Gay Pride month (there’ll be more on this tomorrow – but we wanted today to announce
the publication of Brian Alessandro and Tom Cardamone’s. Fever Spores – The Queer Reclamation of William S Burroughs) – “Inexplicably”, the authors write, William S. Burroughs has not been embraced by the LGBTQI community as one of our own, even though his queerness was central to his life and work. Fever Spores – The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs serves as an appreciation and reclamation project. We seek to bring Burroughs into the gay literary canon”.
The book comprises interviews and essays by a cornucopia of contributors, among them, Blondie founders and musicians Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, cultural critic and author Fran Lebowitz, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Tony Kushner, filmmaker David Cronenberg multiple Hugo-Nebula Award-winning science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, National Book Award-winner Edmund White, PUNK magazine founder and historian, Legs McNeil, Gregory Woods, Paul Russell, Charlie Vazquez, publisher and author, Sven Davisson, and Burroughs’s bibliographer and literary executor, James Grauerholz.
Some offer critical assessments of Burroughs, while others share personal experiences.
Mariana Dominguez provides an early review – here
Jack Kerouac Centennial this year (2022) continues and we at The Allen Ginsberg Project salute that momentous event. We’ve been featuring this past week Allen on Jack and will continue to do so. In the meantime, here’s one, a classic one from the archives, that you might well have missed – his legendary participation, back in 1958, in a panel-discussion at the Brandeis University Club in New York, on the subject “Is There a Beat Generation?”
“Kerouac’s heart-felt, erratic, passionate drunken talk is, quite simply, priceless’.
Kill Your Darlings – The David Kammerer murder continues to be revisited – see here – Richard Milner for Grunge magazine – drawing significantly from a 2019 Paris Review article, “The Queer Crime That Launched The Beats” – here)
Anne Waldman‘s Para ser estrella a medianoche (become a midnight star), a bilingual Spanish-English/ English-Spanish edition (Spanish translations by Mariano Antolín Rato)
has just been published in Madrid by the publishing-house Arrebato Libros. As the publishers note, the book collects poems from her entire career (de toda su trayectoria) – in the first part, texts she wrote for her friends and compatriots, fellow “out-riders”, John Cage, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac and John Giorno, and in the second, a selection of more recent poems, taken from her last two books, Sanctuary and Trickster Feminism. Each of the poems is headed by a text written specifically for the book, in which Anne tells us “when, how and why she wrote them” (Anne nos cuenta cuándo, cómo y por qué escribió esos poemas). The book begins with an added bonus, a set of photographs that illustrate and explain her deep and abiding connection with the Beat Generation.
The Milner piece confirms my suspicion that the farther we get from the historical events in question, the less accurate these random articles about the ‘lurid’ Beat events become.