By Elsadorfman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

I unexpectedly found myself in New York City last week. One of the best things about a creative life is that I can grab my gear and run at an opportunity like this. I had pending writing deadlines and some design work to do, but I just grabbed my phone and my laptop and headed for the airport. The Hilma af Klint and Robert Mapplethorpe exhibitions at the Guggenheim were both great — and a great pairing. Casa Ramen’s pop-up at The Ramen Lab was the best food I ate in a week of great food. Get the pumpkin broth and go for all the spicy options. Amazing bowl. The most New York moment I had was when I grabbed lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Chinatown while I watched this great interview of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in celebration of his 100th birthday. Here’s a bit from the Democracy Now site:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a leading literary figure of the Beat Generation, turned 100 on Sunday. Ferlinghetti is a poet, bookseller, book publisher, artist and activist. In 1953, he co-founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the first all-paperback bookshop in the country. Two years later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched the City Lights publishing house. Both institutions are still running today. City Lights might be best known as the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl.” It revolutionized American poetry and American consciousness, but it also led to Ferlinghetti and his publishing partner being arrested and put on trial for obscenity.

This is an amazing interview with the great American writer and champion of free speech…

I also wanted to take a second to talk about the evolution of the blog. Insomnia is your spot for all things countercultural. While I haven’t been posting here daily, you might not know that I’ve been expanding the blog’s reach over multiple platforms in an effort to explore creating content on crypto-powered sites like Steemit. I’m also posting on a brand new platform called Narrative. I’m wrangling the Counterculture Niche on the site, and I want to encourage authors to add the niche to all of their scrawlings about sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, the paranormal, the occult — you get the idea.

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You probably know Allen Ginsberg as a poet, but you might also dig his photography or maybe you know about his devotion to Buddhism. Like his hero Walt Whitman, Ginsberg contained multitudes and even managed to add teaching to his resume from the 1970s and into the 1990′s during which time he lectured at schools in New York and even helped to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg’s complete lectures have been edited into a unique new book project. Here’s the word from NYT…

In a marvelous feat of editing and reorganization, Bill Morgan, Ginsberg’s longtime bibliographer, biographer and friend, has condensed the 100 or so lectures Ginsberg gave in the five courses he taught on the Beat Generation between 1977 and 1994, totaling almost 2,000 pages of transcripts, into a compact and often spellbinding text, preserving intact the story of the literary movement Ginsberg led, promoted and never ceased to embody. He believed, as Jack Kerouac wrote to him in 1952, “Our clairvoyance is together.”

The very title of “Howl” was a shout-out for emergency-room attention, but the poem’s most controversial line — born of Ginsberg’s foolproof instinct for his audience’s nerve centers, and honored in the title of this book — remains the first: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” The best minds? Many of those supervising the nation’s intellectual life thought this accolade if not best deserved then certainly best conferred by themselves, not by young men running “through the Negro streets … looking for an angry fix” and making, as Phillip Lopate has summed it up, “a mess of their lives.” The poem and the historic obscenity trial that followed turned Ginsberg into a culture hero and an apostate, treated in many quarters, as he later complained, like a “barbarian jerk.” But rejection never halted Ginsberg, a self-declared homosexual and “pinko” at a time when both were hunted species; his gift for counterattack and cajoling was apparently bestowed at birth. When the poet and teacher John Hollander, a fellow alumnus of Columbia’s English department, called “Howl” “frantic and talentlos” in print, Ginsberg rebuked him: “You’ve just got to drop it and take me seriously.” No teacher, he continued, should re-enact their alma mater’s plot against creativity or hand down “limited ideas to younger minds.”

Here’s Ginsberg at Loyola University back in 1990…

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I got back to Nashville late on Monday night after a week at the Sedona Summer Colony in Arizona. I spent last week writing songs, jamming with musicians and talking about movies, art and writing with artists and thinkers from around the country. It was an illuminating, immersive experience in a singularly beautiful setting and I want to thank the Tennessee Arts Commission for helping to make the colony the highlight of my summer so far.

If you follow my blog you know a bit about what was going down recently, but if you missed a post or are just catching up here’s a playlist of the videos I made to document each of my new compositions…

Traveling and re-inserting myself into my regular schedule has me starting my posts a little late this week, but I’ve been coming across lots of rad stuff to point to during my time in the desert. One discovery I made involves a new treasure trove of media from Beat luminary Allen Ginsberg. Here’s the skinny from the Stanford Library blog…

Ginsberg comes up fairly often in this blog (e.g. Rebecca Wingfield’s recent post about “Howl” going up online), but the release of over 2000+ audio cassette recordings to SearchWorks is truly another cause for celebration. These recordings represent a staggering amount of primary source material associated with the Beat Generation, the bulk of which date from the 1970s to 1990s. Once the open reel recordings and videos are completed, we’ll have one of the most comprehensive recorded outputs from a single cultural figure available for the whole world to access.

As a teaser, here’s a recording of Ginsberg and Burroughs having an afternoon conversation about art and Jack Kerouac…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more book posts.