Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 335

September 29, 2017Simon Pettet

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, a stunning new show opened this past week at the Block Museum at Northwestern (Evanston, Illinois). Above is a reproduction of the catalog cover. The exhibition, curated by Northwestern University art professor, Stephen F Eisenman, is a breakthrough exhibit, exploring, for the first time,  “the impact of British visionary poet and artist William Blake on a broad range of American artists in the post-World War II period”  (notably, (but by no means confined to), Allen Ginsberg and fellow members of the Beat Generation – Allen as promoter and propagandist, conduit and curator, … Read More

Friday Round-Up – 306

March 10, 2017Simon Pettet

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 [Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) in 1957 – Photograph by Jerry Yulsman]

updated news of the fabled Kerouac-Cassady letter – see here

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Tomorrow, (Saturday March 11) – Jack Kerouac’s 95th Birthday Celebrations in Lowell, Mass,, kick off at 12 o’clock, (12 Noon) in the Pollard Library with a Pollard Library Tour, led by Bill Walsh, followed by “The Unknown Kerouac”, a presentation and discussion by Todd Tietchen and Jean Christophe Cloutier of the most recently published Kerouac volume. Then, in the evening, at Zorba’s Music Hall –  “Happy Birthday Jack!” -“A celebration of Kerouac’s Birthday with The Neverly Brothers (Dave … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 197

November 14, 2014admin

Diane Di Prima‘s new book from City Lights – The Poetry Deal is out. We’ve reported before about her recent troubling health difficulties. The emergencies still remain but still the urgency of the work, still the extraordinary achievement of the work. “In The Poetry Deal“, her publishers write, (di) Prima maps out over forty years of San Francisco history, from the culture of the late ‘Sixties, to her grief over her friends’ passing during the AIDS epidemic, to stories of her countercultural colleagues and the rapidly changing environment she has seen take place over the years in (San … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 152

November 15, 2013admin

Jean Jacques Lebel’s Beat exhibit (extended in Metz) now comes to Budapest, Hungary, to the Ludwig Contemporary Art Museum (it opened just last week, and will run there until January 12). Here‘s a variety of Hungarian artists, in individual videos, extolling the Beat ethos (it’s all in Hungarian, but for those of you who speak Hungarian…) – musician and tv personality, Varga Livius, poet-rapper, Peter Zavada, poets Tibor Babiczky and Karafiath Orsolya, and DJ Erelyi “Superman” Zsolt  (Lebel’s own introduction to his “jungle”, as he calls it (see above), a helpful survey of the show, (advance

… Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 150

November 1, 2013admin

[Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg at Lucien’s wedding, January 4, 1952]

Kill Your Darlings – We mentioned last week the dissenting position, eloquently voiced by Bob Rosenthal in his post from last February – here. – “The film takes its..title too seriously”, he wrote then. “The large fabrications in the film are not so worrisome as the small ones. In any case, when the truth is stepped on and the nuance of truth is denied, the message becomes moribund”. Both Marc Olmsted in Sensitive Skin  and Brian Hassett in Brianland have taken up the cudgels and gone, perhaps, … Read More

Carolyn Cassady (1923-2013)

September 21, 2013admin

[Carolyn Cassady (1923-2013)]

Word just reaches us of the death of  Carolyn Cassady.  Brian Hassett has the report here.  She died peacefully, with her son, John Allen, there, in attendance, close beside her. “She was her regular rockin self”, he (Hassett) reports, “up through Sunday, woke up with a tummy ache Monday morning, had an infected appendix and checked out by Friday”…”She was 90 years old and still drank her white wine and smoked her More menthol ciggies every day. That is to say  – she was living the life she chose, on her own terms, in her … Read More