The Truth About On The Road
Gerald Nicosia with actors at Beat Boot camp, Montreal, July 2010. From left, Garrett Hedlund, Nicosia, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart
Lionel Rolfe
In his latest book, Gerald Nicosia has unlocked the dynamic of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and not a moment too soon. Nicosia, the author of “Memory Babe,” the definitive Jack Kerouac book, was an advisor to the “On The Road” movie due to be premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival. “On The Road,” published in 1957, was of course, the book that made Kerouac famous. It was inspired by Jack London’s famed book, “The Road,” published in 1907.
Nicosia’s new book is “One And Only: The Untold Story of On The Road.” Read more
Soaring into space
By Phyl van Ammers
The author interviews the artist Ashton Richard Brick and the artist’s mother Olga Justine Brick.
PVA: Tell me, what is the name of this picture?
Abstract 467
ARB: This is No. 467.
PVA: What does it mean? Read more
George Bernard Shaw: Can His Reputation Survive His Dark Side?
By Leslie Evans
It is with a certain sadness that I come to write this. George Bernard Shaw, through his plays, was one of my early heroes. I knew only the good of him then. More recently I have come to learn things, about his political views, that I could have known then but did not, and knowing, would have seen him differently. Learning them prompts me to want to know more about his contradictory character, to decide anew what we should think of him. Read more
The Greatest Music In The World
Angel Stankhov, left, Lionel Rolfe, right
Theodosii Spassov, left, Mayya Isaeva, center, Lionel Rolfe, right
By LIONEL ROLFE
While I’m mostly inclined to listen to what is called “classical music,” upon occasion other musical genres have proven enticing and powerful. I grew up with classical music, but along the way a few musicians not necessarily in that category have impinged their way onto my consciousness. I will humbly offer up a few of their names to make my point that what makes music great is not necessarily its genre.
Foremost among them was Giora Feidman, the greatest of the Klezmer musicians. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0GXlIEIy60). The first time I heard him was in a small synagogue as the result of an invitation by an old friend Marshall Levy, an amateur clarinetist and magician who said I just had to hear Giora. Read more
Christopher Hitchens and the Two Lefts
By Leslie Evans
I cannot help but feel deeply the loss of Christopher Hitchens. I never met him. I read a number of his books, many of his articles in Vanity Fair and in the online Slate magazine, and saw a few of his speeches on video. Contrarian though he was, he had become for me, with a few other similar thinkers, a political anchor in a time when the world was sorting itself into new and unexpected categories and many old convictions had become sterile and untenable. Read more
Tengo Kawana and Aomame’s Adventures in the World with Two Moons
1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. Audible audiobook edition: 10-25-2011. Narrated by Allison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, and Mark Boyett. 46 hours and 50 minutes. Paper edition: 944 pages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, October 25, 2011.
By Leslie Evans
I first encountered Haruki Murakami’s work only last year when I “read,” as an audiobook, as I do most fiction, his 1985 novel “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” Literature began as oral storytelling and in our technological age it is to an important degree returning to those roots. It is common in works of fantasy for the conventions of the fantastic world, once established, to be presented with a strict faux realism to promote the suspension of disbelief. Murakami employs realism generously, but to a different end, long sequences of mundane detail are embedded in a world rich in surreal elements, whose rules and reasons are often never explained. Read more
The Trotsky Project
By LIONEL ROLFE
Back when I was in high school 50 years ago, I was called a Stalinist by my Trotskyite friend, Les Evans. Les had been a Republican because that’s what his salesman father had been up until I talked Les into a more leftist position. Les’ father was the man Arthur Miller must have had in mind when he wrote “Death of a Salesman.” Anyway, Les made the transition to being an acolyte of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s main accomplice during the Russian Revolution. Les then went on to become an officer in the Socialist Workers Party, an editor in the party’s publishing arm and the author of a scholarly book about China in the 1970s, among others. Read more
Anticapitalism, the Hyperstate, and the Current Crisis
By Leslie Evans
The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, Robert Conquest. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005, 256 pp.
“The Return of an Illusion,” John Gray. The New Republic, June 23, 2011.
The global economic crisis that began in 2008 has revived many salvationist dogmas that we should have thought were well past their shelf life. Most notably in the United States this has been Christian theocracy, but also, to some extent at least, the Marxist notion that the problems of inequality and declining living standards can best be solved by scrapping the whole existing system and abolishing private property tout court. Where the former has secured a commanding influence among Tea Party activists, the latter has been seeking, with a good deal less success, to persuade the Occupy movement campers. Read more
BEN & SARAH: A MURDER IN MISSISSIPPI
Writer Jeff Conine began researching and writing Ben & Sarah: A Murder in Mississippi after discovering that one of his students was the sister of once notorious murderer Ben Darras, who is doing life without parole at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, for his part in the sensational murderous rampage inspired by the movie “Natural Born Killers.” The case was famous in part because megawriter John Grisham was a friend of the first murder victim in the case who was shot and killed by Ben and his cohort Sarah. Grisham campaigned against Oliver Stone for making the movie that inspired Ben and Sarah to commit copycat murders. Eventually Stone and Time-Warner won the First Amendment case after it dragged on in the Louisana courts. Ben and Sarah’s story was the subject of a recent Discovery Channel investigation. But this is Conine’s story as his alter ego, Caine, journeys to the prison to interview Ben. In a parallel universe, he lives out his own descent into the heart of darkness, an adventure that takes him to The Blues Club Ground Zero that in reality is actor Morgan Freeman’s Club in Clarksdale, close to the prison. Boryanabooks is proud to present these excerpts from Conine’s story. Read more
The Memorable Life of Edith Nesbit
A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1987).
By Leslie Evans
Edith Nesbit
Preeminent Edwardian children’s author, prolific novelist and poet, co-founder of the Fabian socialists, friend of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Lord Dunsany, and Noel Coward, Edith Nesbit was to the world at large a figure of conventional if progressive sensibilities. In the relative privacy of her home she was the Bohemian duchess, chain-smoking mother to five children, two of them secretly by her ever-philandering husband’s live-in mistress, searcher for occult mysteries, lover of George Bernard Shaw – and afterward of an ever-younger string of adoring young men. A mesmerizing contrast of apparent acquiescence in the rigid conventionalities of late Victorian and Edwardian England, and quiet moral revolt against them. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
