Summer Of Love
Long May You Run
by Levi Asher on Monday, November 17, 2008 07:57 pm
1. If you grew up ordering slim paperbacks in school from Scholastic Book Services, you'll enjoy this Flickr set as much as I do (via).
2. Neil Young has written an article for the Huffington Post about how the Detroit auto industry can radically alter its corporate culture by embracing green innovation. Young is clearly a transportation freak -- aside from his work with Lionel Trains and Linc Volt, he also once wrote "Long May You Run", a sweet love song about a favorite car. But I get the biggest kick out of the simple fact that Neil Young has written an article for the Huffington Post.
3. Judith Fitzgerald of Books Inq., responding to an apt appreciation by Billy Collins of a new Dylan publication, says that Leonard Cohen is a better poet than Bob Dylan. Levi Asher says Judith Fitzgerald has got to be kidding. Leonard Cohen wrote "Bird on a Wire" and maybe two other good songs. The album Blood on the Tracks alone outdoes Cohen's entire career. A midget can't play basketball with a giant.
4. "Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons found that doctors interacting with literature were more willing to adopt another person’s perspective, sometimes after just four one-hour workshops." I believe it. More here.
5. A 4th Century Greek joke book anticipates Monty Python's dead parrot sketch. But what about the cheese shop?
6. OUP Blog presents William Irvine on desire, a topic of infinite mystery.
7. The Millions remembers Liar's Poker.
8. Neil Young is writing about cars, and Lexus is sponsoring original fiction. Participants include Curtis Sittenfeld and Jane Smiley. The collaborative novel's visual layout is a little too "Lexus" for my tastes, but the experiment is worth a look.
9. Joan Didion is writing a film for HBO about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, who will forever be remembered as the subject of a Watergate-era John Mitchell prediction that didn't come true.
10. I caught PBS's broadcast of Filth, about 1960s British decency advocate Mary Whitehouse, last night. Very well done, and quite even-handed. (Note: the fact that I am praising the show has nothing to do with PBS buying a Filth blog ad on LitKicks, and the fact that I watched the show has everything to do with the fact that Roger Waters sang about Mary Whitehouse on Pink Floyd's Animals).
11. Wonkette is a good political website, but they clearly know nothing about The Godfather. Nobody told Tessio (Abe Vigoda) that he was going to Las Vegas before killing him on the way to the airport -- that was Carlo Rizzo. Jeez.
Reviewing the Review: August 24 2008
by Levi Asher on Sunday, August 24, 2008 12:03 pmMiddle East politics takes the cover of this weekend's New York Times Book Review. Kenneth Pollack, a so-called liberal intellectual from the Brookings Institution who urged the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2002 before apologizing for this bad call quickly after, has now written A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, and critic Max Rodenbeck has no intention of letting Pollack off easy. Rodenbeck hammers Pollack's simplistic interventionist strategy to shards, and it's a pleasure to watch him work:
Among other things, he proposes to increase military aid to friendly regimes. This, he says, can create a kind of golden leash that makes governments more compliant to American wishes.
But surely, one can't help gasping, the last thing more guns will bring is political reform. And surely, those Arabs are not so dumb that they don’t read this stuff.
Rodenbeck points out the many ways that Kenneth Pollack's blatantly pro-military political ideology fails to convince (and Pollack still calls himself a liberal? Well, hell, Napoleon Bonaparte was a liberal too). A concern for the security of Israel seems to be at the core of Pollack's entire vision, but I begin to yearn for a third path once Rodenbeck begins tearing Pollack apart on this point:
Can't we just admit that American support for Israel is strategically burdensome and is driven by the passion of several domestic constituencies rather than cold cost-benefit geopolitics?
This is a popular belief, but bears examination. If "several domestic constituencies" refers to American Jews, it's worth pointing out that American Jews were unable to budge the Roosevelt Administration a bloody inch on Jewish immigration from Nazi-occupied Europe during the horrific decade leading to the formation of Israel. Rodenbeck may also be referring to evangelical Christians who support Israel, but the influence there is more vocal and demonstrative than actual. At this point, any reasonable person who does not wish to see a new war ignited in the Levant can support Israel simply because the 7.2 million people who live there are not welcome anywhere else in the world, and the terrible stalemate that exists in the region now is less harmful to all of humanity than any imaginable alternative would be.
Rodenbeck's article is powerful, despite the lack of clarity on this point. The Middle East shows up again in Michael Goldfarb's review of Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East by Quil Lawrence, though Goldfarb's performance is much less impressive. He generally ignores Lawrence's book, instead taking the opportunity to write his own article about the Kurds in Iraq (he finally gives the book under review a polite nod in the last paragraph). This misdirection might be forgiveable if Goldfarb had something new to say, but instead he writes a conventional encyclopedia entry, complete with dull phraseology:
For any author, writing a history of the Kurds presents a challenge, because the Kurdish story has more switchbacks than a shepherd’s trail into the mountains.
Barf. I guess any old metaphor will do? The dullness continues:
Then, in a region where Western reporters are not liked very much, Kurds are exceptionally friendly.
Let's give them candy! Better yet, let's step away from the depressing world of global ethnic strife for the happier realms of experimental fiction and enjoy Charles Taylor's consideration of The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, which was apparently originally published in 1969 as an unbound collection of 27 chapters designed to be read in random order, and has now been republished with an enthusiastic introduction by Jonathan Coe.
Taylor satisfies here, as does Paul Berman with a deep and passionate dissection of another new edition of a work from the 1960s, Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which Berman says "gives him the willies" (this is meant as a compliment, I think).
As is so often the case, the most satisfying articles in this New York Times Book Review are the ones that dive deep into classic literature. Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an inquiry into the mysterious poet's correspondence with a robust abolitionist who wrote for the Atlantic Monthly and adored her poems, sounds like a real corker. It was only last month that I rudely scoffed at a book about a quaint English estate written by Miranda Seymour; I still don't want to read that book, but Seymour quickly closes the sale for me on this one.
Steve Coates doesn't quite rise to the occasion in reviewing Edith Hall's The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey -- I don't think the NYTBR should ever publish a phrase as generic as:
Hall ... fills her pages with sharp and often surprising observations about the "Odyssey"
Sharp and surprising -- is that the best Coates can do? Also, his long list of works influenced by Homer's epic could be more original (for instance, I would certainly have included the Who's first rock opera, "A Quick One", an early prototype for "Tommy", which was based on The Odyssey and has aged better than some of the dusty titles cited here).
Still, this book and Brenda Wineapple's are the kinds of books I love to read about on a Sunday morning, and I bet many others feel the same way.
Among other things, he proposes to increase military aid to friendly regimes. This, he says, can create a kind of golden leash that makes governments more compliant to American wishes.
But surely, one can't help gasping, the last thing more guns will bring is political reform. And surely, those Arabs are not so dumb that they don’t read this stuff.
Rodenbeck points out the many ways that Kenneth Pollack's blatantly pro-military political ideology fails to convince (and Pollack still calls himself a liberal? Well, hell, Napoleon Bonaparte was a liberal too). A concern for the security of Israel seems to be at the core of Pollack's entire vision, but I begin to yearn for a third path once Rodenbeck begins tearing Pollack apart on this point:
Can't we just admit that American support for Israel is strategically burdensome and is driven by the passion of several domestic constituencies rather than cold cost-benefit geopolitics?
This is a popular belief, but bears examination. If "several domestic constituencies" refers to American Jews, it's worth pointing out that American Jews were unable to budge the Roosevelt Administration a bloody inch on Jewish immigration from Nazi-occupied Europe during the horrific decade leading to the formation of Israel. Rodenbeck may also be referring to evangelical Christians who support Israel, but the influence there is more vocal and demonstrative than actual. At this point, any reasonable person who does not wish to see a new war ignited in the Levant can support Israel simply because the 7.2 million people who live there are not welcome anywhere else in the world, and the terrible stalemate that exists in the region now is less harmful to all of humanity than any imaginable alternative would be.
Rodenbeck's article is powerful, despite the lack of clarity on this point. The Middle East shows up again in Michael Goldfarb's review of Invisible Nation: How the Kurds' Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East by Quil Lawrence, though Goldfarb's performance is much less impressive. He generally ignores Lawrence's book, instead taking the opportunity to write his own article about the Kurds in Iraq (he finally gives the book under review a polite nod in the last paragraph). This misdirection might be forgiveable if Goldfarb had something new to say, but instead he writes a conventional encyclopedia entry, complete with dull phraseology:
For any author, writing a history of the Kurds presents a challenge, because the Kurdish story has more switchbacks than a shepherd’s trail into the mountains.
Barf. I guess any old metaphor will do? The dullness continues:
Then, in a region where Western reporters are not liked very much, Kurds are exceptionally friendly.
Let's give them candy! Better yet, let's step away from the depressing world of global ethnic strife for the happier realms of experimental fiction and enjoy Charles Taylor's consideration of The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson, which was apparently originally published in 1969 as an unbound collection of 27 chapters designed to be read in random order, and has now been republished with an enthusiastic introduction by Jonathan Coe.
Taylor satisfies here, as does Paul Berman with a deep and passionate dissection of another new edition of a work from the 1960s, Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which Berman says "gives him the willies" (this is meant as a compliment, I think).
As is so often the case, the most satisfying articles in this New York Times Book Review are the ones that dive deep into classic literature. Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an inquiry into the mysterious poet's correspondence with a robust abolitionist who wrote for the Atlantic Monthly and adored her poems, sounds like a real corker. It was only last month that I rudely scoffed at a book about a quaint English estate written by Miranda Seymour; I still don't want to read that book, but Seymour quickly closes the sale for me on this one.
Steve Coates doesn't quite rise to the occasion in reviewing Edith Hall's The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey -- I don't think the NYTBR should ever publish a phrase as generic as:
Hall ... fills her pages with sharp and often surprising observations about the "Odyssey"
Sharp and surprising -- is that the best Coates can do? Also, his long list of works influenced by Homer's epic could be more original (for instance, I would certainly have included the Who's first rock opera, "A Quick One", an early prototype for "Tommy", which was based on The Odyssey and has aged better than some of the dusty titles cited here).
Still, this book and Brenda Wineapple's are the kinds of books I love to read about on a Sunday morning, and I bet many others feel the same way.
Be-In
by Levi Asher on Friday, August 15, 2008 09:22 am
1. I wish I could see the new free production of Hair in New York City's Central Park, but it's pretty much impossible unless I'm willing to get on the ticket line at 9 pm the night before and stay there till the following afternoon. The last time I did that was for the much-hyped Seagull starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, and I literally fell asleep once the play started.
Oh well. The New York Times gives this Hair a great write-up, but Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal calls it a "poorly crafted revue" and claims that James Rado and Gerome Ragni "don't know the first thing about how to write a musical". I think Teachout misses this by a mile. He's right that Galt MacDermot's bouyant music is the show's best saving grace (and it's a fact that more people listen to the album than ever see the show) but I have seen the show -- an amateur college performance, many years ago -- and I remember how it lit up the room from start to finish. If Rado and Ragni didn't know how to write a musical, at least they sure knew how to create a musical that lets everybody else -- the performers, the composer, the director -- look great, and that makes an audience very happy. What more can we want? Teachout probably doesn't love Godspell either.
Gerome Ragni died in 1991, but James Rado can still be spotted in the East Village, and I've had the privilege of hanging out with this pleasant and friendly writer and performer (I asked him whether he or Ragni were responsible for combining Allen Ginsberg and Shakespeare verses in the big second-act Vietnam War number, but he smiled and wouldn't say). Rado also keeps the fires burning at the official Hair website, which features photos from countless international productions of the classic hippie-era show.
2. Herman Melville with Nathaniel Hawthorne on a mountain, thinking about a whale.
3. An intense sampling of comic artists flagellating themselves (via Maud).
4. Sparrow, a wistful New York poet and activist, is running for President. I doubt he'll win but it's worth a link.
5. A Charles Bukowski side story.
6. The poetry slam in 2008.
7. Jeff VanderMeer on recent political fiction at the Huff.
Backseat Driving: March 2008
by Levi Asher on Monday, March 31, 2008 02:08 am1. Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, which has already been made into a good Paul Newman movie, is being performed onstage before a hometown crowd at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. I wish I could catch it, and if it travels to New York I certainly will catch it.
There's also word that director Gus Van Sant is making progress on his film version of the Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a classic non-fiction text that describes the mid-1960s cosmic collision between Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, Robert Stone, Larry McMurty, the Grateful Dead and a big bus. I think this ought to be an outrageously good movie, but I hope Gus Van Sant will do a better job with it than he did with Tom Robbins' hippie-era classic novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. That movie had it's moments (Uma Thurman dancing with her thumbs), but the ultra-stylized visual treatment and wooden acting made it boring to watch. My two favorite Gus Van Sant films were two of his quietest and most naturalistic: the haunting Elephant and the bleak, blank Last Days. I think an overly stylized or stagy treatment (a la Cowgirls) would hurt Tom Wolfe's classic narrative, a narrative about a moment when truth was truly stranger than fiction. I think this film is in good hands, but I hope Van Sant will let the great story speak for itself.
2. Last week I praised the new HBO series John Adams, and I still feel that way, though in this week's episode I really wasn't trying to see John Adams getting busy in a Braintree bedroom. I wasn't trying to see Paul Giamatti getting busy in a Braintree bedroom either.
3. Mike Palacek is another patriot.
4. Happy birthday The Millions!
5. Regarding another Penguin project, what does the technology add?
6. I love a writer who'll speak up for himself. Novelist James Morrow doesn't agree with New York Times Book Review critic Siddhartha Deb's comments about his the Philosopher's Apprentice, and invites you to sample the novel on his website. I urge you to do so.
There's also word that director Gus Van Sant is making progress on his film version of the Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a classic non-fiction text that describes the mid-1960s cosmic collision between Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, Robert Stone, Larry McMurty, the Grateful Dead and a big bus. I think this ought to be an outrageously good movie, but I hope Gus Van Sant will do a better job with it than he did with Tom Robbins' hippie-era classic novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. That movie had it's moments (Uma Thurman dancing with her thumbs), but the ultra-stylized visual treatment and wooden acting made it boring to watch. My two favorite Gus Van Sant films were two of his quietest and most naturalistic: the haunting Elephant and the bleak, blank Last Days. I think an overly stylized or stagy treatment (a la Cowgirls) would hurt Tom Wolfe's classic narrative, a narrative about a moment when truth was truly stranger than fiction. I think this film is in good hands, but I hope Van Sant will let the great story speak for itself.
2. Last week I praised the new HBO series John Adams, and I still feel that way, though in this week's episode I really wasn't trying to see John Adams getting busy in a Braintree bedroom. I wasn't trying to see Paul Giamatti getting busy in a Braintree bedroom either.
3. Mike Palacek is another patriot.
4. Happy birthday The Millions!
5. Regarding another Penguin project, what does the technology add?
6. I love a writer who'll speak up for himself. Novelist James Morrow doesn't agree with New York Times Book Review critic Siddhartha Deb's comments about his the Philosopher's Apprentice, and invites you to sample the novel on his website. I urge you to do so.
Reviewing the Review: March 23 2008
by Levi Asher on Saturday, March 22, 2008 02:49 pmDavid Kamp, considering Sarah Boxer's Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web in this weekend's New York Times Book Review, wisely zeroes in on the same problem I have with this book. Noting that Boxer says an editor gave her the idea for this book and that she originally considered it a dreadful idea, he finds the book "too preoccupied with being respectably booky rather than wildly bloggy" and discovers "a nose-holding quality to her introduction". He asks:
Shouldn't a person editing a blog anthology be gung-ho from the get-go? Shouldn't this person be downright besotted with blogs and bloggers, ready to plunge in, get dirty and exult in the form in all its messiness and ephemerality -- non-linkiness and timelessness be damned?
This hits home with me, since I and my then co-editor Christian Crumlish fit this description exactly when we published this book eleven -- yes, eleven -- years ago:
And we were gung-ho from the get-go up the wazoo, but the book sold about a thousand copies and then died a painful death (and, by the way, it got nice little reviews in Washington Post Book World and the Los Angeles Times but nothing in the New York Times Book Review). So: Kamp is right, but it's not like we didn't try.
(And, no, by the way, I'm not interested in trying again. Some things you do only once per life).
There's much to praise in this issue of the Book Review. Colm Toibin takes Nicholson Baker's controversial World War II history book Human Smoke on its own terms as an intensely curious book by an author who "wishes to stir up an argument as much as settle one". Toibin also helpfully emphasizes this book's focus on the misguided popularity of aerial bombing of cities as a global problem-solver.
History, politics and ethics dominate today. Walter A. McDougall's Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 appears to be as iconoclastic as Human Smoke, according to Michael Kazin's respectful review. But Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2,500 Year Struggle Between East and West seems to be filled with paranoid nonsense about Islamic extremism and "the struggle against the 'Infidel' for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entire world". And, according to critic Amy Chua:
Pagden quotes Osama bin Laden at length for the view that the greatest crime of the United States -- for which 9/11 was punishment -- was that "you separate religion from your politics, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord your Creator".
This is pure pablum, since anybody who doesn't get their news solely from Bill O'Reilly must know by now that Al Qaeda attacked America to further its political objectives against the pro-American governments in nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and that they really don't care very much about America at all except as far as America affects the Middle East. The myth that Islamic extremists are starry-eyed religious dreamers obsessed with fighting America (when they are actually pragmatic political radicals wishing to overthrow the governments of the nations they were born in) is beyond stale. Amy Chua views Pagden's book with some skepticism but nowhere near enough. It's the New York Times job to state clearly when a book is filled with popular distortions of simple fact, and Chua does not state it clearly enough here.
Maybe we'll have to look for fiction for ethical insight, and I'm intrigued by The Philosopher's Apprentice, a novel about morality and philosophy by James Morrow in which a teacher and student construct a hypothetical "social justice project". Critic Siddhartha Deb wants to like this book, and captures my attention with notions like "clones called immaculoids, created from aborted fetuses by a right-wing group and sent out to stalk their parents". But she also hates the writer's overwrought prose style, and the sample she presents here effectively makes her case that the author's style renders his book unreadable.
Louisa Thomas praises The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt, which I'm looking forward to checking out. Ron Powers, reviewing The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hajdu, proves himself once again to be a terrible, terrible writer. Here's his intro:
My first hallucinatory experience had nothing to do with drugs, unless you consider comic books to be a form of drug. On a spring morning in 1953, I strolled into Mrs. Shelburne's sixth-grade classroom at the Mark Twain School and spotted a classmate covertly flipping through a Superman comic. Only it wasn't quite Superman. Not the Man of Steel I idolized, but a grinning thug-imposter in red cape and blue tights, gut-punching a helpless geezer on crutches as his false teeth flew out and a mob of citizens cheered, and a babe far leggier and bustier than Lois Lane leered her approval. The monster’s name bulged in thick red letters atop the panel: Superduperman. My good-guy stomach rolled. Everything stretched and went slantwise; a parallel universe yawed open, like jaws, and threatened to suck me inside. Then Mrs. Shelburne waddled into class; the kid stowed the comic; the jaws evaporated. Too soon, I realized dizzily. Wait! I wanted in!
Right, so David Hajdu wrote a book about comic books in the 1950's, but somehow it's all about Ron Powers.
An unusual endpaper by Polly Morrice about the legacy of J. D. Salinger in literature about children since Nine Stories lands many good points, though it overreaches in a few parts (the Glass siblings are "possibly the first gifted-and-talented children in literature"? No.) A good piece nonetheless.
Finally, I don't usually read the Times' Travel section (why should I? As you've probably noticed, I never travel -- I'm always here) and I almost missed a surprising and worthy cover article on Ken Kesey's Mexico by Lawrence Downes.
Shouldn't a person editing a blog anthology be gung-ho from the get-go? Shouldn't this person be downright besotted with blogs and bloggers, ready to plunge in, get dirty and exult in the form in all its messiness and ephemerality -- non-linkiness and timelessness be damned?
This hits home with me, since I and my then co-editor Christian Crumlish fit this description exactly when we published this book eleven -- yes, eleven -- years ago:
And we were gung-ho from the get-go up the wazoo, but the book sold about a thousand copies and then died a painful death (and, by the way, it got nice little reviews in Washington Post Book World and the Los Angeles Times but nothing in the New York Times Book Review). So: Kamp is right, but it's not like we didn't try.
(And, no, by the way, I'm not interested in trying again. Some things you do only once per life).
There's much to praise in this issue of the Book Review. Colm Toibin takes Nicholson Baker's controversial World War II history book Human Smoke on its own terms as an intensely curious book by an author who "wishes to stir up an argument as much as settle one". Toibin also helpfully emphasizes this book's focus on the misguided popularity of aerial bombing of cities as a global problem-solver.
History, politics and ethics dominate today. Walter A. McDougall's Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 appears to be as iconoclastic as Human Smoke, according to Michael Kazin's respectful review. But Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2,500 Year Struggle Between East and West seems to be filled with paranoid nonsense about Islamic extremism and "the struggle against the 'Infidel' for the ultimate Muslim conquest of the entire world". And, according to critic Amy Chua:
Pagden quotes Osama bin Laden at length for the view that the greatest crime of the United States -- for which 9/11 was punishment -- was that "you separate religion from your politics, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord your Creator".
This is pure pablum, since anybody who doesn't get their news solely from Bill O'Reilly must know by now that Al Qaeda attacked America to further its political objectives against the pro-American governments in nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and that they really don't care very much about America at all except as far as America affects the Middle East. The myth that Islamic extremists are starry-eyed religious dreamers obsessed with fighting America (when they are actually pragmatic political radicals wishing to overthrow the governments of the nations they were born in) is beyond stale. Amy Chua views Pagden's book with some skepticism but nowhere near enough. It's the New York Times job to state clearly when a book is filled with popular distortions of simple fact, and Chua does not state it clearly enough here.
Maybe we'll have to look for fiction for ethical insight, and I'm intrigued by The Philosopher's Apprentice, a novel about morality and philosophy by James Morrow in which a teacher and student construct a hypothetical "social justice project". Critic Siddhartha Deb wants to like this book, and captures my attention with notions like "clones called immaculoids, created from aborted fetuses by a right-wing group and sent out to stalk their parents". But she also hates the writer's overwrought prose style, and the sample she presents here effectively makes her case that the author's style renders his book unreadable.
Louisa Thomas praises The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt, which I'm looking forward to checking out. Ron Powers, reviewing The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hajdu, proves himself once again to be a terrible, terrible writer. Here's his intro:
My first hallucinatory experience had nothing to do with drugs, unless you consider comic books to be a form of drug. On a spring morning in 1953, I strolled into Mrs. Shelburne's sixth-grade classroom at the Mark Twain School and spotted a classmate covertly flipping through a Superman comic. Only it wasn't quite Superman. Not the Man of Steel I idolized, but a grinning thug-imposter in red cape and blue tights, gut-punching a helpless geezer on crutches as his false teeth flew out and a mob of citizens cheered, and a babe far leggier and bustier than Lois Lane leered her approval. The monster’s name bulged in thick red letters atop the panel: Superduperman. My good-guy stomach rolled. Everything stretched and went slantwise; a parallel universe yawed open, like jaws, and threatened to suck me inside. Then Mrs. Shelburne waddled into class; the kid stowed the comic; the jaws evaporated. Too soon, I realized dizzily. Wait! I wanted in!
Right, so David Hajdu wrote a book about comic books in the 1950's, but somehow it's all about Ron Powers.
An unusual endpaper by Polly Morrice about the legacy of J. D. Salinger in literature about children since Nine Stories lands many good points, though it overreaches in a few parts (the Glass siblings are "possibly the first gifted-and-talented children in literature"? No.) A good piece nonetheless.
Finally, I don't usually read the Times' Travel section (why should I? As you've probably noticed, I never travel -- I'm always here) and I almost missed a surprising and worthy cover article on Ken Kesey's Mexico by Lawrence Downes.
Mahirishi Mahesh Yogi Dies
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 11:26 pmMaharishi Mahesh Yogi, born as Mahesh Prasad Varma in Jabalpur, India more than 90 years ago, has died of natural causes in his home in Vlodrop, in the Netherlands. This unique individual built an astonishingly popular and enduring worldwide organization out of a simple Hindu practice: meditation.
Mahesh's innovation was to translate the Hindu religious rite of Yogic meditation into a minimal format that could easily fit into the busy lives of 20th Century humans around the world. Transcendental Meditation, which became the brand name for his particular approach, involved no spiritual mysticism, and was compatible with any religious or even non-religious viewpoint. Each person was given a "mantra", a secret word, which they would focus their minds upon for 20 minutes at a time, approximately twice a day. This practice became popular around the world in the 1960's, especially in late 1967 and early 1968 when the Beatles briefly declared themselves members of the Mahirishi's movement.
Whether following the "TM" technique or not, meditation has become a part of American culture, and Mahirishi Mahesh Yogi is largely to thank for this undeniably positive development. People meditate in many different ways, but Mahesh's organization is still highly active. The great film director David Lynch wrote a book two years ago called Catching the Big Fish that explains how the practice of TM has made his career possible. Here he talks about his first experience with the technique:
So in July 1973 I went to the TM center in Los Angeles and met an instructor, and I liked her. She looked like Doris Day. And she taught me this technique. She gave me a mantra, which is a sound-vibration-thought. You don't meditate on he meaning of it, but it's a very specific sound-vibration-thought.
She took me into a little room to have my first meditation. I sat down, closed my eyes, started this mantra, and it was as if I were in an elevator and the cable had been cut. Boom! I fell into bliss -- pure bliss.
According to Jonathan Gould in Can't Buy Me Love, the Beatles had a more complex ongoing relationship with the Mahirishi's philosophy than is commonly known. John Lennon and George Harrison were the two who took it seriously, and according to Gould the song "Across the Universe" was originally written as a description of the experience of meditation:
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
I am not a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation or any other specific approach, but I have been very influenced by this practice because I was introduced to it by my grandparents many years ago. My grandmother Jeannette Schwartz had attended one of the Mahirishi's introductions to meditation in the early 1970's, and became a lifelong convert. My grandfather Sidney enjoyed meditating too, and all of us grandchildren were given mantras and instructed to do our twenty minutes at a time together, twice a day, whenever we visited. I wrote some more about this when Grandma Jeannette died on Valentine's Day, 2002.
My grandparents never stopped meditating, and I have occasionally kept up the practice myself, though truly I'm a mediocre meditator at best. It seems to me that David Lynch or other enthusiastic followers of TM may alienate people with this "elevator drop pure bliss" stuff, since I've meditated a lot and find that it's usually nowhere near that exciting. Still, meditation does feel good, and it does help you expand the way you are thinking about the things in your life.
The Mahirishi has taken much criticism for his sometimes simplistic teachings, not to mention his often outrageous style. He giggles a lot and has been criticized for avoiding serious real-world politics and basking in luxury while the world suffers. He has generally worked as a peace activist, and as a sardonic, good-natured critic of Western materialism. Unlike other "modern mystics", there is nothing remotely cultish or megalomaniacal about the Mahirishi, or about his Transcendental Meditation movement.
It's too simple to be a cult. TM is all about this: 20 minutes at a time, twice a day. That's the whole thing. That's what the Mahirishi says you should do, and who thinks it's not worth a try?
Here are some other articles worth a look.
Mahesh's innovation was to translate the Hindu religious rite of Yogic meditation into a minimal format that could easily fit into the busy lives of 20th Century humans around the world. Transcendental Meditation, which became the brand name for his particular approach, involved no spiritual mysticism, and was compatible with any religious or even non-religious viewpoint. Each person was given a "mantra", a secret word, which they would focus their minds upon for 20 minutes at a time, approximately twice a day. This practice became popular around the world in the 1960's, especially in late 1967 and early 1968 when the Beatles briefly declared themselves members of the Mahirishi's movement.
Whether following the "TM" technique or not, meditation has become a part of American culture, and Mahirishi Mahesh Yogi is largely to thank for this undeniably positive development. People meditate in many different ways, but Mahesh's organization is still highly active. The great film director David Lynch wrote a book two years ago called Catching the Big Fish that explains how the practice of TM has made his career possible. Here he talks about his first experience with the technique:
So in July 1973 I went to the TM center in Los Angeles and met an instructor, and I liked her. She looked like Doris Day. And she taught me this technique. She gave me a mantra, which is a sound-vibration-thought. You don't meditate on he meaning of it, but it's a very specific sound-vibration-thought.
She took me into a little room to have my first meditation. I sat down, closed my eyes, started this mantra, and it was as if I were in an elevator and the cable had been cut. Boom! I fell into bliss -- pure bliss.
According to Jonathan Gould in Can't Buy Me Love, the Beatles had a more complex ongoing relationship with the Mahirishi's philosophy than is commonly known. John Lennon and George Harrison were the two who took it seriously, and according to Gould the song "Across the Universe" was originally written as a description of the experience of meditation:
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
I am not a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation or any other specific approach, but I have been very influenced by this practice because I was introduced to it by my grandparents many years ago. My grandmother Jeannette Schwartz had attended one of the Mahirishi's introductions to meditation in the early 1970's, and became a lifelong convert. My grandfather Sidney enjoyed meditating too, and all of us grandchildren were given mantras and instructed to do our twenty minutes at a time together, twice a day, whenever we visited. I wrote some more about this when Grandma Jeannette died on Valentine's Day, 2002.
My grandparents never stopped meditating, and I have occasionally kept up the practice myself, though truly I'm a mediocre meditator at best. It seems to me that David Lynch or other enthusiastic followers of TM may alienate people with this "elevator drop pure bliss" stuff, since I've meditated a lot and find that it's usually nowhere near that exciting. Still, meditation does feel good, and it does help you expand the way you are thinking about the things in your life.
The Mahirishi has taken much criticism for his sometimes simplistic teachings, not to mention his often outrageous style. He giggles a lot and has been criticized for avoiding serious real-world politics and basking in luxury while the world suffers. He has generally worked as a peace activist, and as a sardonic, good-natured critic of Western materialism. Unlike other "modern mystics", there is nothing remotely cultish or megalomaniacal about the Mahirishi, or about his Transcendental Meditation movement.
It's too simple to be a cult. TM is all about this: 20 minutes at a time, twice a day. That's the whole thing. That's what the Mahirishi says you should do, and who thinks it's not worth a try?
Here are some other articles worth a look.
Cassady Day
by Levi Asher on Monday, February 4, 2008 03:35 am
Neal Cassady, the real-life model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On The Road, died forty years ago today, on February 4, 1968. There was recently much celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road, and it provides a sad perspective to put these anniversaries together and realize that On The Road gave Neal Cassady exactly one decade of literary "fame" before he died at the age of 42.
This anniversary seemed like a good occasion for me to email Carolyn Cassady a few wide-ranging questions, which she was kind enough to answer from her home in London:
Levi: So much has changed in the world since February 4th, 1968. Or has it? If Neal has been looking down on us all for all these years, what do you think he would say about the state of the world in 2008?
Carolyn: If Neal were watching us since the time he departed this planet, I think he would feel as I do that it is in a very sad state. He was such a loving person, and there is so little evidence of that in the affairs of the world. Acquiring money and/or power at any cost appears to be the religion and goal. Every time there's an "improvement" in products, they're much worse. Selfishness.
Levi: I know that you and Neal were interested together in the teachings of spiritual leader Edgar Cayce (by the way, I had a piano teacher as a kid who was a Caycean, so I know a little about it). Have you remained involved with this movement, and what do you think about it today?
Carolyn:Neal and I used the Cayce connection as the springboard for further studies in occult lore. We didn't continue after the first few years with just that. We explored all the scriptures from early Eastern systems, the Theosophists, Max Heindel, etc etc., and I became interested in Astrology. I am poor at interpretation, but I get a little. Otherwise, the teachings of that accumulated search and the present-day Truth movements, like Unity satisfy my needs nicely, and I try to live by the wisdom of the ages as best I can.
Levi: How do you feel about today's literature? What books have you recently enjoyed reading, and are there any newer writers you like, or any newer or older writers you can't stand?
Carolyn: I'm not an authority on today's literature. I read very few novels; I like biographies, documentaries and maybe historical novels. I have read more English writers since moving here, and I havaen't read any more American ones. I have enjoyed Julian Barnes, Jude Morgan, Roddy Doyle, Peter Ackroyd to name a few. I do read reviews in literary magazines so remain interested in trends.
Levi: Can you think of any surprising truth or fact about Neal Cassady (or about the times you spent with Neal and Jack Kerouac and the rest of the gang) that the world does not yet know?
Carolyn: My dear, my book is full of surprising truths about the lads, but not enough people read it or read it carefully. So there are still masses of myths and misinformation everywhere.
Levi: Is the date of February 4, 2008 going to be an especially significant one for you and your children? And do you have any thoughts you'd like to share on this 40th anniversary?
Carolyn: I remember February 4 with affection both for Neal and for Anne Murphy, who's birthday it is. I understand the Beat Museum in San Francisco is celebrating Neal's birthday on the 8th, but I am not included in that in any way -- except Neal's children will be there. I always think of Neal with gratitude for teaching me so much wisdom about life; I feel privileged to have known him, and I miss him always. He was a unique individual in spades.
Carolyn also told me: "You know how tired I am of living in the past, but I guess it's what makes the present." I don't like living in the past either, but I'll make an exception for Neal Cassady, because he has always been one of my very favorite Beat Generation figures. Some of the very first articles published on Literary Kicks were about the connected careers of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey, and probably the very first exciting and impressive thing that happened to me after launching LitKicks was that I was put into contact with Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who had circulated a short article about the origin of the Grateful Dead song "Cassidy" online. I asked if I could give the piece a home on LitKicks, he happily agreed, and you can still read his excellent piece about "Cassidy" and Cassady here.
The following year I got a chance to interview John Allen Cassady, Neal's son, which was a very special event because John had not spoken out in public about his experiences as a child among Neal, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the rest of the Beat crowd before. This interview meant a lot to me (and also helped put LitKicks "on the map", which I appreciated very much). I always sensed a deep, earthy warmth emanating from the members of Neal Cassady's family (and if you've ever dealt with literary estates or families, you know that deep, earthy warmth is not often what emanates from these sources). This seemed to speak, as did many other indicators, for an essential simple human goodness at the heart of Neal Cassady's legacy in this world.
"Did You Hear Neal Cassady Died?"
-- The Washington Squares
Did you hear Neal Cassady died?
Lying on the tracks down in Mexico
Did you hear Neal Cassady died, last night?
Can you see Neal Cassady drive?
An old car and a girl in heaven alive
Can you see Neal Cassady drive, last night?
He was a-lying on the tracks down in Mexico
What a sad, sad, lonely way to go
for the king of the hipster daddy-0's ...
Two years after On The Road became a smash success, Neal was arrested and convicted for selling a small amount of marijuana and spent two years separated from Carolyn and his children as a prisoner in San Quentin. Jack Kerouac never stopped blaming himself for ruining a hard-working family man's life by making him a celebrity lawbreaker and a target for law enforcement. After returning home following two years in jail, Neal juggled his job and large family precariously along with his crazy wanderings among Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and various crazy hipsters coalescing around the growing San Francisco music scene.
Neal was found dead by the side of a railroad track in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where he'd been staying with friends. According to Carolyn Cassady's Off The Road, he had walked a quarter mile south towards the nearby town of Celaya when he seemed to have stopped walking. The manner of his death has always seemed significant -- of what? I'm not sure. But I tried to estimate where exactly this might have been on Google Maps, and this satellite image may show the spot:
Best wishes to the Cassady family. Of course, the spirit lives on.
Ira Levin’s Perfect Day
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 09:02 pm
I just read on Sarah Weinman's site that Ira Levin has died. Ira Levin was the author of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, two bestselling novels I enjoyed greatly when I was a kid in the 70's reading under the influence of my Grandma, my mom and my sister. These books were both made into excellent movies, of course (Roman Polanksi's chic spin on Rosemary's Baby was especially good) but the books were fun to read too. Ira Levin specialized in conspiracy theories: Rosemary's Baby presented a Satanic conspiracy and Stepford Wives a male chauvinist conspiracy. But Ira Levin wrote another conspiracy novel, This Perfect Day, which I also read as a teenager and liked perhaps even better than the other two.
Why did teenage me read this strange and even then little-known book, which depicts a rebel named Li RM35M4419 (nickname: Chip) who takes on a totalitarian government managed by a giant computer named UniComp? I guess I had a lot of time on my hands, but this often paid off, and This Perfect Day was a very exciting and rewarding read. I don't want to give away the core secret conspiracy that is revealed during the course of This Perfect Day, but perhaps I can suggest that some readers may want to honor this author's death not by rereading the familiar bestsellers but by finding copies of this one instead. You can read the Wikipedia page above if you don't mind a spoiler (no, UniComp is not gay) and I'll just say that the book does come up with a good payoff and stands up to 1984, Animal Farm, Slapstick, Brave New World and other totalitarian fables. Like these novels, it touches upon fascism, Stalinism and Maoism, but Ira Levin has more fun with these concepts than any of the others (except maybe Slapstick, since nobody ever had more fun with a concept than Kurt Vonnegut).
The book also offers a highly original message that has something to do with co-optation of the underground. Dana Spiotto's recent Eat The Document tells a similar story in a very different way.
I'll update this page with more links about Ira Levin as I find them. Farewell to a highly original author, Ira Levin of New York City, 78 years old.
Philomene Long
by Levi Asher on Monday, August 27, 2007 08:46 pmI've just heard that Los Angeles/Venice Beach poet Philomene Long has passed away.
I interviewed Philomene here on LitKicks last year. I was fascinated by the fact that she was a nun before she was a beat poet, and we talked a lot about religion during this interview. Philomene was also a filmmaker, as well as a close friend and creative partner of Charles Bukowski. You can read more about here at this Empty Mirror Books page or this other Empty Mirror Books page. Here's an interview with the Santa Monica Mirror, and here's an early LitKicks review of her movie, The Beats: An Existential Comedy.
But for the best link of all, check out Philomene and her husband John Thomas Philomene reading the great poem "Marriage" by Gregory Corso on YouTube.
I interviewed Philomene here on LitKicks last year. I was fascinated by the fact that she was a nun before she was a beat poet, and we talked a lot about religion during this interview. Philomene was also a filmmaker, as well as a close friend and creative partner of Charles Bukowski. You can read more about here at this Empty Mirror Books page or this other Empty Mirror Books page. Here's an interview with the Santa Monica Mirror, and here's an early LitKicks review of her movie, The Beats: An Existential Comedy.
But for the best link of all, check out Philomene and her husband John Thomas Philomene reading the great poem "Marriage" by Gregory Corso on YouTube.
The Seagull Is Back
by Levi Asher on Monday, August 20, 2007 10:20 pmThe Seagull is back. And I'm not talking about Anton Chekhov.
A friend of mine literally screamed -- a spontaneous burst of horror -- when she spotted the new edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a once-popular book from the 1970's, on a bookstore shelf. Richard Bach's slightly corny fable about a bird who wants to fly faster and better was the "Da Vinci Code" of its age, and people usually either like it or violently hate it. I read it when I was a kid and thought it was pretty good. Whether it deserves a comeback or not, I'm really not sure.
This book was a classic of the late hippie age, the early 70's, and as a kid I remember it showing up on the same bookshelves that would house Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I'm O.K. You're O.K. I sat down and read the whole book at one point -- you could read it in a single sitting -- but it didn't make a gigantic impression on me. I liked the positive message, but it all felt a little humorless and simplistic. But then, what did I expect? It's a book about a seagull who thinks in English.
I always felt the triumph of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was partly the triumph of great book design. The cover is as much a work of pop art as anything Andy Warhol ever did, transforming a seagull's body and spread wings into a cool, perfect white curve. The arrangement also neatly echoes the book's basic theme: the pursuit of white-light perfection. The deep blue background is bold yet calming, the typography modest and modern. I sometimes think the book designer Chip Kidd is overrated; he still hasn't done a cover as good as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I'm happy to report that the new paperback edition leaves the design mostly intact, though the book is slightly wider and larger.
The aesthetic didn't survive the transition to film, though. The film was supposed to have been really bad, and I have never met anybody who's seen it. I don't even know if Neil Diamond ever saw it, and he did the music. If you've seen it, please tell us everything you remember.
Richard Bach's follow-up novel Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah also suffered from a mediocre cover design, with a feather motif that unfortunately foretold the coming horrors of "Forrest Gump".
Richard Bach is still writing, and commands a loyal audience to this day.
* * * * *
PS: Hey, I'm a heartthrob.
A friend of mine literally screamed -- a spontaneous burst of horror -- when she spotted the new edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a once-popular book from the 1970's, on a bookstore shelf. Richard Bach's slightly corny fable about a bird who wants to fly faster and better was the "Da Vinci Code" of its age, and people usually either like it or violently hate it. I read it when I was a kid and thought it was pretty good. Whether it deserves a comeback or not, I'm really not sure.
This book was a classic of the late hippie age, the early 70's, and as a kid I remember it showing up on the same bookshelves that would house Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I'm O.K. You're O.K. I sat down and read the whole book at one point -- you could read it in a single sitting -- but it didn't make a gigantic impression on me. I liked the positive message, but it all felt a little humorless and simplistic. But then, what did I expect? It's a book about a seagull who thinks in English.
I always felt the triumph of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was partly the triumph of great book design. The cover is as much a work of pop art as anything Andy Warhol ever did, transforming a seagull's body and spread wings into a cool, perfect white curve. The arrangement also neatly echoes the book's basic theme: the pursuit of white-light perfection. The deep blue background is bold yet calming, the typography modest and modern. I sometimes think the book designer Chip Kidd is overrated; he still hasn't done a cover as good as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I'm happy to report that the new paperback edition leaves the design mostly intact, though the book is slightly wider and larger.
The aesthetic didn't survive the transition to film, though. The film was supposed to have been really bad, and I have never met anybody who's seen it. I don't even know if Neil Diamond ever saw it, and he did the music. If you've seen it, please tell us everything you remember.
Richard Bach's follow-up novel Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah also suffered from a mediocre cover design, with a feather motif that unfortunately foretold the coming horrors of "Forrest Gump".
Richard Bach is still writing, and commands a loyal audience to this day.
PS: Hey, I'm a heartthrob.
