The New York Times asked several writers this week to reflect on the consequences of “really expensive” (ie, by British standards, still cheap) fuel. Michael Paterniti waved goodbye and, in his view, good riddance to the great American road trip. Of course he’s already had his fun. He’s the author of the wonderfully titled Driving Mr Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain.

Returning today from a memorial service for my old colleague Peter Wilsher, I read in the order of service this tribute to him from Peter Pringle, who was one of his correspondents:

“For me, Peter was one of the last great foreign editors of Fleet Street, always fascinated by stories not being told by others, and stories, therefore, that would tell you something you didn’t know.”

When, in our multimedia world of recycled content, was the last time you read one of those?

That Springsteen goalscorer’s slide I mentioned in an earlier posting — here is it is on YouTube:

My colleague Paul Mansfield, reviewing a new book about the States (Divine Magnetic Lands by Timothy O’Grady) finds evidence within it that American society is not as litigious as we think, and that Americans sue each other no more than they did 30 years ago.
Maybe, but American lawyers do put a damper on pretty well everything. On a recent trip to Seattle, I picked up a guide for runners and walkers left in my hotel room. It says: “This picturesque course [along the waterfront] poses the usual hazards of urban jogging/walking. Please take precautions to ensure your safety — including use of the route preferably during daylight hours. The Fairmont Olympic Hotel does not patrol nor maintain the course so assumes no responsibility for the safety of our guests who traverse it.”
Lewis and Clark would have had a dull old time if they had had to go exploring with a lawyer.

“So, who was good?” I was asked on coming back into the office after reviewing the Isle of Wight Festival for the Telegraph.

Iggy Pop, I answered immediately. I own one Stooges album, Raw Power, which hasn’t had a lot of play and probably won’t get much more. In terms of sheer spectacle, though, I thought Iggy and the Stooges were the highlight of the festival.

At 61, the original American rock’n’roll outlaw is still a man against whose attentions any father would lock up his daughters. He didn’t slash his bare chest with razor or bottle as he used to in his most drug-addled days in the ‘80s. He didn’t need to: shoulder-length hair sopping from constant dousings, he still looked like an Apache who at any moment might draw a knife and take a scalp.

Lunging into the crowd, he set up a call-and-response with the front row: “My idea of fun…/…Is killing everyone.” The security guards took him at his word. When he leaned briefly on the shoulder of one of them, she looked absolutely terrified.

The Isle of Wight was a place of mixed messages. The Police, the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and Iggy were desperate to convince us that it was 1978 again. But at Smallfleet petrol station, any of the 55,000 festival-goers unwise enough to have brought a car were having to stump up £1.45 a litre. It was only 20p (79p a gallon) the last time these guys were strutting their supremacy over one another.

KT Tunstall – whom I didn’t have room to mention in my review – was a babe in those days, but she’s now man enough to hold her own with any of the punks. Halfway through her set, she dismissed her band for Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, the song with which she got her break, and stood alone, one woman with just her guitar, commanding a stadium.

Who else? The young Coventry foursome The Enemy showed a punkish anger that was less contrived than Johnny Rotten’s; and both the Kaiser Chiefs and N*E*R*D were much more impressive live than on record – though the batteries of lights they employed must have outweighed all the good done by the issuing of biodegradable tent pegs.

What’s the longest you’ve been delayed at an airport? Long enough to write a book? That’s the premise of Dear American Airlines, the debut novel of Jonathan Miles, reviewed in The New York Times by Richard Russo – though I’ve just realised you can only read that if you’re a registered user of the NY Times site. There’s an excerpt from the book itself on USA Today.

Russo, whose work I’ve discovered only recently, is a fine novelist himself. The Risk Pool is the best evocation I’ve read in a long time of small-town America.

What a grafter, running back and forth at his end of the Emirates Stadium for the whole night, the big screen showing veins popping on his forehead from the sheer, crowd-pleasing effort.

No, not one of those overpaid kids who play for Arsenal. I’m talking about Bruce Springsteen, who at nearly 60 can still manage a goalscorer’s knee-slide.

My wife and I, who had last seen him at Wembley 20 years ago, were lucky enough to get tickets at the last minute when a friend of a friend wasn’t able to go.
Nobody works a crowd or himself as hard as Springsteen did for two-and-a-half hours last night, from the mellow mike-to-the-crowd chanting of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out to the joyous, air-punching encore, when an audience most of whose speediest days were behind them bellowed that “tramps like us, baby we were born to run”. The urge was still there, even if the capability was gone, and Springsteen drew it out.
The man who sang so understandingly in Night in 1975 of those moments when the “boss man’s giving you hell” has long since taken over the running of the firm, but he flogs himself as hard as ever.
He remains committed in other respects, too, though he’s generally happy to let his songs do the talking. About halfway through the set, he played Livin’ In The Future, that cry of a disillusioned patriot from the latest album, Magic:

“My faith’s been torn asunder,
tell me is that rollin’ thunder
Or just the sinkin’ sound
of somethin’ righteous goin’ under?”

He introduced it with a couple of sentences about “extraordinary rendition” and the suspension of habeas corpus – surely the first time any player’s used those words in front of an Arsenal crowd…

Being frightened to death is one thing. Being able to communicate that fear in prose, so that your readers are almost as frightened on your behalf, is something else. Richard Grant did just that last weekend, writing in the Telegraph Magazine of his encounter with the bandits of the Sierra Madre.

The neatest phrasemaking of the week came last night on Channel 4 news from Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, commenting on the difficulties facing Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister, he said, is now reduced to the Travolta-Micawber Formula: staying alive in the hope that something will turn up. And Finkelstein had the generosity to acknowledge that the coinage wasn’t his but a friend’s.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that immigrants to the United States should watch only English-language TV so that they can understand the language and news of their home state.

  On the contrary, argues Joe Mathews in a piece in the Washington Post this week: political leaders should be encouraging Americans to switch off English-language TV and learn Spanish – “the language of civic-minded news”.

  The sharpest coverage of state and local issues — government, politics, immigration, labor, economics, health care — is now found on Spanish-language TV. These outlets tell their viewers more about how the state and the region work, they are more persistent in demanding explanations from public officials, and their reports routinely include more interviews with more sources from more perspectives. The Spanish-language TV broadcasts are, for lack of a better word, more American.