Another notice (see the flood of notices last week) of Allen’s photographic Beat Memories show – Tim Keane (on Hyperallergic) – “”I Noticed My Friends” – Allen Ginsberg’s Photography” – “At best these pictures are a celebration within a rite of mourning”, Keane astutely notes. “And if photography prolongs a lived moment that vanishes as soon as it arrives, [and surely it does] Ginsberg sensed how better suited [perhaps?] photography than writing can be to that impulse..” [Tho’ he was hardly a slouch, we might add, when it comes to preservation of the moment, elevation to eternity, via writing!]
“I am with you in Rockland”. As we’ve noted before, among our most popular postings over the years are our periodic postings on (here’s another one) Ginsberg tattoos
Elizabeth Pusack over at Tin House has been burrowing through the John Wilson Special Collections Room at the Portland, Oregon library, and came across this little gem, which she dutifully transcribed – an August 1965 postcard (from Allen) to “Bill” Burroughs –
“Dear Bill, out in Fresno awhile, + visited Big Sur, then spent $2000 and bought a Volkswagen 1964 Camper-like a transistorized trailer – now I’m a householder! – and went up here then Crater Lake + 2 days backpacking on Mt Rainer + we’ll go on foot 8 days into Olympics or Cascade Mountains – Seattle a lovely 1920’s American City – great Goodwill shops + 2nd-Hand clothes + Tambourine markets – I’ll weave with Peter [Orlovsky] across states to NY in a month or more. I’m up here with Gary Snyder before he goes to Japan again. How long you be around? I see the heat is closing in on me (?) love, Allen”.
“I can feel the heat closing in” – Allen echoes the famous line from Naked Lunch. Bravo! deciphering the Ginsberg scrawl!
Eliot Katz’s and Tom Savage‘s recollections of Allen in Volume 2 are just two of a myriad of lively, informative entries in Clayton Patterson‘s recently-published three-volume, monumental Jews – A People’s History of the Lower East Side. Tuli Kupferberg, Abbie Hoffman, Ed Sanders, Philip Glass, and Robert Frank, are further names with which readers of the Ginsberg Project will be familiar. The delight is that there will be plenty of names and facts with which they’re not familiar. For more about this particular project, see here
Speaking of Eliot Katz, his introduction to the new Andy Clausen collection, recently noted in these pages, may be read here.
Ray Bremser’s birthday today – what would have been his 79th. For more about Ray Bremser see here (our Ray Bremser birthday posting).