1. Allen Ginsberg will be appearing on a HotWired chat moderated by my cyber-buddy Steve Silberman on Monday, Dec. 16 at 4 pm Pacific Time.
Check here for more info. Warning: you MUST have RealAudio installed for HotWired chats. Also, if you miss the chat on Monday, you can listen to the RealAudio file later.
2. Several new Kerouac books are out. “Angelheaded Hipster” by Steve Turner includes many never-before-seen photos. Ken McGoogan’s “Kerouac’s Ghost” is a fictional treatment of Jack’s life, literally narrated by Jack’s ghost. I haven’t seen this one yet, but I’ve heard about it and it sounds interestingly odd. There’s
a fairly scholarly treatment of Jack’s fiction by Tim Hunt called “Kerouac’s Crooked Road.” Finally, Mind In Motion, which made the Kerouac ROMnibus CD-Rom that came out about a year ago, is now selling the CD-Rom directly via the web, and has created a good new website featuring extensive samples from it. Could be a cool Christmas present for someone.
How long will the Beat-book glut continue? I don’t know, but I hope we’ll continue to see original and ground-breaking treatments, like the “Women of the Beat Generation” book I mentioned several weeks ago (see below), and fewer rehashes
of the basic facts. I’m quite certain the “commercialization of Beatness” is now at an all-time high. Oh well … when the fad passes, I’ll still be here.
3. Life’s been crazy this month. Which is nothing new. I’m working on a couple of web-fiction-related projects that will hopefully be coming out in the first half of ’97 — one of them a book, and one a CD-Rom. To the many people who’ve sent me email that I’ve taken a ridiculously long time to write back to — sorry I’m so slow, but please don’t stop writing. I love getting interesting mails … I just have trouble sometimes clearing my brain of other stuff enough to compose intelligent replies. And I don’t want to just write back with “Thanks for your kind words” like I hear other webmasters sometimes do. So bear with me please …
and if I seem to have lost your mail entirely (this *almost* never happens) please do give me another chance.
