Dibs

According to the Lowell Sun in Jack Kerouac’s Massachusetts hometown, the executor of Kerouac’s literary estate says he signed a contract on Sunday with Viking/Penguin to publish an unedited version of On the Road next year — exactly as it appeared in its original “scroll” version, typed over three weeks on one continuous 120-foot roll of paper by the author, based on notes and memories about that transcendental 1947 road trip. A substantially edited version was published by Viking in 1957. “Incidents in the original were edited out of the published version because of the censorship of the time,” the paper quotes John Sampas as saying, adding: “Portions of the edited sections refer to drugs and sex.” Sampas said: “On the scroll, entire paragraphs are crossed out and not included in the published version.” The original scroll was purchased in 2001 for $2.43 million by James Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts of the National Football League and is touring the country, with stops in select museums and libraries. John Sampas, the brother of Kerouac’s third and last wife Stella Sampas, “has enlisted a group of four young Kerouac scholars well-studied in British and American literature to help edit the project. Sampas says he met them last October at UMass Lowell’s Kerouac symposium, which takes place during the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! Festival.” Now this is really bangtail news, man, which burns burns burns like Roman candles.

Stylemaking singer, tragic addict — Billie Holiday is a cultural icon right up there with I Dream of Jeannie and Che Guevara. But now evidence is emerging that Holiday was a big fibber. Lies pepper her ghostwritten 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues — and they pepper the new 50th-anniversary edition from Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, appearing in bookstores today — according to Richard L. Eldredge of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Ohio’s Oxford Press. “Don’t expect a lot of accuracy from the late singer,” Eldredge warns. “Even the first line of the book — ‘Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married’ — has been proved inaccurate…. Holiday’s parents never married and were scarcely together at all, except at the carnival (or dance) in Baltimore on the night in the fall of 1914 when she was conceived…. Holiday also takes credit for helping to create her signature song, ‘Strange Fruit’ …in truth, the searing depiction of lynchings in the South was written by Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish schoolteacher from New York City who thought Holiday would be the ideal singer” to record it.
An interesting sidenote, not mentioned in the article, is that Meeropol adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But now here’s the totally nutty thing. The ghostwriter’s name had a vaguely familiar ring for Dibs! Sure enough, a quick search revealed that Dufty was the author of a 1975 book warning about eating too much sucrose. The book was called Sugar Blues. How weird is it that the same guy wrote two books thirty years apart whose titles ended in the word “blues”? Admit it, that’s weird! Dufty also coauthored a book about the macrobiotic diet. Back to Billie Holiday, via Eldredge: “While a riveting read, one of the reasons [LSTB] might have been allowed to go out of print in the 1980s was a growing controversy regarding some of the information in Holiday’s story…. Historical accuracy isn’t of paramount importance to author David Ritz, who provides the foreword for the book’s 50th anniversary re-issue. ‘The question should be, ‘Do we get a compelling character that jumps off the page?’ The answer with Lady Sings the Blues is yes. A good first-person memoir becomes a piece of the artist.’” … That should prove a great relief to James Frey.

Over the next few weeks, Mini Cooper — the company that makes those cute retro cars — will run an ad campaign aimed at Americans who already own the cars. It seems an odd choice of target market, but the campaign sounds so cute. Encrypted ads will appear in major magazines such as the New Yorker and Maxim. “Mini owners are being sent a book stocked with special glasses, a decoder and a ‘magic window decryptor,’” according to Business Week and MediaBuyerPlanner. “Owners will use the decoder tools to find Web addresses in the [magazine] ads that point them towards free prizes or invitations to events. The idea is create word of mouth among owners and a certain amount of jealousy in the eyes of people who can’t read the ads or attend the events.” Hee! A book that makes people jealous — what’ll they think of next?

A White Castle burger.

Those inexpensive little burgers dispensed 24 hours a day in hundreds of slightly castellar-looking structures throughout eleven American states — it’s White Castle, a cliché and a staple all rolled into one, for the millions who live in their midst (not including Dibs!, who has never actually seen one). Now, to celebrate its 85th anniversary, the chain — founded in Wichita, Kansas and considered to be the first fast-food hamburger restaurant — has published its own recipe book. Titled By the Sackful, the unusually shaped book includes vintage photos, personal memories, and recipes created by customers. According to the chain’s Web site: “The recipes all have one very important ingredient in common: They’re all made with at least 10 White Castle hamburgers! So if you’re a true Craver, you’ll find plenty of company here. The book makes a great gift for fellow Cravers, too!” Proceeds from the sales of the book are being donated to Turkeys 4 America, a nonprofit founded by a teenage brother and sister that “has provided over 1,000,000 servings of turkey to families in need at Thanksgiving since 1996!” You might be wondering what hamburgers have to do with turkeys. It’s this: One of the recipes in By the Sackful is for turkey stuffing, with sage and thyme and celery and … ten burgs. Happy Thanksgiving!

A Japanese theatrical troupe is performing the Celtic chivalry epic Tristan and Isolde — Cornish knight, Irish princess, love potion, danger, escape, mortal wounds, misery — set not in the misty, chilly region of its origins but in Okinawa, Honshu and Hokkaido — with Tristan as a tribal Ainu. According to the Japan Times, “Satoshi Miyagi’s renowned Ku Na’uka contemporary theater company” is staging their new version at the Tokyo National Museum from July 24 to 30: “Writing in the original program notes, Miyagi explained that although … this ancient story was one of his all-time favorites, he had never found a way to clearly address its themes. However, he said he was eventually inspired to write and stage the work when he had the idea of projecting Tristan’s pure, knightly, but ultimately spurned character through that of the great Showa Era novelist Yukio Mishima…. This production casts the heroine, Isolde (Mikari), wearing a vivid Ryukyu costume, while her secret lover, Tristan (Koichi Otaka), is portrayed as one of the original Ainu inhabitants of Hokkaido.” Pure, knightly, ultimately spurned … but does the Mishima-Tristan (the Mishtan? Trishima?) commit harakiri at the end? You’ll have to pay 6,000 yen (and go to Tokyo) to find out.

Police officers executing a search warrant last week at the public library in Norman, Oklahoma, discovered “nine unopened Trojan condoms; three opened Trojan condom wrappers; one green penis ring; one bottle KY liquid lubricant; DVD Young as they Cum; a quilt, fitted sheet, top sheet and two pillows; a book, The Secret Lives of Girls; a silver metal case containing 47 miscellaneous pornographic DVDs; and a box containing two artificial penises, two sex toys, Vaseline, Probe lubricant and one used condom,” according to the local paper, the Norman Transcript. The search was connected with the arrest of 42-year-old library employee Ganelon Grant Diers, who has been charged with raping a 13-year-old girl. “Police also confiscated more than 20 video discs, numerous DVD-R discs and floppy discs, an 80-gigabyte hard drive Grey Apple computer tower; a dozen blank or burned DVD-Rs, one DVC cartridge and digital media from several cameras. A total of approximately 1.25 terabytes of digital media has been seized as evidence in the case.” Well, sure he’s tech-savvy. He works in a world of information and words! “The allegations involve a 13-year-old girl who told police she’d met Diers on the Internet, that they’d been involved in a dating relationship since March and had been sexually involved on one occasion — the Fourth of July,” reports the Transcript. Way to sully our nation’s Independence Day, perv! “Police reportedly responded July 8 to the report of a disturbance at the girl’s home, to find her parents arguing with Diers. Police said Diers admitted picking up the girl at 2:30 a.m. and taking her home at 5 a.m., at which time he was confronted by her parents.” And he’d been keeping his “equipment” at his place of employment, home of thesauruses and Charlotte’s Web.

An asteroid has been named after the billionaire novelist, according to the U.K.’s Daily Record. Astronomer Mark Hammergren, who works at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, discovered asteroid 43844. Having begun reading the Harry Potter series two years ago, he wanted to name his new find after the author and submitted his proposal to the proper authorities. “Now it has been officially renamed Asteroid Rowling after the the Edinburgh-based writer,” reports the Daily Record. This news shares a page on the paper’s Web site with a story headlined “Arm Is Torn Off.” The story goes: “A man’s arm was torn off as he was towed across a lake at high speed on a waterbed. Dutchman Chris Vandenhoff, 33, was on Marker Lake in central Holland when his arm got tangled in the tow rope.” … Just so you know what is of equal importance to celestial events involving J.K. Rowling.

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and widely hailed by critics, but now residents of London’s real Brick Lane neighborhood are protesting local production of the film version, calling the novel racist, according to the Guardian. Ruby Films’ adaptation is already underway in a London studio, but a petition is circulating in the largely Bangladeshi Brick Lane area urging — as quoted in the Guardian — “all right-thinking people to join … in preventing this attack on good social, ethical standard and idea.” Heading the protest “from his sweetshop armed with three mobile phones and an address book, the chair of the Brick Lane Traders’ Association, Abdus Salique, warned of the damage film could do to community relations. ‘Nobody can come with a camera, make a film about that book here. She [Ali] has imagined ideas about us in her head. She is not one of us, she has not lived with us, she knows nothing about us, but she has insulted us…. I’ve seen her, I’ve talked with her…. She never told us she’d write a book. Now she can’t even come to Brick Lane.’” Is that a threat? “Can’t”? According to the Guardian, Salique also claimed that neighborhood groups “prevented Monica Ali from being awarded the Booker. … ‘We stopped that.’ … Young people are getting very involved with this campaign. They will blockade the area and guard our streets. Of course, they will not do anything unless we tell them to, but I warn you they are not as peaceful as me.” Ah, the streets of London. A spokesperson from Ruby Films denied that “the book or the film was in any way racist.” But a spokesman for Tower Hamlets council, an area governing body, said that his group would “take the concerns of local residents seriously when giving permission to use the borough” for filming — and thus could keep the cameras out. The novel has faced other criticism; on its Amazon page many readers call it boring. “Soporific,” writes “Mr. Read-a-Lot,” for example. “A big yawn,” muses “blue kazoo.” Maybe Monica Ali “can’t” come to their neighborhoods, either.

Buy my book!

As the lines continue to blur between being famous for one thing and doing another because you’re famous for the first, we can only wonder whether publishers keep giving book deals to actors because they know they can sell books this way (probably) or because they just want a laff. “Goldie Hawn has signed a deal to write a series of novels after the recent success of her autobiography,” according to Ireland Online. That memoir, Goldie: A Lotus Grows in the Mud, includes dialogues remembered apparently verbatim from fifty years ago, and reveals a New Agey fondness for “holy cities” and for helping the poor: “I loved writing the book. It took me into another world and then I got offered the novel deal. It’s great — and such a change from acting.” … And then I got offered the novel deal — funny how cocktail waitresses and pool-cleaners and math teachers almost never get to say that.

Pavel Krusanov.

Hard-drinking Russians holla back at the “blue book” cherished by adherents of Alcoholics Anonymous, authored by the semianonymous father of all twelve-steppers, Bill W. The Moscow Times reports on a new anthology whose title, Sinyaya Kniga Alkogolika, translates to The Blue Book of the Alcoholic in English: “Put together by the St. Petersburg writer Pavel Krusanov, the book does not exclusively preach the benefits of sobriety, and its name comes from the affectionate term sinyak, or ‘blue person,’ used to describe a lush.” Contributing writer Sergei Korovin comments: “There are plenty of bastards who drink moderately. Of course, I don’t consider them to be people. They are not our comrades.” In one story that appears in the book, a man walking with two small children past a pair of drinkers hurries the tots along, saying: “Look, the daddies feel hot, and they’re having a drink of water.” In another, a mother promises to buy her son trousers and shoes. He asks for more rubles than these items would normally cost, not telling her that he plans to spend the extra on a binge. Krusanov refers to his own drinking bouts as “going on reconnaissance.”