Man. Verses. Nature. Don’t miss Hillary Louise Johnson‘s extensive profile on Gary Snyder for Sactown Magazine
‘His face has an elvish triangularity to it, with merry eyes and curling lips over a bearded chin. Here, he is just another woodland creature: larger than a wolf, smaller than an elk, to quote the title of one of his essays exhorting us to be less human-centric in our cosmology. At 92, Snyder has an older man’s spine, curved elegantly like a violin bow, making him look a bit like a character out of a traditional Japanese watercolor, if only he were wearing a kimono and carrying a staff. But he is nattily dressed in olive green shorts and shirt, and a chunky maroon sweater vest that I compliment because it is stunning and obviously something special.”
Another “don’t miss” – Steven Taylor on Gregory Corso on Simon Warner‘s always-informative Rock and The Beat Generation Substack:
SW: Where did you meet him?
ST: Allen Ginsberg’s apartment. That’s the first clear memory of our interaction. I saw him before (or after) that at a club in the Village, where he was heckling Allen and me during our act. He was very drunk, as was his companion, the actor Michael J. Pollard, whom I recognized from the movie Bonnie and Clyde, where he played the sidekick ‘C.W.’ I remember Allen yelling, ‘Gregory! Go home and take care of your baby!’
There are many memories of him. I loved to listen to music with him, because he felt it so deeply. It made one feel validated in committing to music. He tells me, ‘Write the atom bomb Te Deum.’
Read Marc Olmsted‘s review of The Golden Dot – here
Raymond Foye – from his article on the visionary Jordan Belson in the current (March) issue of The Brooklyn Rail:
“Allen Ginsberg once said that culture was only ever the same six people, i.e., it only takes half a dozen people to create a social group with enough ingredients to produce the cross-pollination necessary for a new imagining of reality. One gets a sense of this reading Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (2010) where figures like Belson, Philip Lamantia, and Gerd Stern move in and out of the scene, sharing news, ideas, friends, lifestyles, and other connections (including jazz and drugs). Belson’s flat was one block north of the apartment where Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl” and in fact it was Belson who gave Ginsberg the peyote that inspired that poem. In 1954 Belson and Ginsberg discussed making a film of William Burroughs’s then-unpublished Naked Lunch, and/or Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, or perhaps another film sympathetic to the Beat sensibility. Unfortunately, this was a project that would have to wait until January 1959 when Al Leslie and Robert Frank made their film Pull My Daisy.”
Raymond footnotes this with an intriguing archival discovery :
“Ginsberg’s “Film Project” is described in a 1954 letter to Jack Kerouac. Although the letter appeared in Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford deleted much of the discussion of Belson, including the film scenario, which is (therefore) reprinted here for the first time”
A brief excerpt:
“….Imagine our misty disappearing Maya dream faces gazing out of the screen or on one another – we invent a tragedy – Neal with an affair with some drunken nurse who he kills (like Dreiser) perhaps a great scene with Neal in Death Row or electric chair – or I’ll take the Cross if no one else wants it in a movie, – scenes with Neon Halos etc. Whatever. Anyway perhaps Bill in Frisco or Bill on Earth for the 704,727,00th Kalpa. Burroughs on Earth. Fine Title. Or perhaps film Naked Lunch or Dr. Sax. Dr. Sax by the way very parallel in symbolic bimbolic to old pre-Buddha cosmic myths, the great misty serpent blacking heaven out and absorbing all earth juices, till it was destroyed by an Indian Sax and serpent crashed into watery flow juicing up earth again to life…”
Check out this 2021 essay (also by Raymond) on Belsen (and his relationship with Harry Smith) that appeared in the Spring issue of the Gagosian Quarterly
We look forward to discovering more about this remarkable and hitherto occluded figure.
More rave reviews (to add to our own) of Stevan M Weine’s forthcoming Ginsberg study,
Best Minds..
Midwest Book Review declares it “A masterpiece of definitive and seminal scholarship”.
“Best Minds – How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness” will have a very special appeal to readers with an interest in the life and poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Best Minds..” is exceptionally well written, organized and presented..an inherently fascinating, informative, and insightful study that is unreservedly recommended”
We have already noted the interview and discussion set for 30th of March in New York with Holly George-Warren, Weine will be speaking again the following week (April 4) in Chicago. at the Seminary Coop/57th Street Books, with his colleague and mentor, Professor W J T Mitchell
Official pub date isn’t until March 28 but advanced copies are available via direct communication with the publisher. We re-iterate, it’s a groundbreaking and extraordinary book.