BOOK - DIAMOND SIGNATURE

BOOK - Cultural Writing. Travelogue. J J Ratter is better known as Penny Rimbaud, outspoken drummer and lyricist of the seminal anarcho-punk band CRASS. In 1973 he made a two-month journey across America which he describes as a "quest for the spirit of my two literary heroes, Whitman and Kerouac." What he found was an America torn apart by its humiliations in Vietnam and the political mess in Watergate. On his return to England, Ratter commenced work on THE DIAMOND SUTRA, expressing the growing sense of anger and disillusionment shared by so many young people of the time. Twenty-five years and innumerable rewrites later, THE DIAMOND SIGNATURE offers an account of Ratter's continued struggle "to create an identity in a culture that has ceased to have one."