Vintage footage this week. First up, thanks to our friend Greg Masters, amateur video of Summer session at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, back in 1978 – Haunting glimpses of Allen and Peter, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs (an extremely el hombre invisible William Burroughs!), Larry Fagin, Michael Brownstein, Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer, amongst others. Check it out here
& a little vintage Jack Kerouac footage – here Thank you Kevin Ring and Beat Scene for alerting us to it.
As he describes it, it’s “footage of Jack.. in Milan during his ill-fated trip there in the mid 1960s. Fernanda Pivano speaks of his visit (in Italian). Jack seems bemused as he is escorted throughs a big bookstore there and is seen sleepily sipping from a glass before eventually dozing off on a sofa.
He was, he said, doing the promotional trip there to earn money to care for his sick mother. The film lasts just a couple of minutes.”
And thank you Alessandro Manca – and Jerry Cimino of The Beat Museum, for alerting us to this – ‘Nanda’s account of that 1966 Milan visit (from Amici Scrittori (1996) – translated here by Irene Panzani and Kate Collins).
Diane Di Prima – Kurt Hemmer‘s Beat Generation class in Pullman, Washington, recently posted this, by way of hommage – “Diane Di Prima – A Phone Conference, Poetry Reading and Discussion of Her Life” (listen to Diane read and reminisce – an invaluable document) – Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo on the European Beat Studies Network posted this (another moving tribute), and check out the Di Prima page here on Cuke.com, in case you. haven’t seen it).
And Rudy, her son, is currently spearheading an effort to name a park, the Page Laguna Mini Park in San Francisco, in her honor – see here
William Burroughs and J.Robert Oppenheimer – “That Time William S Burroughs Fled A Ranch School in New Mexico”. (Ken Layne’s Desert Oracle is excerpted by the always-exemplary Literary Hub – here)