Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 557

A more-than-usual miscellany this week

Nicola Bardolo, author of the first and only German biography of Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac  Beatnik, Genie, is interviewed (in English) by Simon Warner – here

Holly George-Warren, upcoming biographer, (on Oprah, no less), poses the question –
“Can A Feminist Still Love Kerouac?’   Clearly, the answer is (a complicated one, but..)
she can, yes. In a provocative (but, frankly, necessary) piece, Amanda Petrusich, Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Sheila Weller, Amber Tamblyn, Laina Dawes, Fiona Paton, Michelle Shocked, Mary Gauthier, and Debra Devi  are all interviewed, and all offer informed observations.

Brian Hassett (no stranger to these pages) provides a detailed account of his Kerouac@100 experience – here.  If you weren’t there, you can get a pretty good sense of it from him (and his enthusiasm is infectious). Don’t miss it.

“We did it right in good ol’ Lowell”, he concludes,  “Jack wasn’t there in body but he was in soul.  His Spirit was in every glance, and nobody left town without a hundred years of Jack’s blood dyeing our own with the colors of love, for real, not fade away.”

Samantha Evans‘ earnestly-made 2016 “Howl” documentary. “How “Howl” Became History“, (originally made as part of her doctoral dissertation for the University of St Andrews), features contributions from Jack Foley and Jonah Raskin, Anne Waldman, Clark Coolidge, Thurston Moore, and her St Andrews professor, poet and novelist, John Burnside.
It’s a dutiful and engaging survey – Not sure we agree with Raskin’s concluding remark
– “He (Allen) seemed a little nutty, actually, because he wasn’t always trying to make a lot of sense” – Oh really?  –  Quite the contrary,  never unfixed or unfocused,  Allen (in our recall) was always insistently striving for comprehension.

Ah, but we’re nit-picking, we’re long-time admirers of Raskin’s work, most notably 2006’s  American Scream – Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and The Making of The Beat Generation,

Hungryalist poet Malay Roychoudhury reads “Howl” translated successfully into Bengali

For the definitive account of the Hungryalist movement – see Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury‘s 2018 volume – The Hungryalists – The Poets Who Sparked A Revolution 

Speaking of Indian poetry, we’ll draw your attention to another account (focusing on the bilingual English-Marathi poet, Arun Kolatkar, another of Allen’s friends) – “Translation As Literary Activism” – an in-depth article and one well-worth reading.

Another invaluable “deep-dive” – Kathelin Gray writing on “William S Burroughs and The Biosphere 1974-1997”

Bill Morgan’s new book is announced this week on Beatdom – an examination of the relationship between Thomas Merton and Lawrence Ferlinghetti

John Moe writes on David Melzer’s new book from Lithic Press, Rock Tao

Andrew Schelling writes on Anselm Hollo  (how we miss him!)

& Cecil Taylor was born on this day. Check out our last years Cecil posting