A big day today. William Blake‘s birthday!
Previous William Blake birthday postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project – here, here, here, here, here, here and here
David Amram (who just recently celebrated his 95th birthday this month), our beloved David Amram! – Check out Jon Pareles‘ laudatory profile this past week in Monday’s New York Times
and speaking of nonagenarians – Andrew Hoyem was celebrated recently at City Lights.
See Jonah Raskin‘s account of the evening – here – and here at The Daily Californian
Anne Waldman, touring with a new book, Mesopotamia, and a new movie, Alystyre Julian’s Outrider, recently passing through Paris lit up the city, See Nina Zivancevic‘s account – here
What else? – well, news from academia – Dr Jonas Faust of the University of Heidelberg just recently published the volume Speaking the Unspeakable – Allen Ginsberg’s Paradigm of Prophetic Poetry
“Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), one of the most important and widely read American poets of the 20th century, depicted himself as the prophet of a new America. Scholars and critics have echoed this self-description and turned prophecy into a key theme of his life, but their understanding of this notion often remains vague and ill-defined. Speaking the Unspeakable constructs a flexible definition of prophecy from the poet’s own perspective and applies it to his entire work chronologically to capture its developments, idiosyncrasies and tensions..”
Faust will be speaking and reading from the book at the Heidelberg Center For American Studies on December 16 – see here
and on Tuesday, December 2nd (next Tuesday), Conor Williams will be hosting an event in Brooklyn at the e-flux screening room – “Allen Ginsberg, A Screening and Performance”, featuring a musical performance (of Ginsberg’s “Capitol Air”) and readings by A.S.Hamrah, Lynne Sachs, Hannah Beerman, and Terrence Arjoon. “The presentation will be followed by the screening of two rare Jonas Mekas films, (Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit, filmed at Ginsberg’s East Village loft in the days immediately following his death in April 1997, along with an additional video portrait of Ginsberg by Mekas, bridging footage recorded with Ginsberg in 1987 and Mekas’s reflections in 1997).”