 |
| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Haynes |
 |
| Harold Pinter. Photograph: John Haynes |
 |
| Billie Whitelaw and Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Haynes |
 |
| Billie Whitelaw and Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Haynes |
 |
| William S. Burroughs |
In July of 1957, an unknown writer named William Burroughs visited a friend in Copenhagen. After three weeks in the area, including a brief excursion to Sweden, he wrote to the poet Allen Ginsberg that "Scandinavia exceeds my most ghastly imaginations." In Naked Lunch, the novel Burroughs was writing at the time, Scandinavia became a model for a place called Freeland. "Freeland was a welfare state," the book explained. "If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion."
After Naked Lunch was published in 1959, Burroughs graduated from unknown writer to literary celebrity. Today he is widely regarded, along with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as one of the three towering figures of the Beat movement. He was one of the most prominent figures in the emergence of the postwar counterculture, and his influence stretches well beyond the Beats to the bohemias of the '60s, the '70s, and beyond. In 2014, a century after his birth in St. Louis, his work remains a touchstone for alienated cynics of all kinds.
Michael Ochs Archives/GettyBut Burroughs' worldview was miles from the peace-and-love socialism that our cultural clichés tell us to expect from a hippie hero. In 1949, according Barry Miles' new biography Call Me Burroughs, he complained to Kerouac that "we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism." When he was a landlord in New Orleans he sent Ginsberg a rant against rent control, and when he found himself owning a farm in Texas he gave Ginsberg an earful about the evils of the minimum wage. Eventually he departed for Mexico, and there he wrote to Ginsberg again. "I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time," he told his leftist friend. "I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia....At least Mexico is no obscenity 'Welfare' State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you." He added that Westbrook Pegler, a hard-right pundit who would soon be a vocal defender of Sen. Joe McCarthy, was "the only columnist, in my opinion, who possesses a grain of integrity." [Read More]
 |
| William S. Burroughs |
I am up to my neck in this new work right now plus kicking habit. Besides I don't have a complete MS. In fact I have hardly any of Queer. I still think Roosevelt skit is funny. Sounds to me like Rexroth just doesn't dig what a routine is. You don't study Zen and then write a scholarly routine for Chrissakes! Routines are completely spontaneous and proceed from whatever fragmentary knowledge you have. In fact a routine is by nature fragmentary, inaccurate. There is no such thing as an exhaustive routine, nor does the scholarly-type mind run to routines.
 |
| Allen Ginsberg |
COLD SUMMER BORSCHT
Dozen beets cleaned & chopped to bite size salad-size Strips
Stems & leaves also chopped like salad lettuce
All boiled together lightly salted to make a bright red soup,
with beets now soft - boil an hour or more
Add Sugar & Lemon Juice to make the red liquid
sweet & sour like Lemonade
Chill 4 gallon(s) of beet liquid -
Serve with (1) Sour Cream on table
(2) Boiled small or halved potato
on the side
i.e. so hot potatoes don’t heat the
cold soup prematurely
(3) Spring salad on table to put into
cold red liquid
1) Onions - sliced (spring onions)
2) Tomatoes - sliced bite-sized
3) Lettuce - ditto
4) Cucumbers - ditto
5) a few radishes
__________________________________
for Summer Dinner [Read More]
 |
| Doodles from the journal of Sylvia Plath |
 |
| From Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg |
 |
| From Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg |
 |
| From Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg |
 |
| Allen Ginsberg autographs his Collected Poems for Daisy Ball, 31 May 1986, Jackson, Mississippi. Photograph: Gordon Ball |
 |
| Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, and William Burroughs. Photograph by Victor Bockris. |
 |
| William S. Burroughs. Photograph: Bob Willoughby |
 |
| Screenshots of the new On The Road iPad app |
 |
| Bob Donlin, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert La Vigne, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco 1956 Standing in front of City Lights Bookshop |
 |
| Welcome to the new design for A Piece of Monologue. Hope you like it! |
 |
| Franz Kafka, The Sons (Schocken). Design: Peter Mendelsund. |
 |
| Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac (right) |
When you think of the Beats, you think of free sex and flaming sunsets, of bulbous '49 Hudsons easing towards the horizon on dusty highways that seem to go on for ever. You don't think about roundabouts, recycling centres and Rover estates. But that's what you get in Bracknell and it's in Bracknell, near Windsor, that one of the last surviving members of the Beat generation lives.Source: Lauren Cochrane, 'Neal Cassady: Drug-taker. Bigamist. Family man', The Guardian, 16 January 2011
Carolyn Cassady opens the door to her pretty green cottage with a lipsticked grin and a shy handshake. She's 87, but looks a decade younger, dressed neatly in a lavender fleece with matching moccasins. The second wife of Beat muse Neal Cassady – the man immortalised as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic On the Road – Carolyn moved to London in 1983, and relocated here 10 years later. "I was brought up English," she says. "My parents were anglophiles and we had a whole lot of English customs at home. I made the break and I much prefer it." [Read more]
Burroughs was originally made in 1983 by Howard Brookner and Alan Yentob, as part of the BBC’s art strand Arena, and updated after Burrough’s death in 1997. It is an exceptional documentary, one that gives an intimate and revealing portrait of Burroughs, as he revisits his childhood home; discusses his up-bringing with his brother, Mortimer; his friendship with Jack Kerouac, Allen Gisnberg, and Brion Gysin; and has a reunion with artist Francis Bacon, who Burroughs knew in Tangier. Other contributors include Laurie Anderson, Terry Southern, Patti Smith, and James Grauerholz. [Read more]Also at A Piece of Monologue
 |
| T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and other poems |
 |
| James Franco, Rob Epstein, and Jeffrey Friedman on the set of Howl |
D. A. Powell: The core debate for the trial is obscenity. You might have easily played down the “offensive” language, yet you neither shy away from the potentially objectionable language nor overuse it.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Rob Epstein: The whole notion of obscenity is so quaint now. We live in an era in which nothing is held back. But it’s paradoxical. Because even though there’s such exposure to everything all the time, there’s also a lack of authenticity. And Allen’s whole point was that if you were going to talk about sex, you needed to be authentic. [Read more]
 |
| Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg outside City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco |
