Posts Tagged ‘Art Arfons’
INFINITY OVER ZERO BECOMES LITERARY COROLLARY OF FREE BEER!
Public Release of Land Speed Record History sub-titled “Meditations On Maximum Velocity “
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 18, 2008, Los Angeles, CA – In a move designed to liberate words into the sphere of public domain and make information available to those who crave it, KeroseneBomb Publishing has released the entire body of Cole Coonce‘s impressionistic history of the Land Speed Record, INFINITY OVER ZERO, for complimentary, no-strings attached consumption.
To that end, the book’s entire transcript can be found here:
http://infinityoverzero.wordpress.com
More than just a dry exercise in data smog, Coonce’s I/0 follows the arc and through-lines of dozens of land speed and drag racers who dreamt of breaking the sound barrier in a motorcar; interspersed with some rather free-form prose are excerpts from no-bullbutter interviews with legendary hot rodders and speed fiends, including Art Arfons, “Jocko” Johnson, Craig Breedlove, “Terrible Ted” Gotelli, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, “Jet Car” Bob Smith, Richard Noble, and the fearless man with enough ice in his veins to actually go supersonic on land, Andy Green.
Also contained between the covers are remembrances of some of the more gonzo maniacs who plied their trade in pursuit of maximum velocity, and — in various manners — paid the ultimate price; deceased speed demons such as John Cobb, Glen Leasher, Donald Campbell and Gary Gabelich.
(Indeed, Leasher’s catastrophic passing at the helm of the jet-powered “Infinity” is part and parcel of the book’s central metaphor.)
K-Bomb realizes that electronically digesting a tome this size (256 pages) is not for every consumer; therefore, for those who don’t want to actually schlep a laptop to the reading room just so they can peruse an anecdote in the book, hard copy paperback versions of INFINITY OVER ZERO are still available for purchase via sundry online shops, including those found at dragracingonline.com, hotrodnostalgia.com, draglist.com, and Amazon. (Be advised that both used and new copies of I/0 are fetching prices upwards of 50 dollars at Amazon; this price can be beat elsewhere.)
Feel free to peruse the entire book on your computer’s liquid crystal display c/o http://infinityoverzero.wordpress.com/, then save the book to your hard drive, and maybe kill a small forest in order to print out the whole enchilada — Cole Coonce
PS: This press release carries with it a postscript of sorrow. It has come to my attention that legendary, iconoclastic drag racer Robert “Jocko” Johnson passed away last week from natural causes. Amongst the laundry list of radical, far-out racers documented in I/0, his story is one of the more moving, inspirational and bizarre.
One of the benefits of posting the book is that all of the copy is very “searchable.” Ergo, for those who don’t want to plow through the entire book, but merely tap into what made “Jocko” so o-u-t-s-i-d-e as well as irreplaceable, one can selectively point his or her browser here:
http://infinityoverzero.wordpress.com/tag/jocko-johnson/
I hope the reader enjoys exploring the life of Jocko as much as I enjoyed researching and interviewing the man. – CC
