Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 624

Bastille Day today – and Woody Guthrie‘s Birthday.  Check out this wonderful all-star tribute for Woody from back in 1970

For more on Woody,  plenty to see at  The Woody Guthrie Archives –  and (also)  Woody Guthrie.org 

Our on-going pondering about Artificial Intelligence.  Our friend Stephen Bornstein asked AI to “write a poem in the style of “Howl” using current cultural issues”.
This is the result:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by algorithms,
starving hysterical naked,
scrolling through the digital streets at dawn looking for a viral fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient connected connection
to the smartphone dynamos in the machinery of artificial intelligence.”

Pretty self-serving that last line  (as he rightly observes!)

A big Diane di Prima celebration, on the occasion of what would have been her 89th birthday, is coming up next month in home-town, San Francisco
The family, (Chris and Dominique), who are hosting it, have set up a  Go Fund Me fund to help cover costs for what promises to be a monumental occasion.
For more details and to contribute to the fund (a very worthy cause indeed)  go  here

David Wills over at Beatdom takes a cursory look over some of the Beat-related titles that have been published so far this year. Glad to see Stevan M Weine’s ground-breaking Ginsberg  book is among them.

and coming soon from Kevin Ring’s Beat Scene Press, a posthumous title from playwright, essayist, critic and poet, Jay Jeff Jones – The Beat Origins of The Summer of Love – a large-format, 12,000 word essay,  “an exploration of the social, political, literary, cultural landscape of those times”

For more on Jay Jeff Jones – see here

Johnny Depp digs Dylan Thomas. (and seems to want us to know!)  – check it out here