Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 251

[Allen takes the back-seat - Two photographs - Ryan Weideman (Self-Portrait with Passenger,1990) 

and Brian Graham  (Allen Ginsberg and Brian Graham, Cape Breton, 1992)]

[ - and a third - Steve Silberman, Allen Ginsberg, and Marc Olmsted in San Jose, California, 1986 - Photograph by Marc Geller]

Our good friend Steve Silberman gets to sing Allen's praises once again - "I once told Philip Whalen that my initial experience of working with Allen was disillusioning because he was a crabby, horny, egomaniacal, middle-aged rock star instead of the sweet, broken-hearted nerd in his poems, and Philip replied, "What's so great about illusions anyway?" Ten years later, I became Allen's teaching assistant at Naropa and it was a much better experience, because I was no longer this painfully self-conscious teenager mooning around him. These experiences made me a writer".  Read more on Steve's "Advice to Writers" - here

Crowded By Beauty - Steve' s review of the recent Philip Whalen biography (in The Shambhala Sun) is available on-line here 

(Jonah Raskin reviews the book for the San Francisco Chronicle here, Aram Saroyan for Hypoallergic, here 
 - see also our (July 2015) posting on the book - here)

Allen in India. Did we perhaps miss this one? Abhimanyu Singh's review of  Jeet Thayil's radio documentary. That documentary, incidentally, can still be listened to here. 

And what a delight to hear this - Nanao Sakaki's 1990 reading, recently digitalized and uploaded and made available by the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

(More Nanao on the Ginsberg Project - here and here  (also here, here - and  here)

and this

- Tuli Kupferberg's 1966 "No Deposit No Return" album, now available in its entirety from the ever-redoubtable PennSound 

"I've seen the best minds of my generation laid down in cemeteries.." David Bowie paraphrases Allen Ginsberg in the fade-out of the 1989  Tin Machine song, "Prisoner of Love" (listen closely)

"When I was nine or ten I was given books on Jack Kerouac, (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Gregory) Corso, and all that whole Beat crowd and they sort of became early Bibles to me.."  (David Bowie interviewed, 1973) 

                                                  [David Bowie and William S Burroughs, 1974] 

Countdown to the Feb 2 publication of The UnCollected Ginsberg - Wait Till I'm Dead -
"Rainy night on Union Square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I’m dead.—Allen Ginsberg, August 8, 1990, 3:30 A.M." -  Oh yes, we're waiting.