JANE EYRE’S GOTHIC SHADOW AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS’ GOTHIC STONE

Gothic is a rather subjective term but the novels Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) transcend literary nit-picking. Both are the finest gothic exemplars of their generation. The two books evoke landscapes of gothic expressionism using wholly different palettes. The Bronte sisters published almost concurrently, but their masterpieces diverge on an elemental level from the first sentence of the opening chapter. Wuthering Heights is a novel howling at the gothic stone, Jane Eyre a faerie whisper from of gothic shadow.

WHITE HORSE TAVERN – 567 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK NY 10014

The White Horse Tavern (founded circa. 1890) is a bar and eatery on Hudston Street in New York's West Village. It was a favorite drinking hole for poets like Dylan Thomas and regular venue for the young beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Bukowski got drunk there once or twice too.

WALKING: MAP LOADS SLOW BUT CACHES AT THE SPEED OF THOUGHT

When you move through the world on foot it is slow, but the detail is unparalleled. Distilled into memory, the space and time become navigable at the speed of thought; the fastest speed you can imagine. We can call this taking possession and none of the 'faster' modes of travel take ownership of space in this way. Walking is therefore the fastest and the best and the most bohème way to move through the world.

THE SOUND OF THUNDER

In the year 2055, time travel has become a practical reality, and the company Time Safari Inc. offers wealthy adventurers the chance to travel back in time to hunt extinct species such as dinosaurs. In the shadow of a Presidential election, the spectre of America's first Fascist candidate looms. Eckets, a hunter, hires a guided safari, traveling back 66 million years, to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex...

GINSBERG’S HOWL AND T. S. ELIOT’S THE WASTELAND

I've often heard Howl and The Wasteland paired before, in the smokeless midnight air of alt-coffee urban popups, listening for free as a mumbling hipster reads them aloud, back-to-back, in the same reverent cadence and double bass rhythm and nobody listening to the words...

WORDS MATTER. DEFINITIONS MATTER.

I don't like it when English is used badly (or lazily) in ways that - for whatever reason - get accepted into normal everyday usage. It's good when language grows but too often it's a case of importing one word, at the price of losing others.

THE “BEAT” ICONS – JACK KEROUAC and ALAN GINSBERG

Compare and contrast of the ‘beat’ heavyweights Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the former destined to live long and popular, a fine intellectual force on the American scene, the latter doomed to die young and unhappy but undeniably a genius in the global pantheon.