Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 314

May 5, 2017Simon Pettet

Very pleased to note that the Allen Ginsberg Archive at Stanford University has just recently gotten around to providing, for on-line study, a digitalized copy of the iconic “Howl” manuscript/typescript ( an endlessly fascinating document, featuring Allen’s various autograph corrections and annotations)

Allen sent the first six pages of this manuscript to Jack Kerouac, and Kerouac later sent them on to John Clellon Holmes. Holmes notes receipt on the top right-hand-corner, first page – “sent by Kerouac to me, Aug. 30, 1955 / JCH.”

[Jimmy Page and William Burroughs]

Jimmy Page, legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist just recently … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 313

April 28, 2017Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg reading and lecturing in Olomouc in the Czech Republic, 1993]

Allen’s new book, The Best Minds of My Generation, selections from Allen’s lectures (not to be confused with the lectures transcribed here on the Allen Ginsberg Project), “mercifully reduced to 455 pages, shorn of repetitions, student interventions and Ginsberg’s habit of beginning every sentence with “So” – (sic) – as the reviewer in the London Times would have it) continues to impress one and all.

Here’s an excerpt from Gaby Wood‘s review in London’s Daily Telegraph:

“Lovingly edited from recordings by Bill Morgan, who has … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 295

December 9, 2016Simon Pettet

howl-and-kaddish

screenshot-2016-12-06-15-37-05

[Two early French editions from 10/18, Editions Christian Bourgois]

 

The European Beat Studies Network’s 2017 Annual Conference, the sixth, (this past year (2016), it was held in Manchester, England), will have a decidedly Francophile bent this coming year – “Paris Interzone – The Transcultural Beat Generation (Collaboration, Edition, Translation)”.

From the announcement by the conference organizers:

“This year’s conference will honor and address the key role that the French capital and Francophone cultures have played in the transculturalism of the Beats, by welcoming submissions in both French and English and holding a plenary session on language barriers and … Read More

Ginsberg on Dylan (from “No Direction Home”)

December 19, 2015admin

Allen Ginsberg not Alan Ginsberg!  Some time back (January 2014) we ran part of this clip, but here it is again. Allen’s comments are, of course, from the 2005 American Masters documentary (directed by Martin Scorsese) – No Direction Home – Bob Dylan

AG: “A very famous saying among the Tibetan Buddhists – “If the student is not better than the teacher then the teacher’s a failure”  – and I was really knocked out by the eloquence (of Dylan), particularly, “I’ll know my song well before I start singing…”..”where all souls shall reflect it” (or, you know, … 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

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 144

September 20, 2013admin

[Leonardo DiCaprio and Allen Ginsberg – Photograph by Jerry Aronson]  

“The film of the year”? – “The film of the year”? –  Well, obviously, we had to run this one! – Rebecca Cope, in Harpers Bazaar, on Kill Your Darlings.  Kill Your Darlings “buzz” continues to roll on, full pace. Here’s Timothy M Gray, in Variety: “The chief lure of “Darlings” for mainstream audiences and kudos voters will be word of mouth about (Daniel)Radcliffe’s breakthrough performance [as Allen Ginsberg], though the film has many other assets…Radcliffe said he’s dissimilar to Ginsberg, but added, “We are both

… Read More

Laki Vazakas’s videos: Herbert Huncke, Charlie Plymell, Mary Beach and more

December 16, 2009admin

Laki Vazakas, has been posting his videos of the last 17 years that feature some of the beat generation’s great unsung heroes & we can’t thank him enough. There just isn’t enough footage of any of these colorful personalities, so we jump at ever chance we get to see & hear them. Included in this pantheon are Herbert Huncke, Mary Beach (collagist, translator, editor, wife of Claude Pelieu and so much more) Charles Plymell (old friend of Allen’s since they roomed together with Neal Cassady in 1963), and that’s just for starters. We’ll get you going with Herbert Huncke … Read More