Buddhism and The Beats (Ginsberg 1993 – I – Introduction)

July 15, 2017Simon Pettet

A real treat this weekend – with gratitude to Robyn Brentano and students from the NYU Ethnographic Film Program – “Buddhism and the Beats.”. “In 1993, Allen Ginsberg spoke to a gathering of students of the Tibetan Buddhist monk, Lobsang Samten, about the impact of Buddhist thought and practice on himself, the Beat writers, and American culture at large”. The full hour-and-a-half tape is transcribed below (continuing tomorrow, and with the Q & A session to be featured here next weekend)

AG: Well, good evening, Rinpoche [Lobsang Samten Rinpoche] and I met very recently at the house … Read More

Rimbaud’s Birthday

October 20, 2016admin
Allen Ginsberg
Arthur Rimbaud‘s birthday
For Rimbaud on the Allen Ginsberg Project – see here and here and here 

A defence of Rimbaud  by Allen Ginsberg

from a letter from Allen Ginsberg to (Professor) Lionel Trilling, September 4, 1945 [sic]:

…That you are unable to understand why I make so much of Rimbaud, dismays me somewhat. Though I should dislike to be over-bumptious about it, with your kind permission, I must witness his defense. I fear that since you have read  Rougemont‘s Partie du Diable you possibly approach Rimbaud viewing him as another eccentric French Satanist

… Read More

The Lion For Real – (Three Renditions)

December 14, 2014admin

Another from Michael Minzer and Hal Willner’s The Lion For Real – the title track. The musicians on this one – Arto Lindsay, guitar, Michael Blair, guitar (& glockenspiel), Gary Windo, tenor sax,  Rob Wasserman, bass, Beaver Harris, drums – sound effects by Richard Fussco. Allen’s sleeve note:  [“Soyez muette pour moi, contemplative Idole”] – “Be mute for me, Contemplative idol’, epigram from Tristan Corbiere‘s last stanza, “Rhapsody of a Deaf Man”.[“Rhapsodie du sourd“] –  Retrospective account of a “mystical experience” 1948 described elsewhere (Paris Review Interviews – Writers at Work … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 174

April 25, 2014admin

 

Wild in Denver – Neal Cassady’s Teen Years by Charlie Hailer

News from New York – it seems that this summer’s regular Howl! Festival won’t be happening this year.  More on that story here – and here  No HOWL! this spring. News from the HOWL! Festival Board:Due to circumstances beyond our control, HOWL! Festival 2014, originally scheduled for May 30 thru June 1, has been postponed. New dates will be announced as soon as available. Steve Cannon will continue as Poet laureate and will rule at the next HOWL, whenever that is. It’s Tompkins Sq Park bureaucracy, IMHO — HOWL has never been supported like the Treasure that it is. In memoriam –  here is a group reading of “Howl” (from the 2010 Howl! Fest) and here is “Plutonian Ode” (from the following year, likewise ensemble).

File:Harry Smith 1985.jpg Amanda Petrusich (from a forthcoming book) on Harry Smith and the legendary American Folk Music anthology

Next Thursday, Thursday May 1st, at London’s Horse Hospital, a book launch for Joe Ambrose and A.D.Hitchin’s … Read More

Spiritual Poetics – 4

August 3, 2011admin
Student: Does it always have to do with what you choose to use?, whether you’re typing, or writing, or (using a) tape-recorder (amassing) amounts of material in that way?

AG: Right. Very much so. Yeah. I want to go into that, actually, in about four sentences. I just want to get to the nub of “selection”, because that used to be a big academic argument – the principle of selectivity, and “beatnik” writers being un-selective, and that selection was so important, that you really had to make fine intellectual distinctions between different … Read More

Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg: Liberal Father, Radical Son

July 31, 2009admin

[Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)]

Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg: Liberal Father, Radical Son by Adam Kirsch

from Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2009

“In the spring of 1944, as the Second World War neared its turning point, the first skirmishes of the generational battle that would define postwar America were taking place in a lecture hall at Columbia University. When Allen Ginsberg, then a seventeen-year-old freshman, signed up to study the Great Books with Lionel Trilling, neither one of them could have suspected that they were about to begin a lifelong friendship that was also a mortal combat—over literature and politics, … Read More