Colin Thubron: Interview, London June 2008

INTERVIEW WITH COLIN THUBRON: London, June 2008
BY JAMES DALGLISH

The door opens to the first floor apartment in a West London neighborhood so full of sycamores and shrubbery that it seems at first some kind of urban-rural utopia. This is the address of Colin Thubron who in his books at least prefers a more austere landscape. And now the novelist and travel writer is standing in front of me with a friendly smile that allows time for recovery from the discrepancy between photos and reality. Mostly it’s the shock of white hair and a face that is neither as intimidating or ruggedly Asiatic as some recent author shots suggest. He looks very fit for his age, however, and I can easily imagine him scaling the Assassins mountain barehanded as described in Shadow of the Silk Road.

His invitation to enter comes in a voice that my dull American ear hears as a RP intonation of perfectly pronounced syllables. The same refined sounds introduce me to the author’s life partner, Margreta de Grazia, a professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. We sit in a spacious living room graced by a fireplace and lined with bookshelves (which I’ll later find include few travel titles and none of Thubron’s books). A wide window looks out on a garden/lawn.

Colin Thubron began his literary career with four travel books about three small countries – Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon -- and the city of Jerusalem. (Out of print in the US, they can be ordered from the UK.) More ambitious in 1978, he took on giant Russia - then the USSR - in his first big publishing breakthrough Where Nights are Longest. He turned to another giant, China, just opening in 1986 (Behind the Wall), then pushed into newly independent states of central Asia (The Lost Heart of Asia), then reencountered a post-communist Russia (In Siberia). His latest, reviewed in these pages, improves even upon that. His parallel novelistic career includes seven titles of concise, intense fiction.

Born in 1939, Thubron comes from an illustrious British family that, he acknowledges, gave him a number of privileges in life – but not including wealth, he insists. He’s always had to earn his own way as a fulltime author.

His half-American father was a descendant of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code. His mother descended from John Dryden, the first English poet laureate – which “fed into my feeling that writing was important.” He himself, unmarried, has no children.

His father’s foreign postings as military attaché provided Thubron his first travel experiences and stimulus to roam later in life. In a typically English colonial pattern, the young boy was educated at boarding schools in England while his parents served their nation abroad. On holidays, he would fly across the Atlantic in old Stratocruisers (Boeing’s first long range commercial aircraft) to visit them. “I think I got an early feeling of excitement about travel because of these transatlantic journeys which I would undertake alone.”

After Eton, the traditional incubator of British prime ministers, he went directly into publishing instead of first going to university (“which always amazes Americans,” he quips). Why the unusual career choice? “I already wanted to be a writer. I never had any doubt about what I wanted to do....It was a passion.” Soon after taking his first paying job was with Hutchinson publishers, he lit out on his own.

Modus operandi [could be a sidebar?]

As his readers will already know, Thubron carries very little into the field. Only what will fit into a small rucksack: one change of clothes, minimal bad weather gear, four-to six moleskins and a ball point pen. No recreational reading—only a phrase book or dictionary. As for money, he hides that somewhere. Plastic and ATM machines are making that aspect of travel easier, he notes, even in Siberia. He takes no camera or recorder.

Each project, he informs me, takes about three or three and a half years to complete. He spends as much as a year researching the country and studying its relevant languages, which prepare him for his most important sources, the people he will meet. Although his travel narratives seem scholarly, even donnish, in their factual backgrounds, Thubron not only attended no lectures at Oxford or Cambridge but is also not a trained specialist in any of the areas about which he has written. “The great material for the travel writer is his experience on the ground,” he insists. “That’s where such originality as he may lay claim to exists.”

Two interviews were not enough for me to discover at which stage of his writing Thubron injects his famous stylistic brilliance - or as a friend put it, his obsession with avoiding ordinary linking verbs. But I did learn that his post-travel production begins with processing his “densely packed notebooks,” the source of each travel book. He then transcribes by longhand the notes while fleshing out the narrative into what he regards as the real first draft.

Q: Between that and the published version do you make any revisions?

CT: Yes, umpteen. First, the notes... are very full. In a way, I’ve got the whole journey there in impressionistic splashes of words. Those get disciplined, you hope, shaped into something by longhand. When it’s eventually on the screen it seems suddenly to have lost the personality it had in handwriting. In handwriting it has a certain energy, but once in print it loses something. Then I start to smash it up. I have to reenergize it and also, paradoxically, to prune it down because it’s overwritten.

Q: Is it tough earning your living as a fulltime writer these days?

CT: As for economics, I'm secure now, but only became so after the publication of my first book on Russia (Among the Russians). Before then it was very tough.

Q: Does it help commercially to work in more than one genre?

CT: I don't think the writing of novels as well as travel books helps much commercially. My publics for each genre are very different. But it does help creatively. When I'm worn out by one genre, I go for the other!

Q; Why has Great Britain produced so much good travel literature?

CT: I have no ready answer. But I suspect it may have something to do with the institution of the boarding school: a peculiarly British phenomenon. It's not a fluke that almost all British travel writers are middle class and have been the victims of boarding school since the age of about eight. I think it inures us to a certain kind of self-sufficiency and isolation, and gives a sense of being able to cope alone. It's a very tough initiation into the world. I don't think it's altogether beneficial I could go on about this! But it does encourage a sometimes dangerous sense of invulnerability.

Q: How did you write your first book Mirror to Damascus?

CT: I’d traveled there with my parents, actually, when I was a student. And became fascinated by the inland cities of Syria… It’s always been the desert Bedouin that people have romanticized. But to me it was always the urban civilization. I was fascinated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama. You wander these streets and you see nothing. You’ve got mud walls on either side, a door is left open, you look in, there’s a little marble paved courtyard and a lemon tree. You don’t know what is going on. I didn’t even know what a mosque was really. And so like all my books, it was a journey of discovery for myself. It wasn’t something I felt I knew about and was telling the reader [as an expert]. It was like taking the reader into the experience of my own astonishment, discovery, sometimes disillusion, whatever it might be.

Q: Could you describe your interest in a travel writing as a geographical or cultural passion?

CT: It’s both really. I think would put it like this. The actual business of traveling is exciting to me, being on the move in solitude, cut off from everything familiar. That has a certain geographical excitement. But I’ve always felt at least that I traveled not for its own sake but for an object, for a place. As you noticed, I do a lot of research, and get a strong sense of what a place is going to be like, and then get a passionate desire to go there. So there’s always this feeling the first thing is the place rather than the journey.

Q: How do you create vivid scenes in which the reader feels he’s reliving your journey?

CT: My style is sort of automatic now. I don’t really think about it. I don’t think: How am I going to say this? At least I try not to. I think about what I’ve got to say and hope that the writing will follow. So I go back to the notes... The notes have an immediacy, which a recollected journey would not have by itself alone. And it’s possibly from that the sense of lived immediacy comes from...

Q: The color of the sky, the weather...?

CT: Yes, all that’s gone down in great detail in the notes. Because those are the things you forget. After a few weeks, I find that the early experiences have faded. I mean you can usually remember how a conversation normally went. Or what a landscape looked like, or what a building looked like, but you can’t remember the precise expression someone used, or the texture of those rocks, or the exact color of that church wall... or whatever it is. That’s what I get down in notes and that’s often what gives life to the description. Those vivid little details, which bring things to life and those of course you forget unless you get them down in notes. People think that I must have a good memory but I don’t.

Q: Do you have a stylistic ideal?

CT: I do. I suppose I can only say that I’m trying to get simpler. A little bit more economical now. Which I think is a typical product of getting older. When one’s young, one’s very exuberant, everything gets poured in ... I’ve noticed with people who get older there’s a kind of economy creeps in, sometimes a dryness. Fortunately, I began with a super abundance of imagination and color so I can well do with a little pruning down that my instinct is to do now... My drift, if you will, now is toward something a little simpler and starker.

Q: How do you as a travel writer deal with the point of view that we are all culture bound and therefore can’t escape our own cultures or really understand those of other people?

CT: I think these two things: One is that in travel writing, as opposed to academic work, you introduce this person into the drama which is the “I” figure, walking across the landscape, having these conversations. How he reacts, how he feels is all going to be implicit in that narrative. ... The traveler is out there holding himself up for judgment whether he wants to or not. He’s this person who’s being staged, and his idiosyncrasies, his tastes, his values, are all up for the judgment of the reader.

The second thing is that, particularly in American academe, there’s an idea—maybe this comes from Foucault--that it’s all about power. The traveler has power. He is visiting a culture that he has some understanding of. He comes from a culture that the people he is traveling amongst don’t know at all. Presumably he is in most cases middle class and educated, traveling among peasants, factory workers and fishermen. Who knows? Anyway the power balance is unequal. But I don’t go with this extreme idea that this therefore makes encounters with the foreign country in some way invalid. This would turn all human contact into paranoia. So those two things I would weigh against the Orientalist argument from the travel writer’s point of view. They don’t eliminate for me the very obvious idea that you can’t lose your own culture. Of course you can’t but you can begin to be conscious of it and even use that in the travel narrative.

Q: Compared to some travel writers you keep yourself pretty much out of the narrative. Any reason for that?

CT: Maybe I’m very English, I don’t know. It’s not an intended technique, it just happens. I don’t have anything very interesting to say about that. I’m concentrating very much on the country I’m in. And I tend to take my discomforts for granted. Whatever I happen to be feeling or thinking is pretty secondary to the fascination with the country itself where I am. And my personal reactions and thoughts tend to get lost in that process. That may be a fault because I know people want a little bit more of me very often.

Q: OK. What about the creative element in your writing?

CT: Is that a polite way of saying do I make up things?

Q: No, what I meant was...

CT: The answer is no quite firmly. I don’t believe in fictionalizing. Certainly in England there’s a kind of literary---not exactly a movement but idea-- that it’s all right to turn your travel book into fiction and to make up stuff. I think the ordinary reader—and that’s the huge majority -- takes it on trust that what happened happened. And in my case, it seems a failure of imagination or a failure of the journey if you’ve got to make a lot of stuff up to make it interesting...Usually the experiences you have are so extraordinary you don’t have to make anything up.

Q: Actually I wouldn’t have questioned your veracity. But it’s a good issue...

CT: The other thing is that in my case, I’m traveling among cultures I don’t feel I sufficiently understand, and if I were to make up, say, what a Chinese reaction to something would be, or even a Russian one, I would go horribly wrong. What I have done sometimes is to conceal people’s identity... in almost all the books it’s been necessary to safeguard someone’s privacy, even their safety politically.

Q: And the dialogue?

The conversations are condensations of what was spoken and what was important to me rather than literally word for word [transcriptions]. A whole lot is left out.

Q In Shadow of the Silk Road, is the ‘intermingling of cultures,’ as you put it, the lead idea?

CT: Yes, I think so. In looking back I realized whether it’s a product of the Silk Road or not, the book was all about interfusings and the rich impurities of cultures, that were seen as discrete, just as at the end of the book where I describe the borders as being so porous, some of the political borders were almost meaningless. Whereas other borders that meant more ethnically such as the division between Turkic and Persian peoples, were not on the map. That was exciting of course. That gave it a certain a bit of buoyancy that the book on Central Asia didn’t have.

Q: If we look at Lost Heart of Asia and then at Shadow of the Silk Road, I wonder why you retraced many of the steps made in the earlier book.

CT: I was keen on going back because I’d become fascinated with the Silk Road, because I had an urge to go back into what I’d felt was the heart of Asia and ...to revisit those cultures which had always fascinated me over forties years of travel. In other words China, Islam, Central Asia, the ex-Soviet Union, the Middle East, all these old fascinations for me, and something that was able to unite them which was the Silk Road.

Q: Does Shadow of the Silk Road summarize your previous work?

CT: It seems like that. Because it is based on so many of my interests that have been with me always since I started to travel, both Islam and the ogres of the Soviet Union that I wanted to visit and humanize. The subjects of my books are not often chosen from any very intellectual thought. It was a sort of gut desire to go back to these places and look for a unifying theme.

Q: When you’re out in the wild on one of your austere trips, what do you miss the most?

CT: Well, it’s irritating to those who are close to me, but I miss very little. I’m very inspirited by where I am. I’m very curious. There’s a constant tension of not understanding. All the time I’m traveling in o rder to write like this, I feel I’m not understanding, I’m not making enough contact. So there is a continuous strain, which is preoccupying you. So you’re forgetting--or trying to forget--your own culture, your own home, your own background... but I sort of leave it behind the moment I’ve taken off in the air. I find those things drop behind very fast. So I don’t on the whole miss people. When it comes to creature comforts, I find that I don’t mind the discomforts of travel or accommodation. You’re usually so exhausted you could sleep anywhere. Probably, if there’s a physical thing I miss, it’s the idea of a good rich Indian meal or something like that, but there’s not much I miss.

Q: Do you ever take trips purely for pleasure to tropical islands with blue skies and seas?

CT: Yes, but not quite the ordinary pleasure ones. I enjoy scuba diving, so I’ve been in places like Sulawesi, Jamaica, Mauritius. This has been pure holiday. I learned scuba a long time ago on Heron Island in Australia on the Barrier Reef.

Q: In one of your imaginary dialogues with the Sogdian trader (In Shadow of the Silk Road), there is a strong hint that you may quit traveling. He asks you, haven’t you ‘seen enough’ for one lifetime? So are you finished?

CT: These are dialogues between my cynical self, and my romantic self. But no, I have no intention of quitting...I don’t think I’ll stop writing travel books. I already have another one in my head. ... I want to make a short journey in Western Nepal over the Tibetan border to Mount Kailesh, the Buddhist and Hindu Holy mountain. This will be a very different journey from the last one. This will be short and focused, almost a pilgrimage. It’ll be more personal... I don’t know if this will work as a book. It may resolve into articles. But that’s my plan in September.

Q: Finally, what is it about the travel genre that attracts you?

CT: As for the form of travel writing, I think it's the sheer flexibility of the medium I find most attractive. A travel book is a very personal blending of the author's interests, so it can be a license, perhaps a dangerous one, to indulge in all sorts of passions and preferences - in my case the interaction of past and present, and the probing (in personal encounters) of people's beliefs and values, above all. The 'first person' narrative allows uniquely--outside autobiography--for the author to air his own feelings and thoughts, sometimes quite transient ones, and this gives a living texture to the work that appeals to me. But of course it's not only the form of the travel book that appeals to me, but the travel itself. The two are inseparable. Sometimes I even get a sense that it is the travel writing the book.

Q: Thank you, Colin Thubron, so much for your time.

Nixon- Khrushchev Kitchen Debate & George Feifer

Yesterday on NPR.org an audio essay by Gregory Feifer appeared commemorating and describing the the notorious Nixon Khrushchev "Kitchen Debate" in 1959--one of the Cold War's icon events and one of the first media circuses. In this early example of televised news propaganda, VP Richard Nixon debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on the merits of the communist and capitalist systems. The setting was a trade exhibition in Moscow which featured the best in US consumerist manufacturing (such as washing machines and Thunderbirds). I'd known that my friend the American writer George Feifer had played some role in this event, but never such an amusing one as portrayed in this audio essay by his son. A literary tie-in occurs in the account of how George met his Russian wife, whom I would take to be the heroine of Feifer's hilarious, rumbustious memoir of the 60s, Moscow Farewell. The rich photographic documentation shows the principals of the debate and Feifer's role as a guide. Read & hear the story at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101430375

AVAAZ petition on GAZA is necessary & useful

THE AVAAZ petition on stopping the war in Gaza seems to me a welcome initiative, especially for far-flung people like us far away on the fringes of the world without much say in what goes on "over there." Actually, though, living in the Middle East forces me to a more direct confrontation with this event for several reasons. First personal anger: once again I cannot travel in the Middle East due to a war/controversy for which my country will be blamed. Second, the news here is closer, more direct and much more gory. Unless you get Al Jazeera in English, you will probably see nothing that will disturb you viscerally. Here though, in video and newspaper shots, we see lots of dead bodies, and some of them are children. The NY Times has printed only polite and well-arranged shots of living people. So that’s another reason I got involved with the Avaaz petition, to protest Israel's blackout and censorship on several levels. The last point I want to make is indignation and disgust with Israel’s brutality and indifference to world opinion. I thought nothing that happened in the Middle East could shock me, but the spectacle of Israel’s US provided jet fighters bombing a people cooped up in a pen with no escape and then calling their legally elected defenders “terrorists” has surpassed the limits of what is politically and humanly digestible. Last, it’s Israel’s denial of reality that revolts me – Hamas, whatever you may think of them, are a legally elected government, not a gang of terrorists, and should be dealt with diplomatically even though they broke the cease-fire and thus are also guilty for the situation. And as for that even deeper denial of Israel: unless I’m mistaken Palestinians have been around since Biblical times, so why not get used it to? For these reasons, I’m for the AVAAZ petition, which seems to me useful though late in the process

Travels without Herodotus

Note: these reviews have not been fact checked and come as they are, none previously published. The author will not countenance any belly aching about spelling, syntax or other peccadillos, though he will any other reasonable opinions on the worth of the titles considered below.-JD

Finally finished my "summer" reading short list which took me through October! These were Lenin’s Tomb: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick, Travels with Herodotus by Ryzard Kapuscinski and Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties by Robert Stone. All of these highly touted books—which had to crowd out some half a dozen other contenders on my list – lived up to my expectations, more or less.

I’d always wanted to read more about the collapse of the Soviet Union (the most important historical event of my lifetime), and Lenin’s Tomb was the most frequently mentioned title on this topic. The author (working for the Washington Post at the time) is a highly talented Pulitzer-winning reporter and editor who spoke Russian fluently and was able to draw up a many-faceted picture of the end of an Empire that everyone assumed would last forever.

It is the sort of book that required of me little or no virtue or self-discipline to read since it exerted a steady narrative pull like a strongly plotted novel.

Lenin’s Tomb revived my memories of this event which I remember from real news reports but have partially forgotten: It answered most or many of the questions that remained in my mind: first on leadership level: who were the plotters who nearly unseated Gorbachev but then quickly caved in; what were the roles exactly of Gorbachev and Yeltsin (were they the great heroes they appeared to be?) before, during and after; how did the huge Soviet nomenclatura react to the revolutionary forces in the streets, and how was power finally wrested from their hands? Remnick also recounts in detail those very fraught moments when the Baltic states managed to break away from the tyrannical grasp of the ‘bear.”

Even more interesting, though, was the question of how a bunch of cowed sheep (to mix a metaphor) – the Soviet citizens -- went from abject obedience to self-confident, democratic revolt. The author had deep entrée into Soviet society, and reports on all levels; he goes to what was left of the Gulag at that time, reports on the key strike of coal-miners in Siberia and gives a rich picture of the response of the Soviet intelligentsia--writers, artists and intellectuals such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. There is a touching portrait of the latter enjoying his last few days of life in vindication. The author also interviewed Stalin’s closest living relative, a grandson, who coerced Remnick to drink a toast to his grandfather!

Yes, I enjoyed reliving the Soviet collapse (not gloatingly either since I had once been a Soviet sympathizer in a minor way) but just as I was finishing the book, the Georgia-Russia mini-war broke out over two unspellable ethnic enclaves– and Russia was behaving like the old monster that was supposedly dead and buried... Or was it?

An excellent book all in all and timely in the sense that 20 year anniversary of this event is coming up.

Travels without Herodotus
Travels with Herodotus by the Polish journalist Ryzard Kaspuscinski had come as highly recommended by critics I trusted as any book of last year, and I was so sure of its merit that I gave it to a friend before reading it (this friend luckily took a shine to it!). Finally, getting to it, after carrying the book to a place where it might shed light on my own travels, Bodrum, Turkey – I wasn’t disappointed. A strange book it is, and one of the few that concentrate on the theme of the far-flung and well travelled life and try to justify it.

Kapuscinski made his reputation travelling all over the world reporting on unlikely events in strange places for the Polish central news agency; one of his most famous books was Emperor, nominally about Haile Selassie but seen as a comment on the Polish communist regime.

In Travels Without Herodotus, the author tells story after story of the huge quandaries he faced when thrown into the international arena as Poland’s only foreign correspondent without a single foreign language to his credit and next to no knowledge of the great civilizations – such as India & China--that he had to cover. He claims that a text picked up by chance helped him navigate these dilemmas and even profit from them. The text in question was of course the Histories of Herodotus, the ‘father of history.’

RK claims he learned much of his reportorial craft from the astute native of Halicarnassus, and cites a series of passages of what he considers insightful observation of foreign peoples and their customs. He also credits the Greek as having a critical awareness of sources and an admirable scepticism in his insistence on “confirming” the rumors he heard.

A typical RK comment:
In the world of Herodotus, the only real repository of memory is the individual. In order to find out that which has been remembered, one must reach this person. If he lives far away, one has to go to him, to set out on a journey. And after finally encountering him, one must sit down and listen to what he has to say—to listen, remember, perhaps write it down. That is how reportage begins; of such circumstances is it born (76)

Far from arraigning the Greek, as does Edward Said in Orientalism, with various crimes of contempt toward Eastern cultures, Kapuscinski finds Herodotus remarkably free from those mental vices, (but is blissfully unaware of the post-colonial polemics swirling around ‘dead white males’ Greeks not exempt).

The description of Kapuscinski’s last autobiographical work as an expression of his lifelong literary kinship with Herodotus, the ‘father of history” and the “first travel writer,” is accurate and amazingly so; I expected the author to use Herodotus mainly as a peg to tell his own stories and then drop the subject, but in fact he does much more, allowing the Greek into every crevice of his strange, complex life. He also retells by quotation a number of detailed plots from Herodotus, so that the reader benefits from the suspense of two narrations.

Kapuscinski's intention isn’t scholarly, rather to point out how the ancient Greek excelled at the profession he invented. RK’s approach to Herodotus is nonacademic and in a way naïve but as such is refreshingly positive. As a classic Herodotus is an unassailable authority, and RK never tries to second-guess him.

The only other point that RK doesn’t consider deeply is his own collusion with the Polish Communist regime which permitted him this relatively privileged life.

The most appealing theme in TWH though is its deep meditation upon and attempt to justify the far-flung life lived among “difference” and the pleasures of the intellectual attempt to decipher the enigmas generated by that difference. It offers one of the strongest defenses of intellectual nomadism that I can recall.

Not finding Herodotus’ Histories readily available, I took this volume with me to Bodrum (formerly Halicarnassus), Turkey, as the next best thing. And what do you know, at the end of the book a real epiphany occurred.

No, it wasn’t the plywood cutout of Herodotus standing outside the town of Bodrum, claiming the historian as its own. It was RK’s account in the final chapter of his trip of homage to the birthplace of his literary boon companion. Curiously enough, RK landed in Bodrum from the Greek island of Kos. I read this chapter after a short trip to Kos, and was delighted to see I had followed a bit of RK's itinerary (10 kilometers of it!). His last chapter is a touching visit to the town he thought was still called “Halicarnassus.” It was poor day trip devoid of charm but redeemed by the literary coincidence. I realized that sometimes it’s good to travel without Herodotus.

A primo read
Finally, Robert Stone’s widely praised memoir of the 60’s Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties is by far the best memoir I have read on that tormented, disputed period. The title comes not from the color of an herbal substance popularly consumed during the 60s but from an early morning atmospheric phenomenon observed by Stone and hipster friends as they hid out in Baja, Mexico, along with novelist Ken Kesey, who was a fugitive from justice at the time and an influential disturber of the peace.

Stone has never completely fulfilled the heavy burden laid upon him of being a great American novelist in the tradition of Hemingway/Faulkner/Wolfe or of being a believable successor to his hero Joseph Conrad. He has a kind of stature, yes, I agree, but to what degree he belongs in the company of the fictional greats remains to be seen.

(Stone and fellow American Don Delillo have both struggled mightily to write the great American novel – or Anti-novel – and both have been seen as just falling short by tragic milli-inches)

In any case, Prime Green won’t hurt his reputation and will probably gain him new readers of his past oeuvre since Prime Green was a bestseller in a tough quality book market. On the evidence provided here, I’m planning to read his first work, A Hall of Mirrors (but for the same reason will take a pass on the movie).

I give myself no virtue points for reading Prime Green all the way through because as a fellow rememberer of that time it was all intimate enjoyment at rubbing up against shared impressions -- along with the naked joy of hearing someone else’s confessions of shameful and/or hilarious episodes.

Contrary to what I’d heard Stone in this book doesn’t pose as hero nor exaggerate his leadership role in the 60s milieu. He is modest throughout, even in the tale of his first novel’s going straight to Hollywood. The only slight dishonesty I could find is Stone’s implying that he had been on the notorious Merry Pranksters Kool Aid Acid Test bus ride from SF to NY in the early 60s, when it seems he had not.

His style is thoughtfully hirsute but never opaque – it has though the stamp of an aggressive illogic that is the true Stone style, not pretty but painfully real and sometimes awkward.

One of the most valuable aspects of Prime Green is Stone’s depiction of the San Francisco post-Beat, proto-hippy literary scene and the coterie of sorts that formed around Ken Kesey (author of perennial favorite One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). Stone seems to have really liked and admired Kesey and this book is in some ways a tribute to him.

But I like best Stone’s detailed anecdotes of his early career days when he was unknown and struggling, such as having to defend his West Coast hirsuteness from red necks on a Greyhound bus in Ohio, his journalistic fiasco in wartime Vietnam and later another disastrous flameout on a New York City tabloid. Great stories from a writer who was really there and makes it come alive. The complaint of “too short” is well earned.

Tibet Petition from Avaaz.org

Anyone interested in signing a petition and/or having an automated letter sent to the head of state of their government urging the boycott of the Olympics Opening Ceremony this summer in Beijing as a means of showing disapproval of China's recent crackdown in Tibet can do so through the Avaaz website at Avaaz.org. Avaaz is an international independent human rights organization which takes up a wide variety of causes.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_report_back/7.php/?cl=70373558

Tibetan Poet Woeser

Here are some links to information on the Tibetan poet Woeser. I feel that by taking a figure such as Woeser, who is married to a Han Chinese writer Wang Lixiong (both of whom are under a kind of house arrest in Bejing) the situation in Tibet could be made accessible to people who are unaware of the situation. Woeser has been described as a particularly talented and outspoken poet and writer in regard to Tibetan issues and resistance to Chinese hegemony in Tibet.

http://www.tibetwrites.org/?_Woeser_

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/31/tibetan-poets-blogs-.html

There is also a very detailed and sympathetic article ("The Quiet Heroes of Tibet" by Pankaj Mishra) in The New York Review of Books Jan 17, 2008. 39-41.

Mid East Book Blog (MEBB!)

Would like to add a link to the new MidEast Book Blog but don't know how. Anyway, these two blog sites are to be linked sometime in the future so that the book blog will be a part of the FFPReview. Thanks for any advice.
Jim D