Cannes publicity poster for upcoming Walter Salles’ movie, On The Road, 2011
Allen’s birthday is getting closer, and the various birthday-celebration projects are hotting up. We’ve been reporting these past weeks on CA Conrad’s Jupiter 88 – Allen Ginsberg initiative – brief taped video-portraits – memories, stories, poems – sending the shout-out to Allen. Several additional participants have been added to the roster just this past week – Marc Nasdor, Stephen Boyer, Elinor Nauen, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Filip Marinovich, Erica Kaufman, Ariana Reines, Dan Machlin, Sharon Mesmer, Vincent Katz, Edwin Torres, Paolo Javier, Douglas A Martin, Nathaniel Siegel, Stacy Szymaszek (with a Presspop Ginsberg doll), Eileen Myles (with her chihauhau dog, Hank), and CA Conrad himself.
Then there is Claire Askew’s Starry Rhymes. Her special anthology, Starry Rhymes: 85 Years of Allen Ginsberg is pretty much completed now and soon to go to press. There’ll be a gathering in Edinburgh on June 3rd. (at the Forest Hall).
And not forgetting Atlanta Georgia, and their 2011 Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, same night, (470 Candler Park Drive), there’s going to be a “Howl-a-thon”. There’s footage here of Franklin Abbot, (AQLF Chair) and Rupert Fike (MC for the evening) discussing and looking forward to the event.
Sobering serious news about Irfan Sanci, the Turkish publisher of Guillaume Apollinaire and William Burroughs. Here is the AP story.
and here, Allen, from a 1989 interview for the No More Censorship Factsheet. Asked who he thinks might benefit from censorship? – “The basic thing that Burroughs and Wilhelm Reich and others have pointed out”, (he explains), “is that censorship of sexual discourse or public communication about sex is one way of keeping the populace under control. If you can censor the seat of one of the greater emotions, then you’ve got the other varieties of communication and consciousness under control. So in Russia and Nazi Germany and other authoritarian countries, one of the strongest taboos is free communications of that basic emotion, sex..”