Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 289

                                                                         

                                        [Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, San Francisco, 1965, photo c. Larry Keenan]

Better late than never. Allen's letter to the Nobel Committee, from November 20, 1996 (sic):

"Dear Members of the Swedish Academy,  For the Nobel Prize in Literature I propose 
Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is a American Bard & minstrel of XX Century, whose words have influenced many generations throughout the world. He deserves a Nobel Prize in recognition of his mighty & universal poetic powers"
Sincerely, 
Allen Ginsberg, Poet, Member of American Academy of Arts and Letters, Co-Director Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute, Distinguished Professor of English,Brooklyn College." 

Yesterday's announcement of Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize still has us reeling.

Well, on to other things...

                   [Jack Kerouac - Satori in Paris - cover of the UK (Quartet publishers) 1977 paperback edition]

Lowell Celebrates Kerouac - Rick Dale of The Daily Beat on the annual Jack Kerouac gathering last weekend at Lowell
And here's a report from the local paper, The Lowell Sun
Satori in Paris was the book of focus this year (plus a good deal of attention also being given to the new book, newly-published posthumous work, from the Library of America, The Unknown Kerouac) 
Robert Everett-Green reports on the connecting thread between these books - the French connection 
(On Kerouac and "the French connection" - see also here
& here  (Cher Ti-Jean parle en français)



Allen Ginsberg in China - Last week we spotlighted David S Wills post on Jack Kerouac Chinese book-covers. Today we alert you to his follow-up - Allen Ginsberg's Chinese publication 

Allen, the teacher - Ed Foster," poet, publisher, and literary historian" (from a recently-published interview with writer, Rob Couteau):

                                                    [Ed Foster - "Self Portrait in a Bathroom Mirror"]

"I remember once, Allen wanted to attend a faculty meeting at my school [Stevens Institute of Technology]. He was just curious: “What’s a faculty meeting like?” “Allen, they’re boring. Like all meetings, they’re terribly boring!” But he insisted, and he came over, with Ted (Berrigan). So, I introduced him to the then president, who introduced him to rest of the people there: “We’re very honored today, the great poet, Allen Ginsberg, is here with us,” and so on. And then, we go into business, the business of the meeting. 

Allen falls asleep. Instantly. That’s the best thing you could possibly make of any meeting anywhere at any time – just fall asleep! Meetings are inhuman, they’re awful. In the seven or eight years that I was the director for the humanities and social sciences at my school, I never held a meeting. Not one."

and, again: 
"I recall that, when I went out to Naropa to teach, Allen knocked on the door just moments after I arrived and took me to the local grocery store to buy supplies – but only organic! – and chided me when I chose a tomato that didn’t meet that standard!"

"..He was the most generous, open, and helpful of people."

                                                                        [Nathaniel Mackey]

Nate Mackey in Perimeter 4, another recent publication, with more of Allen-teaching recollection:   

"It's funny that.. when I met Allen Ginsberg, one of the writers whose anti-academicism had given me pause, when I really got a chance to sit down and hang out with him—I guess it would've been the first year I went to teach at Naropa for a week in the summer, so that would've been 1991, something like that—a lot of what he talked to me about—maybe it was because he saw me as this guy who'd been in academia all those years and was looking for a common place of connection—a lot of what he talked about was teaching at Brooklyn College. 

He was proudly announcing that he'd gotten tenure. [laughter] I was trying to get him to tell me stories about the people I was interested in. "What was (Robert) Duncan like? What was (Lawrence) Ferlinghetti like back in those days?" That kind of stuff. "Who were the musicians you were hanging out with? I hear you're a friend of Don Cherry." He'd talk about that too, but he was quite proud of his syllabi. He was telling me about what he was teaching, the reading series he ran, who he was inviting. and stuff like that. He seemed to be genuinely delighted with the whole teaching project, both at Naropa and (also) at Brooklyn College".


True Confessions – More true confessions -  Somehow we missed this last month in Bustle

(and, not entirely unrelated, from a little bit further back - this)

Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate!  -  Yes! - Allen would've been so pleased!

"Nature That Washed Her Hands in Milk"

AG: [continuing with the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh] -  Then, there's some pretty snow, snow stuff - snow and milk  - page 137. A couple of… that one stanza there, one or two stanzas ,that are on .. well some of the same theme [suffering and death]. The first line of "Nature, That Washed Her Hands In Milk" - that's a real cute.. "Nature that washed her hands in milk", that's a real weird, sweet notion ((Jack) Kerouac wrote a lot of poems about man is existing in milk and living in lilies (sic). He has a poem that begins, "Man is existing in milk and living in lilies'. [Editorial note - from Mexico City Blues - 228th Chorus - "Praised be man, he is existing in milk/and living in lilies -/And his violin music takes place in milk/And creamy emptiness"]  So, "Nature that washed her hands in milk" (it's just funny to write about milk, you know, pretty poems about milk and snow and fleece and quiet lambs, a sort of poetic prettiness, sort of..  So, toward the end, or mid.. - let's see, one, two, three, fourth stanza:

"But time (which nature doth despise,/And rudely gives her love the lie,/Makes hope a fool and sorrow wise)/His hands do neither wash nor dry;/But being made of steel and rust/Turns snow and silk and milk to dust."

That's really pretty - "turns snow and silk and milk to dust - good sound - just simple words "snow" and "silk" - "snow and silk and milk to dust" - "snow and silk and milk" - it's good, just a good.. good piece of phrasing there - "The light, the belly, lips, and breath" - that's a nice "belly" too, for, you know, one of those little enumerations  - "The light, the belly, lips, and breath,/He dims, discolors, and destroys"…"Yea, time doth dull each lively wit/And dries all wantoness with it."  -  funny speed-up there - "And dries all wantoness with it."   

Okay, I just wanted to get that little piece rolling in.

[Audio of the above can be heard  here, beginning at approximately thirty-one-and-a-quarter minutes in, and concluding at approximately thirty-three-and-a-quarter minutes in]

Terry Gross Interview, 1994

[Terry Gross. 1987 in the studio on NPR's "Fresh Air"]





"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix"

TG: Allen Ginsberg, reading his now classic poem "Howl". Ginsberg was a cultural hero to several generations. He was one of the leading Beat poets in the (19)50's, in the (19)60's he was an icon of the counterculture, through the (19)70's and (19)80's, he continued to write and to explore Eastern religions. By the (19)90's, he was an inspiration to up-and-coming performance poets. Ginsberg died of liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 70. His work has since been revived through documentaries, CDs, biographies and poetry collections. When I spoke with Allen Ginsberg in 1994, we talked about his poem "Howl". It was partly inspired by his mother who had been in a mental hospital

AG: She had been there for several years and I had put her there after a breakthrough of some very violent behaviour towards her sister and a cousin she was staying with. And then I had gone out to San Francisco but the grief was very much on my mind. I had a friend, Carl Soloman, with whom I had been in a mental hospital six years before, and he was back also in Pilgrim State too. So I addressed a poem ostensibly to him but the emotions were I think were directed towards my mother, both grief and a sense of solidarity.

TG: Yeah, I know, Part 1 begins with one of your most famous lines

AG: Yeah

TG: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.."

AG: "..starving hysterical naked.."  The original phrase was "starving mystical naked", but I figured that was a little too simple-minded, because the problem was not all the problem of society, was also the neuroses of the people, so there's a certain ironic edge to it which I don't think critics of the time realized. So I said "starving hysterical naked". So it wasn't just a one-dimensional protest for the safety of madmen, you know. It was also, like a, like, trying to give a..quick sketches of a series of cases that I drew from real life

TG: I want to move on to another poem, "America"

AG: Yeah

TG: ..which was read the same night as "Howl", at the same reading..

AG: Yes. And at the very first unveiling of that poem. It's really funny. The text in the recording differs a little from the text that I wound up with. There are a few extra lines, some very funny lines actually..  

TG: It really is very funny. You get a lot of laughs from the audience

AG: Well, it sounds like a stand-up comedy routine. That's the era, actually, of Lenny Bruce around San Francisco. He was playing, I think, at the Purple Onion, I went down to see him and watch his act, actually. But I hadn't expected that kind of reaction, and I didn't think the poem was that good (nor did (Jack) Kerouac), it was just sort of, like, a joke, like, a take-off, a send-up of America, very light-hearted, but it's done with many different voices in a kind of schizophrenic persona - you know, one minute serious, one minute faggoty, one minute desperate, one minute religious, one minute patriotic, one minute "I'm outting my queer shoulder to the wheel"   

TG: Why don't we hear the beginning of "America", as you read it in 1956 at Town Hall in Berkeley

"America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing/America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. /I can't stand my own mind. /America when will we end the human war?/ Go [bleep-sic] yourself with your atom bomb/I don't feel good don't bother me./I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind./America when will you be angelic? /When will you take off your clothes?/When will you look at yourself through the grave?/When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? /America why are your libraries full of tears?/ America when will you send your eggs to India? /I'm sick of your insane demands./ When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?/America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world./ Your machinery is too much for me./ You made me want to be a saint. /There must be some other way to settle this argument.         

TG: Allen Ginsberg recorded in 1956. You must have seen yourself as a provocateur, in a way, at a very young age. I was thinkingthat you were.. you were just coming from a place that was not average, you know, your mother was mentally ill, your mother had been a Communist, you were gay, you were an intellectual, you loved poetry, you know, everything about your life kind of set you apart.

AG: But also you..but you've got to realize that by this time I had already known William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac twelve years. This is not some sudden discovery of a community or ideas..

TG: Right

AG:  ...We had had a long period of privacy and silence to ripen our art, to know each other and to amuse each other and to understand each others language and intelligence and sort of enlarge our own consciousness with the experience of others. Also I had already had some sort of natural religious experience and we had all by this time tried out some of the psychedelic drugs (in addition, on top of the natural religious experience that was without drugs) and already had traveled a bit, and so we were.... I wasn't a young kid then, I was twenty-eight years old, you know. It was quite a ripe time.

TG: Was it surprising to you to find people like Burroughs and Kerouac, who you felt this kind of friendship and aesthetic closeness with?

AG: No. It was just some sort of natural kinship that we felt, almost felt instantly, on meeting

TG: But did you expect you'd ever find that?

AG: Not exactly. But I hadn't even conceived of such a thing. I'd conceived of friends, and had had friends at high-school, but I was still in the closet. Kerouac was the first person I was able to come out of the closet to and tell him about it and actually slept with him once or twice (tho' he was primarily straight - but he was very tender toward me and saw that I was in solitary and in a great deal of confusion and anguish and he took a sort of kindly view. Burroughs was always out front and clear and lucid and intelligent (as he is now, at the age of eighty, he was so at the age of thirty-four, I think he was then). So I was lucky when I was seventeen that I met people whose genius sort of ignited my own talents to..sort of up-graded, I think, my own natural intellgence. But I'm really a student of Kerouac and of Burroughs and in some respects an imitator. I've had a steadier life and so I'm perhaps more on the scene (as of now), on the air, going around, giving readings, but I feel myself basically a pupil of Kerouac's ear and his intelligence in language and his awareness of the pronunciation of consonants

TG: When you talk about being a student of Kerouac's, I've never been able to tell how much your style of reading influenced him and how much his style of reading influenced you

AG: Oh, I think his style influenced me. It was way back in (19)47-48, I heard him read (William) Shakespeare aloud and it was such an interesting intonation that he put into the soliloquy of..Hamlet, I think, where Hamlet is sitting down on the steps saying.."What am I? ..What am I doing? ..I'm nothing but a John O'Dreams?" [" Yet I,/A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak/Like John-a-dreams.."] - and the way Kerouac said "John O'Dreams", it was like his mind went off into a little dream n that phrase. So i began seeing that there were intonations, differences of pitch, possible. You know, most poetry was..still is.. pronounced in a montone or duotone..way (it's like I'm talking now, in a sort of monotone) but there's possibilities in conversation where you go from, you know, a little high woodle, when you're talking to a little baby, down to very serious heart tones, when you're talking to your grandmother in her last days on earth..

TG: Of course with your readings. I always felt that there was a sort of Hebraic intonation, even though I know that Buddhism was probably an even greater influence on you and you certainly hear that in your voice too, but there is a kind of Hebraic sound

AG: The Hebraic thing is very real. My grandfathers were rabbis and one of the most strong musical influences I ever had was hearing a recording of Sophie Braslau, a great operatic singer, singing Eli Eli (Lama Sabachthani), with a kind of melisma, I guess you would call it,  sort of,  a very beautiful way of bending the notes that's characteristic of the Hebrew melody.

TG: Now when did that start to enter your reading style?

AG: Well, certainly with "Kaddish" because I was imitating the dovening motion of Kaddish, with, you know, the sound of "Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra khir'utei" -  da-da-da, da da-da, da-da-da - "Magnificent  mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed"  - That  is.. The whole rhythm of the poem has a kind of combination of Ray Charles'  "I Got A Woman"  -  "Yes indeed, yes indeed, yes indeed"  (which I'd been hearing the morning before I wrote the poem) and a rhythm of the original Hebrew Kaddish that was still running through my mind and body. The first time I heard it, actually, a Jewish friend played it to me in dawn-light, the morning I started writing the poem

TG: And the Kaddish is the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

AG: Yes it's a kind of mass and prayer for the dead in the synagogue. And (for) a minyan, a group of elders, that can get together and moourn for the dead

TG: So I guess you didn't say the prayer when your mother died

AG: Well, I didn't know it as well, but I did try and do it actually. I wandered around San Francisco with Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen and we went into various synagogues bu tthere was no minion so that we couldn't do it. So this is a way of making up about a year, a couple of years, later

TG: And this is a couple of years after your mother died

AG: Yeah, my mother died in (19)55. Incidentally, you know, I sent her the original.. a copy of the original manuscript of "Howl", which she received about a week before she died, and she wrote me a letter which was postmarked the day she died, which is quoted in "Kaddish", in which she said (that) she got my poems, she can't tell whether it's good or bad - that my father should judgem beacuse he's a poet, but.. judging from the.. that I should.. she'd read it obviously, and said "get married, Allen, and don't take drugs".  And she said, 
"I have the key. The key is in the window. The key is in the sunlight in the window". And then she died of stroke, I think, (within)  perhaps hours, or within twenty-four hours, of writing the letter. So I received that letter after I heard that she died. It was like a message from the Land of the Dead, so to speak

TG: Is there a particular section of Kaddish that you've had the most problem with controlling your emotion?

AG: Yeah. There's a section that begins… When I'm visiting my mother in the mental hospital for the last time and I walk in and I see that she has had a stroke, and then, suddenly, there's a break in the poem and there's kind of a lyrical rhapsody -  "Communist beauty, sit here married in the summer among daises promised/ happiness at hand..." - And then the section that ends "O beautiful Garbo of my karma". It's really a nice, exquisite, poetic passage, and it's also full of feeling,  and it's like a flash-back in the midst of tragedy to a happier day. And so there's a lot of emotion buried there from childhood. 
Also, at the very end, the section, "O mother/what have I left out?/O mother/ what have I forgotten?..".. "with your eyes/with your eyes/With your Death full of Flowers" - That has a sort of cumulative emotional build-up that's quite great

TG: I want to play an excerpt of Kaddish and, you wrote this in the late 1950's, the recording that we're going to hear was made at Brandeis University in 1964

AG: Yes

"with your eyes running naked out of the apartment, screaming into the hall/with your eyes being led away by policemen to an ambulance/with your eyes strapped down on the operating table/with your eyes with the pancreas removed/with your eayes of appendix operation/with your eyes of abortion/with your eyes of ovaries removed/with your eyes of shock/with your eyes of lobotomy.with your eyes of divorce/with your eyes of stroke/with your eyes alone/with your eyes/with your yes/ with your Death full of flowers"

TG: That's Allen Ginsberg reading an excerpt of "Kaddish"  
Your mother was institutionalized several times.

AG: Many, many times. All during my childhood I had to go out to visit her at Greystone Hospital

TG: Were you frightened by her madness?

AG: Sometimes. Sometimes sorrowed, sometimes frightened, sometimes stuck with the responsibility I  couldn't carry out as a kid, going out alone to see her alone in a mental hospital when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that I was a..  or having to stay at home and take care of her while my father was at school, teaching,  and getting into crisis situations with her that I couldn't handle, actually, It kind of broke my brain, broke my spirit, to some extent.

TG: Now when you started doing hallucinogenics, like LSD, did your hallcinations ever scare you because you'd seen you r mother have hallucinations and illusions because of her mental illness?

AG: Well, no, not really. I realized that if everybody began disagreeing with me, I'd better look around twice!,  and think three times, and be pretty sure I knew what I was doing. And so I've been able to be in situations where everybody disagreed, but at the same time maintain my sanity, so to speak, by simply following my heart, really . I have as much a tendency to paranoia as anybody in the United States at this point but at least I can see its paranoia, and most people don't see their own paranoia

TG: That's interesing. So your mother's delusions actually helped you figure out what was real and what wasn't?

AG: Well, yeah, I sort of went through the mill already so I was kind of innoculated

TG: Huh

AG: Yeah, I would say that the experience of having to deal with someone who was a..sort of deluded and hallucinating (and also (hearing) voices and all) helped me deal with my own psychic disturbances and also the psychic disturbances of other people ( I seem to have a kind of tolerance, you know, "in one ear and out the other", for.. you know..like.. so that I can be with people who are qite disturbed, get disturbed myself but not so much so that I  have to turn my back, until, you know, all hope is lost.  

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 288

[Gregory Corso's Painting of Edgar Allan Poe]

October 7, 1849 -  the death of Edgar Allan Poe. 
More Allen-Ginsberg-on-Poe postings here, here and here 

October 2017 marks the Centennial of the English poet David Gascoyne. Enitharmon, his English publisher, have taken the occasion to reprint a 1986 letter/memoir/note he wrote to Allen - See here  

October in the Railroad Earth - October is Kerouac month… (every month is Kerouac month! - but this month (this weekend) in Lowell, Massachusetts, it's the annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac). Full details about the weekend's activities - here



Allen Ginsberg En Route to G(h)ent (from 1979)  - another rare cassette just out from Counter Culture Chronicles - "An intimate look, Allen Ginsberg on tour in 1979 (in Belgium/ Holland), featuring Peter Orlovsky, Harry Hoogstraten and Steven Taylor - Allen and his party travel by bus to Ghent after a successful reading at the Leeuwerik in Eindhoven. They are joined on the trip by organizer Benn Possett, Simon Vinkenoog and a clueless journalist. Harry's beau Suze Hahn is at the wheel. Allen talks about politics, his relationship with Jack Kerouac, recites poetry, and gives a crash course on traditional and modern verse. The conversation continues at a local bookshop. We follow Allen to the concert hall and the tape concludes with a couple of songs on stage."

David S Wills has an interesting article over at Beatdom this week - Chinese Kerouac covers!
Here's one  (but he features many):

Andy Clausen is interviewed by The Sunflower Collective on the Beats and Allen, and shouldn't be missed - here 

Jeanne Hodesh interviews Hettie Jones (on the occasion of the publication of her 
correspondence with Helene Dorn (Love H), and, similarly, shouldn't be missed - here 

Martin Scorcese's 2005 Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home  (featuring, amongst other things, this interview with Allen) receives a 10th anniversary digital/Blu-Ray box-set release (available in the coming weeks) - See more about that upcoming release - here 



More anniversaries - October 7, 1955, Allen performs "Howl" for the first time at the Six Gallery    (" I saw the best minds of my generation…")

The Unknown Kerouac

Just out from Library of America - The Unknown Kerouac - edited by Todd Tietchen (with several texts newly translated from the French by Jean-Christophe Cloutier) 

The publishers write:
  
"Edited and published with unprecedented access to the  (Jack) Kerouac archives, The Unknown Kerouac presents two lost novels, The Night Is My Woman and Old Bull in the Bowery, which Kerouac wrote in French during the esoecially fruitful years of 1951 and 1952. Discovered among his papers in the mid-nineties, they have been translated into English for the first time  by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, who incorporates Kerouac's own partial translations.

Also included are two journals from the heart of this same crucial period. In Private Philologies, Riddles and a Ten-Day Writing Log, Kerouac recounts a broef stay in Denver - where he works on an early version of On The Road, reads dime novels, and even rides in a rodeo - and shows him contemplating writers like Chaucer and Joyce and playing with riddles and etymologies. Journal 1951, begun during a stay in a Bronx VA hospital charts, in ecstatic, moving, and self-revealing pages, the wave of insights and breakthroughs that led Kerouac to the most singular transformation of American prose style since (Ernest) Hemingway.
This landmark volume is rounded out with the memoir Memory Babe, a poignant evocation of childhood play and reverie in a robust immigrant community, in which Kerouac uncannily retrieves and distills the subtlest sense impressions. And finally, in an interview with his long-time friend and fellow Beat, John Clellon Holmes and in the late fragment Beat Spotlight, Kerouac reflects on his meteoric career and unlooked-for celebrity."

A full listing of the contents can be found here

John Winters early review (for WBUR) can be found here 

An excerpt (an essay entitled "America in World History", from a handwritten journal dated September 3 - October 9, 1946) may be seen on the Esquire magazine web-site and read here

Robert Crumb's Birthday

It's Robert Crumb's Birthday. He turns 73 today.  Happy Birthday, Robert!

                                                      [Robert Crumb - Self-Portrait (1982)]

R. Crumb on Allen Ginsberg: 

Allen Ginsberg kissed me once. It was in 1989, before I knew what was going on and I couldn't stop him, he kissed me on the mouth. [laughs]

I like Howl. Howl's great. It's like the beatnik manifesto of the '50s, y' know, it really says it all. It's got that beatnik attitude of that time in America. It's quite eloquent. But after that, he didn't really do anything that struck me as particularly interesting. But he was like a spokesman for the hippies in the '60s too. He would lead the hippies in all those Indian chants. He tried to lead them in the direction of spirituality, an East Indian kind of spirituality with meditation and chanting and all that.

R. Crumb on Jack Kerouac:

When I was 17, I read On The Road, and it sickened me, because my reaction was, "Oh God, these guys are out there having so much fun. I'm not having any fun at all. I'm just sitting here in my parents house. But them — the girls, the adventures, they're just like having a fuckin' lark On The Road."I liked his writing. I still like his writing, I think he's a great writer. He has a very particular, specific genre that he does of that time. He's very much of his time, you know, the non-conformist in the post-war era. But I like Kerouac. I haven't read everything that he's written. Sometimes I intend to go back and read more of his stuff, but I haven't read anything he's written in a long time.

R.Crumb on William S Burroughs:

"I love Burroughs also; a great writer. But his best writing is his straight-ahead prose. He wrote all this crazy fantasy stuff, which I think he was encouraged to do by this other beatnik writer, Brion Gysin, who, for some reason Burroughs admired. Gysin was, I think, a jive-ass, bullshit kind of guy. Burroughs, I think he lacked confidence in his own writing, because when he wrote straight prose it didn’t sell well. When he wrote Junkie, and that came out, it didn’t sell well in the beginning. And then he wrote this other book, Queer, around the same time in the early ’50s and he couldn’t even get that published. That wasn’t published until the 1980s. And Queer is a great book. Both Junkie and Queer are great. They’re both written in this very dry, prose style. And his little thin book called the Yage Letters, which were letters he wrote back to Allen Ginsberg while he was in South America looking for this psychedelic Yage plant. That’s a great book; great stuff. But the problem is, there’s not enough of that, not enough of his straight-ahead prose. He just didn’t think it was any good because he either couldn’t get it published or it didn’t sell. So then he wrote this gimmicky thing called Naked Lunch, which is mostly fantasy stuff and not very interesting to me, and that sold well. He made his reputation on Naked Lunch.

"He was a very eccentric character; very eccentric ideas and thoughts. He tried all kinds of strange, avant-garde psychotherapies. He was into psychic experimentation. He built himself an orgone box based upon the theories of Wilhelm Reich. He later got involved in Scientology and had this E-meter and used it as a way to psychically clear himself. He said it was his electrical Ouija board. [laughs] He tried other stuff too, like out of body experience. I can relate to all that stuff because I’m interested in all that fringe, psychic experimentation also. But he was very serious about that stuff.

"The sad thing about Burroughs, the tragic thing. was he abused himself so badly with substances. It’s amazing that he was still a very sharp thinker into his late years. His intellect was still pretty good even though he'd used drugs and heroin– and he didn’t stop that until he was about 60 or something–and then he became a bad alcoholic. I heard these  tapes of him giving recitals, reading his stuff to audiences, and he’s so drunk you can barely understand him, he’s slurring his words so badly. It’s really sad. Still, he lived until his mid-80s. He was a tough guy. He appeared to be kind of wimpy, but he was tough."

Here's Crumb eloquently reminiscing, last year on Australian radio

from that interview (on Allen and the Beats):

(Allen was a) classic, classic example. He became a guru, total guru of the hippies - and loved it, ate it up. He'd get up there on stage, and, you know, just chant OM or something in his robes and everything and they loved him, ate it up. He was a hero, they were all heroes, all those people from the Beatnik-histter era, you know, they were our antecedents and the people we looked to. Like Kerouac - it killed him, it destroyed him, they wouldn't leave him alone, they pestered him to death, he couldn't escape from them hippies they climbed over his fence to get at him. He just wanted to sit quietly and drink in his house with his mother aor whatever and they hounded him to death. 

The Arena documentry ("The Confessions of Robert Crumb") from 1987, is available - here


The Confessions of Robert Crumb

The trailer for Terry Zwigoff's landmark 1994 documentary may be viewed here  

Here's Crumb and his wife fellow-cartoonist Aline Kominsky at the Prague Writers Festival in 2009

Here's Crumb's 2010 Paris Review interview


Here's Crumb on NPR's Talk of the Nation  in 2013

In fact, all of the Crumb brood….

Here's Crumb (more recently) talking comics in San Francisco in May 2015

oh and ps. Jesse Crumb, Robert's son, turns out to be a pretty talented artist himself. From the 1995 set (with Erica Detiefsen)  - Beat Characters - Diane di Prima, Ted Joans, Kenneth Rexroth, David Meltzer, microphone (poetry and jazz), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tuli Kupferberg, and Allen Ginsberg 

In fact, all of the Crumb brood…..