Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 384

September 21, 2018Simon Pettet

Leonard Cohen‘s birthday today. He would have been 84.  We start the Weekly Round-Up today with a beautiful woodcut of him and Allen by George A Walker

and this note from Cohencentric – Leonard Cohen Considered – “Leonard Cohen Meets Jack Kerouac at Allen Ginsberg’s Home”

Our 2014 posting on Cohen (well worth re-visiting) may be accessed – here

and here‘s David Remnick’s haunting profile and last interview with him (for The New Yorker)

Out next month, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the posthumous volume – The Flame – Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings 

“This volume contains … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 292

November 11, 2016Simon Pettet

screenshot-2016-11-11-08-30-06

It’s been a monumental week.   Here at the Ginsberg blog now on Ginsberg.org we’re transitioning (as you see) from our old site to our new presence (part of the spruce-up of the entire site). Some work remains, protecting and reconstituting our archives, (not to mention, other aspects of the site), meticulously going through old posts one-by-one, so bear with us.

Meanwhile, like the rest of the world, still reeling, Here’s the ACLU’s statement.

Not enough that a madman is handed keys to the world.   The death, yesterday, aged 82, of poet-troubadour legendary rock star, Leonard Cohen.  R.I.P.

Rolling … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 290

October 21, 2016admin

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s birthday today – from Richard Holmes’ definitive biography: ” (William) Wordsworth called him “the most wonderful man” he had ever known; but many subsequent biographers have been skeptical. It would seem possible to write an entire book on Coleridge’s opium addiction, his plagiarisms, his fecklessness in marriage, his political “apostasy”, his sexual fantasies, or his radiations of mystic humbug.

And indeed, all these books have been written. But no biographer…has tried to examine his entire life in a broad and sympathetic manner, and to ask the one vital question; what made … Read More

Leonard Cohen

September 21, 2014admin

Leonard Cohen and Allen Ginsberg – “An encounter with Leonard Cohen after a poetry reading at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. c.1988 – “Cohen was in the audience and Allen was in the lobby signing books after the show. They couldn’t stop talking” – Photograph courtesy Frank Beacham

Leonard Cohens birthday today. He’s 80 years old. Robert Sward: You once said that “the angels of mercy are other people”. What does that mean? And what is the relationship between angels and language?

Leonard Cohen: I don’t know. One of the things I always liked about the early Beatnik … Read More

Allen in 1976 – The Vision of Naropa

September 21, 2013admin

western buddhist practice, contemporary buddhism, modern buddhism

[ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987)]

Allen Ginsberg, August 8 1976, (early days), speaking on the formation and the vision of the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University)

AG: In the last few days we’ve seen a lot of high American artistic activity presented here from this stage – Wednesday night, William Burroughs, who’s perhaps the dean of American novelists, at top form and funnier than ever, read an enormous beautiful section of.. from old and new work..Naked Lunch to the present year, which actually is, for any art audience in America, a great occasion, familiar and at home

… Read More

Howl Premieres Tonight!

September 22, 2010admin

After so many years, some nine years in fact, Howl (the movie) premieres in NYC tonight, and opens in NYC & SF theaters Friday, and nationwide (US) next week. Congratulations to Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman for completing this monumental project, to Eric Drooker for the herculean task of animation design, & John Hays at Wild Brain for shepherding Drooker through that task, Werk Work Works for coming in and financing the project, to Jawal Nga who jumped in at the very beginning before anyone had a clear idea of where the film would go or even if it would … Read More