Metropolitan Greetings: Allen Ginsberg Behind the Iron Curtain (from Havana to Moscow)
In 1965, Allen Ginsberg traveled to Eastern Europe, visiting Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the...
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Category: Essays
Fifty Years Ago, Hunter S. Thompson Took On Police Brutality
Hunter S. Thompson is best known for his bizarre Gonzo writing, which fused fiction and journalism...
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Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats
This essay originally appeared in Beatdom #20. Hunter S. Thompson was never part of the Beat...
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A Sixty-Year History of The Rum Diary
Sixty years ago, on June 26th, 1960, an article with an odd title appeared in the Louisville...
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The Howling Inferno: Crying Out in Anguish to America
But all the streets are burning everywhere. The city is burning these multitudes that climb Her...
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From “Philadelphia-Sigma subversion and insurrection” Center to Kingsley Hall: exploring the Laing-Trocchi-Berke connection
It should have been one of the most enduring countercultural unions of the century: Alex Trocchi,...
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The Protests of Ginsberg and Di Prima as Marginalized Minorities
There is nothing more American than a protest, than questioning authority and rebelling in the...
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Allegories from the Cave: Burroughs and Trocchi – a Platonic Love
‘Demiurgos scowled, and with that Plato awoke. Or did he?’ Voltaire The drug experience has often...
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Virgules / After Cézanne
In his 1966 interview for The Paris Review, Ginsberg recounts his early preoccupation with...
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Snyder, Kerouac, and the Dharma
The worlds like an endlessfour-dimensionalGame of Go. Riprap, Gary Snyder “All these people,” said...
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Specificity: The Secret Brilliance of Hunter S. Thompson
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Nick Carraway, describes Jay Gatsby as...
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Reflections on Jack Kerouac’s Favorite Line in Shakespeare
While his student at Naropa Institute in 1977, I heard the poet Gregory Corso drunkenly inform...
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