Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 463

Gary Snyder‘s 90th birthday today – Happy Birthday, Gary! – A Living Treasure

Regrettably, the live gathering scheduled by Point Reyes Books for this day had to be postponed (due to the presence of the virus) but..

Gary Snyder Birthday Celebrations on The Allen Ginsberg Project  here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here 
An early Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder 1983 at Naropa here and here
More Gary Snyder 1983 at Naropa
Gary Snyder 1994 at Naropa,
The Ginsberg-Snyder Letters here

Michael McClure‘s passing last Monday still leaves us breathless. Here‘s Neil Genzlinger’s detailed obituary notice in the New York Times. Here‘s the AP wire service obituary. Here‘s Italy’s Corriere Della Sera 

and soon after we learn of Michael’s death, news of another death close to us, too  – David Carter. David Carter, pioneering historian of Stonewall, and editor of Allen’s selected interviews, Spontaneous Mind, died May 1st of a heart attack. We mourn him too

Ginsberg/Beat bibliographica, Beat Generation collecting:

The Jack Kerouac University Archives auction that we mentioned last week, (Kerouac’s letter to Robert Lax, incidentally, fetched $14,000, just under the estimate, Allen’s posthumous note to the Kerouac Estate, $400), brings us to the subject of Beat items and Beat fetishization –  which brings us, in turn, to the subject of Jerry Cimino of the Beat Museum and artist Richard Prince.

“Richard Prince’s collection of Beat Generation books is, without a doubt, the most important private collection of Beat books and original documents in existence”, Cimino writes.  To that end, he has written Prince an open letter, hoping and requesting that he, Prince, might, perhaps, some day, bequeath some of his extraordinary treasures to the Museum.

What kind of treasures are we talking about? – Well, two copies of Howl inscribed by Allen in 1956, (one given to Kerouac and one to Lucien Carr), the copy of On The Road that Jack used on the Steve Allen Show in 1959, (the one Jack secretly doctored by taping pages of his unpublished novel Visions of Cody, and reading from that with no forewarning), a copy of Visions of Cody, inscribed to Neal Cassady  and a copy of On The Road inscribed to Cassady, the original scroll manuscript of Big Sur (the original scroll!),William Burroughs‘ annotated copy of his classic novel, Naked Lunch, another copy of Naked Lunch inscribed to Paul Bowles… Need we go on?
For multiple images from Richard Prince’s remarkable book collection – see here and here

Strange to see them thusly entombed in their forbidding embossed black boxes, but how great that they’ve been lovingly curated and assembled and preserved.
Curious fact, Richard Prince used to live in Allen’s old 437 East 12th Street, New York City, East Village building.

Buddha dharma – Our friend, Jacqueline Gens, recently uncovered this extraordinary picture (taken by Gary Snyder). Of it, she writes: “I found this snapshot of young (Chogyam) Trungpa Rinpoche, Allen and Peter, taken by Gary Snyder when they visited the Young Lamas Home in the early 60’s. The biographical narrative of Trungpa meeting Allen while trying to hail a cap in NYC in the 70’s is untrue. We checked with both Trungpa’s son and Gelek Rimpoche who was also at Sister Palmo’s Young Lamas Home and they confirmed it was Trungpa Rinpoche. I can only image how unusual for the young Trungpa to meet with them, and poets, no less.”