A follow-up on last week’s post about philistinism, and ignorance about Allen, in Arica, Chile. The controversy, it seems, has now effectively been resolved by an unequivocal public apology by Salvador Urrutia, that city’s Mayor – “nuestras disculpas a Allen Ginsberg por las desatinadas, fundamentalistas e intolerantes declaraciones en contra de sus poemas que se han realizado en los recintos de nuestra Municipalidad” (“our apologies to Allen Ginsberg for misguided, fundamentalist and intolerant statements that have been made in the halls of our Municipality”), he writes. He also offers apologies (disculpas) to Daniel Rojas Pachas, the poet targeted, “objeto de ataques absurdos“, (the) (object of (these) absurd attacks).
Performances this past week (in both Los Angeles and San Francisco) of the Hal Willner-Chloe Webb-Bill Frisell-Ralph Steadman Kaddish, revised somewhat from itsNew York debut last year. Positive reports is what we’re hearing.
The manuscript (from the Ray Davids collection) of a segment of Wales Visitation (Allen’s classic 1965 poem) that, as we reported a few weeks back, was up for sale at auction, surprised everyone, surpassing the £800 to £1,000 price-tag – it went for £3,125 (approximately $4,800).