Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 152

Jean Jacques Lebel's Beat exhibit (extended in Metz) now comes to Budapest, Hungary, to the Ludwig Contemporary Art Museum (it opened just last week, and will run there until January 12). Here's a variety of Hungarian artists, in individual videos, extolling the Beat ethos (it's all in Hungarian, but for those of you who speak Hungarian...) - musician and tv personality, Varga Livius, poet-rapper, Peter Zavada, poets Tibor Babiczky and Karafiath Orsolya, and DJ Erelyi "Superman" Zsolt 
(Lebel's own introduction to his "jungle", as he calls it (see above), a helpful survey of the show, (advance warning about the sound quality) is presented in English).

Did everyone see Adam Green's recent piece, "Boy Poet", on Daniel Radcliffe, researching his part (Allen Ginsberg in "Kill Your Darlings"), in the current issue of the New Yorker? - 
"On a recent Thursday morning, two amateur scholars of the life and work of Allen Ginsberg" (one of them Radcliffe), Green writes, "met at the Strand bookstore on lower Broadway (NYC), to set off on a tour of the late poet's haunts..." 


[Daniel Radcliffe]

Radcliffe - On his first experience with "Howl" - "As soon as I got beyond three pages, I found myself in the "What the fuck?" territory" - On his favorite English poets -  (John) Keats ("His language is so gorgeous") (and ("Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard") Thomas Gray.. - On his own poetry-writing - "By his own reckoning", Green writing again, "Radcliffe wrote close to a hundred poems between the age of  sixteen and twenty-one, experimenting with a variety of forms - heroic couplet, terza rima, and an obscure form called pantoum - "The second and fourth lines of the first verse become the first and third lines of the second verse, and the second and fourth lines of the second verse become the first and third lines of the third verse..It's kind of complicated!"... Radcliffe said that his work included many love poems and poems about the vagaries of celebrity, along with a sonnet.."  

The article (New Yorker fact-checkers, aren't you legendary for your exactitude?) suggests 206 East Seventh street was an address where Allen "shared an apartment with (William) Burroughs and Gregory Corso" (uh? - maybe a very young Gregory passed through, but don't you, perhaps, mean Jack Kerouac?) 




[Anselm Hollo (1934-2013]

Anne Waldman, Reed Bye, Ed Sanders, Simon Pettet, and his widow, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, remember (the much-missed) Anselm Hollo in The Poetry Project Newsletter. See here and here for our posts on Anselm Hollo 

Here's an interview with Baltimore-based writer, Katherine C Mead-Brewer, author of "The Trickster in Ginsberg", by J.Haeske, in Retracing Jack Kerouac

Brian Hassett continues his Naropa 1982 memories (Allen, Edie Parker, Henri Cru) on Brianland


[Henry Cru 1921-1992]

Here's David Willis' review of  American Hipster, the Herbert Huncke biography, in Beatdom

Dangerous Minds features the 1994 Jeremy Isaacs BBC interview with Allen that we presented and transcribed for you here. (How come no shout-outs or credits, Dangerous Minds?)  

This coming Wednesday, Wednesday November 20th, in San Francisco, at City Lights, it's the book launch for Michael McClure's new edition of his classic collection,  Ghost Tantras

István Eörsi (1931-2005)

[István Eörsi, Kiev Restaurant, NYC August, 1984. photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Today marks the anniversary, six years on, of the death of István Eörsi, Allen's friend, Hungarian translator, documentarian (1997's "A Poet on The Lower East Side"), and, considerable presence in his own terms - poet, playwright and political activist (Eörsi, a student (and life-long disciple) of the philosopher Georg Lukács, was imprisoned in 1956, following his activities as part of the Hungarian uprising, and spent three-and-a-half years in jail).

A "clowning stoic" as his friend George Konrad once described him, Eörsi remained true, uncorrupted, deeply committed, a gadfly for the truth, a significant intellectual and cultural figure for the next more-than-four decades.

In 1989, when Communism fell, he was one of the founding members of the Hungarian liberal party (SzDSz - Alliance of Free Democrats - true to his maverick status, he left the party in 2004). His last published article, as George Gomori notes, in a reasonably comprehensive obituary notice in London's Guardian, was, "characteristically (sic)", "a protest against the editor of a Hungarian television program, who (had) cut certain sentences out of an interview conducted with him a few days earlier". His death (from leukemia) was a tragedy. We remember him well and raise a glass of slivovitz to him (his favorite tipple!). He remains fondly recalled and sorely missed.

A very dear memoir of him (and also of Allen) may be read here in Mark Scott's recent piece in College Hill Review - "Illinois Jacquet, Allen Ginsberg, István Eörsi and My Father". More personal insight into István (and into Allen!).

A short poem of his (in English) appears here in European Cultural Review.

And, er.. if you have a spare $4500 floating around, you might want to consider this.

My Conscience Says Tell The Truth in Finland

Footage has just emerged of Allen in Finland in 1983 (and of Burroughs too, for that matter) - both snatches of interview(s) and brief glimpses of readings. The footage is from Finnish YLE tv. Allen is seen reading, spiritedly, from "America"- a line at a time, followed by Finnish translation (Burroughs is glimpsed reading sections from A Place of Dead Roads - "and swear to me that you will never wear a policeman's badge"). The video accompanies an article on the Beats in Finland in that nation's newspaper and can be accessed here 

AG: My conscience says “tell the truth in Finland”

Interviewer (Karri Kokko): What is the greatest danger?

AG: Greatest danger is lying to Finland

Interviewer: What do you call worthless?

AG: Worthless? – Looking at other people with your own idea and insisting that they live up to your idea, rather than simply accepting and recognizing them for being themselves..

..Life is not pure entertainment. We are born in bodies. We suffer old age and sickness and death. We have sexual lives. We all go to the bathroom every day We all smell flowers every day. We all eat everyday. We weep every day, (or laugh every day). If a poet is going to actually write about real life you will have to include everything that people do everyday and understand everyday. Otherwise, it will be some kind of baby-fiction for little children, and fiction for insensitive people is what builds up police state. When you avoid the truth of life, when you avoid the facts of how we relate to each other , what our real life is, we wind up lying to each other and building a state which is a lie, building a society which is a lie.Unless people are truthful, not forcing it, not pushing it, but simply truthful to their own minds, we’ll always live in a state of paranoia because there’ll always be some missing suspicious element that we don’t understand.

Interviewer: What do you find ugly?

AG: Nothing living is completely ugly if it’s really there.

Meanwhile, a couple of years earlier, in Hungary, Allen has a cameo at the very beginning of Gyorgy Szomjas' rock n roll odyssey film, Kopasckutya (the movie in its entirety can be viewed here)

"The universe is down. So..the universe contains suffering. So you look around at the rain and you look around at the down and you begin to appreciate the down, what can you do with the down by accepting the down and working with the down because the down passes away anyway. And anyway, it turns out to be an empty dream, so the only thing you can do is be gentle to the down and gentle to the rain coming down in the leaves of the trees in the rainy night in the middle of (the) Hungary."