1. The late satirist/writer Terry Southern is the subject of a new website, terrysouthern.com, composed by his son Nile Southern. It’s good to be able to enjoy these great nuggets of late-period hipster culture (Southern wrote the screenplay for ‘Easy Rider‘, among many other films and books). It’s also nice to see a new trend growing: adult children of beat writers putting together websites as personal tributes to their parents (cf. jackmicheline.com and Zane Kesey’s key-z.com). Today is Father’s Day — so check out these links.
2. The not-very prolific Buddhist/beat poet Philip Whalen has a new book out: ‘Overtime: Selected Poems’.
3. If you can make it to New York City on July 21, come to The Bitter End in Greenwich Village for a kick-ass poetry reading I’m putting together. The occasion is the 5th birthday, believe it or not, of this website. I’m putting this show together with my poet friend Brian Hassett, who arranged a couple of excellent shows I participated in earlier this year at the Living Room in the Lower East Side.
One thing that made these shows so good was the presence of David Amram, an extremely talented and very serious musician who was Jack Kerouac’s own piano player, back when Jack used to read poetry on stage. David generously offered to improvise behind a few of us less-seasoned neo-Beats as we read our own poems, and the amazing thing about the way he accompanies live poets is that he actually listens and plays according to what he hears — no matter how humble or unimportant the reader or the words. He also does some songs of his own, and I’m very glad that he’ll be at this event. Other special guests will include John Cassady, Neal’s son, who’ll be playing guitar and telling a story or two, poets Richard Hell, Lee Ranaldo, Ron Whitehead, Bob Holman, Herschel Silverman, Breath Cox and haiku master Cor van den Heuvel. And on the
newer edge, representing the other side of Literary Kicks, I’ve invited a bunch of my webby friends to get on stage and kick some shit around — Mark Thomas of Sorabji, Leslie Harpold of Smug, Christian Crumlish and Briggs Nisbet of Enterzone, Xander Mellish, Meg Wise-Lawrence and Phil Zampino. It’s going to be a wild night — check out the program and I really hope you can make it.