Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 240

This weekend in Big Sur, California at the Henry Miller Memorial Library, a weekend Allen Ginsberg celebration, beginning tonight with a choral reading of "Howl", a reading/performance by Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye and a screening of the 2010 film, Howl, starring James Franco, with filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman there to answer questions

Not to be confused with - not at all to be confused with! - a low-budgeted horror-flick of that name that seems to be circulating.


More of Randy Roark's remarkable ephemera (see his copy of Allen's notes on Bob Dylan here) 
Randy notes: "Typescript with Allen's corrections of the first page of a long unpublished poem from his journals in 1979. One of my jobs was to find poems and such in his journals. This one apparently didn't make the cut."   

And another one here

Too late to make it here last week, but, in case anyone missed it, here's Lucy Jones' "'A rocket up the backside of conformity - how Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" transformed pop", 
that appeared in The Guardian  

and (Allen and performance) on the BBC (the full program can be seen here) 

and, on the BBC,  this weekend - Jeet Thayil's radio-portrait - Ginsberg in India.  
(More information about that program here)

["From roof of Brahmin's house where we'd rented third floor room six months December to May 1963, could see past temple mandir tops across Ganges River to other shore. Our balconies hung over vegetable-meat market on one side, other side overlooked sacred Dasaswamedh alley down to bathing steps Ghat, peopled by pilgrims, beggars & cows; monkeys visited and snatched our bananas, Peter Orlovsky held my retina, Benares India Spring 1963" [Ginsberg caption] - Photo © The Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Aram Saroyan on the Philip Whalen biography on Hypoallergic

Jack  Kerouac and Gore Vidal's sexual encounter on Dangerous Minds

and Jack Kerouac, as the subject of an awful and naive (overblown) reading of a 1962 letter (see here) in Salon, wherein JK opines (among other things) that Marilyn Monroe was - quote "fucked to death" - unquote.  As one level-headed correspondent labeling himself/herself "The Fool" writes: "This character assassin sure reads a lot into one private letter, most of which is written in the most unserious style imaginable for the most part reflecting off-the-cuff informal, wasted banter. From that (author), (David) Krajicek extracts one sentence, wrenches it from any kind of minimally sympathetic context, and proceeds to chew the scenery with an incredibly overwrought interpretation." 
And another correspondent, "Langley Park" (sic), writes: "I think he (Kerouac) was right, and it's very perceptive of him. I think the burden of who she was and what people wanted from her, and what they did to her, killed her, she was fucked to death".

(Disappointing, since Krajicek was the author of  this seemingly-well-researched article) 

Here's Brian Hassett reporting on last week's Lowell Celebrates Kerouac 2015

and here's an enthusiastic review of last week's "Still Howling" event 


Patti Smith reads "Footnote to Howl" ("Holy, holy, holy.."), on October 7, on "the day".

 


Well, what do you know,  "Howl" and Allen Ginsberg was a question on the popular quiz-show, Jeopardy, Tuesday night (in the category of "Modern American Poetry" - "A critic said this 1956 poem was "a tirade against those who do not share the poet's...sexual orientation")

And, to round things off (on the Round-Up)  this week, a selection of recent Howl-at-60 posters

Mexico City Blues - 7

                                                                    [Gore Vidal]

                                                   ["Dem eggs & dem dem/Dere bacons"]

["..be boppy/be buddy/I didn’t took/I could think/So/bepo/beboppy.."]

                                                     [William Carlos Williams]

G: I’m just trying to check through the things (in Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues) that are exemplary of pure poetry

[74^th Chorus]

“”Darling!”/Red hot,/That kind of camping/I don’t object to/unless it’s kept/within reason” – You got that? - “”Darling!”/Red hot,/That kind of camping/I don’t object to/unless it’s kept/within reason./ “The coffee is delicious.”/

This is for Vidal./ Didn’t know I was.a Come-Onner, did you? (Come-on-er)/ I am one of the world’s/Great Bullshitters,/Girls/  Very High Cantos.” – It’s whatever he thought.

[80^th Chorus]

“This is about a kind of funny bebop complexity or bebop simplicity in poetry – 80^th Chorus – Goofing at the table with Bill Garver, actually. The situation was Bill Garver (was) in Mexico City, sharing an apartment at 220 Oruzaba Street, an old junkie retired from New York, who had a legal (prescription) for morphine in Mexico, and who had retired to live out his days there. Kerouac was living upstairs and would go down and visit Garver who was shooting-up, or just talking, or…

“GOOFING AT THE TABLE/ “You just don’t know.”/”What don’t I know?”/How good this ham n eggs/is/”If you had any idea/whatsoever/How good this is/Then you would stop/writing poetry/And dig in.”/  “It’s been so long/since I been hungry/it’s like a miracle”/Ah boy but them bacon/And them egg– /Where in the hell/is the scissor?/ SINGING: -“You’ll never know/just how much I love you.”

That’s the 80^th Chorus. So it’s dispersed mind, but it’s actual recollection of the things happening there.

[81^st Chorus]

“Mr Beggar & Mrs Davy/Looney and CRUNEY,/I made a pome out of it,/Haven’t smoked Luney/& Cruney/in a Long Time./ Dem eggs & dem dem/Dere bacons, baby/if you only lay that/ down on a trumpet/Lay that down/solid brother/’Bout all dem/bacon & eggs/Ya gotta be able/to lay it doen/solid -/ All that luney/& fruney"

[82^nd Chorus]

“Fracons, acons,& beggs,/Lay, it, all that/be boppy/be buddy/I didn’t took/I could think/So/bepo/beboppy/ Luney & Juney/ -if-/ that’s the way/  they get/ kinda hysterical/  Looney & Boony/Juner & Mooner/Moon, Spoon, and June.”

[83^rd Chorus]

“Don’t they call them/   cat men/  That lay it down/with the trumpet/  The orgasm/Of the moon/And the June/  I call em/  them cat things/  William/Carlos/Williams” - He knew William Carlos Williams’ work and advanced on it into the mind. In other words, not merely vernacular thought but vernacular mind. So that’s why it ends – “I call em/  them cat things/ “That’s really cute, that un” – that one – that un – “That’s really cute,/ that un”, William /Carlos/ Williams.”

Bobbie Louise Hawkins [in attendance in the class]: (Did you make that up - "vernacular  mind"?)

                                                              [Bobbie-Louise Hawkins]

AG; I just thought it up this minute. That is to say, Williams was working with actual speech as he heard it around him and arranged it. (He) composed his poems, as he says, of the elements of the speech as it is heard around. But he was primarily preoccupied with quotidian speech, or vernacular speech, or Rutherford (New Jersey) speech. Kerouac was more preoccupied with the quotidian mind, that is to say, the sounds in the ear, or the sounds in his head,

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: (What) is that word? -  “quotidian”?

AG: Quotidian – Q-U-O-T-I-D-I-A-N – Everyday. Everyday mind, or, in Buddhists-speak, Ordinary Mind, i.e, what is actually happening in the mind and the stream of language that goes in and out of the mind, as in those early poems when he’s saying, “DON”T IGNORE OTHER PARTS/OF YOUR MIND/…when you’d let the faces/crack & mock/& yak & Change” – the “yakkety-yak” of the mind, the matter-babble behind the ear – “yak & change/& go mad utterly/in your night/firstmind/reveries” – as a baby. “Bo-bee-zabba-dooble-wee-blue-di-doo” [Allen parodies mind-language, scat singing] – Anything you do with it. The actual mind sounds, rather than the household sounds of Wiliams’, or  the doctor’s sounds. So Kerouac was really preoccupied with the internal vernacular

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: So it’s like his mind is the locus of experience..

AG: Yes

Bobbie Louise Hawkins: ..and the source of his language

AG: Yes, rather than Rutherford (New Jersey). In that sense, I think, there was an advance over Williams (not over, but an advance from Wlliams’ base) because previous writing of that kind of gobbledygook nature, or Surrealist, or automatic, writing, or Dada had been senseless, but literary (rather than senseless, but painted after nature..sketched after nature). Jack was sketching after what-he-heard-in-his-mind-nature, His mind was Mont St.Victoire and he was constantly sketching Mont St Victoire, his brain was Mont St Victoire, so that he was constantly making paintings of (that), rather than the speech out of the mouth, in the street, So, as we were moving from, say, Objectivist, Imagist, 1930’s clear lucid material world preoccupations to a later psychedelic, more internalized subjective exploration (in the) (19)50’s and (19)60’s, this was sort of like a signal…what do you call it? – graduation or move or evolution, in terms of his and others' preoccupations to what's going on inside my head.

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 85

[Untitled #3, 1998 - Allen Ginsberg - lithograph & screen print via Gemini G.E.L]

Wrathful deities - Moloch - Don Mudra's suitably Germanic setting of that celebrated section of "Howl" kicks off our regular "Friday Round -Up" this week. Auf Deutsch and with pile-driving relentless back-beat, it may be listened to here. Also on his site is a recording (sans beats, but with the requisite backing of Allen's rhythmic Aboriginal songsticks) of "Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag", a.k.a, "Don't Smoke", morphing nicely into Kurt Schwitters' classic avant-garde (Dada-ist) composition, (the) "Ursonate", (not to mention, recordings of the late, much-lamented, Rolf Dieter Brinckmann - and even, Klaus Kinski) - all courtesy of SoundCloud.

Pluto - Plutonian - more utilization of SoundCloud - this time by author and DJ, Bart Plantenga on his new and challenging sloowtapes site. Allen (& Peter (Orlovsky) are featured (see here), in a 1979 recording, along with Steven Taylor, and Harry Hoogstraten (source of the original tape) - a vintage performance, recorded, one wild night, at the De Leeuweik bar in Eindhoven, Holland. Allen introduces and reads his recently-composed "Plutonian Ode".

Sloow Tapes is a limited-edition, cassettes-only, back-to-basics, project.

For a list of currently-available titles, see here.

Staying in that part of the world, (well, sort of), Unrequited Records (out of San Francisco) have been working with Eddie Woods and Ins and Outs Press in Amsterdam, (again, on vintage recordings - (this one from 1987)), and have put together an elegant, first-rate, double-CD of Herbert Huncke - Guilty of Everything (same title - and what a title! - he gave to that collection of his back in 1990 - also the title given, a few years earlier, to his wonderful little Hanuman book)

While you're at it, check out also Unrequited Records' CD's of other Beat greats - Harold Norse (Harold Norse, Of Course) and Jack Micheline (Jack Micheline in Amsterdam).

Meanwhile, in Paris, at the Beat Hotel... Well, look what has happened to the Beat Hotel!

The death this week of the "prolific, elegant (and) acerbic" Gore Vidal (as the New York Times obituary so described him) should, of course, be noted here - and is. We respect, most, (for the immediate present), his political savvy - a maverick, (but not unhinged), almost lone voice, bravely "telling it like it is", an "eminent outlaw", speaking, at all times, "truth to power" (all the more significant - and useful, because he, himself, was of that power (born into, and never really ever escaping, the power elite)).

There was the high discourse and there was the "deep gossip" - Regarding the latter - that he slept with Jack Kerouac! (the "Beat connection"!) - "Lust aside, we both thought, even then (this was before On The Road) that we owed it to literary history to couple". Allen, of course, whilst acknowledging the tryst, vigorously denies that they actually, fully (sic), "consummated"! (Kerouac too drunk?) - well, of course, he would!

nonzerologic ponders the Allen Ginsberg-Stanley Kubrick connection. (Yes, there is a Ginsberg-Kubrick connection).

Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone on his forthcoming Tempest. And here (from an unlikely source) is an early sneak-preview of one of the recordings

Percy Bysshe Shelley's birthday tomorrow, Saturday. AH! - Exhalation of breath.