Recent posts: A quick round-up #1
Rock and the Beat Generation was launched in early summer. A brief reminder of articles you might have missed – or perhaps wish to return to…
OUR NEWSLETTER was unveiled in June and already we have wandered a quite wide waterfront of topics, with features, interviews, reviews and the popular ‘Beat Soundtrack’ series all part of the mix so far.
Our sixth and latest contributor to the ‘Beat Soundtrack’, where writers, critics and followers of the scene make their own literary and musical choices and connections, is the great Nancy Grace, an academic pioneer in the field with a particular focus on the women of the Beat Generation.
In June, we profiled Beat legend, musician, composer and friend of Jack Kerouac, David Amram. In July, we paid tribute to the passing of British Beat veteran, poet Michael Horovitz, whose long life as a promoter of verse as performance sadly came to an end.
August saw us engage with the Bay Area historian and counterculture expert Jonah Raskin as his new novel Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955 neared its autumn publication date and we also mourned the death of that ever-political poet Jack Hirschman.
We explored, in September, that interesting ground between true biography and artistic recreation, with both Kerouac and Bob Dylan under the spotlight, while Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles was our first book review, as we did a retrospective assessment of another piece of fictional memoir.
In October, Kerouac’s continuing impact on popular music-making as the writer’s 2022 Centenary nears was the focus of an extended essay, Larry Beckett’s extraordinary epic poem series American Cycle was in the spotlight and my personal reflection on Genesis P-Orridge took me back to a childhood in England’s West Midlands.
Find all of those articles and more here…