The Darien Library is holding “One Page Poetry Circle“, a monthly poetry discussion group at 7 p.m. on Wednesdays October 21, November 18, and December 16, during which anyone is welcome to bring a poem for reading and discussion. Madge McKeithen, a faculty member of The Writing Program at The New School, mediates the discussion and this week’s theme is “Poetry and Masks.” I attended last month’s session for the first time and I enjoyed the atmosphere thoroughly; it’s a chance to voice your thoughts, opinions and interpretations about poetry without the pressure of graded scrutiny. Ms. McKeithen maintains a wonderfully relaxed, open feeling during the meetings and I loved hearing the selections of the other participants, whether revisiting poets I know and love, like T.S. Eliot, or discovering the work of new authors I’m yet unfamiliar with.

Image by Tom Palumbo, circa 1956, from Wikipedia

Next Wednesday, Oct. 21 is the 40th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac. For a retrospective on Kerouac’s seminal work, On the Road, please read the essay from our guest blogger, Roy J. Nirschel*, below.

In the spring of 1968 as Paris burned and protest filled the streets of  America, including my hometown of Stamford. I traded a Joe Cocker album for a dog-eared copy of On the Road.  In a fortnight I was transfixed, reading about a life I would never lead.

Four decades later I still read Kerouac, buy copies of the book for friends, attend lectures on the Beat generation and make pilgrimages to his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. I even run (although I use the term loosely) in the annual 5k road race in his honor that raises funds for a scholarship for a budding local writer. I ask myself why?

What is it about On the Road that compels me to return to it each year, like a homecoming that is both familiar and new with each reading?  Why did Time Magazine consider it “one of the best hundred English language books of the twentieth century?”

On a base level it is a love story; two men exploring the possible on the open road that was America, before the Interstate highway system or the Internet superhighway. Kerouac and Neal Cassidy (Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity in the book) embark on a journey filled with spontaneous joy as  well as conflict; purposeful and purposeless.  Sal is looking for kicks and finds his muse in Dean, a grown yet still juvenile delinquent.

They travel to see girlfriends and wives that do not welcome them (Dean has women coast to coast as well as male “friends”). They visit lost acquaintances and make new ones. They connect with Bull Lee (William Burroughs) in New Orleans, squabble over their affection for Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) in New York and fail in their Denver quest to find Dean’s wino father; “Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found.” Paradise, like life for the real Kerouac, always managed to be find in the suburban comfort of his mother’s world.

On bus rides, hitchhiking, trains and stolen cars, Dean and Sal meet hucksters, train brakemen, Mexican laborers, black jazz musicians and drifters. They are wide-eyed innocents abroad; marveling at the simplicity of it all in a pre-Cold War America yet haunted by a personal restlessness.

On the Road is distinctive too in style.  Kerouac, high on caffeine and allegedly Benzedrine (though that claim was later discounted), spent several  non-stop weeks at the typewriter using a teletype roll of paper that he had taped together into one, continuous page. (I saw the iconic “scroll”, now owned by Indianapolis Colts owner Robert Irsay, when it toured last year). While On the Road sat in his backpack and was rejected as too explicit, Kerouac continued to write, although neither Town and the City or Subterraneans were commercial hits. It took nine years for Viking, to publish an  edited On the Road in 1957.

Kerouac believed that all his writing was one continuous story he would connect as his magnum opus.  Alcohol, depression and death intervened on October 21, 1969, when he died at the age of 47. He was with his mother in St. Petersburg Florida, watching Graham Kerr’s “The Galloping Gourmet” on television.

On the Road tapped into a spirit of liberation when a stale, grey, post World War II uniformity reined. It spawned the short-lived “Beat Generation whose writers still resonate today. Perhaps surprisingly, though, Kerouac was a patriot and a man of faith, however unorthodox. He had human flaws and a voracious appetite.  While I did not embrace his appetite, I did his love for language, his descriptiveness, even his internal conflicts, which were intensely human.  Like Kerouac many of us of the generation of ‘68 searched for roots, even while pushing against them. We saw the open road as an invitation to the possible and a warning sign, and craved kicks while returning safely to mother in suburbia.

I do not know what became of Joe Cocker, or whether my high school friend Michael Waters kept the album or scratched it beyond recognition.  I do know what became of Kerouac and what On the Road has meant to me and countless others who keep this story on the popular seller list generations later.

*For more on Nirschel, read his bio box on the bottom right of the blog’s main page.

Next week is Banned Books week. Sponsored by library, publishing and journalism organizations, this week celebrates, among other concepts, the First Amendment, the right to know, the right to free and open access and the importance of access to unpopular or unorthodox viewpoints.

In 2008, the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom received reports of  513 challenged books. Check out the Top ten.

For more information check out http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/ which provides a map of book challenges and the ALA site.

This is my first time over at BookEnds, and I’m slowly slogging through T.R. Reid’s “The Healing of America” because I foolishly began reading four books over the past few weeks and I’m only close to finishing one — “The Long Goodbye,” by Raymond Chandler. Yes, cheesy private detective fiction holds my attention longer than both “American Lion,” Jon Meacham’s account of Andrew Jackson in the White House, and “Over the Edge of the World,” Laurence Bergreen’s history of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the Earth. Thankfully for the reader, I’ll save my recent troubles with historical non-fiction for another post. I’m here to talk about French health care, because, simply put, that’s last the chapter I read in “The Healing of America.”

I want a carte vitale — which means “vital card” in English, I think. It’s like a credit card but with a computerized chip that digitizes a patient’s medical record from age 15 onward. As Reid reports, “…it is the secret weapon that makes French medical care so much more efficient than Americans are used to.” French doctors and medical facilities don’t have to keep patient records in file cabinets, because it’s all on the patient’s carte vitale. What’s more, get sick in France or just go to the doctor for a check-up, you take this card with you and it not only tells the doctor all about your past treatments and illnesses, it also tells which private insurance fund covers the patient, how much they paid the doctor, how much the insurance plan pays back to the doctor, etc. It does everything, including eliminate the need for administrative workers so heavily relied upon by doctor’s offices in the United States.

The French carte vitale keeps administrative costs low. Coupled with a national health insurance system that makes it mandatory to be insured — no one is denied coverage — and some top-flight doctors, as Reid reports, the carte vitale is “a symbol of what the French have achieved in designing a health care system to treat the nation’s 61 million residents.” The card is by no means a cure-all. French politicians routinely campaign on health care reform platforms, and many now decry the the cost of their system and say doctors aren’t paid enough. But the carte vitale seems a simple yet effective way to streamline a cumbersome health care system, perhaps one of many first steps in reforming the U.S. system.

I’m often embarassed by the paucity of fiction books on my shelves. I don’t know why I care. But while many I know suck down the latest Oprah book or books at the top of bestseller lists for weeks, like The Kite Runner and anything by Nicholas Sparks, I find out about a new Andrew Jackson biography and I’m distracted again to a non-fiction wasteland where I can discuss what I’m reading only with my former history teacher.

I like what I like, but I’m trying to correct for this. When I picked up our most recent book club choice, I spotted a few fiction gems on a buy 2 get 1 free table, so I took advantage of the deal and got Angela’s Ashes and Olive Kitteridge.* Now a colleague, staff editor Robin Watson, has recommended The Gargoyle by debut novelist Andrew Davidson. But don’t think this in any way is enough to round out my to-read list. So, suggestions welcome.

*The third, I must admit, was this.

Philip Hensher’s “The Northern Clemency” is very much about England, set in a city “made by fire out of water.” The primeval description refers to Sheffield, South Yorkshire, circa 1974, when the city was the steel center of England and heaps of coal fed the gaping furnaces of the factories and muddied the rolling, purplish landscape of the pensive moors.”The city made its money from steel; it was driven by its waters; it was built on coal.” Over the course of the novel, Sheffield hovers like a persistent haze, lovingly and forbiddingly evoked by turns, almost a character in itself.

Hensher’s human characters, though, are entrenched in a claustrophobic suburbia, a world of dull cocktail parties fed by vol-au-vents and nosy neighbors obsessed with the Queen. The residents of Rayfield Avenue are, for the most part, bored and dissatisfied, but none quite so much as Katharine Glover, the proverbial desperate housewife with three sullen children and a lifeless marriage. Katharine’s spontaneous decision to try for a job in a newly-opened flower shop triggers a disastrous train of events – her husband Malcolm, assuming she’s having an affair with her charismatic young boss, walks out of the house without a word and Katharine erroneously releases her dismay on her youngest son, Tim. The deeply disturbing scene in which she violently stamps on the head of his illicitly purchased pet snake haunts both Tim and the rest of the book through the final pages.

Each of the characters evolve, over a span of almost twenty years, in the shadow of England’s changing  politics. There are frequent references to the regime of Margaret Thatcher, evocations of the crippling recession that took hold in the ’80s, and a brief but powerful portrayal of the coal miner’s strike that gripped the north of England in 1984.

I enjoyed Hensher’ detailed descriptions, his unusual metaphors and the precision with which he evoked a certain era  — the minutae of everyday life was meticulously catalogued and really gave the reader a sense of time and place, from the description of a public swimming pool to careful mention of iced biscuits and tea in a local, gossip-ridden cafe. The characters, however, were harder to respond to. With a few exceptions, like depressed housewife Katharine and her over-sexed but compassionate son Daniel, I found most of the characters to be depressingly unlikeable. A few of the overlapping storylines were intriguing — surprisingly, I found the side-plot of florist/reluctant drug runner Nick Reynolds and his diabolically sleazy dealer fascinating — but a good deal of the characters left me cold. The most irritating were Sandra Sellers, the emotionally indifferent and destructively promiscuous daughter of the Glovers’ neighbors, and Tim Glover, an eerie child who grows into an annoyingly fervent Marxist, obsessed with Sandra to the point of creepy delusion. Even some of the more appealing characters felt distant and suffused in chilliness— throughout the novel, I felt almost as if they were deliberately held at arms’ length. This might have just been my reaction — another reader might find it easier to get close to them — but I ultimately found the city itself to be more compelling than the people who lived in it, the city made by fire out of water, that seemed to breathe on its own.

I’m currently deeply immersed in Gay Talese’s book, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” which chronicles the sexual revolution and cultural shift of the 60s and 70s as well as its origins. Like many journalism students, I hold Talese as one of my heroes. Occasionally, when I’m stuck on a story, I often take a break to reread one of his essays or stories. I’m always struck by the stylistic purity of his prose. It’s never showy or overwrought, and seems to convey exactly the right facts with astonishing detail, leaving the reader wondering, “How the hell did he know that?”

Emulating Talese is a tough task that I imagine will take time and practice. But when I came across an interview of him on Charlie Rose recently, I decided that I might be able to adopt as least one of his reporting axioms.

“You should dress for the story!” he said with verve. As always, Talese was nattily dressed in a three-piece suit.

The son of an Italian tailor, Talese has in the past written about his devotion to style and well-made suits as both a show of support for a dying industry and a symbol of his heritage. Above is a segment produced on Conde Nast’s Style Web site that says it all.

Unlike Talese, I’m a harried dresser. Though I did make an effort on my grooming this week, I wound up with my shirttails sticking out of my pants by the end of a long day in the newsroom yesterday.

But I’m committed in spirit if not execution. Watch out, Zoning Board members! I just may dust off that tiara next week.

The New York Times had an article today about reading on the NYC subway. Anyone have a good reading on Metro North/public transportation story?