Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 515

Ginsberg’s Karma,  Ram Devinenis film (mentioned here last week) premieres at the UK Asian Film Festival tomorrow (and will feature heavily in the upcoming annual Ginsberg birthday celebrations (June 3rd) at New York’s Howl Happening Gallery).
Ginsberg in India – 
“an insightful and entertaining look at a transformative phase in the poet Allen Ginsberg’s life”.

The documentary follows poet Bob Holman as he travels to India to piece together Ginsberg’s life there and features interviews with many of the artists and writers who knew him and befriended him during this critical time.

Among those featured in the film, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, John Giorno, Anne Waldman, Deborah Baker, Bill Morgan, Tony Trigilio, Meena Alexander, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Subodh Sarkar, Utpal Kumar Basu and Ashok Sarkar (aka Ashoke Fakir – (from Bill Morgan’s Ginsberg biography – “All of Allen’s Indian friends knew Ashok was phony and hypocritical, but on the other hand Allen remembered Gary (Snyder)’s advice that “even the fake holy men are holy men”)

Complementing this, Bob Holman’s Indian Journals

Don’t miss a Q and A with the participants available on You Tube – here

The movie itself will be available on You Tube streaming free (starting June 7) – here

Illustration(s) by Harsho Mohan Charroraj

July 3rd (next month), “Discover America and the Beat Generation – Jack Kerouac Types On the Road – The Genealogy of a Counterculture through Publications’, organized by Beat scholar, Matt Theado, opens at the BB Plaza Museum of Art in Kobe, Japan.

“The show features a replicated manuscript of Kerouac’s original On the Road  “scroll,” along with Kazuhiro Yamaji’s exquisite collection of Beat Generation publications—including first editions, broadsides, signed books, and extremely rare and precious small press magazines -one of the most extensive collections outside the US.”

On July 17th, the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies will be hosting a symposium (streamed live on You Tube) featuring Theado, Minami Aoyama, Motoyuki Shibata and Beat scholar. (Herbert Huncke biographer) Hilary Holladayalongside other presentations

More Kerouac-related news –  In her new graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman StrengthAlison Bechdel and her partner, Holly, retrace Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder’s 1955 ascent of Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Paris Review presents an excerpt – here 

Pradip Choudhuri (1943-2021)

Sad notes of passing – continuing our India-theme  – Pradip Choudhuri, one of the leading poetic and philosophical voices of India’s Hungry Generation died April 25th, after testing positive for COVID-19. Read more about him and his extraordinary lifehere

Ed White (1929-2021)

and alsocontinuing our Kerouac theme Ed White, Kerouac’s close friend, died April 29 at the ripe old age of 92 –  See a full obituary notice here 

Bolinas poetsDan Chiasson addresses this forgotten enclave of American poetry in the New Yorker

Also check out The Song Cave‘s  expanded edition of the long out of print City Lights Books classic On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing in celebration of its 50th anniversary.

Bob Dylan’s birthday last week. We’ve already mentioned this but, for a wider (sociological) perspective –  there’s this – Charles Kaiser in Salon

Rosebud Feliu-Pettet, who wrote the definitive account of Allen’s passing, would have been 75 this past Tuesday. An audio of her reading from this piece, (along with others reading from her miscellaneous writings), can be found here

We’ve been making a habit of closing each week with tracks from Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis’ “She Walks in Beauty“. Here’s another one – Marianne Faithfull reads John Keats “Ode To A Nightingale”

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