Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 682

The death last month (August 29th, to be precise) of our dear friend Steve Silberman has left a significant hole in Ginsberg studies. We lead off and dedicate our blog post this week to him – Ginsberg-o-phile, Deadhead, Buddhist, best-selling New York Times author, journalist, pioneering neurodivergence researcher, beloved San Franciscan, husband, fan, ubiquitous social media presence..

Perhaps the most pertinent (and gratifying) in that latter context is his long-time custodianship of the Facebook site, Our Allen – “a group for former students, friends, apprentices, lovers, comrades, gurus, and peers of the poet Allen Ginsberg”.  Hard to overstate what an extraordinary resource and platform that was (and is) for all the aforementioned constituencies.

His own informative and elegantly-constructed  web-site Steve Silberman.com  can be found here

Here’s the note he wrote for The Guardian, back in 2015 –  “My Hero -Allen Ginsberg”
Steve first encountered him back in 1977 in New York:
“Allen seemed like the happiest, most awake middle-aged man I had ever seen. I immediately made an internal vow to be wherever he would be the following summer”

and, from Private Passions, (2018), an interview with Michael Berkeley on the BBC
–  his recall of being Allen’s assistant, that next summer, at Naropa:

“One of the things that he gave me to do as a shy dorky, completely star-struck kid from New Jersey was he gave me his journals that he carried with him everywhere and continuously wrote in and he said “If you see anything that looks like a poem, call it to my attention”. So Iactually did find pieces of writing that were so condensed and so good and so focused that they became poems that were published in his published work.”

Steve, subsequently,  interviewed and wrote on Allen. From the intro to
his “must-read” 1996 interview in HotWired:

Allen Ginsberg: Hi, Steve. As you know, or as you don’t know – listeners, lookers – Steve Silberman and I are old friends, going back a decade or longer.
Steve Silberman: I was Allen’s student when I was 19, and I’m now 39, so …”

Now read on.

Touchingly, he wrote on Allen’s passing for Wired – “Ginsberg – A Web Unto Himself”  (‘Steve Silberman reflects on the late poet’s power to mobilize a global community – without a net”)

Check out also “No More Bagels”, Steve’s 1987 interview (included in First Thought,  Michael Schumacher‘s collection of interviews)

We’ve featured Steve before on The Allen Ginsberg Project, most notably in conversation with Raymond Foye – here and here
and most recently, earlier this year in his loving tribute to his friend David Crosby

Steve, the quintessential “Deadhead”. He co-authored with David Shenk, in 1994, Skeleton Key – A Dictionary For Deadheads (and it is fitting that he’s the voice that concludes Long Strange Trip  the epic 4-hour 2017 Grateful Dead documentary).

His Buddhism? Lion’s Roar salutes him,  (and provides a useful compendium of some of his articles for them – here)

Perhaps , best-known, however, is his pioneering work on autism – NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. (2015)

NeuroTribes won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2015, and received wide acclaim from both the scientific and the popular press.  Read more about it – here – Watch the TED talk (“The forgotten history of autism” and the PBS review. And Steve always spoke highly about how pleased he was with the NPR Fresh Air interview

Selected obituary notices – Rolling Stone, Salon, Relix, The Bookseller, The Conversation, LGBTQ Nation, The San Francisco Standard , The New York Times

Steve poignantly wrote, August 13, shortly before his death – “When I die, please don’t say that I’ve crossed over into the spirit realm, gone to the Other Side, moved on to a better place, rejoined my ancestors or any other those comforting fables. Just selfishly or selflessly use my own impermanence  to WAKE UP to your own”

**************

Other news – One to One,  the John and Yoko film, debuted at the Venice Film Festival this year to rave reviews – Allen’s in it.

and Tuesday saw the long- awaited premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer”

Guadagnino talks to Variety about the film – here 

and from The Hollywood Reporter:

“In his official director’s statement, Guadagnino described his approach to the film by writing – “‘How can a man who sees and feels be other than sad?’ William Burroughs asks in the last entry of his personal diary before his death. In adapting his second novel, published almost forty years after he wrote it, we have tried to respond to this humble appeal of the great iconoclast of the beat generation.”

Early rave reviews of the film here – from  Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Deadline  (“Daniel Craig Nails The Spirit of Writer William S. Burroughs in Guadagnino’s Superb Literary Adaptation” Damon Wise in Deadline crows)..     And, undoubtedly, (particularly given the James Bond angle and the (what Guadagnino would argue, prurient) interest in the sensitively-filmed sex scenes), this is just the beginning,  we’ll be hearing plenty more.

More reviews –  The Guardian, the BBC, Vanity Fair…

More on Queer on The Allen Ginsberg Project in the weeks ahead.