Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 419

Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr, Columbia University Campus, 1944

The Lucien CarrDavid Kammerer murder/manslaughter that was once a strangely forgotten occluded episode has since had plenty of traction (most recently in the 2013 film, Kill Your Darlings (see here, here – and, significantly, here).

James Polchin revisits it again, this time for The Paris Review  in “The Queer Crime That Launched The Beats” (a selection from his recently-published Indecent Advances – A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall)

A complicated tale – Polchin gives it a detailed and nuanced telling, noting differing reactions – (Allen’s and Jack Kerouac‘s in distinct contrast) – “the nervous tensions between embracing and repulsing homosexual desires”

Similar contrasting response – celebration and repression – can be seen so many years later, (notwithstanding the huge advances made for homosexual equality), trickling through, in this little report, from the Paterson local paper (Paterson, New Jersey, home, famously to Allen and William Carlos Williams) – The headline in the Paterson Times over Gay Pride weekend –  “(Mayor) Sayegh raises gay pride flag over Paterson City Hall, faces criticism from religious leaders”. Common sense will always triumph over religious bigotry, but it’s always an up-hill fight.

William Burroughs gets an outing Monday night (July 8) in Brooklyn at Pioneer Works Mallory Catlett‘s “Decoder- The Ticket That Exploded”, a multi-media piece. For more – see this  – (and on the 20th, workshops – Alex Wermar-Colan on “Computational Cut-Ups”, and G Lucas Crane on the (see below) “Nova Drone”)


Speaking of Burroughs, Casey Rae’s book continues to garner a lot of attention – see , for example, here – and here

On Wednesday June 10 in Vancouver (as part of their “Indian Summer” festival) – Deborah Baker on “The Beats In India” (Deborah Baker, long-time resident of India, is of course the author of the 2008 study, The Blue Hand)

Last weekend’s memorial in San Francisco for Tom Clark at Bird and Beckett bookstore was a big success (so our spies inform us). “Keeping Score”, Micah Ballard‘s tribute to Tom Clark may be read here

Speaking of the West Coast and those sadly gone, Patrick James Dunagan presents “A Portfolio in Honour of David Meltzer”

Our own 2017 note on Meltzer may be accessed – here 

Through till next Friday (July 12th) in Marbella Spain (at the Hospital Real de la Misericordia) Tomás Ayuso pays graphic hommage to the Beat Generation
(an earlier presentation of that show may be glimpsed here)

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