Carolyn Cassady interview

This is an interview I conducted earlier in the year with Carolyn Cassady. You can listen to it here. The fantastic illustration (left) was done by the talented Tom Kingsley.


What a curse a cult novel seems to be . By connecting so acutely with the zeitgeist, books like On The Road tend to seduce their readers with such emotion that any sense of objectivity is lost. The myths begin; the readers own the book.

Carolyn Cassady seems to have spent most of her life negotiating that difficult terrain between fiction and truth. Fictionalised as Camille in On The Road , married to its hero Neal Cassady ('Dean Moriarty' in the novel) and a lover to its author Jack Kerouac ('Sal Paradise'), Carolyn is perhaps the most qualified person to clear up what she calls 'all that misunderstanding' in a subject so relentlessly stylized and distorted. 'I am not in On The Road actually. Camille? - she just lies there and cries. And I mean black lace? I don't think so,' she laughs, taking a graceful drag of her cigarette.

As expected, she denies that there was any such thing as 'The Beat Generation'. 'As far as I'm concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg.' Generations, just like Sets and Movements, seem to be antiquated notions these days: they're just too easy to unravel. She brings a much more controversial corrective to the men's behaviour - traditionally seen as proto-rebellious. 'They included me in everything. Contrary to popular belief, Jack and Neal were very respectful of women, always gentlemen, never swore...' She also recovers the mindset of the times: 'what most people don't realise is the consciousness of the thirties and forties, which was very much influenced by Victorian values. Both of them were Catholics - Jack an immigrant . They were not wild. ' On multiple occasions during the interview, Allen Ginsberg - though remembered fondly - is blamed for encouraging this reputation of recklessness and abandon: as a conduit for his own literary and commercial success.

'Jack', she mourns, 'got dragged into it...' Jack Kerouac is a great example of what misrepresentation can do to a writer. He wanted to join the canon of great American writers - Jack London, Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway-and the role he was cast in instead proved devastating, as Cassady explains. 'He was called the "King of the Beats" and the "Father of the Hippies", he told me that he was going to drink himself to death. He was so sensitive, so self-conscious, and so paranoid that he just couldn't stand the image that had been created of him. All the hippie stuff was just so alien to what his dreams had been...it destroyed him.' To what extent does an artist have control over how his work is perceived once it's in the public domain? It's a fascinating case study of an artist trying to escape his caricature. As every depth was plunged for commodity - 'his awful poems, his awful drunken doodles, his awful play' - Jack found the only means of escape in alcohol.

Neal Cassady faced much the same dilemma. According to Carolyn, he wished that people would not read On The Road as it undermined his desire for respectability. The problem for Neal - and, now, for his family - is that despite being the focal point for Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing, as Carolyn puts it, 'Jack was the recorder; Neal was the do-er'. Besides his letters, there's very little creative output: he was doomed to always being a character, in some ways to always being fictional. It's much easier to squabble over the legacy of someone's words than their character. Carolyn finds herself constantly having to rectify or absolve Neal's reputation: whether it's the 1980 film Heart Beat starring Nick Nolte as Neal or the final images of Neal, after their divorce in 1963, driving the Merry Prankster Bus - and accelerating his drug intake. He had written to Carolyn to tell her how much he disliked this image too. Even Neal's death is much disputed - as befits his status as a cult icon. The myth is that he died from exposure after deciding to walk back home along the railroad tracks in San Jose - a hopelessly romantic image. Carolyn says it was none of these: under 'cause' on the death certificate, the doctor writes only 'all systems congested.' Carolyn is a fastiduous historian, a self-confessed 'stickler for facts' - a great difficulty in light of the nebulous legacy of her husband. Not just nebulous but polyvalent: Neal might well have desired to be an upstanding citizen but his wilder urges are indisputable. Carolyn does acknowledge this: she didn't want to read On The Road because she didn't want to know what her boys got up to when they weren't with her. A website (nealcassady estate.com) has been set up by the family, 'dedicated to bringing you the real Neal' but one gets the sad sense that the Cassady family's will continue to be a lone voice in the wind. 'I realise now that it is the utter inadequacy of human contacts that makes us turn to art,' wrote William Boyd in The View from Yves Hill , 'only in fiction is everything explained.'

Technorati Tags: Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg, Carolyn Cassady, On The Road, Neal Cassady, William Boyd

Interview with Sarah Hall

This is an interview I conducted earlier this year for Notes from the Underground:


In an interview after one particularly majestic display, Billie Jean King's only explanation was a shrug: 'I don't know...sometimes you just...see the ball like a football.' It's an attractive notion - professionals unaccountably hitting form on certain days - and it turns out that writers have them too. 'It is like exercise,' Sarah Hall says, 'you get that burst of adrenalin... you feel strong . The words come easily.'

It helps if you've got focus - if, in Hall's words, you're 'fired up.' In her latest work, The Carhullan Army , one gets the sense that Hall didn't have too many days staring at the ceiling or re-checking the word count: there's a real sense of purpose here. Set in a Britain crippled by environmental catastrophe, the novel follows Sister, a woman who defies the State's bleak regime by fleeing her hometown in search of an all-female commune of kindred spirits. With her fictional Britain partially underwater, Hall sees this work as a critique of 'reactive', wait-and-see politics. Worthy campaign novels are often short on panache but Hall's mindful of her priorities: as she commented on her receipt of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in November last year, 'the duty of a writer is to write a story.'

Do writers have a duty to address the big issues too? Hall calls it 'not so much a duty as a high note'. A victim of the Cumbrian floods in 2005, ' the implications of an altered climate became no longer merely imaginable, but visible .' It's not that she felt a duty to write about it; more that she couldn't have written about anything else. 'What's happening to the planet is desperately frightening', she says, 'but so much so that most people don't know how to process it.' The Carhullan Army forces both her and her readers to meditate on the potential consequences. Hall never pontificates; she actualizes, and this accumulation of images and interactions - societal disintegration, rationing (both of food and children), overcrowding, disease and the proximity of violence - is far more admonishing as a result.

Her prophesy is both broad-brush and local. We have the 28 Days Later passages - the deserted streets, the derelict shopping centres etc. - but the main focus is on the small-scale, the decentralised. Not 'what would happen to Britain?' but 'what would happen to your town, your village, your family?' Hall grew up on the Eastern side of the Lake District in a sheep farming community: her inclination is towards the rural and local. If she's grinding her climate change axe in her right hand, her left is busy working the axe of community breakdown and social atomisation. Her description of the self-sustaining commune of farming women might be read as a critique of the Tesco-ification of rural Britain and the devastation of its farming communities. 'It's great to have a South African grapefruit for breakfast every morning but it's just not...sensible. We're a great farming country...' she tails off poignantly. Is Carhulla's 'brave new world' (as Sister describes it) not an exercise in nostalgia? 'I'm not nostalgic, I'm just cross. When I was growing up, we had bottles of milk delivered to our door every morning, which we knew came from two farms down the road...The milk was a reasonable price and the farmers made a reasonable living. But yes, what we see in Carhulla we could have seen in Britain a hundred or even two hundred years ago.'

Nostalgic or not, Hall's familiarity with the local geography infuses the novel's language. She talks about the register of her characters. The women speak as their survivalist circumstances dictate - with parade-ground precision - but also as befits their lives as Northern female farmers. Hall grew up with these women: 'if you saw two women farmers leaning on a gate, you probably wouldn't understand what they were saying.' (I felt the you rather assertively.) Her women have a muscular, no-nonsense familiarity with agricultural technique, buttressed by a liberal sprinkle of Northern idiom ('tuss', 'corbie', 'bothie') and cursing. Hall loves to resuscitate the impact of words: 'swear words generally fail to shock...but somehow used by a woman they retain some of their original power.'

Hall used the authenticity of these characters to separate her novel from its literary predecessors. There's something so daunting about Dystopia for a writer - it seems even harder to wriggle free from cliché. So in The Carhullan Army , we do have the spectre of state control ( Nineteen Eighty-Four ), the establishment of a utopia ( Brave New World ), the rurification of cities ( The Tripods ), enforced sterilization ( Children of Men ) etc. But we also have some wonderfully original images and conceits: as Sister flees her hometown, she sees a church with no doors, and the 'grey arched hole' retreating inwards. In another, a rotting dog comes to symbolise the degradation of the world. Did she feel at all burdened by previously conceived dystopiae? 'Not really, because there's a real dialogue going on between writers of Dystopia. Brave New World is a satirical response to the progressive ideas put forward by Freud, Ford and the early behaviourists, and to the work of H.G.Wells, for instance.' Hall sees dystopian fiction as 'the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster'; what she wants to introduce into the broader conversation is a pro-active role for women. 'In any discussion of apocalypse, reproduction is obviously going to be key.' And not just reproduction: one of the The Carhullan Army's controversial decisions is to have women as 'front-line resistance and rebel-force' rather than as just the victims.

It was Hall's willingness to engage in discussion - whether climatic, societal or gender - that convinced the John Llewellyn Rhys panel to award her the £5,000 prize. Suzi Feay, chair of judges, praised Hall for " tackl[ing] the most urgent and alarming questions of today," adding that "we need writers with Hall's humanity and insight."

Technorati Tags: Notes from the Underground, Sarah Hall, Dystopia

The 'slide'?

I'm coining a neologism, not being able to find the anatomical term on Google.

The slide: that region of a man's body between the bottom of his gut and the top of his pubis.

In New York (from where I write), it seems to be the gold standard in male physique, stretching itself grandly over advertising boards across Manhattan. Its loudest celebrant is Abercrombie and Fitch (see above). Theirs runs on and on - ever southward - into a fine, sultry mist. The shop itself - a dimly-lit grotto on 5th Ave with topless male assistants - dresses its mannequins accordingly: a plaster-white crescent separates the top of their shorts from the bottom of the shirts.

Is there an attraction over and above the generic ideal of the Grecian torso? In the promo surrounding The Dreamers, Bertolucci described the area (citation needed) as the localisation of male youth; the focal point of male eroticism - and maligned that his own had turned to flub.






Technorati Tags: New York, Abercrombie and Fitch

Marginalia

... one of the brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin. The margin is a place on a paper form, which is designed for writing things down that are outside, both physically and conceptually, the form that “the system” expects. The thing about the margin is that it is connected to the form in such a way that the form carries the stuff that goes beyond the form along with the form.

Austin Henderson, quoted in chapter 4 of Software Design & Usability (Klaus Kaasgaard): 'Beyond Formalisms: The Art and Science of Designing Pliant Systems'.

Link via David Smith

Literary historians get excited about the margins from writers' own book collections - and rightly so. Geoff Dyer is surely right that the most interesting critics are writers themselves:

On the other hand, it's really, really exciting reading what other writers have said about Lawrence. It seems to me as well, that is the kind of thing which would encourage people when they have left university to go on to be writers as opposed to going on to be academics.

It's part of GD's wider criticisms of academia, which reach a frothy rant in Out of Sheer Rage:

Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because academics are busy killing everything they touch.

Some of the most poignant (and famous) marginalia are Sylvia Plath's on her copy of The Great Gatsby. They range from the banal ('good') to the majestic. When Nick leaves the Buchanan house, passing Gatsby in the driveway, Plath underlined the final sentence in the chapter ("So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight watching over nothing"), and wrote in the margin:

knight waiting outside dragon goes to bed with princess

A melancholy comment.





Technorati Tags: Geoff Dyer, margins, The Great Gatsby, Sylvia Plath,

Things that make the hairs stand up...

To be updated...

After Hours


Ikea ad: Home


Technorati Tags: After Hours, Ikea, Martin Scorsese

A boon for Tory educational policy

Is this the sort of thing the Conservatives want to include in their 'Swedish-school' education plan?

Ex-comprehensive teacher praises his new independent school


Technorati Tags: David Miliband,

Smart guy

David Miliband grows and grows in my estimation. First there was the interview with the FT; now, I've just come across this speech thanks to David Smith's blog:

To quote David Smith's post in full:

In two recent speeches, UK politicians are beginning to show they understand the web. First, George Osborne. And now, David Miliband:

When we think of education, we tend to think of formal teaching in classrooms by teachers. This remains important. But the range of resources to support learning is far wider than that - from workplaces and museums to individuals with skills to contribute, and passions to share. They lie beyond the school gates and they are 24/7. And the key to genuine educational transformation is inspiring children and adults to learn more for themselves – what Yeats called ‘lighting a fire’ as opposed to ‘filling a pail’. So the challenge is to connect people with skills and time to give, from university students, part-time employees and people in retirement, to others with similar passions and interests. ‘Every citizen a teacher’ may be a bit of a stretch, but it is not impossible to imagine an educational world where a large minority of citizens play an active role, either on a voluntary or paid basis in supporting learners as personal tutors, running after-school clubs, or integrated into the curriculum and the classroom. The web can create the potential to aggregate the dispersed supply of citizen-teachers and connect them to learners with particular interests. It can also help learners filter the good from the bad through peer to peer recommendations and make sense of a world where educational resources are much more diverse.

And much more besides: 'I believe the businesses and government that succeed in the future will be those that give people greater power to shape the future of their individual lives and greater capacity to collaborate. A sense of I can and we can.'

Exciting stuff


Technorati Tags: David Miliband

The awakening of my e-consciousness

I have just come across the phenomenal blog belonging to David Smith, a teacher at St. Paul's. Found here. Just the notion of a Head of English at one school, re-launching himself as Director of ICT at another is a wicked one - especially in the English private school sector. But, more than that, he seems to have a real passion for pushing the - for want of a better word - Web 2.0 agenda into his kids' line-of-sight.

He's also ex-tutor to friend and all-round hero, Ed Cooke.


Technorati Tags: David Smith, Ed Cooke