Reposting and restating last week’s big news – “Howl’, a newly-assembled red vinyl box-set will be available soon – next month – from Craft Recordings. February 23 is slated as the release-date. Hold your breath!
A couple of weeks back, Chris Agg uploaded a scattering of short Beat-related video-clips onto You Tube. See here (a few selected examples). We start off with Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his prose-poem “Look Homeward, Jack – Two Correspondences” from the book Wild Dreams of A New Beginning. (Ferlinghetti can also be seen here, reading “Constantly Rising Absurdity”, from A Coney Island of the Mind, and here, reading “The World Is A Beautiful Place”, from Pictures of the Gone World ). Keeping up the Kerouac theme – rare footage, indeed – Jan Kerouac, Jack’s daughter, reading an excerpt from her mother, Joan Haverty‘s memoir, Nobody’s Wife. Rounding it out with the ever-provocative, politically-incorrect Gregory Corso
Must-see videos were also uploaded of Ken Kesey (here and here), Joanne Kyger (here and here) , Bobbie-Louise Hawkins, Jack Micheline and Howard Hart
(all from the legendary Kerouac Festival at Naropa, in 1982, it would appear)
You Tube on the New Year also means some record of the annual St Mark’s Poetry Project New Years Marathon – Here’s John Giorno with his poem-parable, “There Was A Bad Tree”, and Anne Waldman, with an elegy for John Ashbery and a screed against “Patriarchus”.
The Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox. – Allen and his extraordinary involvement with teaching the deaf and American Sign Language – Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, announced this week that they will digitize and make publicly accessible more than sixty videotapes held in the RIT/NTID Deaf Studies Archive that document the ASL poetry and literature movement in Rochester from 1970 through 2011. The digitized videos, the Institute declares, will be “one of the largest collections of online publicly accessible rare ASL literature in the country.”
Australian ambient sound. Allen, with his tape-recorder, as cultural anthropologist. Recently unearthed from the wonderful Stanford trove is this – “forty-seven minutes of Alice Springs pub noise recorded by Allen Ginsberg in 1972, at the Riverside Hotel (now the Todd Tavern)”, a raucous sing-along, (so much you can do with a simple guitar and a couple of pints inside you!) , “captured for posterity”.
LONG LIVE MAN, or at least some of them.