The government seems to have had the most motive for attacking Dr King."

Dowd writes: 'He had been a no-account criminal, brought up in poverty in Missouri, who escaped from jail a year before the murder. After the assassination he fled Memphis, escaping to Canada and then London. He travelled briefly to Lisbon, apparently hoping to arrange contacts with white mercenaries in Africa. He returned to London and was finally arrested at Heathrow trying to board a flight for Brussels.'

Ray was extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's murder. He confessed then recanted his confession. On the advice of his lawyer, he pleaded guilty to avoid a trial conviction and the possibility of receiving the death penalty and was sentenced to 99 years. Ray then fired his lawyer and spent the rest of his days attempting unsuccessfully to withdraw his guilty plea and secure the trial he never had. He died in 1998 of cirrhosis of the liver. MLK's son Dexter met with Ray before his death and became convinced of his innocence.

The King family were subsequently represented by attorney William F. Pepper, whose book on the killing claims that Ray was an innocent in a larger conspiracy. In 1999 he won a wrongful death civil trial on their behalf against one Loyd Jowers, who claimed to have been paid $100,000 to arrange King's assassination. The jury concluded that Jowers was guilty and that 'governmental agencies were parties' to the assassination plot. In 2000, the US Department of Justice investigated this conspiracy claim and could find no evidence to support it.

The claims and counter claims between experts, seeking either to prove Ray's guilt, or that he was a patsy in the service of a widespread conspiracy, continue to reverberate.

Pepper is currently writing his third book on the case; Gerald Posner, who has researched Ray's life in greater depth than anyone else, wrote a book explaining why he believes Ray must be the murderer. Dowd does a useful job of looking at some of the key questions that both sides have to examine and explain

See CNN's round-up at the time of James Earl Ray's death. Contains audio-interview with Pepper.

See: 'The Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination: What Really Happened?'by Mel Ayton [June 12th 2005] on crimemagazine.com based on his book 'A Racial Crime - James Earl Ray and the Murder of Dr Martin Luther King Jr' [ArcheBooks. Feb 2005]. An anti-conspiracy theorist.

See also: lengthy Wikipedia entry

UPDATE: 'April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King's death and the Transformation of America' by Michael Eric Dyson [Published by Perseus Books. April 2008]

MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY; THEN & NOW

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."

Back in 1985, I worked on a gig to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. The event was promoted by Wilf Walker (lovely fellow). Richard Adams (or maybe Mikki Rain) did the badge and poster designs. Marie Seton did a beautiful silk banner that was hung above the stage and then mysteriously disappeared by the end of the gig. I wrote the words for leaflet which was distributed at the gig and helped out on the night. I think such a celebration was one of the first in London; the gig was reviewed for the NME by Danny Kelly.

I didn't realise before that the idea of Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday came from the labor unions, in recognition of King's activism on behalf of trade unionists. Rep. John Conyers introduced the bill in Congress. The King Center lobbied corporations and promoted the idea to the general public - an effort boosted in 1980 by the release of Stevie Wonder's single 'Happy Birthday'. Six million signatures were collected for a petition to support the bill; it's claimed it was the largest petition in support of an issue in US history.

Although he was at first opposed to the idea, Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1983 and it was first observed in 1986.

It wasn't observed in all 50 states of the US until 2000.

Source: Wikipedia

PLANET COFFEE

American Scientist is an excellent magazine, full of fresh and interesting information from many different scientific frontiers, guaranteed to get the brain fizzing.

I was particularly taken with the cover story 'The Rise of Coffee' by Fernando E. Vega, which told me a great many things I didn't know, including the fact that Puerto Rico - Vega's native land - is the sole provider of coffee to the Vatican. A research entomologist, Vega is finishing a book called 'Coffee: A Pictorial History.'

*Coffee is the second most heavily traded commodity in the world, after petroleum products, with an estimated retail value that exceeds $70 billion.

*Coffee is grown in more than 50 countries, in plantations which cover 10 million hectares of the earth's surface.

*Only two of the 100 species of the genus Caffea known are commercially traded - Caffea arabica (which accounts for 70% of the world's consumption) and Caffea canephora, which grow naturally in the equatorial lowland forests of Africa.

*Caffea arabica is endemic to the highlands of Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya. There are conflicting theories how, at some point, the plant spread to the Yemen where, by 1450, it recorded as being used by Sufis. From here, it reached Cairo, then Damascus, then Istanbul. In the process, the cofeehouse, as a meeting place for news, ideas and political debate was born.

*The first coffeehouses in Europe opened in Venice in 1645 and Oxford in 1650. There were 80 coffeehouses in England by 1663 and 3,000 by 1715.

*The first coffeehouse in the US - the London Coffee House - opened in Boston in 1689; the first in New York was The King's Arms in 1696.

*The Dutch started growing coffee in Java in the 1690s, having obtained the seeds from the port of Mocha in the Yemen. Plants from Java were then sent back to the Amsterdam Botanical Garden, from which a plant was sent to France in 1713, where the first scientific description of the plant was carried out. In 1720, a French naval officer took two plants (one of which died) to Martinique and from here it spread to all the other Caribbean Islands. The Dutch took other plants from Amsterdam to French Guyana and Brazil in the same period.

*More than 800 volatile compounds can be detected in the aroma of roasted coffee.

*Professional testers in the coffee industry are called "cuppers".

*One of the most exclusive coffees in the world is known as civet coffee or kopi lawak, which sells for $120-$150 a pound. It is made from coffee seeds found in the droppings of a small mammal called the common palm civet, which lives in Indonesia.

ANIMAL ARCHITECT

This is a most astonishing, beautiful and intriguing image, taken from the recently published book 'Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture' by Mike Hansell [Oxford University Press. 2008]

You're not going to believe this but it is in fact an intricate portable shelter, built from grains of sand, by a species of amoeba called Difflugia coronata, which they carry around for protection. To give you a sense of scale, this little "house" has a diameter of 150 micrometers. Amoebas are microscopic single-celled organisms without any nervous system.

This little picture is triggering so many thoughts in my mind.

As a boy at boarding school, we used to spend a lot of time in a free hours pond-dipping at the local lake - Wiston Pond - and catching, amongst other things caddis-fly larvae which, as you know, built themselves little protective sheaths made of grit, pebbles and sand. This to me was a fascinating thing.

Secondly, I'm thinking about the picture in the last post - that extremely sophisticated, condensed and stylish piece of Swedish technology - the Pacemaker. Compare and contrast. Which is the most beautiful.

Thirdly, I'm trying to get my head round all the hows and whys to do with an amoeba building a house.

I discovered that I was not the only entranced and perplexed by this image. 'Northern Light', is a blogger, living in the Great Northwest of the United States. His blog is called Searching for Bright Light and is a delight. He writes:

Now, WHY would a single-celled "animal" make a "house" with a scalloped door? What are those pointy "fins" in the back that look like a '57 Chevy? How does the amoeba smooth the grains of sand into this oval shape? Where in its single cell does it keep the information or instinct that "tells" it how to make this house? Do these amoebas just live in colonies of little finned, scallop-edged sand-balls? ("Hey Joe, look at Charlie’s new digs!") These guys are ONE CELL, for goodness sake! Am I the only one who is just flabbergasted? How do atheists explain this...random chance? After all, the amoeba could just have likely made his/her door square with zig-zag edges, right?

Here is an extract from review of the above-mentioned book in The Telegraph by Helen Brown.
Full text here:

'We like "building creatures" because we see them as sharing some of the attributes that make us "special". We anthropomorphise, and associate construction with cognitive complexity.

'In fact, creatures of very little brain can prove excellent builders. I was astonished by the magnified photograph of the intricate portable home made by the single-celled Difflugia coronata: a sphere made of hundreds of tiny stones with eight defensive stone cairn "spikes" at one end and frilled "door" at the other.'

Then, as if to complete a virtuous circle, I discovered an essay by Mike Hansell [right], in which he describes his memories of the occasion when he made a presentation of Animal Architecture to three hundred delegates at a conference organised in England by the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. He began by flashing up on the screeen the following message:

'You don't need brains to be a builder.' There was instant applause.

He writes:

'This audience response took me quite by surprise because I had not actually thought of my message as a joke, but rather as the most fundamentally important message that I wanted to convey. To illustrate it I give you this structure: It is a sphere composed of a few hundred stones cemented together, on top of which there are seven or eight sturdy spikes, each a cairn of stones, larger ones at the base, smallest at the tip creating a sharp point. At the bottom of the sphere there is a large circular hole ornamented with a pleated collar of particles too small to be distinguishable from the cement that binds them. The diameter of the whole dwelling, for that is what it is, is about 150 thousandths of a millimetre. Smaller than the punctuation mark at the end of this sentence. It is the portable home of Difflugia coronata, a species of amoeba.

'An amoeba, as you very likely know, is a single celled organism. The one cell does everything. It feeds, excretes, moves and reproduces and, in this species, it also builds a home. The cell has no nervous system at all, let alone a brain. Can its extraordinary achievement really be said to be building? Well, as the organism's amorphous bulk glides gently round the bottom of some pond, engulfing food particles and growing, it also picks up tiny sand grains that accumulate as a mass inside it. When it grows to a certain size, the cell then reproduces by dividing its body equally into two. One of these inherits the ancestral home; the other is left the bundle of building material. These stones, we know not how, are then moved to the body surface and arranged to create the distinctive architecture of this species. Just enough particles of the right sizes, big and small, have been picked up to accomplish this.'

Full text here

Mike Hansell is Emeritus Professor of Animal Architecture at the University of Glasgow. Author of Animal Architecture and Bird Nests and Construction Behavior, he is a leading authority on animal building.

I'm even more astonished having read this. I think I need to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while.

See also review of book in American Scientist

DJ FUTURE; THE PACEMAKER

Check this baby out. This is the Pacemaker, designed by Swede Jonas Norberg.

Imagine a DJ's classic twin-turntable set-up. Now shrink it to pocket size.

The Pacemaker plays two high-quality audio streams at once, and with seperate volume, speed controls and a cross-fader, it allows tunes to be mixed with relative ease.

See this extensive article at Digital Lifestyles

See also DJ Equipment to Go in the International Herald Tribune.

'The Pacemaker, priced at €520, or about $760, and created by a small Swedish company called Tonium, reduces the basic DJ equipment of dual players and mixer significantly. The Pacemaker has a 120-gigabyte hard drive, fits in the palm of the hand, runs on batteries and has a built-in mixer to layer tunes seamlessly so the music never stops.'

Tonium began shipping Pacemakers in February 2008. They are focusing first on customers in the European Union, Japan and South Korea, and then on the United States. American consumers will be able to order through www.pacemaker.net

PHOTOGRAPHIC FUTURES

So we return to the consistently interesting magazine Monocle and their important story, in the March 2008 issue, on the future of photography, seen through the lens of the Japanese market. Here can be seen clearly the devastation of film and film cameras that the digital revolution has wrought.

'From a peak of nearly 40 million in 1997, sales of 35mm and single-lens cameras have plummeted. The situation is stark: if sales continue at this rate, film cameras and film itself will disappear within a few years.'

Last year Japan produced 94 million digital cameras and just 800,000 film cameras. Canon stopped developing film cameras in 2006. Nikon still makes some but its focus is digital. Konica was sold to Sony in 2005.
Over 50% of the 1,800 members of the Japan Professional Photographers Society are working in digital now. Bulk memory cameras are now standard in Japanese mobile phones.

Japan's greatest photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is said to be stockpiling film in freezers; Sebastio Salgado is reported to have begged Fujifilm to manufacture film for him in bulk.

Fujifilm's President Sigetaka Komori is a fervent supporter of film photography. The company released the Klasse W, the one new film camera to come on the market since 2006, and, says Monocle, 'the consensus among photographers is that as long as Komori is in charge, the film is safe.' But he's 68 and will not be in the job for ever.

Taushi Horokawa is one of the most prominent of a group of pro photographers arguing for the value of film. He told Monocle: 'It doesn't matter hopw many pixels there are. Digital cameras can never becone like film cameras - they will always run in parallel, but never the same. There will be developments in digital technology and artists will use digital cameras in their work but film is something else, it has its own culture.'

3-D FROM A DOUGHNUT. Photographing a person's face with a cone-shaped mirror in front of the lens creates a distorted, doughnut-shaped image (left). The cone provides two extra perspectives of the face on opposite sides of the center point, providing enough information to construct a 3-D model (right).
Image: Computer Vision Lab., Columbia Univ. From an excellent article in Science News.

If you recovered from that thought stream get ready for another photographic future: welcome to the new field of COMPUTATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY. An excellent introductory primer on the subject, written by Brian Hayes, was published in the March/April 2008 issue of American Scientist. It begins:

'The digital camera has brought a revolutionary shift in the nature of photography, sweeping aside more than 150 years of technology based on the weird and wonderful photochemistry of silver halide crystals. Curiously, though, the camera itself has come through this transformation with remarkably little change. A digital camera has a silicon sensor where the film used to go, and there's a new display screen on the back, but the lens and shutter and the rest of the optical system work just as they always have, and so do most of the controls. The images that come out of the camera also look much the same—at least until you examine them microscopically.

'But further changes in the art and science of photography may be coming soon. Imaging laboratories are experimenting with cameras that don't merely digitize an image but also perform extensive computations on the image data. Some of the experiments seek to improve or augment current photographic practices, for example by boosting the dynamic range of an image (preserving detail in both the brightest and dimmest areas) or by increasing the depth of field (so that both near and far objects remain in focus). Other innovations would give the photographer control over factors such as motion blur. And the wildest ideas challenge the very notion of the photograph as a realistic representation. Future cameras might allow a photographer to record a scene and then alter the lighting or shift the point of view, or even insert fictitious objects. Or a camera might have a setting that would cause it to render images in the style of watercolors or pen-and-ink drawings.'

Full text here

Check out the website of Ramesh Raskar, leading researcher in this field, based at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory.

See excellent Wikipedia entry

On May 23 - 25, 2005, a Symposium on Computational Photography and Video was held at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Abstract:

Research breakthroughs in 2D image analysis/synthesis, coupled with the growth of digital photography as a practical and artistic medium, are creating a convergence between vision, graphics, and photography. A similar trend is occurring with digital video. At the same time, new sensing modalities and faster CPUs have given rise to new computational imaging techniques in many scientific disciplines. Finally, just as CAD/CAM and visualization were the driving markets for computer graphics research in the 1970s and 1980s, and entertainment and gaming are the driving markets today, a driving market 10 years from now will be consumer digital photography and video. In light of these trends, the time is right to hold a symposium on computational photography and video. The area is old enough that we understand what the symposium is about, young enough that we can still argue about it, old enough that its practioners can fill an auditorium, and young enough that they still fit in one.

ARTHUR C.CLARKE: CONNECTED

This was my cover story and centrepage spread for 'Connected', the digital supplement of The Daily Telegraph,Tuesday, January 7, 1997. The article was was an extended feature based on a newly-published book of the time: HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality. Edited by David G. Stork. Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke (MIT Press, £16.59). published to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the creation of HAL. Entitled 'Hal's heir - the quest for artificial intelligence', it says 'How close are we to building anything like the famous cinematic computer?' Full text reads as follows:

"I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer, Production Number 3.1. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbanu, Illinois, on January 12, 1997."

Sunday marks the true birthday of the most fam­ous computer in cinematic history.

In Stanley Ku­brick's film adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL was born on January 12, 1992; but it is the date given in the novel —1997 — that is being celebrated by researchers as an opportunity to evaluate progress — or lack of it — in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in that time. Where are the thinking, talking, chess-playing, lip-reading computers like HAL — or preferably, since he also committed murder, not like HAL.

One of the prime movers behind the celebration is David G. Stork, chief scientist and head of the Ma­chine Learning and Perception Group at the Ricoh California Research Centre. He has edited a stimulating collection of essays by luminaries from the computer, per­ception and AI communities — HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality — to be pub­lished, in print and on the Web, for the event. Each asks questions about our progress towards creating intelligent machines, telling us much not only about HAL and 2001 but also about ourselves.

Kubrick's film was released in 1968 — the year of the assassina­tions of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the first pho­tograph of the whole Earth from space, taken by Apollo astronauts on the way to the Moon. Computers at that time were not a daily reality for the ordinary person. Most were huge machines that ran on solid-state micro-electronics and used punched cards and tape to input data. The keyboard and video dis­play monitor were new develop­ments. The personal computer, the mouse and the software explosion lay in the future, and the Internet was merely a twinkle in the eyes of a handful of American researchers.

HAL is a child of these times and his conception underlines the folly of predicting the future by extrapo­lating from the present. Even so, 2001, and HAL in particular, con­tinue to fascinate, despite the anachronisms and misconceptions.

Stork writes: "2007 is, in essence, a meditation on the evolution of intelligence from the monolith-inspired development of tools, through HAL's artificial intelli­gence, up to the ultimate (and delib­erately mysterious) stage of the star child."

The consensus in the late Nine­ties, however, is that HAL — reflecting ancient dreams and night­mares — will not be ready by 2001. Beyond that, opinions diverge. Some believe it is only a matter of time before intelligent computers emerge; others that it will never happen because the whole concept is flawed. In many fields we have made great strides, in others piti­fully small steps. Artificial intelli­gence, says Stork, "is a notably hazy matter that we don't even have a good definition for". It is also "one of the most profoundly difficult problems in science".

One of his major contributors is one of the godfathers of AI, Marvin Minsky, who believes that while good progress was made in the early days, the researchers became over­confident. They prematurely moved towards studying practical AI prob­lems such as chess and speech recognition, "leaving undone the cen­tral work of understanding the gen­eral computational principles — learning, reasoning and creativity — that underlie intelligence".

"The bottom line," says Minsky, "is that we haven't progressed too far toward a truly intelligent ma­chine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack." He believes that if we work really hard, we can have such an intelligent system in four to 400 years.

Stephen Wolfram, the principal architect of the Mathematica com­puter system, believes the answer to building HAL lies in the domain of systems in which simple ele­ments interact to produce unexpect­edly complex behaviour. He uses the example of the human brain, in which the relatively simple rules governing neurons have evolved into a complex cognitive system.

Ray Kurzweil, who developed the first commercial large-vocabulary speech-recognition s ystem, believes the way to tackle the task is to reverse-engineer the brain, scan­ning an entire brain down to thelevel of nerve cells and the intercon­nections. We would then need merely to encode all the information into a computer to make a virtual brain every bit as intelligent.

David J. Kuck, a distinguished computer scientist, believes that given the rapid increase in comput­ing power, we could soon build a computer the size and power of HAL. "If automobile speed had improved by the same factor as computer speed has in the past 50 years," he writes, "cars that trav­elled at highway speed limits would now be travelling at the speed of light."

He believes progress in the 21st century will be slower, with gains coming from software and parallel processing, which is used in the human brain. To give some compar­ison, the brain has between a thou­sand billion and 10 thousand billion neurons, plus many more intercon­necting synapses. The fastest com­puter at present has 100 billion switches —10 per cent of the brain's capacity — but Kuck believes that in the future, the physical capacity of computers will match that of the brain.

The only manufacturers that could at present build HAL are IBM or Intel. "However," Kuck writes, "it is not obvious that a HAL-like system will ever be sufficiently interesting to induce governments to fund its development."

HAL's voice is a holy grail for many researchers. Making comput­ers produce natural-sounding speech is remarkably difficult. We have developed programs that work adequately for short utterances or single worlds, but in sentences ma­chines cannot yet convey the human subtleties of stress and intonation. The greatest problem is the ma­chine's inability to comprehend what it is saying or hearing. And while we have made several impor­tant strides in speech recognition, no system remotely approaches HAL's proficiency at speechreading (lipreading) in silence.

A successful automatic speech-recognition system requires three things: a large vocabulary, a pro­gram that can handle any voice and the ability to process continuous speech. We have the first two — and will get the third by early 1998, the book predicts.

Making computers see has also proved to be extremely difficult. There has been success in what researchers call "early" vision — edge and motion detection, face tracking and the recognition of emo­tions. Full vision would include the ability to analyse scenes.

Success has, however, been marked in chess. There are more possible combinations in the game than there are atoms in the uni­verse. Humans play chess by employing explicit reasoning, linked to large amounts of pattern-directed knowledge. The most suc­cessful chess computers use brute force, searching through billions of alternative moves.

The first machine to defeat a grandmaster in tournament play was IBM's Deep Thought, which began playing in 1988. The current champion computer is its successor, Deep Blue, which is capable of examining up to 200 million chess positions a second. Murray S. Campbell, a member of the team that built it, says Deep Blue is actu­ally a system of 32 separate comput­ers (or nodes) working in concert, with 220 purpose-built chess chips, running in parallel.

Garry Kasparov played Deep Blue for the first time in 1989 in a contest he viewed as "a defence of the whole human race". He lost to the machine for the first time last year. Campbell believes man-machine contests will end some time next century. It is only a matter of time before the world's best chess player is a machine, he says, but concedes that "until computers possess the ability to reason, strong human chess players will always have a chance to defeat a computer".

Stork's primary motivation for the book was aesthetic, he says, lik­ening the exercise to that of art his­torians providing fresh insights into a subtle painting. 2001 illustrates many key ideas in several disci­plines of computer science.

"The Internet and the World Wide Web have changed the way people view communication and technology," says Stork. "2001 expressed the anxiety [of the Six­ties] of what computers were and what their potential was. Like much science fiction, it was a metaphor for the salient issues of the present."

He believes the biggest mistake made by early AI researchers was "not to cast the problem as more of a grand endeavour to build useful intelligent machines. The search raises the deepest human questions since Plato."

When Stork saw 2001 in the year of its release, he was "awed. It was overwhelming, and supremely beautiful. It was also mythic and very confusing". The film "shows us and reminds science that it is part and parcel of the highest human aspiration. It also raises the question: is violence integral to the nature of intelligence? It is thus related to Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, which merges violence and aesthetics. It suggests the link can be severed — but at a terrrible cost."

The computing pioneer Alan Turing predicted in the Forties that by early next century, society would take for granted the pervasive intervention of intelligent machines. By the end of this century, scant years away, we will be talking to our PCs and, by 2010, working with translat­ing telephones. Our most advanced programs today may be comparable with the minds of insects but the power of computation is set to increase by a factor of 16,000 every 10 years for the same cost.

Many of HAL's capabilities can already be realised; others will be possible soon. Building them all into one intelligent system will take decades. If we are to achieve that, we must give computers under­standing; but to program them with understanding, we must first under­stand the nature of our own human consciousness. That could take some time.

IN MEMORIAM: ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Clarke, the author of more than 100 books, including "2001: A Space Odyssey",
died early Wednesday, March 19, 2008 after suffering from breathing problems.
He was 90.

A COSMIC COINCIDENCE

This powerful stellar explosion - a bright Gamma-Ray Burst detected March 19 by NASA's Swift satellite - has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. The image shows the X-ray afterglow as seen by the X-Ray Telescope (left) and the bright optical afterglow as observed by the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope on board Swift.
Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

On March 19, 2008, the NASA satellite Swift observed four separate Gamma Ray Bursts,
the most powerful explosions in the Universe, each the signature of a massive star reaching
the end of its life and exploding. Never before had Swift seen four bursts in one day.

"Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts," said Swift science team member Judith Racusin of Penn State University.
See full report here

SUPPORT THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE FOUNDATION

Science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, poses at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
May 9, 2007 (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)

See Previous Posting:

• History of Communications, Computing and Media 1793-96

THINKING OF TIBET

One of my favourite posters, designed and produced some 10 years ago
or more by Lewes designer Andy Gammon.

Increasing pressure on China over Tibet

Published: Tuesday 25 March 2008 17:38 UTC

Paris - There is increasing international pressure on China to resolve the Tibet issue peacefully. On Tuesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he was considering a boycott of the Olympic Games' opening ceremony. He said he was appealing to the Chinese authorities' sense of responsibility regarding the unrest in Tibet.

The Germany government today again called on China to enter into dialogue with the Dalai Lama, but Berlin said that a boycott would be counterproductive. US President George W Bush said he would attend the Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony as planned.

The Tibetan government in exile says that 140 people have been killed during the protests of the past few weeks, whereas the Chinese government says 20 people lost their lives.



Olympic flame's journey begins in discord
http://www.euronews.net/index.php?page=info&article=476856&lng=1

Crackdown in Tibet, but protests spreading:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/tibet.china

Dalai Lama calling for dialogue and restraint, and an end to violence:
http://www.dalailama.com/news.216.htm

http://www.agi.it/world/news/200803191258-pol-ren0032-art.html
 
Leaders across Europe and Asia starting to back dialogue as the way forward:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7300157.stm

Chinese Prime Minister attacks "Dalai clique", leaves door open for talks:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/18/content_7813194.htm

See Previous Posting: LAST SEEN IN LHASA

BOOKS: DIVERSIONARY READING 1

[Left]: 'Peacock Feathers' by Temple Bailey, (Grosset & Dunlap. 1924). The designer was Cole Philips. [Right]: The cover of 'The Cardinal's Mistress', Mussolini's first and only novel, (Albert & Charles Boni. 1928). The artist is unknown

Both taken from the marvelous 'Jackets Required: An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design 1920-1950' by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast [ Chronicle Books. 1995]

In a recent essay in the New York Times - 'Great Literature? Depends Who Wrote It', Charles McGrath looks at 'the assumption that genre fiction - mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories - is a form of literary slumming.'

'These kind of books,' writes McGrath, 'are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they're entertaining, they can't possibly be serious.'

He says the 'distinction between highbrow and lowbrow - between genre writing and literary writing - is actually fairly recent. Dickens wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that.'

[Digression: In my book 'Curious Facts 2', it says 'the phenomenon whereby social structure affects taste was dubbed 'Highbrow' and 'Lowbrow' in a 1914 essay by Van Wyck Brooks.' Have lost my source for this but this statement now seems unlikely. He no doubt discussed the issue in his writings but the 3rd Edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary puts 'highbrow' (meaning 'intellectually superior') as US 1908 and 'lowbrow' as 1913. The answer undoubtedly lies in 'Highbrow/Lowbrow:The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America' by Lawrence ] Levine {Harvard University Press], which I have yet to read. The blurb says that Levine traces 'the emergence of familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century.'
Further digression: Just discovered 'From Lowbrow to Nobrow' by Peter Swirski.

McGrath goes on to talk about 'that interesting category of novels that are said to "transcend" their genre'. This is false praise' says McGrath. 'To trancend its genre, a book has to more nearly resemble a mainstream novel.'

The above thoughts provide a prelude to THE GENERALIST's round-up of the best of genre fiction I have read in the last 12 months. A few of these books are brand new, others have been published in recent years. They are all intelligent, intriguing and interesting books which will provide you with hours of valuable 'diversionary reading' - taking your mind of worldly and personal worries and concerns. They are thus a valuable and absorbing strategic resource.

'In 1909, Sigmund Freud, accompanied by his then disciple Carl Jung, made his one and only visit to the United States, to deliver a series of lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The honorary doctoral degree that Clark awarded him was the first public recognition Freud had ever received for his work. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud always spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States. He called Americans 'savages' and blamed his sojourn there for physical ailmments that afflicted him well before 1909. Freud's biographers have long puzzled over this mystery, speculating whether some unknown events in America could have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction.'

Thus begins Jed Rubenfeld's masterful work, that invents a fictional explanation of this real-life conundrum, in which Freud is drawn into the investigation of a savage murder of a stunning debutante. It's a great read in itself but what makes it doubly intriguing are the author's end notes, which scrupulously itemise how much fact lies behind his fiction and exactly where the fiction differes from the known historical record. It will suprise you.

[The book had the effect of sending me back to my collection of Jung books and led me to purchase what is I believe is the best modern biography - 'Jung: A Biography' by Deirdrie Blair [Little, Brown. 2004] - and read the first 200pp of it. (The book is a vast 647pp with a further 200pp plus of detailed notes and references and an excellent index). Its a totally fascinating story which I hope to return to in due course.]

'The Chatelet Apprentice' is the first of a series of novels featuring the character Nicholas Le Floch in Paris in the 1760s, written by Jean Francois Parot, a diplomat and historian. These books have been celebrated in France since first p;ublication in 2000 but is was only last year that this first adventure was made available for readers in an English translation by Gallic Books in London. (The second, 'The Man with the Lead Stomach', is due for publication in April 2008). Parot uses all his professional skill to paint an accurate portrait of the sights and sounds of the period, full of telling incidental detail. The central crime is suitably dark and convoluted and involves a cast of a characters full of subtlety and substance. Le Floch is an engaging central figure, full of uncertainties, who in this book is undergoing a trial by fire as he struggles to discover missing documents of vital importance to the King as dead bodies proliferate around him.

Fred Vargas is the pseudonym of a French female academic archaeologist and this delightful and quirky book, first published in English in 2003, is one of a number of her works now available in translation. The mystery starts with an Breton town crier who, three times a day in a small Parisian square, reads out the local news and adverts people have posted in his box, to his small but devoted audience. All is well until a series of disturbing messages start appearing, warning of death and pestilence, followed by the appearance of strange markings of apartment doors. The case comes to the attention of Detective Commissaire Adamsberg whose eccentric techniques enable him to eventually unmask the true secrets behind a dark and diabolical plot. Pitched just on the right side of the unbelievable, its creepy themes pick up contemporary resonances with the paranoid times we live in.

The extraordinary phenomenon of 'The Da Vinci Code' has spawned an ocean of imitators, eager to try and emulate the success of the original. The only one I've been drawn to read is Michel Benoit's 'The Thirteenth Apostle' - a satisfying, well-written mystery built out of time-honoured elements: a young Benedictine who, following the mysterious death of a colleague, begins searching for lost biblical texts that place Jesus in a fresh context, one that would threaten the teachings of the established church. Naturally, there is a dark cabal inside the Vatican who are determined that he will not suceed.

[Of course the Godfather of this genre must be Umberto Eco with his landmark books 'The Name of the Rose' and 'Foucault's Pendulum' - both huge tomes stuffed with long sections of arcane knowledge welded to a gripping plot that I remember finding genuinely thrilling and unique at the time.]

Translated from the German, this No 1 Swiss bestseller is one of a number of Eurocrime novels published by Arcadia Books. Set in the claustrophobic community of an out-of-season hotel in a remote Alpine village in the Swiss Engardine, its main character is Sonia Frey, escaping a violent husband and a bad acid trip, who gets a job there as a physiotherapist, hoping that fresh landscapes, Alpine air and a calm and ordered existence will heal her soul.
Bad move as it turns out. Sutter expertly creates an atmosphere of menace and intrigue, in which real-life violence appears to be following the plot of ancient superstitions.



Considered Italy's leading crime writer, Massimo Carlotto's first book 'The Fugitive' is a novelised real-life story about the years he spent on the run from the criminal authorities. It's an extraordinary tale.

Born in 1956 in North-Eastern Italy, Carolotta first got interested in far-left politics at the age of thirteen. He became an activist with Lotta Continua and began getting involved in investigative and counter-information work. In 1976, after discovering the body of an acquaintance who had been brutally murdered, he was falsely accused of the murder, arrested and put on trial. Acquitted and then convicted (there is no double-jeopardy law in Italy), Massimo, on the advice of his lawyers, fled abroad to avoid imprisonment.

From 1982 to 1985, he lived under a series of borrowed identities in Paris and then moved to South America. During these years of exile he was supported and sheltered by the international community of political refugees and worked in a number of capacities (pizzaiolo, translator, academic researcher) whenever he was able. In Mexico, he was betrayed by a lawyer, underwent torture following a case of mistaken identity, and then returned to Italy and to prison. In 1986, Massimo Carlotto became the focus of an international defence campaign that won wide backing: the South American novelist Jorge Amado and the eminent Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio were among his supporters. In 1993 he was finally released from prison with a pardon from the President of Italy.He had been tried a total of eleven times and had amassed 96 kilos of court proceedings.

After his release, Massimo quickly turned to writing, 'The Fugitiveis first and most autobiographical novel, Il fuggiasco (Fugitive) relates the almost eighteen years between his arrest and his presidential pardon. A film version of Il fuggiasco, directed by Andrea Manni and starring Daniele Liotti, was released in 2003. It has won many awards.

Since then, Massimo has written eight other novels, several plays, countless newspaper articles and essays. Film versions are currently being made of two of his most recent novels ('The Goodbye Kiss' and 'Death's Dark Abyss'); in January 2005, he signed a contract with his Italian publishers for five more novels. He also continues to act as a consultant to criminal lawyers, assisting them in cases involving organised crime, political intrigue and state intelligence.

The books mentioned are all published by Europa Editions, a fantastic imprint which specialises in publishing contemporary European writing.