April 18 – Bob Kaufman’s and Kathy Acker’s birthday today.
For our postings on Kaufman – see here and here
For our posting on Kathy Acker see here
Women of the Beat Generation, a perennially significant topic, gets another airing next week in Randolph, New Jersey. Joyce Johnson and Hettie Jones will be speaking on the subject.Hopefully, there’s been some significant progress since this:
Next week – a big week in New York – celebrating William Burroughs. WSB100 is the New York chapter of the centennial celebrations, guided by James Ilgenfritz. On Monday at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Elliott Sharp & Steve Buscemi. On Tuesday at Incubator Arts Project, Lydia Lunch & Quintan Ana Wikswo. On Wednesday a big marathon William Burroughs reading at thePoetry Project at St Mark’s,featuringAnne Waldman, Bob HolmanGenesis Breyer P-Orridge, Penny Arcade, J.G.Thirlwell, amongst a host of others. Friday, at the CUNY (City University of New York) Grad Center an all-day Burroughs symposium (featuring Barry Miles, Oliver Harris, Ann Douglas, Regina Weinreich, Jed Birmingham, to, again, just give a partial list).
Saturday, Oliver Harris and curators on Restoring the Cut-Up Trilogy at the New York Public Library. Saturday evening. John Zorn and Bill Laswell duet at The Stone and Bill Laswell presents his “The Road to the Western Lands”. The following day, Bill Frisell on guitar, Eyvind Kang on viola and Lenny Pickett on sax combine with Hal Willner presenting Burroughs audio-tapes.
A full schedule may be found here
Kathy Acker’s 1988 interview with Burroughs (previously featured here on the Allen Ginsberg Project) – we remind you – may be accessed here
“..(T)he echo-chamber of that collective” “Howl”.” – (and) “..Allen Ginsberg would’ve been very proud here..” – Michael Stipe references Allen Ginsberg in his keynote speech inducting Kurt Cobain and Nirvana into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame just last week (fittingly, perhaps, on the twentieth-anniversary of Cobain’s untimely passing).
His (Cobain’s) 1993 collaboration with Burroughs (including a written request for collaboration and a subsequent thank you note [sic!] – “I really enjoyed the opportunity to do the record” [“”The Priest” They Called Him“]) appeared this past Monday on Dangerous Minds (one of our favorite blogs) – and is well worth checking out
(for a little of the “back story”).
We’ll be featuring more on this – the Stipe-Cobain-Burroughs connection this coming weekend.
and – big news! a new book of Peter Orlovsky’s writings, Peter Orlovsky – A Life In Words – Intimate Chronicles of A Beat Writer (edited by Bill Morgan) is scheduled for publication by Paradigm Publishers (out of Herndon, Vermont) in a couple of months time. More word on that too in the weeks ahead – “This is the “Orlovsky Reader””, the publishers declare, “(which Ginsberg always wanted to publish), offering poetry, prose and journal entries, created by the man who was the muse of the Beat Generation”.
The forty-year anniversary of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa is this year. There’ll be a celebration this Sunday at City Lights, led by Naropa Assistan Professor of English, Andrea Rexilius. A further celebratory reading will take place, at the St Mark’s Poetry Project, in November.