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 Weekly Round-Up – 118

March 22, 2013admin

An early draft of a segment of Allen’s classic written-under-the-influence-of-LSD poem, Wales Visitation, goes up for auction next month in London at Bonhams auction house, part of the Roy Davids Collection, alongside countless other “poetical manuscripts and portraits of poets” (there’s also, for sale, a rare shot of the poet taken with veteran English poet, Basil Bunting – the sale price for that is between £350 and £400). The manuscript is expected to fetch something between £800 and £1,000 (between (approximately) $1200 and $1500).

Wales Visitation – American viewers will remember this classic rendition of it, … Read More

The Beats: A Graphic History

March 27, 2009admin

By Harvey Pekar, Nancy J. Peters, Penelope Rosemont, Joyce Brabner, Trina Robbins and Tuli Kupferberg

(Hill and Wang; 199 pages; $22)

We haven’t had a chance to check out the recently-published The Beats: A Graphic History so for now we’re relying on Gerald Nicosia’s review in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. He points out some troubling factual errors, some fairly egregious ones in fact, but is even-handed enough to point out the book’s strong points, of which there seem to be many.

However, our favorite, without a doubt the most amusing & no-holds-barred vicious review, comes via Greg Adams … Read More