More than any other decade, the 1960’s have come to represent an almost mythical time in American history.  Perhaps this is why we return to them, again and again, in books, movies, and song.  The nostalgia for this bygone era is thick and long lasting, lingering into generations of young adults and children who were born too late to experience the magic.

Raised by two former hippies, I have been hearing stories about this amazing decade since I was old enough to teeter around in my mother’s worn fringed boots.   Upon entering my teenage years, I discovered Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test and through it, Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters.  One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was the next logical step in my counter-cultural education.  Fortunately, Kesey’s sensitive and nuanced portrayal of those that society deemed unfit ages well, and felt just as relevant to a child of the baby boomers as it did to the original generation of free-thinkers.

Kesey was in many ways the quintessential hippy, and Cuckoo’s Nest can be read as a manifesto of the anti-establishment creed.  It is fitting, then, that in our newest feature article, writer Paul Millward takes a trip to the place where it all began, the city that has come to embody a certain ideal of the counter-culture experience: San Francisco.

Like many before him, Millward views his visit to Haight-Ashbury as kind of a pilgrimage, a journey to discover some lost time and place.  Join Millward in rediscovering Kesey’s legacy by reading our newest feature: Flower Children of the 60’s & Ken Kesey, Father of LSD and Hippies. But even while tripping through Millward’s piece, don’t forget about the other, more mainstream side of 1960’s culture, which we will explore on March 20th in our piece on the hit television show “Mad Men.”

Every Friday, starting this week, the staff at Literary Traveler will gather up the relevant book news from around the web, bringing it together in a handy post for book lovers to peruse.  Enjoy!

• Will the iPad change the very way we read?  It certainly seems possible.  Penguin and Apple have teamed up to create interactive “books” with audio, video, and streaming content.  The first offering: Vampire Academy.
• Speaking of vampires, Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has published his second book: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.   According to the LA Times, it’s actually pretty good.
• Congratulations are in order for Abdo Khal, winner of this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel She Throws Sparks as Big as Castles.
• Here’s something to keep in mind for your next visit to Boston: literary-minded diners are welcome at the Boston Public Library, where you can “dine with Shakespeare, Aristotle and Dante.”
• Sally Wolff-King, professor of Southern literature from Emory University, talks to PBS about one of Faulkner’s most important sources of inspiration – the 1,800 page antebellum diary of plantation owner Francis Terry Leek.
• Reminder: Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” comes out today. But before you buy tickets, read up on the making of the movie, and the history of the books, with this interesting article from the New York Times.

It seems that March is monastery month here at Literary Traveler.  With the weather starting to warm ever so slightly, there is a breath of spring in the air, which has always felt more like renewal to me than any January 1^st resolution.

But with renewal also comes return, and that is exactly what William Caverlee does in our newest feature article.  Caverlee writes about a trip he took almost thirty years ago to the Gethsemani Trappist monastery near the aptly named Bardstown, Kentucky.  He samples life at the monastery, and finds himself a little closer to understanding the works of Thomas Merton.

Merton spent much of his life traveling, searching for a place that felt right.  On December 13^th, 1941, Merton was accepted into the monastery as a postulant.  It is here that Merton wrote his autobiography at the age of 31.  The Seven Storey Mountain went on to become one of the most important Christian books of the century, a fact that Caverlee does not dwell upon.  The strongest memory Caverlee imparts centers around the friendly monks and the incongruousness of an old-world institution dropped into modern America.  Yet this is the beauty of our unique culture: the comfortable mixture of old traditions, kept alive by the faithful, and the seductive pull of technology and progress.

Join us in marveling at the wonderful strangeness of the American landscape and reveling in the continual process of return and renewal by checking out Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Often our greatest epiphanies occur at the most mundane moments.  Like Archimedes and his tub, we tend to stumble into truth with our vision blurred and arms outstretched.  However, there are men who dedicate their lives to the discovery and unveiling of holy and sacred truths.

Hermann Hesse was one of those men.  His writing reveals an interest not only in fiction, but also in the deeper philosophical questions that have haunted us since Plato summarized our shadowy limitations.

This month, author Steven Hermans takes a walk through Hesse’s past, following his trail to the city of Maulbronn, Germany.  He journeys to the ruins of the monastery where Hesse spent several years studying before he fell into a deep depression.  It was a special place for Hesse, and through his wanderings, it becomes a significant place for Hermans as well.  Particularly once he comes upon the fountain.

It is here Hermans learns something crucial about his own multifaceted nature; he not simply a poet, a monk, or a musician, but like Hesse, he is a man on a quest for truth.  Although it may seem strange to read so much into an object of stone and water, I, too, can remember a time when the very bricks of a church seemed to speak out in kinship.  While the little, unobtrusive chapel on the Hudson did not have the same advantage of age as the Maulbronn fountain, the quiet air seemed imbued with a purity, a sense of balance and peace.  It was as though it had been built just for that one moment of perfect clarity.

But before we get lost in reflection, take a moment to follow Hermans to the edge of the Black Forest by checking out our newest feature article – Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game: The Fountain of Inspiration - in its entirety.

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Francis McGovern
Literary Traveler

It’s been a brutal winter for many of us.  Cold and snowy, icy and slippery.  As I write this post, heavy wet snowflakes, though delightful and beautiful, descend upon my area of the world.  Forecasters predict it will snow until tomorrow with accumulations of up to one foot of the hard-to-shovel white stuff.

I’m not a hot weather person, as many people are.  I tend to stay out of the sun, a fear of wrinkles since I’m now over 30.  However, it’s been such a harsh winter, I’ve been dreaming of sunny days, vivid colors, the salty ocean.  A margarita or a tortilla on the beach.  It doesn’t matter because I am finding myself, like many other of our literary travelers, craving for that golden ball in the sky.

Maybe that’s why I chose our latest series of Mexico articles?  Or perhaps it was the fact I had such a good time in Mexico when I visited there – the warm people who suffered through my terrible Spanish, the delicious street food that I never got sick from once, the colorful festiveness on every street corner.

Whatever the motivation, I’m happy to introduce our Mexican series, complete with three inspiring articles about Mexican literary travels and an interview with Peggy Stevens Falkenstein, Mexican travel writer.

Frances Calderon de la Barca: Life in Mexico

Chasing a Phantom in San Miguel de Allende: Beat Inspiration Neal Cassady

Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire in the Pinacate Biosphere Reserve

Peggy Stevens Falkenstein: Tying Loose Ends in Mexico

Stay warm and explore your literary imagination in sunny Mexico!

Jennifer, Network Editorial Director

Friday, March 5 marks the release of Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland.” After checking out the Tim Burton exhibit at MoMA in New York at the end of January, I predict a scrawling, blubbering, rubberized, even colorized interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s hallucinatory Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Burton’s muse Johnny Depp plays a rouge-enhanced The Mad Hatter, Burton’s partner-and-muse Helena Bonham Carter bursts as The Red Queen, and Alan Rickman rolls languish as The Caterpillar.

It was easy to imagine how Charles Dodgson, who wrote “literary nonsense” under the Carroll pseudonym, influenced Burton’s work as we walked down museum-white hallways of edible stripes, chomping hoses, and sordid baby dolls. But Burton doesn’t liposuction the books he makes into films, he builds a lard house out of them and then lights it on fire to fuel his own eager, weird intellect.

I wonder how Carroll, back in the 1860s fueled his stories; when I was young, a math teacher told my class he wrote in opium dens. His diaries, however, indicate he was simply attuned to children, concocting labyrinths of hazy yet distinct and heightened rhetoric. The kind of sophisticated, wacked-out language kids get because their impulses detect non-sense and their minds read pleasure.

It’s with that feeling Carroll and Burton capture the sensory part of our collective brain, the pleasure center—stories that blow open the prolific, complex chapters of our childhoods tend to not forget the simple joys in life.

I can’t wait to see what Burton has done on film with the story of Alice In Wonderland. It’s a place we can fall into and feel like kids. And if we choose to, we can visit any time.

Moviegoers anxiously await the February 19, 2010 release of Shutter Island.  Adapted from the novel written by award-winning author Dennis Lehane, the film is sure to do well in the box office with swoon-worthy leading man Leonardo DiCaprio.

Lehane is also the crime novel mastermind behind Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, both adapted into powerhouse films.

Lehane first became popular when President Bill Clinton was in office.  Clinton asked his personal aide to find him some leisure reading.  The aide gave him Lehane’s Prayers for Rain, which Clinton was photographed holding as he emerged from Air Force One.

In the summer of 2003, I took a graduate fiction class at Harvard.  My professor recommended a talk by Dennis Lehane.  The conference  room was packed, standing room only, because Mystic River was about to come out in movie form, with Clint Eastwood directing.

Sitting there in a wooden a chair, I saw Lehane speaking in front of me, cracking up the entire audience.  With the flair of a Boston accent, Lehane told hilarious anecdotes of how his father visited the Mystic River set, met Clint Eastwood and then informed his son he could still get him a job at the local plant.  Lehane said that  Eastwood got a little “Dirty Harry on him” when persuading him to direct Mystic River.  Lehane said a limo driver was the best job for writers because you can write for hours at a time while waiting for the customer at any given event.

Basically, he was a man of the people.  Like Springsteen in Jersey, the working man’s hero.

Shutter Island opens this week and I will be sure to be there.  Though not the most literary film, it certainly will be a lot of scary fun.

Remember to explore your literary imagination with Dennis Lehane and Shutter Island . . .

Jennifer, Network Editorial Director

“Neal is, of course, the very soul of the voyage into pure, abstract meaningless motion. He is The Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another.” –William Burroughs, on Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady–legendary figure of inspiration for the Beat generation–embodied freedom, passion, and sheer vitality. Neal contained the darker aspects of that freedom as well: the inability (and lack of desire) to create permanent connections, an almost selfish quest for new experiences.

In the newest article on Literary Traveler, “Chasing a Phantom in San Miguel de Allende: Beat Inspiration Neal Cassady,” author Anthony Maulucci reflects on the complicated allure of Neal Cassady, and larger-than-life personalities in general.

Maulucci travels in Mexico to visit the site of Neal Cassady’s death. Many brilliant pieces from the Beat generation were penned in Mexico–Kerouac’s Tristessa and Mexico City Blues, William Burrough’s Junky, Gregory Corso’s masterpiece Gasoline. What is the ultimate cost of complete freedom? Follow Maulucci’s visit, and explore some of the same questions that inspired Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the other Beat generation writers.

In The Catskills was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1910. Tomorrow, the publishing house is re-releasing John Burroughs selected writings about his home in the Catskills and his observational travels through them.

When I moved out to Boston from Buffalo, I thought I would work for an established publishing house like Houghton Mifflin, live in the city and eat fresh-baked croissants wearing leather gloves. Things turned out differently, and I learned what I really love about Boston is its extraordinary proximity to well-preserved trails, ponds, trees and mountains. How fortunate I am to have forged a relationship with these things, the way I thought I only could with French baked-goods.

Burroughs wrote from the bark of this kind of personable environmentalism; one which illustrates self-reflection in nature while proposing each element is worth conserving in and of itself. His work was highly acclaimed and has inspired many travel- and nature-writers to highlight a light-footed love of their own backyards as well as the grandest mountains.

My own backyard is small, but my appreciation for the nature around me is far and wide. Burroughs influence has asked us for a century, “Look up at the miracle of the falling snow”–sometimes more lovely in the city lights.