Satori In Paris - Jack Kerouac

 SATORI IN PARIS - JACK KEROUAC

Satori In Paris, or 'what I did on my holidays', by Jack Kerouac. Written in 1966, that's nine years after the publication of On The Road and just three years before Kerouac's passing. It's a memoir, essentially, of Kerouac's trip to France in search of his ancestors, what with him being French Canadian and wanting to trace his roots. 'Satori' is the Japanese word for 'sudden illumination', 'sudden awakening', or simply 'kick in the eye'.

To be truthful, it's unclear what his 'sudden illumination' was or when precisely during his ten days in France did it take place because when he's not quaffing cognac he's mostly being given the runaround by all the locals he's meeting. For most of his time there he's also wet from the rain and he even manages to lose his suitcase by missing the aeroplane it's been loaded on to. His stay in France is more akin, in fact, to Withnail And I, particularly the part when they plea for help from the farmer after telling him they've "come on holiday by accident".

There are obvious signs in Satori In Paris that Kerouac is on a decline and that he feels the world is set against him. His only joy and his only solace, it seems, is found in drinking. And of course, that's how he died, wasn't it? From cirrhosis of the liver due to alcohol abuse.

At the time of writing Satori In Paris, Kerouac was world famous though it doesn't seem to have done him much good or to have been of any use. He obviously has enough money to fly to France and to travel around a bit by train and taxi but he's still counting his pennies because he's not a wealthy man in the slightest. His fame back then only really stretched to younger generations which meant that to older people in France he was just some American tourist who by some freak of nature happened to speak French. Again, this would probably have been belittling to Kerouac, accentuated by him being unable to even get to meet his French publishers for a business chat as they're all 'out to lunch'.

Satori In Paris is a quick and easy read. It's a postcard from the edge. It's Kerouac as a Reuters war correspondent reporting that all is not well. There's movement on the borders and trouble in the hills, and Kerouac is letting us know that he's running out of tape. This is Kerouac drowning, not waving.

John Serpico

Tearing Down The Streets - Adventures In Urban Anarchy - Jeff Ferrell

 TEARING DOWN THE STREETS -

ADVENTURES IN URBAN ANARCHY -

JEFF FERRELL

There is much that Americans get right and that they fully understand but there are also some things that Americans just have no understanding of at all and so get totally wrong. Irony is the classic example of course but also certain aspects of culture and politics - especially when it comes to British culture and politics. Jeff Ferrell, author of Tearing Down The Streets - Adventures In Urban Anarchy is American. In fact (at the time of writing this book at least) he's a Professor of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. Hold your horses for a moment though and don't with a roll of your eyes instantly dismiss this because to be fair, Ferrell's heart is in the right place and his intentions are honourable. He's been doing some thinking and researching the subject, and has come to the conclusion that our cities and urban areas are being compromised, homogenized, sanitized and 'Disneyfied'. Or to put it another way: gentrified.

This is pretty self-evident and no great revelation of course, but the question that it begs is whether it's a good or a bad thing? The answer - as with most things in life, really - is all dependent upon what side of the fence you're sitting. If money is your god and you're fully invested in the capitalist system and the societies it creates, unable or unwilling to think outside the box, then gentrification is alright. For sure, you might like things to be a bit edgy and you like a bit of Banksy but no-one wants to live in a slum and run a gauntlet of muggers every time you go to a cashpoint.

If, however, you have no real investment in capitalist society and even such a thing as getting on the property ladder is a dream too far, then gentrification doesn't really have a lot to offer. In fact, gentrification is going to be set against you. It's going to exclude you and push you further to the sidelines because you have nothing to offer it and it has nothing to offer you. You are surplus to requirement.

Though probably enjoying some privileges that come with being a professor at Northern Arizona University (and there's nothing wrong with that, I might add), Jeff Ferrell is on the side of the surplus people. Not only this, he's also on the side of those who seek to challenge if not destroy the authoritarian, corporate, exclusionary model of community that gentrification enables. He's on the side, even, of the Mikhail Bakunin epithet that says the passion for destruction is a creative passion.

Tearing Down The Streets records a potted history of opposition to spatial control. A history of those who in the author's eyes have fought back against the regulation and closure of public space. It's a long, winding path that's very fractured and ultimately unfinished, with no clear starting date and no clear end point. For all that, however, Ferrell proffers a suggested starting point of 1871 and the Paris Commune, which is actually a pretty good call. From there he mostly focusses on America, going from The Wobblies, Emma Goldman, Jack Kerouac and so on, right up to his own activist lifestyle as a busking, bike-riding, graffiti artist.

The main portion of Ferrell's book is set around his own activities and activist scenes he's been directly involved with such as Critical Mass, pirate radio and graffiti art during the 1990s. Noticeable by its absence is any mention of Seattle 1999 and the mass protests that took place there against the World Trade Organization but that's because he says he didn't go. But also noticeable by its absence is any criticism of any of the things he's been involved with or even any post-mortem analysis of it all.

When writing about Reclaim The Streets, I'd hazard a guess he wasn't there in England either and he's picked-up all his information from the Internet because some of what he's written isn't quite true. It's an example also of (being American) failing to understand British culture and politics though this is exemplified each time he mentions the Sex Pistols as if they were some hardcore anarchist gang espousing hardcore anarchist ideology. The Clash as well to some extent.

It's always been a bit unclear as to how the Pistols were perceived in America because even though they famously did the tour there that ultimately led to their demise, the nuance and even the irony of the Pistols would have been somewhat twice-removed and lost in translation, buried under the hype and the shock horror headlines. For sure, the Pistols were one of the greatest rock'n'roll bands of all time but even more than this they were an idea trying to describe a feeling. They were a vibe. And as Johnny Rotten once said of Anarchy In The UK, anyone who doesn't understand that (song), doesn't understand anything. 

Tearing Down The Streets is good but it's not brilliant, but being just 'good' isn't quite good enough. The stuff of which Ferrell writes is of some importance, and it deserves and demands better. If anyone is going to write a book about it with full annotations and a comprehensive index like this one, then I'd like them to be bringing something to the table so as to try and add to it all. Rather than simply record (and wrongly in parts) a history, I'd like them to try and bring forward the ideas that things like punk and Reclaim The Streets were once exploring. I'd like them to show a bit more vitality. A bit more imagination. As the Bob Hoskins gangster character in The Long Good Friday says to the American Mafia representatives: I'd like them to contribute with 'something a little bit more than a hot dog. Know what I mean?'

John Serpico

Masters Of Time - A E van Vogt

 MASTERS OF TIME - A E VAN VOGT

Do you know on 'Flying Ant Day' when ants swarm and seagulls feast upon them, and the ants  supposedly make the seagulls drunk? In a very roundabout way, if you can imagine what a seagull drunk on ants might feel like, then that's how it is reading A E van Vogt. I'm not well versed when it comes to science fiction so I don't know if this effect is unique to van Vogt or if it's something that other writers within that same genre are also capable of? Philip K Dick perhaps? Brian Aldiss? Time will tell once I get around to ploughing through their respective canons, along with exploring the works of other science fiction writers of course.

In the meantime, there's Masters Of Time, by A E van Vogt that I've just read which is quite a stupid book, actually. Just overly fantastical and an almost child-like flight of imagination. To pause a moment, however, and to consider it seriously, it is on a certain level a very strangely written book. It's disorientating. It's not so much the actual story that is of any note but the technique in which it's written. It's not the meaning, it's not the conclusion, it's not the plot. It's the process.

When it comes to trying to explain what Masters Of Time is about, there's very little point but to say it's disjointed and discombobulated. In the way it jumps from one set-piece to another, there's a similarity with Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, as in Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim finding himself one moment in Dresden during World War Two and the next moment finding himself as a zoo exhibit on the planet Trafalmadore. There's also an element of Michel Faber's Under The Skin in there, in regard to men being kidnapped and reduced to fodder.

The really interesting thing about it, however, is the fact it was written in 1942. Think about it. The idea of going to the moon was still but an impossible dream. The Manhattan Project that would deliver the atomic bomb was not even a glint in Oppenheimer's eye. So for someone like A E van Vogt to be churning out stuff like Masters Of Time in pulp fiction form is pretty impressive, even if the results are somewhat befuddling. 

John Serpico

Monkey Planet - Pierre Boulle

 MONKEY PLANET - PIERRE BOULLE

A curio, and the book on which the whole Planet Of The Apes franchise is based. First published in 1963 and written by Pierre Boulle who in 1954 had previously written The Bridge On The River Kwai. Not that it should matter but also of note is that Pierre Boulle was French.

Monkey Planet in a number of ways is markedly different from what would later appear as Planet Of The Apes. For example, the planet on which the astronauts land is given a name  - Soror - which is Latin for 'sister', given because of the geographical similarities to Earth. The dominant species on Soror are apes, all dressed in a very civilized manner and all displaying the exact same behaviour patterns of man. Rather than riding on horses as in the Planet Of The Apes films, the apes drive around in motor-cars and some even smoke pipes as almost an indication of sophistication. A distinct difference between the book and the films is that in the book, the apes have their own simian language. Being French, Pierre Boulle has his astronauts be French as well.

The book gives some insight into the world that the astronauts have landed, and we discover that the apes have all the things of man-made civilization such as electricity, industries and aeroplanes but as far as the conquest of space is concerned, the apes have reached only the stage of artificial satellites.

The main question, of course, is whether - as depicted in the film - Soror is actually planet Earth but in the future? It's not. There is no shocking Statue of Liberty moment at the end. The book's ending, however, is just as good and just as shocking in as much as it can be, given how well-known the Planet Of The Apes theme is.

On reading Monkey Planet, it's very apparent that Pierre Boulle was a very good writer. The obvious seam he mines is speciesism and the way that man treats other animals, particularly when it comes to holding them in zoos and using them for vivisection. 

Boulle also raises questions of both a philosophical and sociological bent such as 'What is it that characterizes a civilization?' The answer he gives to that one is 'It is everyday life. Principally the arts, and first and foremost literature'. It's an answer I would tend to agree with but then I appreciate literature above any other artform, though of course any lover of the visual arts would no doubt disagree. But it's a moot point.

Monkey Planet is a science fiction book and like all the best science fiction books it is essentially a book of ideas. A book about ideas. So many ideas, in fact, that it took five films - Planet Of The Apes, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, and Battle For The Planet Of The Apes - to cover and make use of them all. And that, I would say, is the mark of a good writer and the mark of a good book.

John Serpico

The Train Was On Time - Heinrich Böll

 THE TRAIN WAS ON TIME - HEINRICH BÖLL 

I was a Heinrich Böll virgin. But I'm not anymore. I've now done the deed and have now lost my Heinrich Böll virginity to his novelette The Train Was On Time. And was it worth it? Were any of the rumours true? Was it as cracked-up as it's meant to be? Well, from a boy to a man let me tell you while I can, the soda pop came free and I've not been left disappointed.

In a bid to make light of this book I write frivolously and appropriate the lyrics of a 10CC song but who am I kidding? The Train Was On Time is a work of what we in the industry call 'maximum heaviosity'.

First published in Germany in 1949, it tells the story of Andreas, a 24 year-old German soldier on a train to the Eastern Front where he knows he's going to die. The journey takes five days. Five days of sitting in the grime, the sweat and the stink of his fellow soldiers, some of whom also know they are heading for their deaths but many more others thinking only of the Greater Germany. The Fatherland. Loyal to the Fuhrer to the last.

They're all heading to a slaughterhouse and so intense is his awareness of this, that Andreas has turned it into a premonition so that he now knows the place, the day and even the time that he's going to die. The one single thought constant in his head from the moment he wakes is 'Soon I'm going to die'. The thought in itself is then whittled down to the one single word: 'Soon'.

'Soon. Soon. Soon. When is soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second. Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death...

Soon I'm going to die, before the war is over. I shan't ever know peacetime again. No more peacetime. There'll be no more of anything, no music... no flowers...no poetry...no more human joy: soon I'm going to die.'

This is peak existential dread. This is the naked lunch that William Burroughs in his book of the same name wrote of: that frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork. This is the blinding sun that Albert Camus wrote of in The Outsider that led to the killing of the Arab on the beach. This is the bell jar that Sylvia Plath wrote of in her book of the same name, the bell jar under which she was trapped. This is the cleansing of the doors of perception of which William Blake wrote. This is the metamorphosis of which Kafka imagined.

This ain't rock'n'roll, this is genocide. No tip-toe through the tulips this. No, this is more like defoliation via Agent Orange. This isn't a book I would recommend that everybody should read and neither would I say it's one the greatest novels ever written because the slightly skewed ending puts paid to that. As an example, however, of the work of Heinrich Böll it stands as a pretty good explanation as to why he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. And that in itself is reason enough to test the Heinrich Böll waters, to swim with the fishes, and to break your Heinrich Böll virginity.

John Serpico

The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac

 THE SUBTERRANEANS - JACK KEROUAC

Apparently, for a fair number of Kerouac readers The Subterraneans is their favourite Kerouac book. As for me? I'm still reading through Kerouac's canon in search of the key to understand his place in culture and his impact upon it - or something like that - so don't yet have a favourite. The Subterraneans to me is just another of his books though probably one of his more better known ones. Before reading it I'd advise there are things to know that are inarguably going to enhance the experience. You need to know for example that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans in a three-day-and-night long burst of creative energy fuelled - I like to think though not verified - by a healthy dose of Benzedrine. 'Speed jive', as Mott The Hoople in All The Young Dudes would call it. 'Spontaneous prose' as Kerouac described it. A method that both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs enquired about and later utilised in the creation of Howl and Naked Lunch.

As with practically all of Kerouac's books, The Subterraneans is based on real events and real people. The lived experience. All of his characters are pseudonyms and once you know who's who, it enhances everything. It reveals a lineage. So, when Kerouac talks about his old drinking buddy Larry O'Hara he actually means Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When he talks about Adam Moorad he means Allen Ginsberg. When he talks about the writer Frank Carmody who's just returned from living in North Africa, he means William Burroughs. And so on and so forth. It also helps to know that all the events Kerouac writes about in The Subterraneans actually took place in New York though he's transposed it all to San Francisco.

The 'subterraneans' is the name given by Ginsberg to the people who hang out together at the same clubs, cafes and parties during the early 1950s. They're all would-be bohemians, getting off on jazz, poetry, reefer, shooting the breeze and 'riding the mystic'. Kerouac (going under the name Leo Percepied), ever the struggling artist makes their acquaintance and is up to his neck in source material for his next book. Simply recording the conversations around him along with all the anecdotes he's privy to would have been plenty in itself but into this mix he adds a love interest in the form of a young black girl by the name of Mardou Fox.

This specific love element is the thing that makes The Subterraneans of much more interest than it already is. It was written, it should be remembered, at a time when mixed-race relationships were frowned upon and could bring the participants to the attention of the authorities who might assume there was some kind of communist conspiracy afoot.

Moreover, it begs the question as to what exactly is a young girl of colour doing hanging out with a lot of self-confessed homosexuals and drug addicts? It's a bit of a mystery. Kerouac becomes enamoured with her immediately and they're sleeping together soon after, though it's a relationship that's complicated to say the least.

The biggest mystery, however, is who exactly is Mardou Fox? In real life her name was Alene Lee but beyond that, very little is known about her. In fact, it's almost as if she's been wiped out of Beatnik history. Literally. The dancing girl pictured on this particular edition of The Subterraneans, for example, is it meant to be a depiction of Mardou? I would presume so but then why is she white and ginger-haired? I realise the picture has been taken from the poster of the 1960 film adaptation starring George Peppard and Leslie Caron, and I know it makes for a good cover but basic details matter.

Written as a Joycean stream of consciousness, Kerouac was obviously on to something here whereby language was being pulled out of shape to reveal the hidden impulses beneath. It's all good stuff but some of what this technique reveals sits uncomfortably. It's obvious, for example, that Kerouac's drinking and carousing with the boys takes precedence over his writing, and that both his carousing and writing takes precedence over any relationship. The carousing, of course, gives Kerouac material to write about but then so do his relationships, particularly his one with Alene Lee.

There are things in The Subterraneans that are so obviously private that in no way would Alene Lee have given her consent to having it written about, even if disguised by the use of a pseudonym and being transposed to another State. Apparently when she was shown the manuscript of The Subterraneans she was shocked and rightly so. How would you like it if your visits to your psychoanalyst were made public along with what was meant to have been private pillow talk and even the details of what you've got between your legs?

There is a lack of decorum here on Kerouac's part and an insensitivity to the fact that being a young black girl in 1950s America was fraught with enough hardships as it was, without having her whole private life exposed for the world to see. Which leaves us all with the undeniable truth that The Subterraneans is a classic of its kind but a classic that leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth and a bit of a stain upon Jack Kerouac's judgement if not his character.

John Serpico

Anti-Fascist - Martin Lux

 ANTI-FASCIST - MARTIN LUX

My only criticism of this book is in regard to the cover as it makes it look like one of those 'books for teenagers' that you see in sections of libraries and bookshops under the same name. The fact is, however, that actually it's what might be called in the vernacular 'the dog's bollocks'. Anti-Fascist by Martin Lux is the real deal.

I should hold my hands up here and declare I've met Martin Lux on a number of occasions. I've sat and drank with him in pubs where he's regaled me with tales of hardened skinheads on their knees begging Martin for mercy. I was at the launch for this book at one of the London Anarchist Bookfairs, and I publicised Martin's mini book tour of Holland as I was living there at the time when he went over to do some readings. The Dutch, by the way, loved him.

Anti-Fascist is a book that needed to be written because if it hadn't then the stories and the history it records would have been written out of history. Rubbed out like all the images of Trotsky from photographs during the Stalin purge. Quietly and conveniently forgotten by polite society. Martin's story, you see, is one that is often frowned upon by certain sections of society if not outrightly condemned. It's about violence on the streets. It's about going head-to-toe with the Far Right and tackling perpetrators, supporters, advocates, enablers and exponents of Fascism head-on.

Rather than writing devastating articles in The Guardian critiquing the conduct of Nazis, it's about going at them instead with baseball bats, knuckledusters, bricks and any suitable weapon at hand, and simply doing the bastards. It's about chasing them physically off the streets and not allowing them an inch. It's about removing them from any platform and denying them any space. Martin's book is about anti-fascism in the raw, in the here and in the now.

The book starts with a description of Martin's background and how he arrived at being a somewhat fearsome anti-fascist streetfighter, and it's an interesting one. Born into poverty with a natural anarchist-like aversion to authority and conservatism in all its manifestations, Martin's political education was fuelled by reading the underground press at that time such as Oz and IT, along with weekly visits to Speakers' Corner. His working class, street-level take on society combined with the then alternative culture's advocacy of revolution, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll made for a heady cocktail.

There was also the little matter of 1968 and the failure of England to partake in the revolutionary upheaval spreading around the globe from Paris, Germany and Italy to Czechoslovakia, America and Japan. But not England, remaining instead as Martin puts it 'a bastion of dull conformity and reactionary crap'.

Martin not only sought to escape from miserable, impoverished conformity but also ways to fight the prevailing ethos; finding suitable tools for the job in the possibilities offered through riot, looting, burning, occupations, barricades, insurrection and revolution.

His story is mapped-out by various confrontations with the Far Right throughout the 1970s, the most significant of these being in Lewisham in '77 where he witnessed the first use of police riot shields on the UK mainland, and Southall in '79 where protester Blair Peach was murdered by the police.

He also records the constant criticism and ostracisation from anarchist circles dominated at that time by what he describes as 'bearded pacifists and their floppy chicks', all telling him that 'racists and fascists are human beings too' and rather than being all 'macho' and 'sexist' could Martin not 'just try talking to them'?

The book culminates with the now infamous story of Martin acting as security at a Crass and Poison Girls gig at the Conway Hall in London where the venue is invaded by forty plus Far Right skinheads. Martin keeps a lid on things before help arrives in the form of a dozen fellow anti-fascists who launch a pulverising attack on the skinheads, turning the concert into a veritable bloodbath.

There are lessons in Anti-Fascist for the taking though it all depends where on the political spectrum you sit as to what those lessons are. The main one, obviously, is in regard to the effectiveness of violence when it comes to dealing with fascism or politics at street level generally. Martin lays out his stall though at the same time concedes that any violent momentum cannot be maintained forever and that other tools and tactics are also demanded. It's always horses for courses, essentially.

The disturbing thing about Anti-Fascist, however, is in how the circumstances, events, situations and racist tropes of the 1970s that Martin writes about are all back with us again now today - with a vengeance. All that has changed are the names of those espousing racist and Far Right rhetoric and the doubling down by the Right-wing media in its support of it along with the demonisation of its opponents.

These are interesting but very unsettling times that we now find ourselves in but unlike the night of the Crass/Poison Girls gig at the Conway Hall there's no sign of any anti-fascists of the (as described by Martin) 'right heavy geezers' kind coming over the hill to help deal with the problem. In fact there's no sign of them even on the horizon. Which means that unfortunately it's going to be down to us and no-one else to step up in whatever way we feel able and in whatever way we see fit.

John Serpico