Peter Hartlaub‘s engaging article for the San Francisco Chronicle‘s sesquicentennial history project, (on the Beat Generation), is well worth reading, (as are the photographs (like the one above) worth perusing) – Allen reading Doctor Sax.
Here‘s a posting from earlier in the year on the Ginsberg Project (Robert Creeley’s 1982 remarks on that book)
Open Culture features the Jack Kerouac recordings
Here‘s, on the subject of Kerouac, the Ginsberg Project posting of Allen reading from Kerouac‘s The Dharma Bums
Peripherally-related information – Jim Irsay owner of “the scroll” (the On The Road scroll) just paid two-point-two million dollars for Ringo Starr’s drum set! – Two-point-two million dollars! (Two-point-four-three million dollars was the price he paid for the scroll, back in 2001)
More vintage Ginsberg (and Beat) photographs. John Suiter writes for the Poetry Foundation this week on the newly-established Walter Lehrman Beat Generation Photo Collection at the Merrill-Cazier Library at Utah State University in Logan, Utah
“Lehrman took the first photograph ever of Ginsberg reading “Howl”, Suiter notes, “at an event sponsored by San Francisco State College.” (In one image) “We see Ginsberg, in sports coat and tie, reading from an early typescript of the poem, his right arm raised high in an anarchic flourish”
Also included in the collection are images of Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, ,Michael McClure. As Michael McClure declared (regarding another image from that legendary (second) Six Gallery reading) “No one ever took a photograph of any of us that is more sensitive and true to life.”
Howard Brookner‘s classic movie, Burroughs – The Movie is now out on DVD (see Andrew Marzoni‘s review in this month’s ArtNews here. The DVD package (from Critereon includes the usual tantalizing “extras” – rare outtakes (including footage of the Nova Convention), an audio interview with Brookner conducted by Burroughs biographer, Ted Morgan, and a new audio commentary by Jim Jarmusch, who worked as sound recordist on the film.
Jarmusch is also the executive producer of a new film, Uncle Howard, made by his nephew, Aaron Brookner and scheduled to premiere at Sundance early next year.
Burroughs presentation copy to Allen of his 1975 The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, incidentally (“For Allen Ginsberg, all the best from the Dutchman, William S Burroughs”) just went on sale – Asking price? – four-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifty pounds (approximately six-thousand-five-hundred dollars)
Drummond Hadley’s passing noted here last week) – Here’s a further obituary notice (from the Arizona Daily Star)
Allen’s 1958 “Poem Rocket” (Poema Cohere) translated into Spanish (by Franco Bordino) on the buenos aires poetry site – here Here’s another Bordino translation – a fragment from “Kaddish”
Allen in Peru in 1960 – Martín Adán and Allen Ginsberg – next Tuesday in Lima (at the Casa de la Literatura Peruana) a symposium. Read more about it (continuing in Spanish) here
Tomorrow in New York at the Medicine Show Theatre, the second annual Medicine Show reading of Howl and Other Poems featuring Martin Espada, Alice Ostriker, Eliot Katz, Lauren Schmidt, and a host of others.
Nice Friday Roundup, as usual. Those photos by Walter Lehrman are outstanding, very happy they have come to light.