Jack Kerouac on Allen Ginsberg. We’ve been featuring Ginsberg on Kerouac, but here‘s a pretty candid Kerouac-on-Ginsberg notebook entry. Jack writes:
“Ginsberg – intelligent enuf – interested in the outward appearance and pose of great things, intelligent enuf to know where to find them, but once there he acts like Jerry Newman [sic] the photographer anxious to be photographed photographing. Ginsberg wants to run his hands up the backs of people, for this he gives and seldom takes – He is also a mental screwball – *(Tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded tape recording) (like Seymour Barab anxious to have his name in larger letters than Robert Louis Stevenson, like Stieglitz & Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire”
Rick Dale of The Daily Beat reminds us the annual, local-boy-makes-good, Lowell Jack Kerouac celebrations are coming up (early October) and offers a secret word.
Also in October, (actually, opening this weekend) – “We are continually exposed to the flashbulb of death” (the University of Toronto Allen Ginsberg photo show) travels to Nova Scotia – to the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery – see here
Deborah Baker‘s Allen-in-India note, “Allen Ginsberg, A Calcutta Story”, that we spotlighted here last week, (via The Sunflower Collective) has been republished on The Wire and is available – here
Doug Holder (who we also spotlighted last week) features his friend, Karen Alkalay-Gut and her thoughts upon visiting Allen’s New Jersey burial site – here
Also on sites housing Allen’s remains – in Colorado, see here
and Jerusalem –here
Steve Silberman‘s review for the Shambhala Sun of the Philip Whalen biography, Crowded By Beauty, is, naturally, a rave one – “not only one of the most keenly observed books on the Beats ever published, but..also a fascinating exploration of the life and dharma of one of the first American-born teachers” – Steve on “The Beat of Philip Whalen” – see here – don’t miss it
Here’s Lynell George‘s review in the LA Times of the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti Letters
and
Paris-based American poet passed away this week,
Stephen Rodefer RIP (1940-2015)