March 2003

A Story Without a Moral, A Day in Dust

History,

Personal,

Technology

I don't know why it has taken me a year and a half to write this account of how I spent the day of September 11, 2001. And I don't know why I finally decided to write it down today. But here it is:

* * * * *A STORY WITHOUT A MORAL, A DAY IN DUST

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The Last Beat Writer Gets Published

Beat Generation,

Being A Writer

I mean, I certainly spent my formative years drinking with the Beats in San Francisco in the late fifties and early sixties. I even did the bars one night with Jack when he came back for a visit. I was there the famous night Allen Ginsberg read HOWL for the first time. My main writer friend in those days was Richard Brautigan. Even our wives and babies were friends, as documented by Ianthe Brautigan in her recent book about her father. It was Richard who intervened with a publisher to get some poems of mine published in Beatitude.

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Blyler, Kerouac, and Bohemian Roads

Indie

In 1957 Gilbert Millstein wrote his now famous review of Jack Kerouac's On The Road: "... its publication is an historic occasion in so far as exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion (multiplied a millionfold by the speed and pound of communication)."

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Ecclesiastes, A Book in the Bible

Classics,

Poetry,

Religion

This article addresses the Bible as literature, not as a religious text. The story told in Ecclesiastes is attributed to Solomon, one of the Kings of Israel, a son of David. Whether or not it is literal or allegorical is no more or less important than knowing which characters in On The Road represent what real life people.

Edgar Saltus’s Imperial Orgy

History,

Russian

Edgar Saltus's work has been described as that of a man consumed by a furious hunger -- a veritable bulimia -- for all experiences.

He wrote over thirty books, but you will no longer find any of them in bookshops. Nearly a hundred years ago he was a popular New York writer. Saltus wrote histories and novels. His novels were erotic, decadent and shocking. His histories, of which Imperial Orgy is one, were noted mostly for their use of imagination. He made things up.

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The Great Lost Rock Memoir: The Autobiography by Chuck Berry

by Levi Asher Sunday, March 17, 2013 06:42 pm

It's fitting that the guy who singlehandedly invented rock and roll when he recorded a song called "Mabellene" at Chess studios in Chicago on May 21, 1955 would later become an early innovator in the rock memoir field.