Bob Rosenthal’s Straight Around Allen
November 10, 2018
  There have been a number of recent Beat books of late and our imprimatur of “essential reading” might seem a little easily dispensed and perfunctory – but no, not for this one, not so. This one is essential reading. Bob Rosenthal’s Straight Around Allen – On The Business of Being Allen[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 388
October 19, 2018
Andy Warhol’s photo archive  (consisting of 3,600 contact sheets and 130,000 images -“the most complete collection of the artist’s black-and-white photography ever made available to the public”)  was[…]
Don’t Hide The Madness
October 13, 2018
Coming out next week ( on Tuesday) – and much anticipated – Don’t Hide The Madness – William S Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg., from 1992, a documentary record of the meeting of two great minds. As Burroughs and Ginsberg biographer, Barry Miles has written – “Steven Taylor’s transcriptions of Billl[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 385
September 28, 2018
Next week in Vienna. The annual conference of the European Beat Studies Network, starting on Wednesday and concluding Saturday October 6th The program includes – on Friday:  Franca Bellarsi –  “Allen Ginsberg’s Ecopoetics: Oscillating between Sentience-in-Interdependence and Physically-Determined Embodiment” – on Saturday (on the “Transnational Beat” segment) – Antonín Zita – “Dismantling[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 383
September 14, 2018
“…rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless, /breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside, Heaven breath and my own symmetric/ Airs wavering thru antlered green fern drawn in my navel,/ same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-Ffin..”  (from “Wales Visitation”) Eco-watch[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 381
August 31, 2018
The Beats and Women – that continually thorny topic (we noted last week Blair Hurley’s Paris Review article – You might also recall Lynnette Lounsbury’s piece in The[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 377
August 3, 2018
Focusing this week on Allen Ginsberg-as-photographer, with a series of interviews. Our two-part interview with Raymond Foye here and here (which should on no account be missed) will be followed, next week, (Monday), with an interview with Allen’s sometime printer, Brian[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 375
July 20, 2018
The Beat Scene – Photographs by Burt Glenn – edited by Tony Nourmand and Michael Shulman (with an essay by Jack Kerouac), a dazzling portfolio of images shot between 1957 and 1960,  both in New York and San Francisco – close up, contemporaneous, and at the heart of the Beat phenomenon –[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 372
June 29, 2018
  “In a climate of fear and hysteria..” – It’s always revealing and instructive to “get to see the files”. We featured a lengthy post on Allen’s FBI files some years back (courtesy the pioneering work of Shawn Musgrave and Muck Rock). Another tenacious investigator. S.P. Sullivan is to be commended for[…]
Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 369
June 8, 2018
  “The Lost Ferlinghetti Tapes” is a mini-documentary by Paul Iorio that presents audio excerpts from an exclusive interview he conducted with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 2000 — inter-spliced with segments about Ferlinghetti, City Lights, the Beats, Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” and the “Howl” trial. And the big news (announced in the New York[…]