moon traveller herald

Why I like Shadow Ticket - For a Wisconsin guy who lived in Milwaukee for two years, the Wisconsin part of this book is a big treat. Been reading Thomas Pynchon since V [actually, before that, the short story Entropy] and this book is just a thrill. It starts with an explosion ["a pineapple" in the 20s dialect] near the Lake. Eventually, a submarine is discovered in the Lake - an WWI Austro-Hungarian job that is running rum]. It’s always back to the Lake, the beer, the cheese and the Mob. The Milwaukee Mob appears in the first words of this book. This mob was a Franchise Outlet for the more prestigious Chicago operation…but if they got you, that distinguishment on the pecking ladder of crime meant little difference.   I like what I will call word flow, somewhat like stream of consciousness, most vividly represented by the Irish Modernist James Joyce. Thomas Pynchon is among few authors capable of such composition; in his manner, a novel can b...

i. Kicking around our pad like many others is a paperback copy of 1984. For the heck of it in the doctor’s waiting room this week I read the Afterword there, written by Erich Fromm. Fromm was a shrink who shrunk from Freud’s more strident theories on human behavior, theorizing that ‘freedom’ was a more essential part of the human complex than Siggy said. [Truth Be Told [TBT]:I confused Erich Hoffer with Eric Fromm, as they both found a spot in the same cell in my brain… Hoffer was the author of The True Believer, a look at doctrinal Soviet-era communism, and was known as the Longshoreman Philosopher. But Google set me right, and now I put Fromm and Hoffer into different brain cells. David Hofstetter was even more helpful in this.] Fromm in Afterword places 1984 as chief among Dystopian works…tho the term he uses in 1961 is ‘negative utopia’. Utopian works beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, writes Fromm, build on a trust in Progress that arose as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaiss...

At the heart of Beat writing is the idea that spontaneity is crucial in expression. The method is best summarized in Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” – featuring such an apothegm as “Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind” and “Blow as deep as you want to blow.” The immediate guide for Kerouac was jazz, most especially the bebop form led forward by Charlie Parker. But among the other influential jazz players there were many others that Kerouac followed. And among these was Lee Konitz, vaunted alto saxophonist who passed away last week at 92 in New York, from complications of Covid-19 and pneumonia. Although the brutal coronavirus caught up with him, Konitz was truly a survivor, one who followed his own beacon across a cavalcade of styles of jazz, continuing to play until very recently. His connection to Kerouac is enduringly important. Born in Chicago, Konitz as a lad was inspired by Benny Goodman. He went on to play with the Claude Thornhill orchestra, Stan Kento...

Theodore Roosevelt's legacy has risen and fallen several times since his death in 1919. Be that as it may, his work was great enough to get him a placed on Mount Rushmore along with our greatest presidents - being the only one from the 20th century so enthroned. Even after all these intervening ears, only cousin Franklin Roosevelt has vied with Theodore Roosevelt for confirmation in the pantheon presidential beyond Rushmore. The book at hand here considers a Roosevelt who had to leave the Republican Party that had quickly started to undo progressive measures Roosevelt had enacted after h, following the near equivalent of two terms, left the White House. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) lived a god-awful long time ago, but still is figure of interest. He is of special interest to dyed in the wool history buffs and some politically obsessed others. From wealth but a Progressive at heart, he tried to divert the Republican Party from kowtowing to big capitalist interests. It is the ...

John Updike who could turn a sentence like very few died Tuesday north of Boston. I was not a big Updike head - never got through one of his novels - but like many literate micks in this neck of the woods-o in the late 20th century I read and admired his poetry, short stories and literary criticism, especially in the New Yorker and New York Review of Books. He was not like more favorite fellow writers Mailer and Kerouac. He strove as said in NYT Obit for a burgherly life. No harm, no foul. The threads of his prose were poetic zephyrs - like larks a'wing. Moon Traveller Herald once did write about Updike. It was just when some people were beginning to grok on the possibility that Google was nigh on a Golden Calf. Where is all this algortighmic parsing and free text borrowing going? He pegged aptly the problem with the new Digital Google Golem to its bloody wall of techno pap. He sang the praise of the physical book, the oily old book store and reminded the Google-eyed usurpers of th...

Last year saw release of the beat manuscript legend known as “And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks,” a book about Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer composed by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in their early writing days [circa 1945]. But that is not what I came here to talk about - Boston sports writer George Kimball does a real good job on the h'ippo' book in the Nov 8 issue of the Boston Phoenix in a piece entitled Back Beat ; I will take another tact. I am here to write about a short story by Kerouac called “cityCityCITY” . This is a Kerouac story stylistically unlike any of his others. In a beat buff blindfold test, I’d bet most people would guess that William Burroughs wrote it. Yes, stylistically it is closely related to the Missourian’s work. Kerouac saw this as another possible collaboration with Burroughs Thought it might outdo Mutiny on the Bounty, as a novelistic collaboration. As much as 'The Hippos', and available in anthologies for a while, i...

There I am in the Rocket Garden. Take a picture of a family taking a picture in front of a Saturn. Mailer was here 29 years ago to cover the launch to the Moon, Jules - blinded by the Sun, entranced by the alligators, stymied some as he tried to get the story from the Waspy Nasa of the day - another big anniversary is a year away, and here I am too. Mailer is dead in the last year. Here I am. Coming down here, knowing where I was going, reading Of a Fire on the Moon - [and smartly too, 2001 was showing on the Orlando TV] - thinking back to how the Moon quest was part and parcel of my youth - seeing how this Mailer piece, mere journalism at the time, for lucre at that, resonates like few tomes on tech - and seeing how the Space program had left its mark on the present day - no where more clearly than at the airport - with droning Midwest voice messages - with moving sidewalks and coolly alienated populace - with birds on tarpaulins. Red light glow of National Rental Car Pontiac dashboa...