Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 315

Allen Ginsberg teaching at Naropa Institute – Photograph  Steve Silberman

From Steve Silberman‘s review of the new Allen Ginsberg book, Bill Morgans selection of Allen’s lectures, Best Minds of My Generationwhich appeared last weekend in the San Francisco Chronicle:  

“Scholarly, wide-ranging and full of penetrating insight and fascinating literary gossip, the book is a major contribution to the core Beat canon, and provides an astonishingly intimate view of a homegrown American literary movement that would have a generative influence worldwide, inspiring generations of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and political activists across the globe..”

For more of Steve’s laudatory and intelligent, perceptive review – see here.

See here for a selection of other reviews

Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, David Amram and Allen Ginsberg, 1959 – Photograph John Cohen

Another news item from last week – Ed White’s obituary in the The Denver Post 

Ed White – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg – caption: “Ed White, Varsity Apartments #219  my residence in summers at Naropa – July 17, 1991, for Ed – Allen Ginsberg”

From Alan Prendergast’s account in Westword:

“White…(studied).. literature and architecture at the Sorbonne and Columbia University. While at Columbia, he became close friends with Jack Kerouac, a dropout who’d attended the school on a football scholarship, and other members of Kerouac’s fast-living, bohemian inner circle. White encouraged Kerouac to visit him in Denver — which he did in 1947, traveling by bus to Chicago and then hitchhiking to Colorado to see White, proto-hipster Neal Cassady and poet Allen Ginsberg. That trip became a major set-piece in Kerouac’s On the Road, published a decade later, in which White appears as the character Tim Gray.

(He appeared in Visions of Cody as Ed Gray, and in Book of Dreams as Al Green and Guy Green.)

Prendergast continues:

‘The pair (Kerouac and White) visited frequently in New York between 1946 and 1955, while White was completing his graduate degree. In 1951, White later recalled, he suggested that Kerouac should carry a small sketchbook to capture fleeting impressions in prose, similar to what White did in sketching architectural designs (White was, in his professional life  an accomplished architect). Years later, Kerouac wrote to White: “By the way, you started a whole new movement of American literature (spontaneous prose and poetry) when in that Chinese restaurant on 125th Street one night you told me to start SKETCHING in the streets…”

Ed White, with Columbia classmates, Tom Livornese and Jack Kerouac, in Denver – courtesy Rocky Mountain News

Westword also has this note on  postcard notations from Allen to Ed Wood

Allen Ginsberg and Ed White in front of the Denver Botanic Gardens Conservatory

John Giorno, following celebrations in Paris, is being celebrated all over New York.

Bernadette Mayer‘s birthday today (she turns 72).

Here’s her PennSound page 

Here’s Adam Fitzgerald’s Poetry Interview, (back in 2011)

Here’s her recent New Directions  book

Here’s her – always worth reprinting –  invaluable list of writing provocations 

Bernadette Mayer

Opening tonight in San Francisco (and continuing until September 27 ) at the GLBT History Museum, “Lavender Tinted Glasses”, a show focusing on Janis Joplin, Kenneth Anger, Allen Ginsberg and Gavin Arthur, (one of a series of events taking place this year in San Francisco to celebrate the “Summer of Love“)

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