It’s Edgar Allen Poe‘s birthday today. “Everything leads to Poe…it all leads back to Poe”, Allen famously declared. For more on the Ginsberg-Poe connection, see our last year’s “Poe-Day” birthday posting – here (and don’t miss our 2021 posting – “Edgar Allan Poe – Rock Star” – here )
Edgar Allan Poe as rock star. The late Lou Reed recorded a whole album based on/inspired by him
Laurie Anderson, Reed’s widow, in the current Vanity Fair, speaks at length about her ex-husband – in the course of which there’s this charming exchange about Allen:
LA: In New York, we live in a city of incredible treasures. And it’s all things that we can go and have a look at and go, “Who made that for what?” You forget that culture isn’t just what’s coming down the pipeline into your laptop. I’ve been rereading Ginsberg lately, and just having my mind opened up to some of the great things that he… I knew Allen, and so did Lou, and we both liked him, but he had this way of bumping heads that we both hated. He would see you and he’d knock your head.
VF: Physically bump your head?
LA: Yes. It was a Tibetan greeting. And he would, like, boom. I was like, “Oh, stop doing that.” But for some reason we just…maybe it was because we were friends or we were too close to see what a genius he was, what incredible works of art he made. And then when you see it from another perspective, “Howl” is like the national anthem. What an incredibly rich history we have as Americans, as people who’ve made really just insanely great things. And so being part of the engine that keeps things coming out, I’m really, really happy to help do that a bit.”
The Material Wealth book tour continues. We mentioned the LA opening here last week.
This upcoming Wednesday (January 24) at 7pm PST (10pm EST), City Lights will be hosting an in-store event – Pat Thomas, the author, in conversation with Peter Hale of the Ginsberg Estate.
This event is free and open to the public and will also be broadcast on Zoom. To experience the virtual part of the event you will need a device that can access the internet and registration is required – see here
The following day (Thursday) at 7pm, there will be a presentation at Mrs Dalloway’s Bookstore in Berkeley
The following week (Wednesday January 31st) the two make a presentation (alongside Holly George-Warren, and Sylvia Reed – yes, the Lou Reed connection again) on the East Coast at New York’s Rizzoli Bookstore