The writers of the Beat Generation were not just great at composing poems or producing genre-smashing novels. They were also voluminous letter-writers, corresponding over vast distances by mail. They shared ideas, gave details of their lives and thoughts, and even experimented with writing styles through the act of writing these letters. Some, like the Joan Anderson Letter, were of incalculable significance. Thankfully, they were often careful enough to save their letters, knowing that some day in the future these might be of importance. Eventually, as telephone calls became cheaper, the letters dried up. However, during the heyday of the Beat Generation, they correspondence was frequent and often stretched into thousands of magnificent words. Continue Reading…
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The Beat Generation and Mental Hospitals
The 1940s and 50s were difficult years to be non-conformist, and that was doubly true if you were a woman. The writers of the Beat Generation, as well as their friends and families, who lived bohemian lifestyles in a buttoned-up era, found that their very existence could be dangerous in those days. Whether they were driven to genuine mental illness by the shackles of a repressive society or deemed unfit for society because of their individualist life choices, many of those who fell under the Beat label ended up in the “nuthouse.” For some of them it was just a temporary stay that gave them inspiration for their art, but for others it was a deeply traumatic experience that irrevocably damaged their life. Continue Reading…
The Beats in Greece
As the birthplace of Western democracy, literature, and philosophy, it is hardly surprising that Greece was of such interest to the Beats. Nearly three thousand years after Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, Ancient Greek civilization provided an irresistible allure for some of the poets and writers of the Beat Generation. Continue Reading…
New Book: Jerry Rubin, Yippies, Chicago 8, Ginsberg, Dylan, John & Yoko
Announcing the first ever oral & visual history of Jerry Rubin & The Yippies – featuring Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Chicago 8 Defendants, Black Panthers, John & Yoko, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Studio 54, Timothy Leary, Zippies, and much more: DID IT! JERRY RUBIN: AN AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY Continue Reading…
Incredible Collection of Ginsberg Materials Now Online for Free
Stanford University has just added a staggering 2,141 digital files relating to Allen Ginsberg to its library website. Most of these files are audio taken from cassette tapes, and they include recorded lectures, answering machine messages, interviews,and even conversations with friends such as William S. Burroughs. Continue Reading…
Released just a few days ago, The Complete Songs Of Innocence And Experience by Allen Ginsberg is a multi-CD (or download, if you prefer) album featuring eight previously unissued songs.
Allen Ginsberg’s First Trip to Africa
On 12th September, 1947, Allen Ginsberg shipped out as a utility man on a collier, the S.S. John Blair, for the Ponchelet Marine Corporation. He departed from Freeport, seventy-five miles south of Houston, going through Galveston, passing near Cuba and Haiti, whose mountains Allen watched pass by, and headed for Dakar, capital of the federation of French West Africa, in what is now known as Senegal. Dakar, on the western coast of Africa, had a long colonial history, although like most European colonial possessions, in 1947 this one was nearing the end of its subjugation. Once a major trading port for African slaves, Dakar had a strategic location that ensured its privileged position within the French Empire. The French West African territories were placed under the control of a single governor, who was located in Dakar, and so it had become a seat of power in the region. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, it had become a major city in the empire. As rights were slowly and inconsistently handed out to “French subjects” – ie the Africans whose homelands had been annexed by the French – the people born in Dakar were first to be given the right to vote, and it was from here that the first ever black African elected to the French government was born, Blaise Diagne. A year before Allen’s visit, the French Empire had rebranded itself the French Union to give the appearance of equality, and more limited rights were being rolled out; however, more substantial change was in the horizon, with independence just over a decade away. Continue Reading…
Beat Family Values: The Typical American Family, and the Beats’ Roll in its Downfall
The Beat Movement scared the hell out of America. After all, the Beats were dirty, they were obscene, they were lefties, queers, trouble-makers; they were everything that post-war America did not want, and their work threatened the very fabric of society.
But what was that society made up of? What were the atoms at the core of American culture in the post-war era? ‘The Family’; the perfect, pristine embodiment of new American values, nestled away in suburbia with a bright white picket fence out front and smiles to match. The Beat represented the antithesis of this, and so the Beats were trouble. Continue Reading…
A List of Countries Visited by Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg was a true citizen of the world, at home wherever he travelled. Although he never actually left the United States – barely travelling more than a hundred miles from his place of birth – during his youth, in his early twenties he quickly learned the skills necessary to travel for long periods of time. He could be a typical tourist with guidebook in hand, buying souvenirs and clicking away with his camera, but he was also capable of journeying for years at a time, sleeping in fields, making friends with people from impossibly different backgrounds. He could communicate with people regardless of language and survive on little to no money. Everywhere he went, he brought his ideas to share, but also learned from all the people he met. Continue Reading…
I’m Watching You Watching Me: The Inversion of the Gaze in Ginsberg’s Photographs
“You never look at me from the place from which I see you.”
– Jacques Lacan
Introduction: The Photographs, The Beats, The Gaze
If we conceive of the photograph as something to be gazed at, what are the affects, then, if the gaze is inverted, and turned back onto its viewer? What happens when the viewer becomes the viewed? To explore these questions, I will analyze a series of five photographs that Allen Ginsberg took while travelling through Tangiers, Morocco, in 1961, from the University of Toronto archives. The photographs were donated by the Larry and Cookie Rossy Family Foundation of Montreal in January, 2014 and together compile the world’s largest collection of Ginsberg’s photographs, numbering 7,686. They are housed within the archives of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Art Centre. A selection of these images have been made publically accessible online through flickr and the Art Centre Online, and from which I am working from. Continue Reading…
