Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 290

                                                  [Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's birthday today
 - from Richard Holmes' definitive biography:
" (William) Wordsworth called him "the most wonderful man" he had ever known; but many subsequent biographers have been skeptical. It would seem possible to write an entire book on Coleridge's opium addiction, his plagiarisms, his fecklessness in marriage, his political "apostasy", his sexual fantasies, or his radiations of mystic humbug. 

And indeed, all these books have been written. But no biographer…has tried to examine his entire life in a broad and sympathetic manner, and to ask the one vital question; what made Coleridge - for all his extravagent panoply of faults - such an extraordinary man, such an extraordinary mind."

Allen noted the "mystic humbug" (not exactly) - the Neo-Platonism and gnostic wisdom  derived from, in good part, Thomas Taylor's highly-influential translations. (Taylor was also a conduit to Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake)

and, as for the drug-use?
Allen, from the 1971 Partisan Review interview:
"What went on in the Humphry Davy household on Saturday midnight when Coleridge arrived by foot, through the forest, by the lakes?"
"Laughing Gas" - Nitreous Oxide - We now know quite a lot about that encounter: 

from Coleridge's notes concerning his nitreous experiments:
"The first time that I inspired the nitreous oxide, I felt a highly pleasurable sensation of warmth over my whole frame, resembling that which I remember once to have experienced after returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room. The only motion that I felt inclined to make was that of laughing at those who were looking at me…."   

And here's Allen's 1959 reading the first part of his 1958 poem "Laughing Gas" ("High on Laughing gas/I've been here before/The odd vibration of  the same old universe..") 

We quoted last week Allen's 1996 Bob Dylan Nobel recommendation, but kudos should also be properly offered to his friend and editor, Gordon Ball. As he notes here, in this Washington Post piece:

"..it was in August of 1996 that I first wrote the Nobel Committee, nominating Dylan for its literature prize. The idea to do so originated not with me but with two Dylan aficionados in Norway, journalist Reidar Indebrø and attorney Gunnar Lunde, who had recenly written Allen about a Nobel for Dylan. Ginsberg's office then asked if I'd write a nominating letter (Nominators must be professors of literature or linguistics, past laureates, presidents of national writers' groups, or members of the Swedish Academy, or similar groups). Over the next few months, several other professors including  Steven Scobie, Daniel Karlin and Betsy Bowden endorsed Dylan for the Nobel. I would go on to nominate Dylan for the next dozen years. This year he finally won." 

And also from the Washington Post  (Hillel Italie's AP story) - Lawrence Ferlinghetti's response - "Bravo for Dylan" - "Ferlinghetti told AP that he had "always considered Dylan a poet first.He had said that decades ago he had hoped Dylan would release his material in print form through the publishing arm of Ferlinghetti's celebrated City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Alas, Ferlinghetti said, "he became famous" and lived on as "a song and dance man"

Joan Baez's response to the news - "The Nobel Prize for Literature is yet another step towards immortality for Bob Dylan. The rebellious reclusive unpredictable artist/composer is exactly where the Nobel Prize for Literature needs to be. His gift with words is unsurpassable. Out of my repertoire, spanning 60 years, no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury. mystery, beauty, and humor, than Bob's. None has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again."
Tom Waits -   "It's a great day for Literature and for Bob when a Master of its original form is celebrated. Before epic tales and poems were ever written down, they migrated on the winds of the human voice and no voice is greater than Dylan's."

and this (ever-astute) from another poet-troubador, Leonard Cohen - "To me (the award) is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain."

Dylan's own response? -  Well, he's remained very much in character, by not giving a response, being purposefully enigmatic ("The Nobel Prize Committee has given up trying to reach Bob Dylan, five days after he became the first musician awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Dylan, 75, is yet to respond to the accolade") 

Allen's response? - Well, we're grateful to George Drury and our good friend Charles Bernstein over at PennSound for this remarkable piece of prescient audio ( "I'm reading Bob Dylan's Writings and Drawings book", Allen declares), recorded 1974 in Buffalo, upstate New York
-  ("On Reading Dylan's Writings") "A Poem For The Laurels  You Win":
"Now that it's dust and ashes/Now that it's human skin/Here's to you Bob Dylan/A poem for the laurels you win/ Sincerest form of flattery/Is Imitation they say/I've broken my long line down/To write a song your way/ Those "chains of flashing images"/That came to you at night/Were highest farm boy's daydreams/That glimpse the Angels light./ And tho' the dross of wisdom come/And left you lone on earth/Remember when the Angels call/ Your soul for a new birth./ It wasn't dope that gave you truth/Nor money that you stole/--Was God himself that entered in/Shining your heavenly soul."    

The Pompidou Center's Beat Generation show is now down - but, great news, it resurfaces again, in a slightly-scaled-down version, next month at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (Jean-Jacques Lebel, Philippe-Alain Michaud and Peter Weibel will be the co-curators)

William Burroughs in China - Following on from his Kerouac one and Ginsberg one, David S Wills delivers another installment of Beat-Generation-in-translation - Chinese book-covers  

Cause for celebration. Next Tuesday (the 25th) is Allen's teacher, Gelek Rinpoche's birthday.

                                                                            [Gelek Rinpoche]

For previous Gelek Rinpoche postings see here, here and here. 
And, for those in the New York City area, make a note of this -  Saturday November 5 at The Great Hall of Cooper Union - a White Tara Initiation, led by Gelek, free and open to all (seating is limited so registration to reserve space is required)

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 286

       [Allen Ginsberg and his life-long partner, Peter Orlovsky, New York City, 1977 - Photograph by Gordon Ball] 

The Beat Generation exhibit at the Pompidou Center draws to a close
with a number of specially-scheduled events - a colloquium and a series of films. Last chance to catch this extraordinary exhibit in its Parisian manifestation. 

Here's Joseph Nechvatal's review in Hyperallergic 

.












et aussi à Paris
Next week sees the publication of Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Krista Halverson with a foreword by Jeanette Winterson - 400 pages celebrate 65 years of the legendary Parisian Anglophone bookshop, with contributions from Anais Nin, Ethan Hawke, Robert Stone, Allen, (all sometime habitués), and many many more. 

          [Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso on Avenue C, New York City, Fall 1973 - Photograph by Gordon Ball] 

New York in the late '70's - Allen's ubiquity: 
Steve Buscemi and Elliott Sharp in conversation:
SB: It's funny to think about it now, but we used to see them [the Beats] around. You'd run into Ginsberg at, like, you know, at like a Polish diner or something
ES: Oh yeah, like everywhere.

and fashion-photographer, Bruce Weber (in Time magazine, no less):
BW: When I came to New York, I got to know Allen Ginsberg, and he was in his 70s then and he was, like, the youngest person I ever knew. So then I thought, it's kind of wonderful to be like that.

[Allen Ginsberg inscribes his Collected  Poems for Daisy Ball, Jackson, Mississippi, May 31, 1986 (Daisy's cheek was scratched in a roller-skating fall) - Photograph by Gordon Ball]

and more recollection - William L Morris remembering Allen (& Peter)'s (early 70's) visit to his poetry class in Attica prison  (in a recent issue of the Buffalo News):

"Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky almost didn't make it to Attica. On a two-lane road between Buffalo and Attica, we ran into a blizzard. Ginsberg was in the back seat chanting Hindu ragas and Orlovsky was in the passenger seat fighting off the flu with garlic cloves. I had no idea where the road was. Orlovsky had taken too much LSD [editorial note - speed?]  the previous year. What he lacked in conversational skills, he made up for in concentration. He discovered that the car's wake revealed a yellow line on the road's edge. Looking down, he recited, "You're on the road, your on the road, you're OFF the road, you're OFF the road, you're on the road", until we reached the valley where Attica is. For weeks after that my car smelled of garlic but I didn't care.
Ginsberg talked to the class about writing. He took out a little red book he always carried. When he had a Zen moment he wrote it down. He didn't look at it again for 30 days. If it still worked, he used it. Otherwise, he abandoned it. Then he said, "Enough. You guys don't need advice on how to write poetry. You need to learn (Zen) (Buddhist) breathing to deal with living in a place like this."   

[Heather Ann Thompson's Blood In The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising And Its Legacy,  published this month, on the occasion of the 45th-year anniversary of the riots]   

Nathan Gelgud on Diane Di Prima

Pat Thomas, curator and mind behind Allen's Last Word on First Blues CD collection, was interviewed on Paul Metsa's Minneapolis-based Wall of Power Radio Hour last weekend. You can get the free app to stream from anywhere and hear the show on-line - here 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 268

                                        [Allen Ginsberg in 1966 - Photograph by Charles Gatewood]

The recent death of San Francisco photographer, Charles Gatewood a few weeks ago, passed by unannounced on this site, so to make amends.  
Charles not only photographed Allen, but a number of  other Beat figures, notably William Burroughs and Brion Gysin (see below) (not to mention a vast array of alternative culture, underground culture, transgressive erotic culture).
Photographer, videographer, demi-monde  cultural anthropologist, his out-put was prolific - over 10,000 prints, 250,000 negatives and slides, and that's not the whole of it. He takes you on a tour (from 2012) of his voluminous archives - here. 

        [Brion Gysin and William Burroughs and The Dreamachine - Photograph by Charles Gatewood]

and speaking of photographers, we should mention Gordon Ball (still happily with us) His exhibit Ginsberg and Beat Fellows opened last week at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and will be up until July 13

[Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky at 437 East 12th Street, New York City, June 1996 - Photograph by Gordon Ball]

This coming Monday at the Vaclav Havel Library in Prague (as part of the Havel@80 celebrations) - "Allen Ginsberg as King and Pariah"  - "Translator and Beat Generation aficionado Josef Rauvolf will discuss US poet Allen Ginsberg's visit to spring-time Prague in 1965, which was significant both to the writer and to the local arts scene, his subsequent StB-managed deportation, and how both the poet and officialdom reflected on his Czech sojourn."

More Rauvolf on Ginsberg (his review of Wait Till I'm Dead for Czech television) - here   

Next Wednesday (the 18th) in New York, at the Rizzoli Bookstore, Allen's long-time secretary, Bob Rosenthal, launches the re-publication of his bona-fide "cult classic"  (poetry and house-cleaning, memoir and practical manual) - the literally-titled Cleaning Up New York . 

Over at Beatdom, David S Wills is compiling a map of Allen's travels.

The Howl! Happening - six-day celebration planned for New York next month around Allen's birthday has begun announcing its schedule. 
More - much more - on that in the coming weeks here. 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 257

[Cadets read "Howl", February 19, 1991, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia. Photo Copyright © Gordon Ball, 2006.]

Gordon Ball's iconic photograph of cadets at Virginia Military Institute reading copies of Howl  has, of course, a back-story. Occasioned by Iain Sinclair's review-article, "Retro-Selfies" in a recent London Review of Books and Alan Baragona's letters-to-the-editor reply, John May in The Generalist tracks the tale. Quoting Baragona ('the guy who.. arranged for Ginsberg to visit the Academy"), he writes: 

"Iain Sinclair is within his rights to scorn the co-opting of Beat Generation rebelliousness as a way to defang it but he is mistaken in using Allen Ginsberg's visit to the Virginia Military Institute in 1991 and my friend Gordon Ball's well-known photograph of cadets reading Howl to make his point…It's true that some cadets, administrators, alumni, and faculty were unhappy about it, though not because of Ginsberg's homosexuality or drug use so much as for his pacifism during the first Gulf War. But there were also many people in all those categories who were excited by the visit, and the administration supported us, even requiring the entire corps to attend (his) poetry reading. Ginsberg was aware of this and at the intermission told the cadets that as far as he was concerned they had fulfilled their obligation and were free to leave. Roughly two-thirds of the corps stayed for the second half. Afterwards, cadets crowded around Ginsberg to speak with him and later lined up at the bookstore to get their copies of Howl autographed…. What you see in Gordon's photo is not frowning, but concentration, weariness, and some confusion as Ginsberg walked students through this challenging poem. This is a class of freshmen, few, if any, are English majors. How do you expect them to look?"


Baragoma notes that Allen stayed for a whole week, recited "Howl" publicly for the first time in ten years, and, aside from the public reading, conducted a workshop, for any  students who might be interested, in transcendental meditation. 
Far from staged, or a study in contempt, Ball's photo registers a very touching and very thoughtful and sincere moment in "meeting of the minds"

Hilary Holladay (Herbert Huncke's biographer) interviews maverick journalist and all-around Beat-o-phile Jan Herman this month in International Times.

HH: How would you sum up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than personalities?

JH: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I'm sure more people have read On The Road than ever read "Howl". But Ginsberg may be more significant a writer than Kerouac in terms of literary impact because of what I believe is the long-lasting influence of "Howl" on poets and poetry itself. I don't think On The Road has had an equivalent influence on novelists, notwithstanding its popularity"
For more of the interview - see here

From the new collection, Wait Till I'm Dead - UnCollected Poems, the LA Times features the poem, "Spring night, at four a.m.", a poem from May 1976 ("Spring night four a.m./Garbage lurks by the glass windows/Two guys light a match…") 

- and Craig Morgan Teicher, reviewing the book - "One doesn't read this book because these poems in particular are important, but because it's Ginsberg, whose importance is unquestionable. Among his many roles in 20th century culture - '60's protest jokester [sic], Zen ambassador, literary lion - he was also, for many, the gateway poet." "These", Teicher goes on, "are not unlike other Ginsberg poems - fierce, funny, libidinous, subversive - but here they afford a fresh chronological tour of Ginsberg's life, which is also one version of the story of the second half of the 20th century."

And - "Ginsberg made his own meaning of the present tense: His poems are set insistently in the now; their power isn't in particular lines so much as the whole aesthetic, the continuous decision to return, again and again, to his own mind and perceptions, like a meditator to his breathing. He treats everything with an utterly absorbing present-tense vividness, which this book lets us view through grown-up eyes".

For a less "grown-up" review, a curmudgeon counterpoint, there's the predictably sour response from one Micah Mattix, "assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University", in the right-wing Washington Free Beacon -  Under the provocative headline, "Allen Ginsberg-Bore", he writes:

 "...one thing Ginsberg isn't is original, or to put it more accurately. he is original but almost always in the same way…his work as a whole is surprisingly predictable…(and) it's not just Ginsberg's syntax that is repetitive….Sometimes the metaphors make sense. Other times they are an end in themselves, and, freed of any obligation to be meaningful, they are the easiest things to create…The accumulated effect of all this…is not shock but a numbing boredom…Every writer has a limited bag of tricks….the problem with Ginsberg's tricks is that they don't work,, or not anymore, or, if they still do, only partially…There is a Ginsberg that is worth reading, but what he needs is a volume of poems about half the size of the current 480-page Selected Poems. In other words, a very selective selected poems and not more uncollected poetry…" 

Has not the reviewer heard of The Essential Ginsberg? (indeed, the now still-troubling reviewer-neglect for that particular book) - Here's some valuable notes if you're using that as a teaching tool. 

The upcoming planned Pompidou Center Beat exhibition in Paris continues to develop. Here's further word on it.

Billy Woodberry's Bob Kaufman movie, When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead, premiered in New York last week. Stephen Meisel in The Cornell Daily Sun addresses the marginalization of Kaufman.  Here's the cover of Kaufman's Pocket Poets City Lights volume (from 1967):

and Kaufman in French translation:

Huerga & Fierro next month in Spain, will publish the first ever (bilingual - English-Spanish) edition of Kaufman's poetry.

An account of last weekend's Wichita Vortex Sutra celebrations - here

Bert Stratton, looking back to college days too, recalls (fondly) "How Allen Ginsberg Messed Me Up" (in the Ann Arbor Observer)  

More book news (and great book news):

Just out (just reprinted by New York Review of Books), Bob Rosenthal (Allen's long-time secretary)'s "70's Cult Classic', Cleaning Up New York.  Richard Hell writes "I first read Cleaning Up New York when it was published in the 1970's and I've been recommending it to people  ever since. It's one of those great, rare works the style of which - immaculate, with unexpected descriptor glints, and funny,low-key frankness - perfectly embodies its subject, namely the revelation of soft shine in humble corners of New York. It's a miracle and you don't have to be clean to appreciate it. And Luc Sante writes, "Bob Rosenthal's Cleaning Up New York is a perfect little gem of a book. There is not one wasted or misplaced word in this chronicle, which manages to contain an awful lot of the world in its few pages. It's not only about the city and its range of denizens, but also about the art of living, the satisfaction of humble work, the way poetry arises from daily experience, and if that weren't enough, it also includes really useful advice about cleaning!"  

and, "keeping it in the family", Aliah Rosenthal (Bob's son and Allen's godson) has a book out - a book of poems - "Son of A…". For more information on that see here  

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 243

          [Allen Ginsberg's 437 East 12th Street, New York City kitchen (looking out on the corridor/hallway), November 1987 - Photograph by Gordon Ball - (images of Rimbaud, Trungpa and Whitman visible on the wall)] 

We're a little behind "Our Allen" with this stuff, but wanted to share with you a few more of Randy Roark's treasure-trove of old Allen pages

His observations on these two: 

"By popular demand, this is the other poem I photocopied from Allen's notebooks so he could take it on an airplane and decode the words I couldn't decipher. It was so casual that when I realized I'd cut off the first lines by using letter-sized paper rather than legal, I just wrote in the words that I'd missed. What's the difference, right?'

Big news - big international news - the announcement of an exhibition in Paris in June (June 2016) on the Beat Generation (co-curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Jean-Jacques Lebel.

"L’exposition "Beat Generation", imaginée et présentée au Centre Pompidou, est la première grande rétrospective sur ce thème en Europe. Inédite, elle met l’accent sur cet épisode parisien, souvent oublié d’un mouvement qui allait profondément marquer la création contemporaine".
("The exhibition, "Beat Generation", designed and presented at the Pompidou Center, is (will be) the first European major retrospective on this topic. Uniquely, it will place an emphasis on the oft-neglected Parisian period of  a movement that would have a profound effect on contemporary creation)

Geographically-organized -  "Suivant un parcours géographique, cette exposition épouse le nomadisme Beat, de New York à San Francisco, Mexico, Tanger et Paris." ("Following a geographical track, this exhibition links Beat nomadism, from New York to San Francisco,  (to) Mexico City, Paris and Tangier")

And also - "Elle est l’occasion de montrer comment le mouvement Beat a correspondu, peut-être pour la première fois dans l’histoire, à un usage systématique des techniques analogiques par les écrivains et les artistes (magnétophone, disque, radio, téléphone, appareil photo, caméra…" ("It's an opportunity to show how the Beat movement corresponded, perhaps for the first time in history, with a systematic use of analog techniques by writers and artists (tape, disc, radio, phone, photo devices , camera(s)...)

"….et de confronter l’œuvre de cinéastes (Christopher MacLaine, Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek...) à celle des photographes (Allen Ginsberg et William Burroughs en collaboration avec Robert Frank, Charles Brittin, John Cohen, Harold Chapman...) ou encore de montrer les extensions de la culture Beat à la scène artistique californienne (Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo…") - ( "…and (a chance to) confront the work of filmmakers (Christopher MacLaine, Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek ...) (and) photographers (Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in collaboration with Robert Frank, Charles Brittin, John Cohen, Harold Chapman ...) or, again, show the extension(s) of Beat culture to the California art scene (Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo…")

               More on this groundbreaking exposition in the months ahead.

                                                       [Anne Waldman at the ESBN Conference]


The (fourth) annual European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) Conference took place last week at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and was, by all accounts, a rousing occasion, a great success. Anne Waldman was there to give the first keynote address - "The Beat Legacy in the Anthropocene"

Anne's own recent Jaguar Harmonics.. (along with Ammiel Alcalay's truly significant
a little history) is reviewed by Jay Murphy in The Huffington Post - here

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Writing Across The Landscape, his travel writings, is reviewed in the same forum - here

Joanne Kyger interviewed in the San Francisco papers - here
Gary Snyder interviewed in the Santa Barbara paper - here 
Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Alan Watts words weaved into - and intelligently used in "Off The Trail" by Manchester filmmaker, Nick Jordan

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 184

[Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky on Cape Breton, 1992 - Photo - Phyllis Segura]   

"...Peter was a taciturn and rugged man with a gruff exterior and a submerged explosive intensity. To (Allen), he may have represented an opportunity to merge (as (Walt) Whitman put it) with the "landscape of the common world'. Like Herbert Huncke or Neal Cassady, Peter expressed the Beat notion that writing is not the exclusive province of an aristocratic, university-educated elite, that a more vital resource than the library or museum may be the idiom and lessons of the street and ordinary life. The paterfamilias of this view was William Carlos Williams whose suggestion to Ginsberg that an indistinct frontier separated a poet's own prose journals from the stuff of poetry became a key ingredient in Beat writing, and Orlovsky's, where the ideal of spontaneity and the need for emotional release was more of a priority than intellectual calculation and design.."

John Tytell's review of Peter Orlovsky's  A Life In Words recently appeared in the American Book Review and is available here



We re-direct you also to our own recent Orlovsky postings - here and here (featuring selections from the volume)





"We are Continually Exposed to the Flash-Bulb of Death" - The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg (1953-1996) - In honour of the recent acquisition by the University of Toronto of "close to 8,000 prints", there will be an exhibition, (organized by the University, in collaboration with the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library), at the University of Toronto Arts Center, starting on September 2nd, and running through to December 6th.  On September 29, John Shoesmith, outreach librarian, "will introduce visitors to photos not seen in the exhibition".  More Toronto announcements, Ginsberg-in-Toronto announcements, will be appearing shortly.

The Collected (Gregory) Corso Interviews book that we mentioned a few weeks back - Rick Shober's Tough Poets Publishing venture - "thirteen interviews that span the most productive years of his career, from 1955, when his first collection of poems was published, to 1982, the year following the publication of his last book of all new poetry." 
-  Rick Shober writes: "I was able to get Richard Brukenfeld to write the foreword. He, as I'm sure you know, was the Harvard undergrad who published Corso's first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, in 1955. His foreword talks about the poet's early days in Cambridge and as a "stowaway" on the Harvard campus. Pretty entertaining stuff."
  "After four years [Shober started working on the project in 2010] the book is finished (design and layout), and all reprint permissions are in hand. Now I'm trying to finance it with a little DIY crowd-funding by pre-selling copies".  
Go here to support this worthy venture - The Whole Shot



Thanks to Dangerous Minds for alerting us that William Burroughs makes it this week onto the cover of the America supermarket tabloid -  The National Examiner - "Do The Rich and Famous Get Away With Killing People?" - Uh? - As a necessary corrective and counterpoint, please read this 
Seventeen years tomorrow since William Burroughs passing

Interesting response on the Ginsberg Facebook (why not here? use of our Comments facility anyone?) on the Gordon Ball cadets-reading-"Howl" image that we posted here last week -  In response to one poster, wondering on the relationship between "Howl" and a military education - Sean Dadson: "I took that course while attending the Virginia Military Institute. Col. Ball, the Professor, was a friend of Ginsberg. Actually, that course changed my life and enhanced many others.. We were attending what many referred to as "The Conservative Bastion of the South". It definitely helped me out of that rut..".."I believe Ginsberg gave a reading at VMI, as a "perfect bohemian" society, but I'd have to confirm with some of my class mates who attended the reading.. so, yeah, it was productive and eye-opening if only for a few of us.." 
And several of his class mates did get back to him -  Chris Valenti: "I was there then. It was the best thing that could happen to cadets. Gordon Ball was my academic advisor as well. I only recall the privilege I felt at the chance to see him and learn from his colleague.."
.."Why do people find this bad or counterproductive? Art and poetry should expand the mind into other forms of consciousness, not simply reaffirm what you think you know."

For those in the San Francisco/Bay Area, in case you missed the opening performance on Sunday, you have two more chances to catch the West Edge Opera's production of the Glass-Ginsberg's Hydrogen Jukebox, tomorrow (Saturday) and next Friday August 8
Artistic Director, Mark Streshinsky speaks about the production here. Joshua Kosman reviews it for the San Francisco papers ("Sunday's splendid performance") here