Ferlinghetti, still roaring at age 94: "Democracy is increasingly defined as successful capitalism"

The thing is, you could say, “I thought you were an anarchist.” The trouble is, we can’t afford anarchism today -– which sounds like a cop-out. But it’s not -– we can’t afford capitalism, either. We can’t afford unrestrained capitalism, just like we can’t afford unrestrained anarchism. In fact, unrestrained capitalism is the ideal of the Free Trade movement and the whole Republican policy in this country. Democracy is increasingly defined as successful capitalism . . . which is not necessarily so. Thinking the unthinkable, you could say that unrestrained capitalism is a form of anarchism! [laughs] Or, you could say that it’s anarchism carried to greedy extremes. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2001, "Real Conversations No. 1")

At an age when most old lions are past roaring, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still rattling the cages. He was interviewed in 2001 as part of a collection called  "Real Conversations, No. 1",  four in-depth interviews centering on art and politics with musicians Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra, and Billy Childish. Ferlinghetti seems to be the odd man out here, but republished ten years on in 2011 by V. Vale's RE/SEARCH publications and considering the tidal wave of events since then, it's astounding how these interviews -- with Ferlinghetti in particular -- still resonate with contemporary issues. 

Depending on your point of view you'll find Rollins, Biafra, and to a certain extent Billy Childish, insightful or exasperating in their politics, but its hard to miss the passion in their arguments. Ferlinghetti, by far, takes the longest view of events past and present, and suggests solutions (some new, some old), sounding the most conservative by comparison. 

Many will consider these four exchanges as nothing more than preaching to the already converted, but in this political season they take on the character of voices crying in the wilderness.

And the Guardian UK reports that Lawrence Ferlinghetti will publish 60 years of his travel journals in 2015. Here's an excerpt from the Guardian article:

... Ferlinghetti, who at 94 is known as one of the last living connections with the Beat generation, sold the journals to Liveright Publishing, part of WW Norton, via Jack Kerouac's literary agent Sterling Lord, the New York Times revealed. Covering 1950 to 2013, and including travel journals and notebooks, the books tell of Ferlinghetti's travels to Cuba during the Castro revolution, to Africa, Haiti and Mexico, to Franco's Spain, Soviet Russia and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, as well as the time he spent in Italy and France.

They will be brought together and published in September next year as Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013), said the New York Times, and will shed "as much light on Mr Ferlinghetti's political passions as on his relationships with the Beat writers", also covering his encounters with major writers such as Ezra Pound and Pablo Neruda.

"It shows a much more political Ferlinghetti, a voice for the poets of dissent," editor Robert Weil told the paper. "It is hardly just the Beats. It's a real engagement with much of the 20th century, although there are portraits of the Beats that we've never seen." The deal also included two out-of-print travel books by the author, 1970's The Mexican Night and 1984's Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre. ...

[Top: 2012 photo of Lawrence Ferlinghetti from Bohemian.com] 

Paul Bowles in the 1970s: "encouraging to even the most offhand inquiry"

Unlikely as it seems, the author of The Sheltering Sky and the author of Huckleberry Finn share memories of summers spent in the small town of Elmira, New York.

The upstate town where Samuel Clemens spent his summers after marrying Jervis Langdon's daughter Olivia (and where he wrote much of Huckleberry Finn) is also the home of Bowles's paternal grandparents. Bowles spent several young summers there, usually en route to visit other family living in Glenora, near the Finger Lakes. Twain, after a lifetime of cigars and comment, was buried in Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery next to Olivia in his hometown wife's family plot.

Much has been written about Bowles the irascible and prickly author, whose public persona was a defense of his own personal need for privacy. Yet he could be welcoming and encouraging to even the most offhand inquiry. Here is an excerpt from David Espey's piece on meeting Bowles in Tangier in the 1970s, after the Peace Corps volunteer wrote the author about the shared experience of days spent in Elmira. To his surprise Bowles sent Espey back a warm invitation to visit him in Tangier.

... But my memories of Bowles go back even further, to the early 1960s, when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the first project to Morocco. At that time, I and my fellow Volunteers were reading with fascination a book about a poor, illiterate Moroccan named Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, an oral autobiography entitled A Life Full of Holes.

In the mid-1970s I went back to the country as a Fulbright lecturer at the national university, Mohammed V, in Rabat. Before I left for Morocco, I made a visit to the Humanities Research Center to read the archives of Bowles and his wife Jane, also a writer of note. What intrigued me in Bowles’s autobiography was his memory of visiting his grandparents in Elmira, N. Y. — which happened to be my hometown and the only world I knew before I went off to Morocco with the Peace Corps. From his description, his grandparents’ house was on Church Street, just a few blocks from where I lived. I wrote to Bowles, mentioned that we had Elmira and Morocco in common, and asked if I could call on him in Tangier. He wrote back a warm letter of invitation, with the comment that he still visited the streets of Elmira, but only in his dreams. ...

We began to talk of Morocco, and he seemed pleased that I knew some Moroccan Arabic. (I had been chatting with his housemaid in the dialect when he came in.) I had read somewhere that The Sheltering Sky was now being used in Peace Corps training for Morocco, and Bowles was incredulous. “What can fiction about ignorant expatriates in the 1940s, set in French Algeria, help in training community development workers?” He agreed that one of his books made from the tapes of Moroccan storytellers might offer more to Volunteers in training.

By the time I met him, Bowles was writing little of his own fiction, and his main literary efforts were translations of Moroccan storytellers — Tangier residents like Mohamed Choukri and Mohamed Mrabet, both of whom I later met. Bowles was fascinated with those parts of Moroccan society which have been little affected by western civilization. In the 1950s, he traveled to remote parts of Morocco to record native Berber music which is slowly dying out, and he deplored the effects of radio and popular music on traditional Moroccan culture.

In his fiction about North Africa, he has written of characters moved by such music to feats of self-mutilation. Thus he has been viewed by some as an enemy of development, a kind of primitivist. My Moroccan colleagues at the university, young professors who had been trained in the U.S. or the U.K., didn’t think much of Bowles. One of them remarked, “What would you think of a Moroccan who lived in the U.S. and presumed to understand American culture because he had spent time with the Apaches?” ...

While it's an interesting literary parlor game to speculate on what the young Bowles would have said to an amused Sam Clemens, it's also interesting that both writers wrote about journeys that twist expectations: Huck Finn and Nigger Jim on the Mississippi, like the traveling couple Port and Kit in the Sahara of Morocco, become entangled in a larger culture they discover they really know precious little about.

From "Yossarian Slept Here," a memoir by Erica Heller: "Should I hire jugglers?"

"Joe who?" my mother asked without guile from her hospital bed. She'd just read a card that had been tucked into a glorious bouquet of freshly delivered flowers.

"Joe Heller," I told her. I was flabbergasted that she didn't know or couldn't guess, but then we were in Sloan-Kettering. It was 1995, she was dying, and although my parents had been married for thirty-eight years, they had had a particularly acrimonious divorce twelve years before and had not spoken since. So perhaps the fact that she was scouring her brain for non-Hellerian Joes she might know was not really all that startling. I reached over for the card and read aloud: "My darling Shirley," it began, "I am so sorry. Joe." I handed it back to her.

When I told her who'd sent the flowers, she spoke slowly and without rancor. "Well, he is a sorry soul," she pronounced wearily, crumpling up the card and dropping it into the yellow plastic trash bin on the floor beside her bed. "But he sent you flowers," I pushed, somehow hoping for more. "They're from Dad. Don't you think they're nice?" I pestered, leading the witness. She stared at me, unruffled and unimpressed. "I get it. I understand," she said. "But really, how wildly would you like me to celebrate this? Should I hire jugglers?" Then she muttered something that I made her repeat twice because it was said so faintly, she closed her eyes and we never spoke of the flowers or of my father again.

By then my mother was bald and terribly frail. After her initial diagnosis a year and a half earlier, I'd moved back in with her at the Apthorp, the apartment building where I'd grown up, decamping from the Upper East Side to properly care for her for as long as was needed.


From the day I moved back in, whether my mother was home or, as she was with increasing frequency, in the hospital, my father was too stubborn and too shaken by the gravity of her illness to call or speak to her. Instead, he called me. Night after night he inquired about her with an array of questions that never varied: Had she eaten? Had she gotten fresh air that day? Was she able to sleep? What were the doctors saying? Had she taken all of her medications and had I remembered to give her all of her vitamins? What was her mood? Every night I answered him, increasingly baffled by his persistent interest and concern, but not, I suspect, as baffled as he himself may have been.

As my mother got sicker, had brain surgery, lung surgery, chemo, and radiation, I could hear how much more difficult it was for him to keep the fear from creeping into his voice. He knew we were going to lose her. It was only a question of when. Officially, they had lost each other many years before, of course, but it was obvious how deeply he was tied to her. They were still uncannily connected.

Even after years of silence, the truth remained that there'd never been anyone who'd known or understood each of them better than the other. There never would be. With Mom's death, this aspect of my father's life would be obliterated, and I sensed that fact very strongly during that time. To me, it could easily be seen lurking just beneath the surface—a surface customarily guarded and closed and, for the most part, ineluctably indecipherable.

Heller (center) in Corsica, 1944

When my father called me those nights he was not the blustery, famous author; the gruff, arrogant big shot; the smug, cocky fellow who sometimes showed up to friends' cocktail parties for the sheer fun of insulting them. He wasn't the caustic, clever master of the verbal arabesque who for years had answered the question "How come you've never written a book as good as Catch-22?" with the sly, Talmudic response to put any other to shame: "Who has?" he'd ask, genuinely wanting to know. He was not bombastic or self-satisfied during those nightly calls. He was only sad. He just wanted to talk, and I let him.

Then, about a month before my mother died, when she had gone into Sloan-Kettering for what seemed as if it might be the last time, one night when Dad called I was simply too exhausted to hold everything back that I'd been wanting to say to him ever since she'd first been diagnosed. I had never found the courage or the proper words to use with him before.

I blurted out that he simply had to communicate with her again now, or he would never forgive himself. "How will you live with yourself if you don't? How will you sleep at night?" I asked in an uncustomarily loud tone. He listened silently, and I could picture him sitting in his lemon-yellow study out in East Hampton where he lived, seething at the very notion of being scolded by his daughter. "Call. Write to her. Send flowers. Do something. There isn't much time left, and if you don't, I think you'll always be sorry," I fumbled, suddenly aware of and horrified by my own stridence. Now, understandably, there was angry silence. When Dad finally spoke, he was petulant, childlike. "I don't need you to tell me what to do," he growled, hanging up before I could respond.

It was the very next day when, sitting in my mother's hospital room, there had been a knock at the door, and an orderly had entered with the exquisite bouquet of flowers for Mom. From Dad.

When I arrived home that night the phone was already ringing. He wanted to know if she'd gotten the flowers and if so, had she liked them. I assured him that they'd arrived and had been magnificent. "Well, what did she say?" he asked with some urgency, and then it was my turn to be silent.

Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, The Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 by Erica Heller is published by Simon & Schuster. Photo from the Wall Street Journal by Everett B. Thomas and courtesy Dan Setzer.

"Man in White": the final years of Mark Twain, superstar

 











Because he is, as one of his contemporaries phrased it, "the Lincoln of our literature," Samuel Clemens holds center stage in American fiction, and Mark Twain, his literary creation, remains our collective conscience on matters ranging from manners to politics. If there is an idea to be said on any topic or controversy, a reader can be assured that Clemens thought it first and Twain expressed it best, if most slyly, in his humor.

Clemens had the luxury of fame, if not always fortune. He was a serial bankrupt, and consequently wrote to the end of his life. He argued in Congress for the extension of copyright law so his daughters would continue to benefit from his work. He wrote a two-volume autobiography at the same time he retained Albert Bigelow Paine to write a similarly larger-than-life biography; Twain wrote so much he directed that some of his writing be withheld for publication over the hundred years after his death. "The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out. I will be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals," he wrote; in 2008 his bushy countenance made the cover of Time magazine with the heading Our Original Superstar.
With an abundance of material Michael Shelden has wisely chosen not to present the whole of Twain, which would be daunting in any single volume. Mark Twain: Man in White (Random House) takes up the last three-and-a-half years of Twain's life when the author presented himself as a stunning apparition, all in white broadcloth. After a long, harrowing period of sadness and mourning for the loss of his wife, daughters, and son, he told his biographer, "I can't bear to put on black clothes again." The public paying their final respects at his funeral found the author arrayed in white, as if he were an angel already ascended to heaven.

The white suits gained the author a visibility that buoyed his spirits and gave the figure of "Mark Twain" an unmistakable image in the public imagination. It burnished his reputation as a wit and a public figure -- he traveled as easily from poolroom to the White House, making friends with stage stars and business tycoons (who could, he found, help him in his financial difficulties). There was no reason to expect that the afterlife would be any different.

The white suit also gave him the opportunity to express himself more freely in his Mark Twain persona. Religion and politics, always good source material for the Clemens pen, became frequent targets at banquets and testimonials in his last years, when admirers mainly gathered to hear Twain speak "and nobody was inclined to contradict what the old boy wanted to say," Shelden writes.

"So after a few preliminary remarks about citizenship, Twain suddenly began to explain why he didn't think America had any business using In God We Trust as a motto: 'There is not a nation in the world which ever put its faith in God. It is a statement made on insufficient evidence. In the unimportant cases of life, perhaps, we do trust in God -- that is, if we rule out the gamblers and burglars, and plumbers, for of course they do not believe in God. If the cholera or black plague should ever come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest of the population would put their trust in the Health Board of the City of New York."

Privately (and in a piece published posthumously, in 1940's Mark Twain in Eruption) Twain railed on in full to his biographer: "It is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter at the narrow gate ... twenty-two ministers put up a prodigious assertion unbacked by any quoted statistics and passed it unanimously in the form of a resolution: the assertion, to wit, that this is a Christian country ... so is hell."


He knew that posthumous publication would allow him to write freely, and he reveled in the chance to enjoy life while he was able. The book is subtitled The Grand Adventure of His Final Years, and Twain was up to mischief until almost the end, making trips to Bermuda, smoking against doctors orders ("I don't care for death, and I do care for smoking," he quipped), still writing furiously. "He was fundamentally young to the day of his death," remarked his daughter Clara; his wife's fond nickname for Clemens was "Youth," and she often addressed him by it.

Like the character of Twain himself, Shelden has a grand time writing about the author -- depression and dark clouds always quickly pass, and the old man is once again back in the public eye nearly until his death on April 21, 1910. The book itself is a friendly and familiar, popular biography, even to its telling of Twain's last and still unpublished work.

Some critics have called the 1909 "Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript" a personal attack on those who he felt had wronged him, "a 400-page rant;" Shelden gleefully writes: "As rants go, it is a gem. It is the kind of thing Twain always did well, but here there is no attempt to hold anything, no effort at balance, and no pretense of civility at the start."

Twain enjoyed his reputation as a traveler and a tale-spinner to the end, and worried that his fame might be passing. Mark Twain: Man in White shows he did everything in his power to ensure his continued recognition -- even to badgering the newspapers at one point to print his obituary, so he himself could read it. (One paper went along. "Here it is," the headline read.) If his "400-page rant" is ever published, Mr. Clemens and Mr. Twain will undoubtedly enjoy the commotion it stirs should it ever see print -- most likely in the 25th century.

"Chinaberry Sidewalks," Rodney Crowell: the real lovesick blues

It's not really fair to call Rodney Crowell just a singer-songwriter. His 35-year career has been part of country and rock music in a way that few can match. His credits include writing songs for performers from EmmyLou Harris to Bob Seger, producing albums for his wife Rosanne Cash, and his own performing career includes thirteen albums.

But before all that, Crowell was a Texas kid whose life was "folksy but complicated," as one reviewer of Chinaberry Sidewalks, his 2011 autobiography, put it. Crowell had a set of parents who provided him with much of the material for a lifetime of country songs. His funny but achingly-told tales have an edge that can't disguise a young man's confusion and hurt. Addie Cauzette and J.W. Crowell's relationship was wild and got wilder, in one of Crowell's own phrases, "from the git-go."

In an early mix of Hollywood matinee-bravery and undeniable scene-stealing at the age of five, Rodney grabbed a gun to break up one alcohol-fueled party -- New Years 1955 be damned. The young gunslinger may not have had the mechanics of marksmanship down but he knew how to make an entrance. As any musician can tell you, that counts for one hell of an impression. Here's an excerpt:

...My decision to fish the .22 from the closet wasn't made lightly. To retrieve the gun meant entering the room alone, a chilling prospect even in broad daylight. But sensing the storm gathering behind the rising levels of alcohol, I figured those dark corners were no match for what would happen if the adults out there started screwing each other.

Aside from enhancing the gravity of my announcement that it was time to go home, I had no intention of using the gun. Based loosely on the Saturday matinees I'd seen at the Navaway Theater, where the good guy got the bad guy's attention by wielding a six-shooter full of silver bullets, my plan required the gun as a prop.

Hank Williams was singing "Lovesick Blues" when I stepped into the living room armed with my father's rifle. Dorothy Lawrence was the first to notice my arrival. "My Lord, he's got a gun!" she called out, a bit less dramatically than I'd have liked but compelling nonetheless. The focus of attention shifted instantly in my direction, and having all eyes on me sent a surge of power through my nervous system that left my mind a small blank canvas. From there, the script unraveled.

It was lack of preparation for this pivotal moment that provoked two serious blunders: one, inadvertently disengaging the thumb-activated safety on the rifle; two, pointing it at my father and pulling the trigger. The bullet exploded into the linoleum floor less than a foot from where Dorothy stood. "Lovesick Blues" came to a screeching halt, and my father pounced on me like he was Batman on pep pills. Sensing his first impulse was to beat me with the butt of the rifle, I braced myself for the worst. Instead, he hugged me so close to his heart that even through the ringing in my ears I could hear it pounding. Being squeezed so hard that I could barely breathe gave me a feeling of comfort. My peacekeeping mission was complete. There would be no fighting that night.

Shocking people sober and sending them home thankful to be alive is one way to break up a party. Although visibly shaken, my parents' friends showed no ill feelings. Cookie Chastain said she knew I was "a good boy and wouldn't hurt a flea." Pete Conn reckoned I "knew not to play with no more loaded guns." Doc Lawrence went as far as making a joke about my aim being so bad that I was "lucky not to have shot [my] dang pecker off." Hushed exits, however, told the story of how they really felt. ...

"Dreadful": an excerpt from the biography of John Horne Burns by David Margolick

In the current national mood of acceptance for gay marriage, and the resulting state-by-state ratification of legal status for same-sex relationships, it may be difficult to imagine the hiding and secrecy that once was the norm for homosexuals in 20th-century America. This was especially true in the military, where long-held ideas required that gay and lesbian service members hide or suppress their sexuality, only recently to be addressed in the repeal of the military's so-called "don't ask, don't tell" rules enacted in the 1990s.

David Margolick has written a new biography of John Horne Burns focusing attention on Burns's  episodic 1947 novel of war-time portraits, The Gallery. When the novel was published it gathered strong praise among critics and writers from Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos  to Hemingway, who wrote a friend that the book was "wonderfully written." One aspect of the novel -- bold for the times -- was Horne's depiction of gay life, which few contemporary reviews mentioned, although the Time magazine reviewer noted the scenes of "an evening spent in a homosexuals’ hangout.” 

A lengthy recent New York Times extract from Margolick's new biography refers to Burns in its headline as "the great gay novelist you've never heard of," but it's clear that Burns -- who never expressly hid his homosexuality -- was neither a good fit in the literary world of post-war America nor comfortable in it. He died, without conclusive explanation, in 1953 at the age of 36 while traveling in Europe with his partner, which prompted rounds of curious speculation. His death was a suspected cerebral hemorrhage brought on by alcoholism, but others suggested suicide due to depression, a failed affair, or even murder. 

Some of the response was in keeping with Burns's own literary-misfit personality: one female acquaintance laughed at the cause of a cerebral hemorrhage and suggested "yes, a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a bullet in his brain." From the book Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press):

...“The Gallery” was actually his ninth novel; he wrote one pretty much every summer, first at Andover, then at Harvard, then at Loomis, books that even his friends conceded were unpublishable — nasty, nihilistic and narcissistic things populated with characters his own agent once called “stinkers.” But the war had touched and humanized Burns, changing his outlook, tone and style. He told a friend that he had shed his ungenügender Selbstsucht — a term he would have learned from Goethe and Brahms, meaning unsatisfying egotism or insatiable self-love — and come, at long last, to care about someone besides himself. 

His new war novel wasn’t really a novel at all. It consisted, instead, of nine portraits, alternately caustic and sympathetic but all keenly observed — primarily of American soldiers, but also of two Italian women — and eight “promenades”: personal reflections of an anonymous, Burns-like G.I. wandering from one image and place in North Africa and Italy to another, just as Burns himself had done. ... 

Like a vast majority of G.I.’s, Burns never saw combat: thanks to his fluent Italian (and German and French), he was channeled into military intelligence, which for him meant reading and censoring the letters of Italy’s captured, homesick soldiers. The only weapon Burns ever wielded was an X-acto knife. But whether in Casablanca, Algiers or Naples, he witnessed, then chronicled, first in his letters home and then in his novel, something else: as he put it to a friend, “the effects of war after the wedge has gone through and left nothing but splinters and pain.” ... 

Undoubtedly the book’s most remarkable portrait is of Momma, the proprietress of the Galleria’s gay bar, where, every day but Sunday from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., gay soldiers from every branch of the Grand Alliance gather to imbibe and cruise and sometimes score. Whether Momma’s Bar ever really existed or was simply Burns’s earnest dream is unclear and, in a way, irrelevant: for someone as evasive about his own sexuality as a gay man of his generation had to be — ostentatiously “dating” and pretending periodically to have a fiancée — it was more than a startlingly ringing endorsement of gay culture; it was an act of enormous and atypical, almost inexplicable, courage. 

The men in the gallery of gays (and, with only a couple of exceptions, they are all men) in “The Gallery” are alternately lonely, proud, unpleasant, sensitive, officious, effeminate, macho, offensive and lovable; in other words, reasonably normal, rather than the suicidal freaks and criminals that had populated American literature, gay and straight, up to then. And they are all in uniform at a time in the history of the United States military when, officially at least, they were not allowed and did not exist. ...

Politics, censorship and banned books: "intolerance ... is changing the fabric of America"

In America, issues of politics and censorship play an increasingly large role in determining what facts readers learn about events. From the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times -- leaked by Daniel Ellsberg -- to the jailing of of Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks case, government agencies claim issues of national security to keep sensitive and allegedly damaging information from being released while Individual rights remain at risk.

Censorship can affect mass-market publication, too, as in the case of Operation Dark Heart (see below). At one point the Defense Department threatened to buy up all copies of the book in order to prevent it from reaching bookstores; St. Martin's Press agreed to a partial compromise -- but one that involves redacting (blacking out) classified text.

At the Banned Books site there is a long list of censored and banned titles, many of which were challenged by American government agencies. Writers using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain material have been questioned and refused access. Publishers have long fought such pre-publication censorship. In one case (Fair Game, the Valerie Plame book) the outed C.I.A. operative found a way around government censorship: she published the redacted text and amended an afterward by a second writer, who reveals the public record of all the redacted material.

"We believe attempts to censor ideas to which we have access--whether in books, magazines, plays, works of art, television, movies or song--are not simply isolated instances of harassment by diverse special-interest groups. Rather they are part of a growing pattern of increasing intolerance which is changing the fabric of America. ... Censorship cannot eliminate evil. It can only kill freedom. We believe Americans have the right to buy, stores have the right to sell, authors have the right to write and publishers have the right to publish Constitutionally-protected material. Period."

(Excerpt from a letter to 28 newspapers, signed by Ed Morrow, president, American Booksellers Assn. and Harry Hoffman, president, Walden Book Co., Inc., 1990).

Here's a brief list of titles which have been under investigation by government agencies, taken from the Banned Books site:

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (2007) Written by Valerie Plame Wilson, who claims her cover was intentionally disclosed by the Bush administration. Portions of Fair Game are blacked-out and indicate, say the publishers, places where the CIA has demanded redactions. The extensive afterword by reporter Laura Rozen, drawn from interviews and the public record, is included to provide context to Plame Wilson's story.

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971) by Mike Royko. A Ridgefield, CT school board in 1972 banned this book from the high school reading list, claiming it "downgrades police departments."

The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974) by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. The CIA obtained a court injunction against this book's publication stating the author, a former CIA employee, violated his contract which states that he cannot write about the CIA without the agency's approval. First amendment activists opposed this ruling, "raising the question of whether a citizen can sign away his First Amendment rights." After prolonged litigation, the CIA succeeded in having 168 passages deleted.

Deadly Deceits (My 25 Years in the CIA) (1983) by Ralph McGheehee. The CIA delayed the publication of this book for three years, objecting to 397 passages, even though much of what the author wrote about was already public knowledge.

Freedom and Order (1966) by Henry Steele Commager. The U.S. Information Agency had this book banned from its overseas libraries because of its condemnation of American policies in Vietnam.

Operation Dark Heart (2010): On Friday, August 13, 2010, just as St. Martin’s Press was readying its initial shipment of Operation Dark Heart, the Department of Defense expressed concern that its publication could cause damage to U.S. national security. The publication of the initial edition was canceled. However, after consulting with the author, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin's Press agreed to incorporate some of the government’s changes, which includes redacting classified text, into a revised edition.

Pentagon Papers (1971) Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, this 3,000-page history of U.S. involvement in Indochina was kept a secret even from the Johnson administration and banned from publication by court order. The most damaging revelations in the papers revealed that four administrations, from Truman to Johnson, had misled and lied to the public regarding their intentions. The New York Times was printing portions of it when the order to stop publication came down. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision and Bantam proceeded to publish a paperback edition. Daniel Ellsberg, who originally leaked the document to the Times in 1971, said at the end of 2010 that “every attack now made on WikiLeaks and JulianAssange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

"Writers Gone Wild" (Bill Peschel): Mailer, going a few rounds with the muse

A writer's life: finding inspiration in oak-paneled rooms, vistas overlooking inspiring views, sharing witty conversation with one's peers. And, of course, brawling.

The story between the covers of a book may only tell half the tale of its author's struggles to get his point across. Many times this confusion and misunderstanding can come from many directions: editors, publishers, critics, friends -- and enemies -- can change the course of literary history as surely as drink, drugs, sex, and other obsessions in a writer's life.

Much contemporary biography has become studies in pathology, as some critics have noted not unfairly. Still it is fascinating to hear some of the stories behind the words, if only to make the reader marvel that the completed novel got written at all.

Here, for example, is a brief excerpt about the outside-the-ring pugilistic career of Norman Mailer, fromWriters Gone Wild, a compendium of stories about the less-sedate aspects of the writing life by Bill Peschel.

Norman Mailer, between rounds

Highlight Reel

Norman Mailer was as prolific with his fists as he was with his opinions. Here are some of his classic bouts:

* Jerry Leiber: In 1967, at the popular restaurant Elaine’s, Mailer attacked the songwriter from behind and got kicked into a wall, smashing the plaster. Mailer tried to eye-gouge Leiber and a waiter did the same for Mailer. Elaine herself broke up the fight by threatening to bar Leiber if he knocked out Mailer.

* Bruce Jay Friedman: The novelist and screenwriter was on the receiving end of a Mailer head butt after he messed up Norman’s hair at a party in 1968. As Friedman got in his car, Mailer unleashed his fury on the car, hammering it several times. Friedman got out, took a head-butt to the chest, and threw a punch. They were separated again, and Friedman drove off with Mailer again punching the windows .

* Rip Torn: As part of an improvised scene in Mailer’s 1970 movie “Maidstone,” Torn nearly brained the director and star with a hammer, wrestled him to the ground and choked him. Mailer bit off part of Torn’s ear and fought back until they were separated by Mailer’s fourth wife, Beverly, and his children.

* Gore Vidal I: After Vidal compared Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex” to “three days of menstrual flow” in 1971, Mailer head butted him in the green room of “The Dick Cavett Show.”

* Gore Vidal II: At a New York party in 1977, Mailer threw a drink and then knocked Vidal to the floor. Vidal got the last word, however: “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.”

"How to Wreck a Nice Beach," Dave Tompkins: the vocoder speaks

"When I talk to the Secretary of State, he better soundlike the Secretary of State." 
(Lyndon Johnson)

That Presidential frustration with newfangled technology was understandable, way back in the 1960s. In the 21st century the vocoder -- that little black box on the cover, above -- has altered the way most of us regard recorded music and basic speech. As with many inventions gone far afield from their original purpose, the vocoder technology was first intended as a means of disguising the human voice for military purposes. Today we hear the altered human voice every day, and have grown accustomed to it in its million inflections.

The vocoder's alien-sounding tones have saturated music, telecommunications, and most of pop culture: we can all get an instant laugh duplicating the disembodied vocoder voice of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. FDR, JFK, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, Henry Kissinger, Walter/Wendy Carlos and Winston Churchill have all had their own close encounters with the machine, which Bell Labs invented in 1928.

How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks (Stop Smiling Books/Melville House Publishing) is a tech geek's wild ride through Dave Tompkins's ten-year research and interviews, taking tangent at every opportunity to weave together the improbable uses and history of this one technological wonder. Like most of the inescapable gadgets that come to permeate popular culture the vocoder is unrecognizable from its original form, much like the defense-industry origins of what became the internet which followed it in the 1940s.

How to Wreck a Nice Beach (the title is a phonetic play on the human ear's ability to recognize meaning in speech even in distorted form) is probably more history and detail than a casual reader might need, and Tompkins's writing style is that particular style of rock-music writing, the pop-baroque: Homer Dudley "invented the vocoder when he realized his mouth was a radio station while flat on his back in a Manhattan hospital bed, eyes on the ceiling, a goldfish as his witness."

Behind the fireworks on the page there is an obsessive's amount of research. Music fans of a certain tech bent will be interested in the scope of Tompkins' interviews from Afrika Bambaataa, to Laurie Anderson, to Holger Czukay of the group Can. These are not household names to casual pop listeners, and the book will have a built-in cult appeal, but it is surprising to discover a few omissions. Stevie Wonder is one. Tompkins admits his inability to get an interview with Georgio Moroder gave him dreams.

And there were others: "The head of the A/V department at the Bavarian insane asylum that played whispering vocoder water drops for patients while they slept. Them, Solzhenitsyn, Roger Troutman, and the guy who intercepted those Allied transmissions who thought they were bee frequencies and sent them back into the ionosphere as a jamming frequency."

In interviews for the book, Tompkins (a writer for Vibe, the Village Voice and The Wire) likes to scatter his literary references wide and drop time-space continuum non-sequiturs on the unsuspecting reader, in that disquieting way of the truly inspired (or obsessed, depending on one's point of view):

"Yeah. Lovecraft's stuff was so unspeakably squishy to read when you're young. There are really crazy sentences in there. I remember my brother had his copy of The Necronomicon inside a black briefcase with the issue ofPenthouse where Kris Kristofferson's with this Cher look-alike in various positions. So I remember sneaking under my brother's bed, and there's thePenthouse and there's the Necronomicon, and there's Lovecraft's "Tale of the Cthulhu Mythos" and thinking, alright, when's mom coming home?

And I thought that was Cher all along, I believe, until I realized she just had the Cher hair."

The SIGSALY WW II vocoder system with turntables (1945).

"Oh, you had something to tell me about the U.S. Open ..." the interviewer then prompts weakly, maybe realizing it would be best to plunge ahead rather than attempt to parse these wobbly metaphysics. Reading the book is similarly fun and distracting at the same time, as Tompkins' style is something the reader accepts after a while -- or either puts away in frustration.

Over the long haul the book takes on exhausting dimensions (ten years of research into one corner of pop culture is a long time; the writing may be fun, but the writer often loses focus in that what was I saying? style as he layers on the stories). But the dedicated reader/gadget fan will hang in there. Like a spy novel there are unexpected connections throughout the book.

If there are no real conspiracies, no unexpected dark secrets to discover about the vocoder or its uses, the facts themselves pile up to make an intriguing story. (Neil Young was sued by an unhappy Geffen Records after he delivered the album Trans, in which his vocals were vocoded; the record label claimed he didn't sound like himself.) At the very least, having read How To Wreck a Nice Beach will bring a sly smile the next time I choose between Kathy or Alex, Bad News, Hysterical or Deranged as a text-reading voice option.

From "Burroughs In the Bunker and Out," Marc Olmsted

 William S. Burroughs & Marc Olmsted,

from Burroughs on Bowery (1978)

The historiography of William Burroughs has entered an elemental half-life, sustaining an entire writerly sub-culture by itself since the cat-daddy of beat-noir disappeared from the scene. What Burroughs himself would think of all this is a guessing game -- although it would be a promising bet he would offer his cantankerous opinion to anyone who might listen.

While Uncle Bill is busy now in another Bunker tending his cats, it's instructive to listen to the stories of those who interacted with Burroughs as an artist. Reputations, especially cultivated ones, are funny things: beyond the publicity it's still about the ideas. And, of course, ideas are not responsible for what happens to them.

At this remove, the life of William Burroughs has become an antidote to the church of Elvis: rock-and-roll may have been thoroughly subsumed by the culture, but drug addiction remains a mess of creative impulses without a hero. Excepting, of course, one's self: as a bad boy, Burroughs was his his own best creation. 

Self-creation is an unbeatable American fixation for bad boys: Marc Olmsted -- as one description puts it -- "is a writer who did some time in prison, got straight while staying gay and writes poetry while making the world a better place." In 2007 he blogged as The Trash Whisperer, picking up trash near Los Feliz, California and writing about it online. 

Before that -- in the 1970s -- he was a film student at San Francisco State, where he suggested making a film to Burroughs, and Burroughs agreed to participation and a subsequent interview; yet creativity, even with the best intentions, seldom runs smooth -- a lesson Olmsted learned in the process. Here's an excerpt from Olmsted's piece online at Rusty Truck, called "Burroughs in the Bunker and Out:"

... I told Burroughs that I had a dream about him where his face was covered with tattoos like Quequeg in Moby Dick, and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt like Hunter S. Thompson, and also looked like a sort of half-Thompson, which was not a stretch.  In the dream, he told me he was a master of Peruvian magic.  Burroughs didn’t seem to like the Thompson part, scowling slightly as I told it, but then leaned forward and said, “I am a master of Peruvian magic, my dear.”  At another point he just leaned on his hands and gazed at me, openly appreciative.   I felt like a young boy at the swimming hole – which was slightly unnerving coming from Burroughs.

I told Burroughs about this great sci fi movie I had seen that reminded me of his work, They Came From Within, where man-made parasites (looking like a cross between a penis and a bloody shit) turned you into an insatiable sexual zombie.  It was actually David Cronenberg’s first feature, who would later make Naked Lunch some 15 years later.

Burroughs presented me with a signed copy of a recent chapbook.  As we began slowly gathering ourselves to leave, I had the brainstorm to use Burroughs as the subject for a rephotography film experiment I was considering.  I talked to James Grauerholz out of Bill’s earshot and asked what he thought.  James went off to Bill and came back with a positive from Bill.  We’d meet for breakfast at a diner the next day and shoot Bill walking around the neighborhood.

So the next morning, I went to the diner and got to bring old pal Richard Modiano (who lived in NYC then), previously denied when I attempted to wrangle him an invitation to the Bunker from Allen.  So we were both quite happy about this new development.  Besides my Bauer Super 8, I was also armed with a primitive cassette tape recorder.

We met at the breakfast joint, and Bill was considerably more reserved, stiff and looked a little hungover.  Still, he was friendly in an otherworldly sort of way.  He was also most definitely a good sport.

I turned on the cassette player, thinking I’d use it for background to the film.  Our discussion turned to film itself, and I made some mention of Godard’s maxim that every camera movement was a moral statement.

“To move the camera or not to move the camera,” said Bill.  “Right,” I answered.  It turned out to be the only remotely legible section of the entire tape, which was mostly a cacophony of restaurant background noise.  I later used these two sentences as a loop for the film, though there were only a few mortals who could recognize the words.  Basically, Bill then took a walk around the neighborhood and I filmed him.

Later I intercut the then-rephotographed footage with fragments shot off the TV from Monster Zero, From Russia with Love and White Heat.  I also shot some peep show gay porn right off its rear-projected screen where fellow film student Craig Baldwin worked.  Some cruising cat wanted to join me in the booth.  I declined.

The San Francisco State University Film Department had this device where you spooled the Super 8 through and it would show up as a TV image, a sort of pre-VCR device the industrial world used that would allow cheap screenings of Super 8 training films.  I had been introduced to this device by Craig (he was later to make the great Tribulation ’99), because it allowed all kinds of crude rephotography off the TV screen, going in for close-ups on what was original a full shot, and filming 2nd and 3rd generations of Super 8 footage. Craig had a big influence, cementing an interest in found footage and deconstruction of image.  Craig lived in this big ramshackle house on Andover in the Mission.  It would eventually be condemned, with problems like a giant broken hole in the bathroom floor into the apartment below, covered with a sheet of plywood.

Blue first Burroughs walk?

saucer-ray-crowd water

gun window

fence

saucer take-off

walk

flare

spider face-end

– found poem of my own scribbles: how to edit Burroughs on Bowery.

I finished the work print in my graduate film production class, having a terrible contest of wills with instructor-filmmaker Karen Holmes.  She gave me a C in the class and a D in the one unit lab, basically because I wouldn’t do what she said.  I had been used to a great deal more freedom & empathy in my undergraduate years.   They were the worst grades of my entire film school career. ...

Through these difficulties, Olmsted persevered: He completed Burroughs on Bowery and then American Mutant, with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary. His website is a kaleidoscope of reinventions, from punk musician to Buddhist student to filmmaker.  

Burroughs on Bowery, described by Olmsted here as a student film project, would be hard to distinguish the writer beyond the projected image and intercut randomness: still, as WSB once wrote, "you have to take a broad, general view of things." Olmsted is quoted in an interview as saying Burroughs "laughed ... when I showed it to him in 1978.  Then he said, “Great movie, Marc,” after that funny evil, closed-mouth mmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm laugh throughout the 4 minute movie." 
  
It's a safe bet Burroughs never had to get a passing grade from a demanding film instructor, though: "The movie was HATED by my film school, San Francisco State University.  They voted not to include it in the Film Finals of that year."