Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 435

“Oct 24 — Quel Deluge – He threw up his hands & wrote the universe dont exist & died to prove it”.

Jack Kerouac remembrances and celebrations this past week.

Monday marked the 50th anniversary of his death, yesterday, the anniversary of his funeral.

Allen’s contemporaneous journal notes (we’d remind you, if you haven’t seen them yet), were just published on-line (with annotations and an introduction by Michael Schumacher) by The New Yorker

Death from a broken heart?

“I would say he (Jack Kerouac)  offered his heart to the United States and the United States rejected his heart. And he realized what suffering the United States was in for, and so the tragedy of America, as (Walt) Whitman had seen the tragedy of the United States. “When the singer of the nation finds that the nation has sickened, what happens to the singer of the nation?” This is Gregory Corso‘s question. 

And America, by his day, was sick. Militarily sick. Military-Industrial-Complex had taken over. Hard-heartedness had taken over. Everything that as a Canuck-peasant Kerouac hated had taken over – the mechanization, the impersonality, the homogenization, the money-grabbing, the disrespect for person – that had all taken over. And vast wars – and the attack on the provincial in the wars.  

So I would say America broke his heart.”

(Allen, from the 1987 documentary, “Jack Kerouac’s Road – A Franco-American Oddysey.“)  – (the full movie is available – here)

Gelek Rimpoche and Pablo Picasso‘ – the anniversary of their births celebrated today

Bob Kaufman’s Collected Poems is finally out. Read Dwight Garner’s review of it in the New York Times

It is, he declares, “the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work…this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor”.

From Richard Kostelanetz  on  Bob Rosenthal’s memoir, Straight Around Allen

“Though many books have been written about Allen Ginsberg … this one told me much that I’d not known before. Uniquely, it is written from the perspective of Ginsberg’s literary secretary…

Filled with modest detail, Straight Around Allen is an intimate portrait

With images new to me—not only photographs but specimens of Ginsberg’s handwritten messages—and an informative text, this is a treasure.”

Read the full review- here·

Mick Lowe on Allen in 1966 in the current Nebraska Quarterly

So, New York City marathon-runner (“ultra runner”) , Todd Aydelotte makes this declaration:

“For the coming months, I’ll be running to Allen Ginsberg in NYC, which will culminate in the Howl UltraRun, a 60-70 miler where I will loop audio of Ginsberg reading this poem, using his words as a mantra for long miles, an attempt to go deep with Ginsberg as the body breaks.”

New/old  Bob Dylan recordings coming out later this month (November 1st, to be precise). Bob Dylan – Travelin’ Thru (featuring Johnny Cash) – Volume 15 of the Bootleg Series