Big news on the archival front. Stanford, the repository of Allen’s archives, announced this week they have acquired “an unseen piece of Beat Generation history”, the Al Aronowitz archives.
Michael A Keller, University Librarian, is quoted: ““Aronowitz and Ginsberg were especially close friends, and their collections at Stanford complement each other and invite concurrent and comparative study…The Aronowitz collection also includes ephemera and interviews from the Bay Area Beat literary scene, documenting a pivotal countercultural moment…”
“The collection’s resonance with the Allen Ginsberg papers, also housed at Stanford Libraries, was a key reason the Aronowitz family decided to place the collection at Stanford”, we are informed. (Another factor was the Libraries’ demonstrated strength in historic audio preservation).
J. Christian Greer, (a lecturer there with specific focus on psychedelic culture/ counterculture, is also quoted, noting that, curiously, “almost none of Aronowitz’s published writings have been reprinted”. New histories are now able to be written. “Aronowitz’s proximity and intimacy with the Beats writers undercuts the mythmaking and media frenzy that later swallowed Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and especially the king of the Beats, Jack Kerouac,”
“The interviews”, we are informed, “complement Aronowitz’s working drafts and notes, which make up the core of the collection”. There is also “a trove of evidence testifying to his ubiquitous presence on New York’s arts scene”. “Highlights include the earliest known film footage of the Velvet Underground, (a band Aronowitz originally managed), notes scribbled on paper plates for his Saturday Evening Post article on Woodstock, unreleased film scripts and footage by underground filmmakers Shirley Clarke and Barbara Rubin” – and, (most intriguing for Kerouac scholars), “(a) manuscript of Aronowitz’s unpublished book on the Beat Generation, annotated by Jack Kerouac”.
Kerouac is also the focus of a new in-depth piece by Simon Warner in Rock and The Beat Generation this week, on when the Beats connected with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters back in 1964 – and why wasn’t Bob Dylan (who was around) connecting too on that “summit occasion”
“(S)ome might argue that a quite contained and compact affair, a private get-together in the heart of New York City’s midtown in the summer of 1964, was perhaps the ultimate screw-you conflab, a dazzling distillation of the radical spirit of the rising age – two coasts, two eras, two literary moments, two subcultural families, entwined… Yet one other man, a good friend of Ginsberg, who might conceivably have been an extra visitor to these wake up and ecstatic shores was not present”
“In shorthand”, Warner writes, ” this was close to the unholy marriage ceremony of Beat and hippie, marijuana and LSD, a feral coupling laid down in a posh apartment…”a kind of surreal wedding”. Check out Warner’s piece to find out why Bob wasn’t in that company.
Patti Smith will be having a new book out. Publication date is November 4th. Here is the cover:
Mary Norbert Korte, (1934-2022), the “Beat Nun” (see our expansive 2020 post on her)
has a new (second) volume now available. The Collected Books of Mary Norbert Korte
(the second and final volume completing the project titled Jumping into the American River, which also contains Korte’s previously published Volume 1, New and Selected Poems)
Gary Snyder news – “Back by popular demand, (the) Library of America is pleased to present a free, online screening (next Tuesday through Thursday) of Colin Still’s captivating documentary O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder, exploring the life and art of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and environmental writer”.
For more details – see here
Burroughs in the zeitgeist – William Burroughs is always in the zeitgeist – Stephen Marche (from an op-ed piece in last Sunday’s New York Times – “The motto of the United States has changed from “In God we trust” to “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
– Ring any bells?
And that very same Sunday, Burroughs experts Anthony Clayton, William Redwood and Jim Pennington were conducting a guided walking tour of Burroughs’ London.
Meantime, the Burroughs-centric Nova 78 (we noted it here) had its official release, two days prior, at the Locarno Film Festival
Diego Lerer gives the doc an early review – here
Damon Wise also gives a review – here
and coming this November from Beatdom:
The Bunker Diaries, a memoir by Stewart Meyer, author of The Lotus Crew. (Meyer was a close associate of Burroughs during the seventies and eighties and this book details their friendship).
“We get to drop in on conversations between.. Ginsberg and Burroughs”, the publishers inform us, “sometimes with Peter Orlovsky in the background, hyped up on amphetamines and busying himself by scrubbing the kitchen”. Notable cameos also from Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke
“It is filled with Burroughs’ wisdom, which comes in many forms, including advice on writing that he handed down to Meyer, who for much of this period was working on his first novel. …”You want to write a great book or paint a great painting, you might have to first take yourself over the edge. But as a writer, as an artist, your primary responsibility is to come back and do the work.”