It’s a strange book, unconventional perhaps, charming at points boringly dull at others. The narrative is dense, an unseemly mixture of sarcasm, destruction, sexual desire and comic humor. It is a brilliant portrayal of the upheavals in Ireland during the 1920s and the ensuing disintegration of the British Empire. Inspite of all its qualities, the booker prize seems unwarranted. The narrative is inconsistent and lacks the vision necessary for the work to be categorized as a great historic novel; at best it is not the best work of a wonderfully talented writer.

In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles.  At that time there were probably yachts there too during the summer since the hotel held a regatta every July. As for the regatta, for some reason it was discontinued years ago, before the Spencers took over the management of the place.  And a few years later still the Majestic itself followed the boats and preceded the pines into oblivion by burning to the ground — but by that time, of course, the place was in such a state of disrepair that it hardly mattered. 

The narrative revolves around a Hotel and its occupants, in rural Ireland, as they undergo the vicissitudes of life in a country struggling for its identity. The Hotel- pointedly named The Majestic serves as a metaphor; its fall from its once regal avatar to its present dilapidated state is a reflection of the degradation of Irish society and in turn of the empire. The inhabitants of Majestic- the Spencers and the few old ladies serve as the last reminders of the fading aristocratic older generation. In the midst of undulations, these residents are a reminder of changing times- times where the old order is fading away to make way for a radically new one. The author brilliantly portrays the rapidly changing and violent social environment of Ireland throughout the almost claustrophobic, frozen life of the occupants. This combination of dynamic flux with stasis is one of the greatest achievements of the author and one that distinguishes this book from others in its genre.

The landscape of the country is broken into divisions and conflicts. There are ethnic conflicts between the rural and urban Irish, there are religious conflicts between the catholic and Protestants, there are conflicts among the unionists and Sinn Fein, then of course there is the small matter of the break-up of the British empire. Amidst this hoopla, Major Brendan Archer serves as a silent observer in the novel. It is the major who provides a sense of calm and reality to the condition of rural Ireland. Interestingly, the time-line of the novel is anchored to the major and not the violent environs; that is the novel follows happening at the pace of major’s life and not the other way round. So, in some sense the author’s focus is not Ireland but the effect of Ireland on the major and residents of the Majestic.

The major serving as the silent observer of the novel provides perhaps the most disconnected view of the happenings in Ireland. While the residents portray Englishmen living in their crumbling ivory towers and the English refer to the irish as extremists, the character of the major is the great balancing act. His stumbling through corridors after corridors of the Majestic as his stumbling through life in search of unknown people and unknown feelings lends a degree of fatalism to the novel. This fatalism abetted with almost claustrophobic feel of the story makes the narrative almost eerie; almost like the eerie calm before the advent of battle. Clearly, the character of the Major is one that the narrator has reserved for himself.

As events heat up, the Major finds it impossible to leave, obsessed with his love for Sarah. It is this fleeting love story, barely a courtship, which continues to baffle me. While on the one hand we have a sweaty half naked major spending his nights closeted in a storeroom, on the other we have a flighty temptress flirting her way with the dominant male characters in the novel.  In some ways Sarah represents the modern Irish woman; no longer bound by aristocratic men. But there are ambiguities nonetheless. One could hypothesize that the character of Sarah perhaps serve as a placeholder for a real life acquaintance of the author.  In contrast to the stifled advances of the major is the maturing of the twins into women; much more open with their sexuality as opposed to the gentry. Thus change pervades the novel- through the broken façade of the Majestic, the debates over religion and politics but most of all from the radical departure of the newer generations from the ideas of the old. The crumbling of the Majestic is in resonance with the changing conditions of the Irish society.

The only constant in the novel is the author’s attention to detail. From Angela’s letters to Edward’s suit, each and every aspect of the characters is painstakingly detailed. When Edward finds his beloved pigs hacked to death their blood oozes through the ‘eyelets of his shoes’. Be it the golf course, Sarah’s house or the grounds of the majestic, Farrell is the master of detail. The re-creation of Irish life and times is not the result of external happenings or crimes but rather prevalent through the nitty-gritties of the life of the characters. We know that something is amiss not by tales of murder or manslaughter but rather because the roof of the majestic has broken in a spot. This stitching together of a narrative, by piecing together detail after detail is trademark Farrell. Another innovation on the part of the author is the ingenious blending of the civil strife in Ireland with the happenings across the rest of British Empire. Historical snippets (primarily news clippings) from disparate parts of the globe serve to augment the growing disillusion of British monarchy’s subjects. An exemplary illustration of the attention to detail, are the letters sent by Angela to the Major. Each letter is full of details enabling the major to piece together a world he has never seen.

The end of the novel, akin to the end of the empire is brutal; perhaps a little too brutal for the rather quaint tone the rest of the novel adopts. The ending is sudden, incomplete and leaves much to be desired. Major and Sarah’s love story is left broken, so is the life of other minor characters. In my view, the sudden ending is not a shortfall but rather another facet of author’s construct. The majestic is burned down, the residents leave; the major is almost killed – all in order to portray the rapid pace at which Ireland was changing. Whatever it may be, the sudden ending does not do justice to the scope of the novel. In some ways, The Troubles is a peculiar historic novel. For it lacks the scale and breadth often found in such pieces; instead it chooses to take a different pathway- so must the reader if he wishes to enjoy this particular piece.

Sukrit

Origins

Travelling back to pre-revolutionary Lyons, France it would be a customary sight to see the city dominated by weaving studios- large rooms full of even larger looms operated by expert master weavers not much different from the sight opera conductor. For since roman times Lyons was famous for its fine quality of silk weaves – intricate and complicated patterns beautifully represented in fine knit silk. In the late seventeen hundreds Lyons suffered from a peculiar conundrum – It had more orders than its weavers could possibly deliver. A radical new invention was needed to cope with this demand. It was here that Jacquard came up with his design for a programmable loom thus bringing a paradigm shift in the way humans thought of as machines. Just as William Shakespeare might never have become a great poet and playwright without the wonderful simulation and energy of Renaissance London all around him, Jacquard would most likely never have blossomed as an inventor had he not lived in Lyons, the silk-weaving capital of the world.

The standard silk weaving loom of the day called the drawloom was a pitiable machine or rather not a machine at all. It only facilitated the manual weaving of patterns or images in fabric thus requiring expert weavers. At the maximum rate of two woven rows a minute, a mere inch of brocade fabric still required a full working day to complete, each warp thread requiring manual lifting and placement.  What was required was a method of ordering, with complete precision, the lifting of warp threads that formed the shed in a better way than having a draw-boy doing the whole thing by hand. Programming Cards was the answer.

The idea behind the Jacquard looms was a system of punch cards and hooks. The cards were rectangular with holes punched in them. The hooks and needles used in weaving were guided by these holes in the cardboard. When the hook came into the card one of two possibilities could occur; either the hook would go through the hole or remain stationary. In the first case the warp thread would be lifted thus creating a pattern. By controlling the relative placement of these holes, one can in principle control each warp thread of the fabric individually. This made the whole process of weaving infinitely flexible; any image could be embodied into a chain of punched cards and woven by the Jacquard loom. The astonishing truth is that the Jacquard loom enabled decorated fabric to be woven about twenty-four times more quickly than the drawloom. We can perhaps more readily appreciate the impact of the speed increase when we consider that, today, a supersonic jet aircraft flies at up to twenty-four times the average speed of a modern car. The increase in speed was as remarkable as that.

Though Jacquard loom resulted from the genius of an individual it was nonetheless a product of the social conditions prevailing in France. At the start of the nineteenth century, the chaos, butchery, continually gyrating politics and general fiasco of Revolutionary France were being meta-morphed into a coherent, ordered, disciplined new society that saw rational order as its god. It was a society that had a particular love for new types of machines and completely new inventions. This was to be expected; after all machines are the ultimate physical embodiment of reason.  It was lucky for Jacquard that Napoleon had been fascinated by the silk industry all his life. As a result, during Napoleon’s leadership great emphasis was placed on innovations in the weaving industry. Patrons were easy to find and so was the money needed for experimentation. Jacquards’ weaving background, encouragement given by the government combined with his genius provided the perfect ingredients for invention.

Diffusion

The success of this loom was evident from the beginning. Its effect on the French silk industry was immediate, enormous and extra-ordinary. The loom was acknowledged by Napoleon himself and Jacquard was awarded a handsome prize. This policy of providing grants to inventors and subsequently awarding them encouraged a whole generation of engineers to innovate and invent. Jacquard Loom was declared public property with a handsome royalty for Jacquard himself.

The rapid diffusion of the loom was the result of two things. Firstly, the Jacquard loom took away the difficulty and complexity from the weaving process, turning it into a rapid and easy process. The subsequent increase in efficiency resulted in its adoption by large majority of the weavers. The most important reason for its rapid development can be attributed to the efforts on the part of the government to reform silk industry in the country. The subsequent publicization of the technology, along with a small fee for its usage made way for its fast diffusion.

Leap of Faith

The story of Jacquard’s idea might easily have ended with the new kind of loom transforming the French silk industry and then the worlds’. But the potential of the Jacquard loom extended far beyond silk weaving. It formed the core of Babbage’s visionary Analytical Engine- the first ever computing machine recognizable as the modern computer.

One of the many problems Babbage faced in the development of his computing machines was that of finding a mechanical method for providing these machines with the numbers on which they were to operate. Babbage adopted the principle of using punched cards to transmit information to the machine – the same way Jacquard had done some 20 years ago.  Babbage’s interest in the Jacquard loom went beyond the relatively simple idea of using holes in the cards to represent numbers. Babbage conceived his greatest project and one that would consume his entire life without ever being built – The Analytical Engine, by drawing a perfect analogy with Jacquard’s loom. Babbage conceived that his analytical engine would be stocked with what he called “operation cards”; punched cards that would describe the algebraic operation to be performed. Other cards named variable cards would be use to provide the inputs. Babbage’s vision of the analytical engine provided humanity with the first form of a programmable computer, operation cards being the assembly language and variable cards the user language. It was an engine which would possess its own computing library, repeating the same calculation over and over once specified. The information age had dawned. To think it might not have for the inventiveness of a Lyon silk weaver !!

The conceptual link Babbage made between his own work and Jacquard’s is beyond doubt one of the greatest intellectual breakthroughs in the history of human thought. It is a leap of scientific imagination that is too easily taken for granted today, when computers and information technology are all around us, when we are so familiar with machines that are essentially special kinds of Jacquard looms built to weave information rather than fabric.

This is not to imply that computers would never have come about if Jacquard loom had never existed. It would be credulity indeed to imagine that a society as obsessed with information as the humans would not have devised a way of processing it. But they surely would have looked and worked very differently today. Also Textile engineers might not have the fun they have now at the expense of computer engineers

It is a lesson that Technology has never forgotten to teach the inventor. Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never made; not for the lack of available technologies but for the simple fact that it was just too far ahead of its time. A little more faith on the part of the British Government might have brought the information age a century ago. But it wasn’t till 1939 that Howard Akien came up with the first modern computer.

In an age where invention is all but forgotten, replaced by ‘organized’ institutionalized research, it pays to remind oneself of individual genius, capable of heralding paradigm shifts in the way we think. Jacquard’s loom was once such innovation. It forever changed the way humans viewed machines.

Sukrit

1. Incidental comics

2. Dear Blank Please Blank

I am not saying these are as good as the above mentioned epic ones but they are pretty good.

-Vikas

P.S:

Seriously this is all I could come up for a post. Looks like I am out of ideas.

College started and the all I could do in the very first week was to be unable to fully decide what courses I am going to take in the sem.

@anurag : thnx for telling me about the second site.

– Albus Dumbledore

Well. Hmm. A cigarette does a person a world of good. No generalities. It does me a world of good. Clears up the head a little. Focuses ones mind. I find it hard to distinguish whether this mind clearing effect is narcotic or rather a play of my own psyche. But that is secondary. Whats important is that it does me good. Didnt i just start out with this. Focuses the mind ! yeah sure sure.

So anyways just finished reading Hell’s Angels , a chronicle of the marauding losers outlaws jokers petty criminals etc. written by the wild man of American Journalism Hunter S. Thompson. Well that guy does live upto his reputation. The book is as good as promised- frank, real, un-prejudiced and with depth. You see what makes Thompson different from other writers is a set of two things :

1. He doesnt go into anything with pre-nomination or rather a pre formed opinion. Like Holmes used to say , its futile to theorize before you have the facts.

2. Unlike other journalists who tend to stay away from the action and take a bird eye view, Thompson jumps in the pot.

How do you chronicle a gang of killer biker outlaws notoriously famous (or infamous) for their notoriety ? Well its simple. buy a big fuckin bike. Fill it up with gas and spend a year on the road with them partying pleasuring eating drugs. Thats Gonzo Journalism. Hunter S. Thompson founded it in Hell’s Angels. What ends in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins in this book. Its the freewheelin journey of a man out to document the most awesome and shocking phenomenon of the American 60s- The Hell’s Angels.  It takes a man as crazy as the Angels themselves in order to be able to successfully document them.

Well Hell’s Angels are the elite of the motorcycle outlaws the one percenters, outlaws whose Harley 74 is all they own in the world and all they care about.  Living on the bike from one run to another, booze and drugs and occasional visits to the mamas and huge tattoos and the winged skull on the back of their jackets and the mix of human semen grease and sweat characterizing them and with chains as belts holding up the crumpled levis and orgies and scuffles with the police and shows for the ‘squares’ and breaking up peace marches and constant pondering about the world and the feeling of alienation and constant worrying, worrying that the person sitting next to them might just turn around and stick it in their guts and devotion to their president and a healthy contempt about all middle class upper class and all other classes and the protection of their dominion and to being called losers and being seen with awe and shock by the so called citizens and LSD and marijuana and more sex and week long parties with stupors long enough only to sustain the human body and Harleys and road accidents and road rash and characterized by California and beating up the niggers and being petty criminals showcased by the press as professional thugs and being forced to live up to their image and drinking beer instead of water and knowing nothing or no one except their angel brothers and with no money or property or corrections and showing respect for Ginsberg but hatred for the screwed up beatniks and generally inhuman (or human- depending on which side you are on) and the mystic element and beer brawls and then some more beer followed by sex.

The above is  my understanding of Hell’s Angels written out in incomprehensible gibberish which bodes well with the complex enigma they are.  With the reference to 50s or 60s Hell’s Angels would come across as a cross hybrid between the beatniks and hippies, social outlaws with the aim of changing the society. One couldn’t be further from the truth. Hell’s Angels don’t stand for any patriotic american tradition ; not part of the upper class intellectual beat generation or the hippie movement. These movements were a form of rebellion by people, a rebellion against the status quo of the society. Hell’s angels were just a bunch of bums knowing nothing with no skills and no jobs sticking together cauz that was the safest way for them to survive. They didnt want salvation didnt give a damn about the Vietnam war knowing only their other angel brothers. They are bums. That’s the end of that. Ginsberg loved them. Called them misguided. Angels liked the fellow and hence let him live. They coudnt understand a word he said though. They were like the Robin Hood gang of yesteryears only that in the Robin Hood sense they were not heroes.

There is an important difference between the word loser and outlaw. One is passive and the other is active, and the mean reasons that the angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the day dreams of millions of losers who dont wear any defiant insignia and who dont know how to be outlaws. The streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed-even for a day-into hairy hard fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders and then thunder out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker’s daughter. They command a fascination however reluctant, that borders on psychic masturbation. The Angels dont like being called losers, but they have learned to live with it. ‘yeah, i guess i am one,’ said one. ‘but you’re looking at one loser who is going to make a hell of scene on the way out.’

Hell’s Angels were the acidic side effect of the society they inhabited , a society without any meaning,purpose or central tenets , primarily after the second world war and left free to drift on its own. A society in which the American Dream and american way of life has ceased to mean anything ; a society where the sense of alienation is likely to be popular- especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they’re supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place.

Even though Vonnegut’s narration is crazy at best and drivel at worst, the book strikes a chord somewhere deep down. It opens up the box that each of us has kept safely locked up, the box full of Whys.  Why this ? why that ? why iit? why life ? blah blah blah. I wont go on , afraid lest it may turn out to be Confessions 2.0

Anyways the best part of the book is Bokonon – a crazy half negro full of nice little witty sayings. I’ll sum up few of my favorites

Tiger got to hunt,

Bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder,’Why, why, why?’

Tiger got to sleep,

Bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand.

A lover’s a liar,

To himself he lies.

The truthful are loveless,

Like oysters their eyes !

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness. And God said, ‘Let us make living cretures out of mud, so the mud can see what we have done.’ And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked, ‘What is the purpose of all this?’ he asked politely.

‘Everything must have a purpose?’ asked God.

‘Certainly,’ said man.

‘Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,’ said God. And he went away.

There are several more. If you liked these then you would love the book. A warning. All of the above are fomas ofcourse. fomas are lies.

I must thank Shriram for lending me In Xinadu. For one I became a great fan of William Dalrymple and ended up reading From the Holy Mountain. On the other it revived my taste for History especially Roman History. All though In Xinadu was splendid in many ways, its epilogue was special. Here’s a snippet –

When Sir Richard Burton left Mecca having spent a year there in disguise, despite having just accomplished one of the greatest-ever feats of exploration he found himself overcome with depression.

The exaltation of having penetrated and escaped the Holy City without damage was followed by languor and disappointment. I had time upon my mule for musing upon how melancholy a thing is success. Whilst failure inspirits a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories “are in shadows not substantial things……”

Sukrit

Sitting in a room, empty but surrounded by my thoughts. What am i thinking ? To be true i dont know myself. Am i intelligent, do i have a brain or is my whole life a desperate marketing stunt, with a hope that at the end of the tunnel there is some light that would somehow render all this real. I dont think i have been influenced ever by anymore than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Leaving the drugs aside; beatdom was more much more than just people getting high on LSD, it represnted the never ending human struggle, a struggle to find a place in this bizzarre universe. I no i am not making sense, not incoherent but not far from it too.  One should make too much sense, one must fail in courses. A man who has never seen lows and always happy is the unhappiest man on this earth. I have such a friend.

Dylan is a genius. So was Albert Einstein. I am not.

Thats it.there is truth. Whole life we go on emulating people “influeced” by them all the while pretending that u are like them too. dont think so. it aint right.

The Answer is Blowin in the Wind.

If Camus were to wake up right now and tell me that Sisphyus pulling stones up an incline holds some meaning for him then i would slap him in the face. The bastard who is he kidding. As i said beatdom aint really a bad thing.

What do u think this blog is ? A pathetic effort by a couple of wannabees , out to con a world full of idiots into delude them into thinking of themselves as some break through geniuses. Sanskar calls me a hypocrite. Perhaps I am . Perhaps this post too has some degree of hypocricity in it. (is that how you spell it ? wtvr doesnt matter much). One must sometimes come across the truth , the hard truth no less just to break away from the maze. Stephen Deadulus comes too mind. Often I have criticized him as a hypocrite. I dont anymore. I relate to him now. I understand him completely, his efforts to break way this mould, to create for himself an identity. I know him. I am him.

Forget genius. There is more to life than that. There is something called courage. Albert Einstein was a genius, so was Newton. They were also the most courageous people on the planet. Stephen Hawking is a mdeical miracle. No he aint. He is a human miracle, defying death everyday. Something must be worth living, something must have some purpose. Purpose is a funny thing. Dostoevsky wanted to die, Gogol almost destroyed Dead Souls. There is a reason Russians make the best writers in the world, they write with their soul. Reading The Brothers Karamazov is like looking into a soul, no , a naked soul. Hmm. thats it. yes . finally i do have answered whats so great about Russian Books.

All my life has just been a journey of emulation, a stand to achieve success in the face of the world. Moving from one form of studapa to another, its all nonsense. irrelevant. The one thing i hate about iit is that it makes a person forget himself, his natural inclinations and align his volitions and streamline them with the acceptance by the stud janta of iit. Almost everyone in iit thinks that the other bunch of people are chutiye. well wtvr. once again I am blaiming iit for what are not its faults. It is the easier way out.

Ignorance is bliss. I thought people undertook intoxication to forget the toubles and vicissitudes of this world. Its the other way round for me. My mind is clear now. I see my nothing more than a bunch of insencere disconnected episodes. Insencere . yes thats whats my life has been. I know that most of you have long stopped reading my incoherent mutterings. but for once i am not writing to be read. For once I am writing bcoz i want to. Its funny. in my intro to this blog i said that i this blog is an attempt to reach out to more similarly minded people. hahahahah. its too funny. choking with laughter.

Cant get the image of Johhny Depp typing away truths at his typewriter. its haunting and alluring at the same time. Sanskar is right. This  movie has stirred something deep in my soul.

perhaps some people respect me a lot. The problem is i dont. Physics gaya maan chudaane.

Sukrit

After a very long time I am doing a review of a book.

First thing first, this book is narrated by death, but it does not play a major part. Death just provides an omniscient point of view to the story. The first time through, as usual I rushed through it. It is roughly 550 pages and I intend to read it again but this time a little more seriously.

Death has a personality. If something bad is about to happen, Death warns you ahead of time. My favorite part is when “he” stomps on a framed picture of Hitler on his way to retrieve a thousand souls from a bomb raid. Death is trying to understand the human race as much as the humans are. When “his” job becomes unbearable, he watches the color of the sky as he gathers the souls and carries them away. The descriptions of the sky are like nothing I’ve ever read.

And one awesome excerpt from it

There was once a strange, small man. He decided three important details about his life:
1. He would part his hair from the opposite side to everyone else.
2. He would make himself a small, strange mustache.
3. He would one day rule the world.
…Yes, the Fuhrer decided that he would rule the world with words.

I do agree to the fact that this is a strong story. It is a fast paced story, but on reading I realized this that it was a good ploy to tell the story through death. Death auspicates constantly, so we know a bit about which of the characters will die. Surprisingly this did not reduce the shock value, rather it heightened the anticipation. I for now thin this is exactly how people would feel during war. They know they will lose some of their loved ones. It is excruciatingly painful to wait and see how it turns out.

All the stories on holocaust are told from the point of view of the oppressed. This is the flip side of the coin. This is a take on the story that focused on the question that were all Germans alike, were even the little girls also members of the hate faction.

It is the story of an orphaned German girl living in Hitler’s birthplace. (SPOILER—>) When Liesel’s adopted father is shipped off to war, however, Liesel creeps through the house to see Rosa sleeping with her husband’s accordian strapped around her waist. Rosa’s changes prove one of the greatest reasons to read good literature– to get insight into the type of people we don’t usually give a second chance.

I would love a sequel, to see how Liesel got from Germany to Australia, and to confirm the guess that she married Max. Come on, Mr. Zusak! What are you waiting for?

If you want a fast read, this book is not for you. If you only like happy endings this book is not for you. If you don’t like experimental fiction, this book is not for you.

If you love to read and if you love to care about the characters you read this book is for you.

-Vikas

P.S:

How does this theme look ?Please do tell.

@sanskar and others: what about goa ? we didn’t talk about it.

Some would say that “saale *#&^ maggu ne sab mag rakha hai isliye maze se timepass kar raha hai.” I know there would be many who would think so and a tiny(I am stressing here) fraction who would differ slightly.

So let me try to explain…let it be what do I care.

Now moving on to the content of this post. I am really getting bored ever since the exams started. SO to do something I started watching Rome, a old miniseries that used to come on HBO. But to my surprise it turned out to be not that bad(though I am not saying it is very good). It will do for me since I am at a point now anything will work for me. My exams are in a clusters, two of them happened very quickly near the start , and the remaining will happen near the end. So it presented me with a dilemma of many sorts by giving me two free days in between exams. This dilemma was solved by me reading the book thief, though I have not completed it I am very sorry I started it. I really should not read a book in midst major in which the narrator is death itself. An awesome book by the way from what part I have read.

Another thing I managed to do was give titles and artist attributes to the whole 500 top rock collection. (You can see how much time I had).

Just to cheer you all up and bring you all out of boredom and bringing an abrupt end to this post I go on to my other interest.

-Vikas

This post will be concentrating on the beat generation. This post is a result of sum of events which happened over the past 2 days, my staying in hostel and again seeing the awesome part of fear and loathing in Vegas, me starting to search more about Kerouac, and other things which you may or may not know.

First thing is that I found an awesome site which goes by the name of beatdom.com. The site has all kinds of things, ranging from essays, stories, poems and issues along with very good reviews of the books from the beat generation. Over it, the site also has special sections for Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. More authors such as Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson are also there. Do go visit this site to see what an awesome site this is.

Another thing is that Hunter S Thompson of whom I have become a great fan of, wrote a letter in which he mentioned his list of top ten albums of 1960′s. The list says

1)     Herbie Mann’s 1969 Memphis Underground

2)     Bob Dylan’s 1965 Bringing It All Back Home (especially noted as “Mr. Tambourine Man” in his letter)

3)     Dylan’s 1965 Highway 61 Revisited

4)     The Grateful Dead’s 1970 Workingman’s Dead

5)     The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Let it Bleed

6)     Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 Buffalo Springfield

7)     Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 Surrealistic Pillow

8)     Roland Kirk’s “various albums”

9)     Miles Davis’s 1959 Sketches of Spain

10)  Sandy Bull’s 1965 Inventions

Another thing I wanted to mention in this post is that on Nov 9, was Carl Sagan day on his birth date and over it on the eleventh of this month was Vonnegut’s birthday.(Just wanted to mention it)

-Vikas

P.S:

I think the photo explains the reason behind this post.

@Sanskar : whatever we haven’t listened in this we should try to get hold of them.

@Sukrit : Hunter S Thompson once said, “I’ve been arguing for years now that music is the New Literature, that Dylan is the 1960s’ answer to Hemingway.”

How does this theme look like.