Friday's Weekly Round-Up -260

March 18, 1956. Sixty years since the legendary Town Hall Theater Berkeley reading. Tonight in that very space (now a neighborhood cafe called "Sconehenge" (sic)), Tom Ferrell and George Killingsworth have assembled a gathering to suitably honor the reading of Allen's great epoch-making poem (G.P.Skratz will be m-c)
.
As Allen himself remarked on the occasion:
"The audience (that night) was a little off-center because of the celebrity of one earlier Six Gallery reading, many in the audience had been there. Some thought it was a hoot party, which it was, but they didn't get the non-wine sublimity or aesthetic seriousness. They wanted to encourage but were a little too familiar, too "knowing", not yet aware of the power of Parts II and III. So the beginning of the reading is quite muted. I'm not stable on my feet and I'm worried I'm going to be interrupted if they laugh too much at the curiosity of the lines, because the phrasing is humorous, meant to be appreciated, maybe with response, but not such as would interrupt the flow of the poem. However, the reading goes on, it mounts in intensity and clarity, people begin settling in and realizing what's happening, it's musical as well as intellectual, it should be listened to. By the end of Part I it approaches a tearfulness or emotional power, and when the proclamation launches into Moloch and I'm with you in Rockland"…"



Publication of Wait Till I'm Dead - UnCollected Poems has, of course, sparked, interest in all Allen's unpublished work. As Bill Morgan writes in his "Note on the Selection of Texts":
 "All of Ginsberg's most successful poems were attempts to capture his spontaneous thoughts and insights, what he called "ordinary mind". Composed in that way, in the act of "catching himself thinking", it remained for me only to select the very best examples of his mind at work"
This was achieved through careful reading and rereading of texts, whittling the mass down to those poems that best achieved that goal. If the mind was shapely, the art created by that mind would also be shapely was his creed. It also gave the editor the oppportunity to reexamine every uncollected poem and select only the best from the entire span of his life 

Chris Funkhouser, in "A Personal Appendices", notes one poem, "Nothing Personal", the poem above ("Ginsberg's handwritten contribution to a mimeo magazine from the 1970's that I found on a visit to Bolinas Public Library") that didn't make the cut.
"Homer", we're reliably informed, was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's dog:

"Nothing personal,/  Homer's bark  rough limit of hard sound/ Hiss Crash wave comes lipping/ sand wish/Eyes fixed at Horizon, a bird floats moving/Air surface awash with sun silvery/wave glitter/Spine balanced light on immobile sand seat,/Stomach filled deep its own, exhaled its own,/breath slower than sigh,/Rocks sat Grave on ocean bottom/ What'd he see on that cliffside/ half decade ago, Faces?/I mourn my old loves, today's love light as/white mists/ Old loves the most sweet thoughts! old forms/disappeared in earth as numberless waves by/ the hour -/Old names echoing in head, telephones ringing thru/ White House/mind dreams newspaper corpse photos. Then the/Presence Alone, waves bowing to body, Crashing/ foamy to brown sand crotch."

Funkhouser goes on to also provide annotated typescript from transcription of two of Allen's 1988 dreams (which appeared in limited edition in his magazine We - 12 (1989).
To see the whole note (including unequivocal praise for Wait Till I'm Dead) - see here 

Praising the life and poetry of Joanne Kyger - by Dawn Michelle Baude in The Huffington Post

Praising the remarkable achievement of City Lights Bookstore in The Guardian

Tonight (this afternoon, actually) at Harvard (Cambridge,Mass.), Dr Rita Banarjee lectures on "Encountering Allen Ginsberg - The South Asian Avant-Garde Response to the Beats"

Next Wednesday (Wednesday March 23rd) at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Bill Morgan on The Beats Abroad  (For our recent note on The Beats Abroad see here)

Tomorrow in Luton, England - "Beat Day" at "Lutonia" - Jeff Towns, "the Dylan Thomas guy', introduces Iain Sinclair (talking about American Smoke and introducing his 1967 film, Ah Sunflower!), David Shulman (sharing his film, Guerilla TV, and showing rare footage of Allen narrating the introduction), Colin Still (showing his film, No More To Say & Nothing To Weep For), "Howl", (a live performance with Ceri Murphy as Ginsberg reading the poem, accompanied by graphic illustrative projections), and more

Starting Sunday in Milan --

Giulio Bellotto is the organizer

- and in Thessaloniki, Greece,

The Performing Arts Research Lab AlmaKalma (under the artistic direction of Yannis Mitros) are the organizers there. 

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 166

Chogyam Trungpa would have been 75 years old today

Previous Trungpa birthday postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project may be viewed here and here 

For a rich wealth of Trungpa materials - see here (Shambhala), here (the Chronicles Project) and here (the Chogyam Trungpa Legacy Project)

not forgetting his pivotal role in establishing "the first fully-accredited Buddhist-inspired university in America" - Naropa

A selection from Johanna Demetrakas' 2011 documentary - Crazy Wisdom - The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche may be viewed here

Here's, on the occasion of his birthday, footage of Trungpa, from 1975 - Surrendering Your Aggression



more video (and audio) lectures are available here on the Chronicles site.

Shambhala released  The Collected Works of Chogyam Trunpa Rinpoche (edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian) in eight individual volumes. 

Carolyn Rose Gimian also collaborated with Diana J Mukpo (Trungpa's wife - they married when she was a mere sixteen) on her revealing, candid and intimate memoir, Dragon Thunder.  

By the way, this weekend (Sunday March 2nd) sees the start of the Tibetan New Year, Shambhala Day or Losar, auspicious, we hope - goodbye to the Year of the Water Snake!, hello to the Year of the Wood Horse! 

In other news
Barry Miles' Call Me Burroughs  biography continues to get an enthusiastic reception.  Ann Douglas declares it "authoritative" in last Sunday's New York Times - "Appropriately, this biography, as Miles is at pains to tell us, (she writes) "is..collaboration, resting on the monumental research (James) Grauerholz did for a biography he abandoned in 2010, and the extensive taped interviews Ted Morgan conducted for Literary Outlaw, his pioneering 1988 biography. Miles himself knew Burroughs for many years, it was he who discovered the lost manuscripts of Queer (1985) and Interzone (1989), and he has written a number of books on the Beat Generation, including a fine biography of Ginsberg and an early study of Burroughs. Although he occasionally simplifies Burroughs' story with superficial moralizing..his access and wealth of detail will make this the go-to biography for many years to come."

Davis Schneiderman interviews Miles here for the Huffington Post 

James Attlee's review appeared recently  in the (London) Independent

Duncan White's review appeared, a few weeks earlier, in The Daily Telegraph


[William S Burroughs - Self Portrait (1959)]

Iain Sinclair's lecture on Burroughs, "Ghosts of a Ghost - William Burroughs, Time surgery and the death of the image"  (delivered in conjunction with the show of photography currently up in London at the Photographer's Gallery, and following an introduction by John Sears, the show's co-curator), may be viewed, in its entirety, here. 

Sears and curator Patricia Allmer are interviewed here





Did you all hear of these recently-discovered, previously-unknown, Sappho poems? 

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 151

[Allen Ginsberg - Bloodsong - (edited by James Grauerolz) - Italian paperback, published by il Saggiatore, 2013]

Continuing from last week, (we can't seem to leave it alone!) Kill Your Darlings (see earlier digests here and here) continues to garner reviews (mostly positive ones) - Michael O'Sullivan in The Washington Post takes up the debate over the blurring of fiction and fact (in particular, the presentation of Lucien Carr - wait a minute, "the Lucian Carr character") - "You'd better like it complicated", he writes, "The film is awash in delicious and difficult ambiguities". 
These "delicious and difficult ambiguities" are perhaps part of the reason for a curiously contrasting critical response to the film, nowhere better on display than in "the city by the bay". Here's Anita Katz in the San Francisco Examiner - ("The Beats Come To Life In "Kill Your Darlings"") - "The film is an absorbing personal drama, an informative look at a literary movement's genesis, a lesson in gay history and a moving celebration of the creative spirit". Compare this with Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle ("Muddled Look At Beats") - "Despite it's general intelligence and worthy performances, "Kill Your Darlings" makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on." 

More "Kill Your Darlings" reviews (all of them finding it hard not to acknowledge, at the very least, the energy in this project) -  see (for  example)  here and here, here and here




The other "Beat" movie playing, Michael Polish's adaptation of Kerouac's Big Sur, , similarly, has had critics both contrastingly enthusiastic and despairing. Stephen Holden in The New York Times - ""Big Sur" cracks the code of how to adapt Jack Kerouac for the screen. The secret is deceptively simple. Go to the source and stay there. The hot-wired energy and spontaneity of the Beat mystique are embedded in writing that distills its feverish essence better than any hyped-up action. The hard part is melding readings with live action but "Big Sur" makes it look so easy that you hardly notice the transitions". Holden gives high praise to Polish's screenplay - "a seamless blend of astutely chosen swatches from the novel" narrated by Kerouac (Jean-Luc Barr) alongside "scenes of his interactions with Neal Cassady, Neal's wife, Carolyn, and Neal's mistress (here re-named "Billie)". This emphasis on the text (as well as some undeniably "gorgeous" cinematography) is, for Holden, the film's particular strength. 
Not so for Shelia O'Malley, (writing in the space of the late Roger Ebert) - "Michael Polish's  "Big Sur"..is a strangely tepid experience", she declares, "for such searing psychological material". "The fault lies", she believes, "in the heavy reliance on voice-over (all (of which is) taken from the book) which distances us from what is happening onscreen. Scenes are not allowed to unfold, to explode, to develop, to sit there, because the voice-over is too insistent, interjecting itself every other moment. What would have happened if (it) had been used more sparingly? What if the beautiful collage effect of Kerouac's time in the woods (the film is stunningly beautiful) had been allowed to develop on its own, leaving more room for interpretation, chaos, life? There are moments that are allowed to breathe but they are few and far between"
John DeFore in his review in  the Washington Post  recognizes this too, calling it a "beautiful and sometimes affecting film", but "its powerful literary voice..threatens to overwhelm the director", and, as a result, it "sometimes feels like a beautiful illustration, rather than an adaptation, of Kerouac's prose". It's "an understandable impulse" ("with Kerouac so eloquent on the subject of Cassady's masculine appeal or the incomparable ache of awakening after four days of drinking"), but, regrettably, "an uncinematic one".
It's important to point out that "Big Sur" is not a fun-fest, so its distance and restraint is plausibly in keeping with its subject-matter (a point that DeFore comes to at the end of his review) - and Robert Abele in the LA Times - "the muted emptiness of the ill-fated sojourn wills its way towards something like existential meaningfulness".."there's a strange heft to its hollowness".

Before leaving the matter of Beat movies, we couldn't resist quoting again from our old
bête noire, Rex Reed (see here for his pompous dismissal of "Kill  Your Darlings"). Here's Reed on "Big Sur" - "Fans of all that Beatnik self-indulgence find a literary significance in Kerouac's writing that has always eluded me. Apparently, they eventually wore out the author too. The deadly screenplay (in the form of voice-over narration) is culled by writer-director Michael Polish from the verbose novel without regard for an audience's patience. Don't worry if you don't connect. There's nothing to connect to. The characters are never developed and nothing ever happens. The film has a restless, nomadic quality similar to Kerouac's lifestyle, but [Reed quoting Gertrude Stein] there's no there there. Such a surfeit of ranting despair and self-pity led to a nervous breakdown that signaled the end of the Beat Generation." - Did it? -  Moving on..  

Steven Fama's extraordinary celebration on the occasion of the publication of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia is not to be missed. It can be accessed here.

Ron Padgett will be reading from his Collected Poems this coming Wednesday at the St Marks Poetry Project in New York City.

Jon Day reviews Iain Sinclair's American Smoke in FT (the Financial Times), and Gerard DeGroot ("A wild, obsessive homage to the writers of the Beat Generation") reviews it for the Daily Telegraph - here 
James Campbell interviews him in The Guardian about the book (and about the Beats and other writers) here  (Sukhdev Sandhu's review in The Observer is here)

Lou Reed remembered by Patti Smith (in The New Yorker) "..I didn't understand his erratic behavior or the intensity of his moods, which shifted, like his speech patterns, from speedy to laconic. But I understood his devotion to poetry and the transporting quality of his performances. He had black eyes, black t-shirt, pale skin. He was curious, sometimes suspicious, a voracious reader and a sonic explorer. An obscure guitar pedal was for him another kind of poem..He was our generation's New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.."

Laurie Anderson, his widow,'s obituary note is here 

oh, and Happy Birthday Alice Notley!

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 144

[Leonardo DiCaprio and Allen Ginsberg - Photograph by Jerry Aronson] 

"The film of the year"? - "The film of the year"? -  Well, obviously, we had to run this one! - Rebecca Cope, in Harpers Bazaar, on Kill Your Darlings. 

Kill Your Darlings "buzz" continues to roll on, full pace. Here's Timothy M Gray, in Variety: "The chief lure of “Darlings” for mainstream audiences and kudos voters will be word of mouth about (Daniel)Radcliffe’s breakthrough performance [as Allen Ginsberg], though the film has many other assets...Radcliffe said he’s dissimilar to Ginsberg, but added, “We are both intensely curious and have a love of poetry.” He said that he liked Ginsberg’s most famous poem, “Howl,” and other works, but noted his favorite is “Kaddish,” in which the writer mourns the 1956 death of his mother."

Michael C Hall  (who plays the character of David Kammerer in the movie) has been talking about the project too.

The cast and director can also be seen here.  

More (early, pre-general-release) reviews? -  Well, not everyone is shouting from the rooftops. Here's Bill Weber in Slant magazine with a less-than-enthusiastic survey/analysis

And not forgetting Bob Rosenthal's dissenting opinion here.    

2013, the year of the Beat movies - not only On The Road and Kill Your Darlings, but Big Sur. A (second) trailer for that film was released just this past week.

Speaking of Kerouac, did everybody see the patently-ridiculous dyspeptic review of his Collected Poems published by Bruce Bawer in The New Criterion (sic)? 

The Herbert Huncke biography we noted a few weeks back is reviewed by Troy Pozirekides in Boston’s Arts Fuse - here - "(In) over 400 well-researched pages", he writes, "she provides a captivating look into a man who, by embodying the seedy underbelly of New York, evoked "beatness" to a tee".

Timothy Leary's papers go on public display at the New York Public Library.

Two interesting items from the UK - Iain Sinclair's eagerly-anticipated latest (which he insists - and quite accurately - is not "a Beat book" - but still pretty pertinent) - "American Smoke: Journeys To The End of the Light". Musings on Olson, Snyder, Kerouac, and others. It will be out on November 7.
An illuminating interview by Kevin Ring with the author is available here

And the "lost" English "Beat ("Beatnik") poet, Royston Ellis, has been re-discovered and handsomely re-issued, via Miriam Linna's "hip pocket paperback" imprint, Kicks Books. 
Gone Man Squared, a new collection, includes the full texts of Ellis' first two books of poetry, Jiving To Gyp (1959) and Rave (1960), along with select early writings, many of them previously unpublished. It was Ellis (John Lennon's "Beat" connection) who smartly suggested that the Beatles call themselves "The Beatles" not "The Beetles" (sic).  He was subsequently one of the key inspirations for their classic, "Paperback Writer". From 1966 to 1980 he lived in Dominica, and, since 1980, has settled and become a permanent resident in Sri Lanka. Author of over sixty published books (guides, novels, biographies and books of poetry), he's lived a pretty interesting life.

Also from Kicks Books, upcoming, Benzedrine Highway - Poems 1959-1969 by the legendary Charles Plymell (with an introduction by Allen). More on that in the weeks to come.

Friday Weekly Round-Up - 107

[Marsden Hartley (1878-1943) - Finnish-Yankee Sauna, (1938-9), Collection of the Frederick R Weisman Museum, Minneapolis]

Marsden Hartley's birthday today. Hartley was a figure Allen admired, not only as a painter, but (perhaps even more) as a strangely neglected poet. For more on Hartley the poet see here and here. For more (audio - Allen at Naropa on Hartley) - see here and here).  

Beat Memories - the definitive exhibition of Allen's photographs (that debuted at the National Gallery in Washington DC in 2010 (see here, here and here) makes its way to New York City for the coming year.  January 15, it'll be opening at NYU's Grey Gallery, on show through April 6th.  (From May to September (May 23 - September 8) it travels to San Francisco, for further exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum). 

Kerouac's poems - (see here our last year's post about the Collected Poems) - Here's Joe Winkler in The Rumpus with a spirited review. 

And speaking of previous posts - Iain Sinclair?  on Charles Olson? - We have already noted Iain's stimulating essay on visiting Gary Snyder (published this past May in the London Review of Books.  Here's another more recent piece by Iain, equally stimulating. 
(We should also perhaps mention (why not?) his classic book-length Kodak Mantra Diaries - on Allen (recently republished by Kevin Ring's Beat Scene - Beat Scene, in fact, are going to be making a small limited-edition book of the Snyder piece - "Kitkitdizze: Meeting Gary Snyder" - Grab it while you can! - 125 copies).

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 68

[Allen Ginsberg Papers at Columbia - K.C.Mead - from her blog,"Howling - Allen Ginsberg & The Trickster in "Howl"]

"Should. Should. Should. Should. Should. You keep making this sound, "Should", I don't think anybody "should" do anything." - If you've not seen it, don't miss this account, Richard J McCarthy's account, of a 1969 encounter with Allen.

Zeitgeist, cultural zeitgeist - Last Sunday, tv-watching America hears Allen get a name-check via Ben Feldman, the latest cast member on the mega-hit tv-series Mad Men, playing the part of junior copywriter, Michael (sic) Ginsberg. (Jon Hamm (Jake Ehrlich, Allen's defense lawyer in the Howl movie) is Don Draper, his fictional boss).

Wasn't it just last year that we read this sentence (in the New York Times, of all places!): "Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffee house, about the latest Lady Gaga video, and you'll realize how far we've come."

How about this (we kid you not!) genuine advertising copy - indeed, how far we've come!

Jake Marmer's piece in Tablet magazine on octogenarian "Beat poet", Herschel (Hersch) Silverman, is a gem and well worth reading - "Candystore emperor", as Allen described him, "dreaming of telling the Truth, but his Karma is selling jellybeans and being kind".

Another worthwhile read - Iain Sinclair's review of a new biography of another "fragile soul" who, during his lifetime, during his later years, drifted into Allen's satellite, the great English Surrealist, David Gascoyne.

Last night (jazz and) Beat poet ruth weiss returned to New Orleans and performed - first time in 61 years! - More on the sorely-neglected weiss (lower case, it's important!) here and here.

Nicole Henares reviews "The Language of Bebop.. in Allen's "Howl"".

Daniel Radcliffe in People magazine, the first official promo and on-set interview for Kill Your Darlings - People: "Are you a Ginsberg fan?" - Daniel: "The more I learned, the more I liked him. There's unbelievable sweetness and compassion between him and Burroughs and Kerouac. His work was like an explosion".

(David Krajicek writes about the Kammerer case (the basis of the plot of Kill Your Darlings) today in the New York Times)

Alan Govenar's Beat Hotel continues with an extended play at New York's Cinema Village - and, likewise, the exhibit of Harold Chapman photos at the OMC Gallery

&, we've mentioned before Pejk Malinovski "Passing Stranger" project, but just in case you missed it, here's word on it again.

Iain Sinclair & Ah Sunflower Footage (ASV 10)

Allen speaking in this clip, from Iain Sinclair and Robert Klinkert's "Ah Sunflower!" movie, is one of the great items on the web - on You Tube anyway - in that it speaks so specifically to the (visual seduction of the) medium - postmodern self-awareness, "so you don't get deceived".

so essential is it that its been memorized, but here is the original

- and with a transcript:

Allen: "If you will keep your mind on the image that is in front of you, which is my face in the camera or in your tv tube or screen (tv tube) and realize (now) that I’m looking from the other side directly into a little black hole, imagining that you are there, and also imagining what would be possible to say that would actually communicate, through all the electricity and all the glass and all the dots on the electric screen, so that you are not deceived by the image seen but that we are all both on the same beam, which is, you’re sitting in your room, surrounded by your body, looking at a screen, and I’m sitting in my garden, with my body, with noise of cars outside, so that we’re, at least, conscious of where we are, and don’t get hypnotized into.some false universe of just pure imagery, so that, in other words, you’re taking the film in front of you as an image, with a grain of salt, as an image rather than a final reality, and so you don’t get deceived by either my projections or the projections of the newscaster who will follow."

Iain Sinclair writes about Allen, on the occasion of the DVD's release here (and also, in depth, for Vertigo magazine here). Home Cinema's The Digital Fix reviews it here.

and here is Sinclair further discussing the circumstances of the filming:

Sinclair's own The Kodak Mantra Diaries (first published by his own Albion Village Press in 1971 and recently republished by Kevin Ring's Beat Scene) is essential reading. The new edition is substantially different to the original, not only in format but also with a slightly different selection of photos. It also features a new introduction by Tom Clark.