After I finished Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, I put my hand over my heart and wept. After that, I ordered a dress-form and a swath of gold leather online, dumped all my paints, pencils, brushes and duck cloth onto the floor, called my grandma, and downed a glass of chocolate milk. My reaction looks erratic, but it resembles Smith’s life in New York City in the 60s, process of creation and collaboration with artists passing in and out of the Chelsea Hotel, and travel-induced writing style. Smith’s Romantic, almost serious phrasing, reminiscent of the French poetry she obsessed over, (”Robert Micheal Mapplethorpe…was a mischievous little boy whose carefree youth was delicately tinged with a fascination with beauty,” p.13) would seem contrary to her rock-and-roll vibe if she weren’t so saline-sweet; instead, it comes off strong and declarative, a fat anchor in a world of excess.

As Patti Smith is a voice on behalf of our environment, for liberalism and for truth, her warm words peal apart the most sensitive passages of her life so we can observe the moist-letters and slimy rocks of our own. My desire to create since reading Just kids is springier and takes greater form, because my fascination with beauty is shared.

Smith’s friendship with Mapplethorpe was smeared in sad comforts and brilliant drip-dye colors. Smith promised Mapplethorpe she would write their story, and so she has. No less colorful, however, are the friendships and spirit garnered in the East Village and Central Manhattan that produced art and joy where dirt and disease once was. Smith is an incredibly believable character–she travels and grows and sours and butterflies in a categorically common way. She quickly harps on regular frustrations like her day-job, then graciously extends her hand when we can’t believe her luck. Mapplethorpe was on her arm throughout it all.

While reading, I kept a list of names, ideas or works-of-art I wanted to remember–cultural activists or actions in their own right, friends to Patti Smith:

Robert Mapplethorpe
Godard
Brian Jones
Midnight Cowboy
Williams Burroughs (Lee Burroughs)
Anthology of American Folk Music
Crazy Horse
Anna Kavan
Virgil Thomas
Arthur C. Clark
Oscar Wilde
Dylan Thomas
Thomas Wolfe–”You Can’t Go Home Again…”
The Golden Bough
Tim Bukley
Ossie Clark, designer
Wages of Fear (film)
Banny Fields
Water and eucalyptus leave for floors
Of Human Bondage
Jackie Curtis
Ray Roussel, Locus Solus
Gautier Michaux
Thomas de Quincey
Gregory Corso
Bobby Neuwirth–Don’t Look Back, “Bring It All Back Home,” Dylan
Patty Waters
Clifton Chenier
Albert Ayler
Blonde on Blonde
Genet
Arthur Rimbaud

There are many more. Forgive me if I missed or misspelled any, and if it all seems a little spastic. It’s just something Patti Smith can draw up from our creative, round bellies, like a child’s burp. “Magical!” we gurgle.

Traveling can be fun and easy for business or pleasure, but in this economy, tenacious travelers must do a little digging if they want to get the most for their dollar. I am here weekly to keep the unstoppable seekers up-to-date with the best, get the most, money-saving travel deals.

James Bond and I have become great friends. I have just embarked upon a quest of watching the famous movies after being cursed by a friend because I had not seen them. Not only do I have questions about Dr. No and Pierce Brosnan vs Sean Connery, but, when did this movie phenomenon begin and who was the master creator of James Bond? Ian Fleming wrote his first novel in 1953, Casino Royale, this book introduced Mr. James Bond. Mr. Fleming resided at 22 Ebury Street in London, England and for those as interested in this master creator as I have become, I have found some great travel deals and tours to and from London:

If you are looking for the ultimate trip, and would like to continue exploring, I found a package that offers tours of Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Cavalry Museum, the Tower of London, the Crown Jewels and much more. All tours include lunch!

The “Total London Experience”

As I plan trips around the world an attribute that I look for while choosing a destination is architecture. I am a stickler for an amazing façade, beautiful colors and intricate craftsmanship and Bangkok has it all. Bangkok’s architecture offers creative organization and originality in every structure, such as The Grand Palace or The Oriental, “it’s surroundings creep into my consciousness, comforting my body and mind.”

If you are interested in exploring the charm and elegance of Bangkok, I have found some great travel deals. Round trip tickets as low as $1094, including tax and fuel surcharge. Book before May 31^st!

However, if this is not enough and you want to see more of Thailand, there is a great deal on special passes that entitle you to travel to three cities for only 209.00 USD.

Always dreamed of going on a trip where everything was planned; flights and hotels were booked, dinners were reserved and you could see as much as possible? Well I have found the perfect opportunity for you:

Visit Istanbul, Canakkale, Kusadasi, Pamukkale, Antalya and Cappadocia in 15 days with a guided bi-lingual tour guide. This package includes a round trip to flight to Turkey with a major airline, a bi-lingual tour guide, 13 nights of accommodations, breakfast and 11 dinners, admission to all sites and private deluxe motor coach. Amazing deal! Book before March 26^th and save $400 per couple.

This is an exquisite opportunity to see Turkey and to explore the depths of the hills, maybe you may be caught up in your own déjà vu much like Inka Plegsa-Quischotte experienced while capturing the sun’s shadows on ancient buildings.

Stay tuned… more to come next week. Safe travels.

Every Friday, 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!

• The American Book Review asked several university professors to contribute some nominees to their list of America’s 40 Worst Books.  Some of their choices are – in our humble opinion – debatable.  They’ve included a personal favorite of mine, The Great Gatsby, on the grounds that it is “smug.”  Also on the list: Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses.
• On this day, in 1948, Jack Kerouac turned 26.  He wrote in his journal:  “Guess what?! – on my birthday today, wrote 4500-words(!) – scribbling away till six-thirty in the morning next day. A real way to celebrate another coming of age. And am I coming of age?”  Check out Barnes and Nobel Review for more reflections.
• Dave Eggers, novelist and founder of McSweeney’s, is also blowing out the candles on his birthday cake today.  Help him celebrate (in spirit, if not in person) by checking out  this fascinating interview with Eggers about his new book, Zeitoun.
• Is it possible to become a famous poet simply through social networking?  That’s the argument Jim Behrle made the other day when speaking to a crowd at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.  “Self promotion is the only kind of promotion left,” he said.
• Ebooks are a little scary to many of us bibliophiles, but they may be the greenest way to access academic books and other frequently-updated texts. However, the case for the e-reader is a little more complicated than it might initially seem.
• And finally, congratulations to author Gail Haveren, translator Dayla Bilu, and everyone at Melville House.  Haveren’s novel The Confessions of Noa Weber was just awarded the 2010 Translated Book Award For Fiction.

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, featuring the literary wordsmiths of the hit television series Mad Men.  Take a look: Mad Men: Creating a Perfect World on the Avenue of Dreams.

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.

Welcome to our new community site. If you are visiting us for the first time, please consider joining our beta and blogging with us. We will be blogging about articles on Literary Traveler, and featuring other blogs, blogs like yours! That’s right you can get your very own blog on Literary Traveler. Send an email to francis @ literarytraveler.com with the subject line  “blog.” For a limited time we will be running a beta on this site and will be signing users up for blogs manually. Join us and tell us what you think.

Sincerely

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.