Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 434

Kerouac – We mentioned it last week – but coming up, Monday, commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the writer’s death. This weekend in Halifax, England, (Friday and Saturday)  Simon Warner hosts “Kerouac on Screen”, film, panels, and performance. For more details – see  here

and, Monday, the Beat Museum in San Francisco hosts Gone In October (with special guest, Dennis McNally. For more details on that event – see here

“Gone in October” – plenty of Kerouac celebration already – Czech poets celebrated the 50th anniversary of Jack’s passing at the beautiful Czech gothic castle Pirkštejn this past October 12th. Translator Josef Rauvolf talked about Jack, then Petr Onufer read his translations of Book of Haikus (kniha haiku) supported by his band The Guilty Pleasures, and ten Czech poets read their works influenced by Kerouac or mentioning him. The weather (we heard) was superb, the mood as well and the audience loved it.

(Saturday, incidentally,  (at 8.50), Czech State Radio will be broadcasting Rauvolf’s two-hour feature about Jack. You can listen to it live on-line – here)

More Kerouac news, Gerald Nicosia (also noted last week) can be heard on the radio, talking with Dave Hoekstra – dishing the dirt –  “Kerouac – The Last Quarter Century” –  see –here  (He’ll also be at Beyond Baroque in LA with Paul Blake III, Kerouac’s closest living relative, and other guests, 8 o’clock this Sunday)

and Paul Maher, Jr., another maverick Kerouac scholar, just recently posted “When Jack Kerouac Had His Crack-Up” on the Please Kill Me site –  Big Sur and beyond.  Well worth a look.
(And, while you’re there , check out Paul’s previous article (from this past September) “When Jack (Kerouac) Met Max (Bodenheim)”   –  Maxwell Bodenheim?

 

John Giorno‘s death last week still leaving us reeling. A vast outpouring of affectionate remembrance. Here‘s his New York Times obituary, here‘s local news site, E.V.Grieve.  Here‘s Tricycle (and an additional note on his Buddhism from the Times – here). Here‘s his obituary in ArtNews, and here, in Artforum.
International appreciation too. Here’s Alexandra Schwartzbrod in Liberation, (French) Corriere della Sera, (Italian)  El Pais, (Spanish).   The list could (and will) go on and on.

 

Harold Bloom – (since we’ve been featuring William Blake a fair bit recently), Bloom, the literary critic (controversial literary critic), and great Blake scholar, also died this past week, see his New York Times obituary – here

William Burroughs in Country Life. Somehow, we think William would be amused to find himself in the pages of Country Life.

Tony O’Neill on Burroughs apomorphine “cure” in Filter magazine

next Wednesday (October 23), at Dixon Place in New York City  – Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel – a play by Terese Coe – What, one wonders, would Harry think about that?

Lew Welch – check out Charles Upton‘s account of his search for the bones (following Jonah Raskin’s revived (but still pertinent) review in the Anderson Valley Advertiser)

Joanne Kyger – Delighted to report that her 1974 pamphlet Trip Out & Fall Back ) is the latest addition to Poets House’s digital project  Chapbooks of the Mimeo Revolution  

& be it remembered that the great Zen teacher, D. T. Suzuki was born on this day. See the Allen Ginsberg Project profile on him – here

& see an illuminating video-encounter with his long-time secretary Mihoko Okamura (recorded in 2005) by Ellen Pearlman – here