Book Fever
By Marcia Loy
December 5, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Visits to Africa and Australia

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. —Francis Bacon

I have trouble with Africa. I try to watch films and television shows about the continent but at some point animals are either killing each other or people are killing them. I know this happens. I understand the food chain and economic forces, but I don’t like to watch. Still, here are two very good books about Africa. And one superb book about Australia.

West with the Night will prove an enduring achievement. Sooner or later, someone . . . would have crossed the Atlantic from England. But no one else has written a book like this one. —Village Voice

West with the Night, Beryl Markham, 1942. Beryl Markham was born in England and moved to Africa with her father when she was four years old. I read in Markham’s biography there were suspicions she didn’t actually write this book. I don’t care who wrote it; it’s one of the best books I’ve read. I’ve owned this book for over 20 years. Someone recommended it but I never got around to reading it. My loss. When I read with Book Fever in mind, I often come to an aha! moment when I stick a Post-It on the excerpt I want to include in the column. This time I had 17 Post-Its marking passages. Markham was one of the first women pilots, perhaps the only one flying in Africa in the thirties. She was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from England to Nova Scotia.

Excerpt: We crossed the Gulf of Sidra and landed first at Tripoli and then at Tunis, and then we saw green hills again and were finally at the end of the desert and at the end of Africa.

Perhaps, when we took off from the Tunis Airport, I should have circled once or twice and dipped my wings in salute, because I knew that, while Africa would be there forever, it would not ever be there quite as I remembered it. . . . 

Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradled not only cities, but civilizations—and seen them die, and seen new ones born again—Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

African Silences . . . is a lyrical and sobering account, a portrait of vanishing worlds and what is replacing them. Through Matthiessen’s eyes we perceive elephants, white rhinos, gorillas and other endangered creatures in the wild. —From the dust jacket

African Silences, Peter Matthiessen, 1991. This is the kind of book I find hard to read. The statistics the author quotes on the decline of the animal population in Africa are heartbreaking, and it was published 18 years ago. It’s hard to imagine things have improved. Still, it’s a fascinating look at central Africa.

Excerpt: We climb onward as a green-blue stretch of Lake Kivu comes in view, down to the east.

Mukesso stops short, he has heard limbs cracking. We hear nothing. But Mukesso is sure, and Kagwere and Matene do not doubt him; the Mbuti strike off into dense jungle, making no effort to keep down the noise, and have not gone a hundred yards when they cross the gorillas’ path. The guides are nervous in this tangle, and even the trackers seem uneasy. They stop to listen every little while, ticking the vines and branch tips with their pangas to let the hidden shapes know where they are. One whistles to the others, backs away a little. There is a big dark movement in the nearest bush, only feet away. We see the branches move, glimpse shifting blackness. Then the apes are gone, and the Mbuti do not follow. This place is dangerous, we must wait a little to see which way the apes will go.

What Bill Bryson has done for England and the United States, he has now done for Australia: written a delightfully entertaining travel book. —Boston Globe

In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson, 2000. It’s always a delight to write about a Bill Bryson book. I’ve read seven or eight of them and have loved them all. I must admit Australia was never high on my list of places to visit. I’m not sure why. It seemed raw, like the Wild West, only a lot farther away. Then I read this book and I became convinced that Australia is a wonderful and unique place, full of idiosyncratic people and uncommon places. 

Excerpt: Melbourne was until relatively recently the center of things, particularly in the realms of finance and culture. Sydney used to compensate by making up cruel but generally outstanding jokes about Melbourne’s supposed lack of liveliness, like:

Do you have any children?
Yes, two living and one in Melbourne.

These days Sydney makes jokes about Melbourne and steals its thunder, which is naturally a little hard for Melbourne people to take. Nothing better illustrates the shift in the two cities’ relative standings than that in 1956 the Olympics went to Melbourne and in 2000 they have gone to Sydney. Most things do nowadays. In 1956 Melbourne was headquarters to 50 of Australia’s largest companies while Sydney had just 37. Today the proportions are almost exactly reversed. A generation ago, international companies routinely chose Melbourne for their Australian headquarters; today over two-thirds opt for Sydney. But far more galling to a city that has always viewed Sydney as having the intellectual vibrancy of, let us say, daytime television, Melbourne had to watch as Sydney has appropriated chunks of its cultural preeminence—in publishing, fashion, film and television, all the performing arts.

Having said all that, and once you strip out the huge visual advantage Sydney derives from its harbor, there is precious little to choose between the two in terms of quality of life or cultural satisfaction. Much less separates Melbourne from Sydney than separates Los Angeles from New York or Birmingham from London.

Melbourne may not have a Harbour Bridge or an Opera House like Sydney’s but it has something in it way no less singular. It has the world’s most bizarre right turns.

Next week Book Fever travels to Asia. Happy reading!

Do the Beats matter today?
By Harry Burrus

San Miguel Authors’ Sala 
A Celebration of the Beat Writers
A literary mini-festival
Sat, Dec 13, 5–9:30pm
Hotel Real de Minas
Cnr. Ancha de San Antonio & Stirling Dickinson
200 pesos by Dec 1; 250 pesos afterward

John Cassady

When Jack Kerouac died in 1969, only one of his 20+ books was in print. At the time, many critics announced the Beat generation was irrelevant and had faded away. Others claimed the Beats were an insignificant force, addicted to sex and drugs so of little permanent influence, and only interested in the frivolity of having “kicks.” They contended the Beats’ writing would not hold up over time. However, objective evidence clearly establishes those critics were dead wrong.

The essential tenets of Beat philosophy still resonate strongly today. The Beats’ rants against excessive consumerism, government control and torture, censorship, the increasing power of the Pentagon and the proliferation of American soldiers in foreign countries are cogent now. The Beats respected and valued the land and were advocates for a healthy world environment, all of which continue to be significant concerns. They promoted tolerance of ideological differences, which they saw as being subverted to a political sameness—the position if you aren’t in agreement with us, you’re against us. Sound familiar?

Recognizing the current impact of the Beats, William S. Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris notes, “They asked the relevant question themselves. It was one of the things that united the writers and adventurers we call Beat—and their answers looked both backwards (glancing conservatively, toward a “lost” American past) and forwards, nostalgically (to face looming death, the rags of old age and the ruins of civilization) and heroically (to face the unknown, that which lies beyond the little bit of ourselves we know). So, perhaps they matter because, at their best, they inspire us to look back for what’s been lost and forward to what we need to lose.”


In Naked Lunch (1959), Burroughs revealed he did not share the rose-colored-glasses view of most postwar Americans. With microscopic detail, he peeled away the picturesque façade of modern society, exposing it for what it really was. He predicted the late twentieth-century AIDS crisis and the advent of the internet with its viruses, worms and spam. He forecast the war on drugs and terrorists. Underscoring the continuing literary and social significance of Burroughs, Harris has edited and authored a number of books: The Letters of WSB, 1945-1959; Yage Letters Redux; Junky: the definitive text of Junk; William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination and Everything Lost: the Latin American Notebook of WSB.

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac; 1952 photo by Carolyn Cassady.

Similarly, in Why Kerouac Matters, John Leland extols the importance of Kerouac today. He focuses on the Kerouac-based character Sal Paradise in On the Road instead of the one who usually attracts the most attention, Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady-based), who enthusiastically pursues sex, speed and jazz in the novel. Leland analyzes Paradise’s impressions from his journeys with Moriarty. He explains that what Paradise learns about love, having a work ethic, valuing art and education, and being spiritual are life lessons that still echo today.

Another aspect of Kerouac’s work with current ramifications is that he was a major influence in bringing haiku to the West. His interpretation of haiku was experimental and innovative. His creation of “Western haiku” materially impacts current poets’ approach to creating haiku today.

City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco sells 10 copies of On the Road daily. The Kerouac estate claims that over 100,000 copies of OTR are sold each year. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, continues to attract students, encouraging them to link the past to the present and to apply a fresh approach to their writing. Stanford University bought Ginsberg’s archive and the New York Public Library recently purchased the Burroughs literary archive.

Time not only has substantiated the merit of the writing of the Beats, but has validated it as well. The Beat worldview embraced life and celebrated the human condition. On the Road’s raw energy encourages curiosity, the refusal to accept the status quo and the need to investigate what lies over the horizon. It inspires self-pride and the drive to succeed, regardless of social status. The Beats’ criticism of America in the forties and fifties is instructional because it applies to many of the conditions confronting the US today. Current writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers cite the Beats as their beacons. New bios as well as scholarly books examining their writing, lives and values continue to come out with great frequency. Beat magazines, paper and online, are widely read and popular. Their book sales are the highest ever. Universities have Beat literature as part of their curriculum. The significance of the Beat writers on current American literature continues to evolve because new work has only recen
tly been discovered. The unpublished work is revealed in books and magazines and reviewed by international newspapers and scholars. The Beats are alive and well in this first decade of the twenty-first century and continue to pervade our lives today. 

Harry Burrus is a poet, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker (www.BandanaEntertainment.com), collagist, photographer and Beat enthusiast. He has advanced degrees in dramatic arts and film & writing. 

Book Review

A Forest of Mathematics/Un bosque de matemáticas
By Lucina Kathmann

This bilingual Spanish/English novel and math book (at once) is for tweens, teens and imaginative adults. The animal characters in a forest present negative numbers, Cartesian coordinates, exponents, fractions, decimals and percents through “real-life” (of the forest) situations.

Worksheets are included and a young dragon who was going wrong is redeemed through math. 

Biblioteca de Textos Universitarios, Salta Argentina

US: Chicago Network for Justice and Peace

Information: www.chicagonetworkjp.org 

ISBN 978 950 851 099 0

Price: US$20.00

Order: www.spdbooks.org