1. HotWired is running a series of pastel artworks by Francesco Clemente annotated by Allen Ginsberg. The series is called ‘Pastel Sentences.’
2. “Poetry in Motion” and “Poetry in Motion II”, two new CD-Roms from Voyager, are pretty good. They feature spoken word and musical performances by poets and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, Jim Carroll, Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder, William S. Burroughs and Ed Sanders. The interface is clean and unpretentious, and the poetry readings are presented in short, pleasurable bursts, none longer than a few minutes. Diane DiPrima’s “Light,” accompanied by a hypnotic tingly piano and flashes of colored lights, is one of my favorite pieces. Overall rating: excellent Xmas present!
3. Check this out: a few months ago I received an e-mail from a Norweigan translator named Dag Heyerdahl Larsen who was working on the first Norwegian edition of Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” He needed help with some Americanisms (like”Shazam” and “Baskin-Robbins”) and I had fun trying to answer his
questions (though many of Tom Wolfe’s references make no sense no matter how well you know the language). The book is now out in Norway, and it’s called “Syreproven,” which means “Acid Test” — Dag
explained to me that the best direct translation of the full title would have meant “The Acid Test Based On Electric Kool-Aid.” I agreed with him that this just didn’t have that ‘ring.’ He also told me that nobody in Norway knows what Kool-Aid is.
Dag mailed me a copy, and it was fun to see my name in the appendix, surrounded by all kinds of strange Norwegian text. I wonder what he said about me?
4. I’ve been wanting to write an update on the much-talked-about Francis Ford Coppola film of
“On The Road,” but unfortunately I have no hard information to present. I’ve heard many things — it’s on, it’s off, it’s on again but Coppola’s son will direct …
I heard from one very good source that Woody Harrelson was actually signed to play Dean Moriarty, which is what I recommended in the very first Beat News entry. But now that I’ve thought about this, I don’t even know if I agree with myself that this would be good, and anyway I heard from others that it’s not even true.
Other Beat-related film projects are also in discussion stages, including some involving Jack Kerouac and/or Neal Cassady (the two real-life principals in “On The
Road.”) Nothing, I understand, is definite. At this point, I’d be just as happy to hear that none of these films will be made. There’s too much Beat hype lately anyway, and we’re all getting sick of it.
5. Speaking of Beat hype: when I started Literary Kicks in the summer of ’94 almost nobody was talking about the Beats. What happened? Back then, I didn’t even start a Beat News page for the first few months, because there was no Beat News. Now … forget it. I knew it was getting out of hand when Literary Kicks got mentioned in a fairly brain-dead article about the Beat phenomenon in Vogue magazine. According to Vogue, the Beat Generation was all about clothing! Well well, I learn something new every
day …
Anyway, I used to try to capture every Beat-related URL on the Web somewhere in these pages, but this has recently become impossible. There’s just too much stuff out there. I will continue to put stuff I consider particularly interesting in this page, but if anyone else wants to create and maintain a more comprehensive page of Beat listings and links, I will happily make it a part of Literary Kicks. I wish I had time myself, but I honestly don’t. Any volunteers?
Coming soon: my e-mail interview with John Cassady, Neal’s son.