Sinead O’Connor performing at Sine, on The Allen Ginsberg Project yesterday. We thought we’d follow that up with Allen’s image of Marianne Faithfull performing at that same East Village New York City club.
We’ve featured Marianne before here (in connection with Gregory Corso) and also here
A little bit of candid conversation
Marianne Faithfull: Allen Ginsberg tried teaching me how to give a blow job. He said it was like prayer
Abe Gurko: That’s hilarious. Maybe you can talk about that on the Sunday Morning Show [CBS tv show]. How many people can say that?
A long-time visitor with Allen and company at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Allen dubbed her there a “Professor of Poetics” (an honor, indeed, her father had been a London University professor of Italian literature)
For Marianne’s Lyric Writing Workshop/Class from the Summer of 1988 see here, here & here – for her workshops the following year here, here and here
from a December 2014 Daily Telegraph profile:
“Faithfull, who described herself as a “psychological masochist”, explained that she had tried to live her life according to William Burroughs‘ rules. Burroughs wrote the stylistically experimental novel Naked Lunch (published in 1959) which follows a heroin addict called William Lee. Later in her life, Faithfull confronted Burroughs about the book. I said, “Why did you do that?”. And he looked at me like I was crazy, which of course I was, and said, first of all, it [my writing] is fiction, and, secondly, it was never meant to be taken literally, and most importantly, it was never meant to be taken literally by you.”
Her 50th Anniversary World Tour scheduled to begin earlier this year [2015] had to be postponed on account of hip surgery (“a fucking pickle“, as she declared it, in January, to her fans) but, happy to report, she’s now suitably recovered and will be doing live dates in Switzerland, Germany, France – and Turkey in October. On November 1st, she plays the Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven, Holland.
Rizzoli, last year [2014] published Marianne Faithfull – A Life On Record – and Give My Love to London (her twentieth [sic] studio album) was also released that year
Here’s Marianne talking about the album
