The Last Open Road (1994) by Burt Levy

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Last Open Road (1994)

by Burt Levy

Passaic, New Jersey

New Jersey: 10/13

  The Last Open Road is about the world of auto racing in the era when rich white guys could just drive to some backwoods locale and close off all the streets and race around in their Jaguars, MG's and Ferrari's.  If you are like me, you didn't know that this world even existed, ever, so in that regard it is an interesting novel.  Burt Levy, I gather, is telling the tale from a fictionalized version of himself, the son of Union chemical plant worker in Passaic, New Jersey who catches the "racing bug" while starting his career as a mechanic at a Sinclair filling station.  Along the way he befriends a local scrap metal dealer who is rich and the owner of a Jaguar which is in need of constant attention.  Seeking guidance, he falls in with a lower Manhattan foreign car mechanic/car salesman, who show him the ropes and provide his entree into the world of dilletante car racing in the early 1950's. 

   But beyond that appeal there isn't much going on here besides the uninteresting bildungsroman of a New Jersey foreign-car mechanic. 

The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

 Book Review

The Hasheesh Eater (1857)

by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

   The Hasheesh Eater is generally considered to be the first book that extols the "drug culture" of America.  Obviously, it was written decades before such a culture actually existed, and was then revived by writers from the Beat Generation and so forth.   To be clear, Ludlow was a fan of "hasheesh" which is a concentrated form of cannabis- not a form of opium.  Despite a professional career in the criminal justice system I was still fuzzy on the distinction going in to The Hasheesh Eater.  Ludlow's frame of reference is assuredly classical in terms of his subjective experience- the hallucinations and so forth.

   The hallucinations he describes sound more like what a modern person what associate with hallucinatory drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca.  He also describes a level of psychological dependence that reads as ridiculous in 2024, more in line with how marijuana was depicted at the height of the War Against Drugs of the 1980's.  Even though we now live in a country where marijuana is legal in half the states (and all the important states) in America it is still hard to imagine the state of  American society BEFORE marijuana prohibition- when marijuana was legal, as was cocaine and opium. 

   

A Visionary Madness (2003) by Mike Jay

Book Review

A Visionary Madness (2003)

by Mike Jay

   I heard about this book on Instagram, via an account of an academic I follow.  Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that the internet makes everything available forever, this simply isn't proving to be the case.  A good example is the journalism written during the internet era for outlets like Vice Media or the Gawker blog family.  All that stuff is just gone.  I've observed this interesting dynamic between the operation of copyright upon the ability of audiences to spread a given work vs. the dynamic of public domain materials which conversely effects the ability of publishers to generate interest in a given work.   This dynamic tracks the release cycle for a specific work, with the former dynamic operating at the beginning and the latter taking over after a certain number of years.

   I mention that because I'd never heard of The Air Loom Gang before I saw it on instagram.  It's a good example of a book that exists as a cult classic, though not a particularly succesful example of that genre.  Jay writes about James Tilly, a real person who lived in the UK (with short trips to France) around the time of the French Revolution.  He showed up in London after said Revolution and demanded an audience with Lord Liverpool and when he was refused he made public accusations that Liverpool was a traitor to the crown.  He claimed he was part of a secret mission to France to broker a peace between the UK and revolutionary France.

 At Lord Liverpool's request, he was committed to the then new insinuation of the insane asylum, known as Bedlam where he spent the next couple decades loudly proclaiming his sanity.   The book delves into the nature of his madness, which is revealed as the first technologically driven episode of paranoid-schizophrenia.  He makes this argument because Tilly claimed to be the victim of a secret influencing machine that was hidden below the streets of London.  He sketched the device, which was equally intricate and insane.  As Jay makes clear, Tilly was insane, but in a very interesting way.  It's a book that deserves to be on any shelf where Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault resides but I'm pretty sure finding a hard copy outside a library is rough.