Beat Generation

I remember back in the summer of 2000 writing an essay about Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild. Now there is a film about the book; it actually came out in May of this year, but is coming to a film festival nearby in the first weekend of October, so I’m excited about it. The film is produced by Will Hearst and Jim Harrison, and stars the latter along with Gary Snyder.

From their Facebook page:

The Practice of the Wild is a film profile of the poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. Snyder has been a creative force in all the major cultural changes that have created the modern world. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he was a central figure of the Beat generation. He helped bring Zen Buddhism into the America scene, was an active participant in the anti-war movement and an inspiration for the quest for human potential. All along he was a founding intellect, essayist and leader of the new environmental awareness that supports legislation and preservation without losing sight of direct wild experience — local people, animals, plants, watersheds and food sources.

This film, borrowing its name from one of Snyder’s most eloquent non-fiction books, revolves around a life-long conversation between Snyder and his fellow poet and novelist Jim Harrison. These two old friends and venerated men of American letters converse while taking a wilderness trek along the central California coast in an area that has been untouched for centuries. They debate the pros and cons of everything from Google to Zen koans. The discussions are punctuated by archival materials and commentaries from Snyder friends, observers, and intimates who take us through the ‘Beat’ years, the years of Zen study in Japan up to the present — where Snyder continues to be a powerful spokesperson for ecological sanity and bio-regionalism.

This film will be showing at the Wild Salmon Film Festival in Mission, BC. I’ll post more about the film after seeing it.

Bart Plantenga has been publishing his Beer Mystic novel online through various literary zines. The idea is you do a thing like a pub crawl, where you visit one spot to read a chapter, then move to another spot to read the next chapter, and so on. Each time I guess you get drunker and drunker with words, meanwhile getting to visit the wide open pub/cyber/e-zine spaces and soak them up.

I asked Bart how he came up with this idea, after adding a chapter to Jack and one to Big Bridge. But don’t start there: start back at Excerpt 1 at Smoke Signals Literary Magazine.

Bart said:

The basic tale is told at Beer Mystic.

The concept is multifold: to spread the Beer Mystic far and wide and along the way drag the reader into areas, zines, styles of lit they may not have ever heard of so that the linear goes hypertextual like wandering off the well-beaten path to discover other sites, sights and voices…

I am hoping that this environmentally friendly way of crawling from pub to pub will lead to literary inebriation without all of the accompanying hangovers, jet lags, cultural prejudices and nausea…

Welcome to Jack’s final issue: http://www.jackmagazine.com/

This is the end of a decade-long run of the magazine. In the future I may open up a page for commenting or self-publishing dependent on moderation, but I am not sure yet. It depends on time. I have currently begun working full time with Fraser Riverkeeper in Vancouver, and also opened Moon Willow Press, which will start its publishing early next year. Spread the word for those interested in publishing non-fictional or fictional pieces relating to the environment and nature.

In Jack’s final issue, we go on journeys. We feature Francis Raven’s “A Community’s Habitat” and a compilation of excerpts of “ROCKPILE On the Road” with Michael Rothenberg, David Meltzer, and Terrie Carrión. The magazine is illustrated by a slide-gallery of art by Andrew Abbott, Jeff Crouch, Diana Magallón, Jillian Piccirilli, Johnnie Day Durand, and Valery Oisteanu.

Fiction and non-fiction works include those by Anthony Wright, Bart Plantenga (part of the Beer Mystic pub crawl), Clara Hume, Zdravka Evtimova, Michael Graves, Dr. Gerald Keaney, David Madgalene, Stephen Muret, Valery Oisteanu, Julio Peralta-Paulino, Spencer Bilodeau, Cece Chapman, Ae Reiff, and William Sands.

Poetry is by Daniel Ari, Marcia Arrieta, M Bromberg, Landon Brown, Michael Estabrook, Vernon Frazer, Tom Hibbard, Carlos Hiraldo, Thomas McDade, Rodney Nelson, rob mclennan, Sheila Murphy, Ashok Niyogi, Farida Samerkhanova, Kamiblue, Dee Sunshine, Charles D. Tarlton, and Jon Watson.

Video is by Cecelia Chapman and Donna Kuhn.

Enjoy and keep it touch! Thanks for all your support, readership, and contributions throughout the past several years!

A Benefit for The Louisiana Bucket Brigade

SUNDAY, JUNE 27, 2010     2:00 — 5:00 p.m.

The Phoenix Theater, 201 Washington St., Petaluma  707-762-3565

http://www.thephoenixtheater.com/

POETS INCLUDE:  DAVID MELTZER, JUDY GRAHN,

SHARON DOUBIAGO, NEELI CHERKOVSKI.  Also:  Geri DiGiorno, Terri Carrion, Pat Nolan, Bill Vartnaw,

Katherine Hastings, Michael Rothenberg, Zack Fortune, David Madgalene and Sonoma County Poet Laureate Gwynn O’Gara

MUSIC BY ANNE CAROL and

PETALUMA’S FABULOUS HIGH CLASS!

ADMISSION: $5 — $5,000!  NO ONE TURNED AWAY

All proceeds go to The Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a non-profit 501(C)3 environmental health and justice organization tracking the impact of the BP oil spill and preventing the impact from being “swept under the rug”.   Donations are tax-deductible. Checks accepted.

Can’t believe, I just heard the news.

Larry Keenan did some great stuff on Hopper back in the day. http://www.jackmagazine.com/keenan/keenan9.html and http://www.jackmagazine.com/keenan/keenan10.html

Levi Asher doesn’t look old, but he’s an established cornerstone when it comes to documenting the beats and other literary movements on the web. When I started my site, his had already been around for possibly a decade. I think we both remember when the internet came to be, and those old subterranean and other newsgroups (I recall the earliest trolling and felt intimidated by those newsgroups!), and though it doesn’t seem like that long ago, there sure have been a lot of changes in the way info is presented. Anyway, his site, Litkicks.com has really evolved from when I remember it before, and he’s expanded quite a bit. I can get some of the updates via Facebook so noticed his A Little Country Village Mystery Spot 3, which offered a little bright spot in my day. I love mysteries, even small ones. I have no idea if my guess was right or even close. Go check it out.

Allan Weisbecker of Bandito Books has been working on Water Time: Surf Travel Diary of a MadMan. The first 7 minutes of his film are shown below and are also at Bandito Books as well as YouTube. Weisbecker is author of Cosmic Banditos, Searching for Captain Zero, and Can’t You Get Along with Anyone.

You can find my reviews at Jack Magazine (Zero) and Big Bridge (CYGAWA). I called him the greatest memoirist of our time, and stand by this claim even a few years later. Weisbecker writes with such brutal honesty and humor that his books are the not-able-to-put-down types. He’s one of the most interesting road documentarians of our time, extending his path to the matter of waves on the ocean. He’s been compared to Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

McClure’s schedule is at his site. Just a note that he will be having readings on his new Mysteriosos at City Lights on May 4. He will also be at the Jazzmouth festival on April 24th, and has been confirmed recently for this year’s Ledbury Poetry Festival in the UK, in July.

According to poets.org, regarding Mysteriosos:

Included in this new collection are: a long travel poem to an Indian forest where an enraged elephant charges then recognizes an old human friend and turns back into the trees;” Double Moire” which “reads like a fulfillment of Goethe’s prophesy and Shelley’s: the whole universe seems to be in it, from smallest to most vast. It has been described (by Jerome Rothenberg) as the ultimate nature poem.

Here’s an article about Burroughs having told a reporter once that he was content to live in Kansas.

He lived in Lawrence. I remember once going to Lawrence. Only once. I was living in Kansas City for a while before migrating to Canada, and drove out to Lawrence one evening to see a friend act in a play. The town was a college town, very lively. It thunderstormed so badly that night, however, that I didn’t think I’d make it home alive!

I want to advertise a $2.99 children’s e-book that I wrote when I was in college. This little book has the stamp of approval of the youngsters in my family, and so here is the info straight from Moon Willow Press.

33% of this book’s first 100 sales will be donated to Eco-Libris (plant a tree for every book you read). Eco-Libris’ planting partners include Sustainable Harvest International (SHI), Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama;  RIPPLE Africa (a non-profit organization involved with environmental projects, education, and health care in Malawi, Africa); and the Alliance for International Reforestation (AIR), Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Each of these partners works with areas in the world suffering from deforestation. Eco-Libris’ tree-planting program provides a valued source of sustainable economical and ecological aid to these areas.

---

Everything is the same, the fog says ‘We are fog and we fly by dissolving like ephemera,’ and the leaves say ‘We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind, that’s all, we come and go, grow and fall’ — Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say ‘We are mantransformed paper bags made out of wood pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be possible, but we’ll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come rainy season’ — The tree stumps say ‘We are tree stumps torn out of the ground by men, sometimes by the wind, we have big tendrils full of earth that drink out of the earth’ — Men say ‘We are men, we pull out tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch, we look around, we make a great effort to realise everything is the same.’

-Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

---

Category: Juvenile/children’s fiction e-book
ISBN: 978-0-9813924-0-0

---

1. Buy at Moon Willow Press
Price: $2.99
MWP method of distribution: E-mail (PDF) after Paypal is recieved

---

2. Buy at Smashwords
Price: $2.99
Distribution: Download or read online
Sample: 10% sample available at Smashwords

---

3. Buy at Amazon
Price: $2.99
Distribution: Kindle download
Sample: Available at Amazon

---

Non-refundable

---

Description: Follow young Julie Paris’s journey from her home in Chicago to a small northern Wisconsin town on the banks of the Wolf River. Julie feels left out of an impoverished but soulful community, and, feeling vulnerable and alone, turns to the great outdoors for adventure. Here she learns about the Menominee history of the area and lets her imagination run wild. It isn’t long before the cold November snow — and an unforeseen friend — fall into her life.

The e-book will be sent to buyer within 24 hours of payment, when ordered via MWP. Please be sure to enter your e-mail address when ordering, and then make sure that you check your spam folder if you do not receive an e-mail.

---

Contact: jamesjoyce2010@gmail.com
Website: http://www.jamesjoyce.cz

PRAGUE JAMES JOYCE SYMPOSIUM, 2010

On behalf of the International James Joyce Foundation, we invite you to the XXII International James Joyce Symposium in the “Golden City” of Prague, 13-18 June 2010.

Prague is at the centre of Europe as Joyce is at the centre of the tradition of European modernism, and it is fitting that the major European author of the twentieth century be honoured in the city that is the very heart of modern Europe.

In lieu of a theme, we propose that a meeting of minds such as this one should be a type of feast, a “symposium,” as Plato has it-a “drinking together.” 2010 marks the first time the International Joyce Symposium has travelled to the heart of Europe. We are reminded, as the Symposium’s odyssey continues into its XXII edition, of the need to reconsider of the universality of Joyce and the European idea upon which his work was founded, and the post-European world in which it continues to be received. A feast of nations, of cultures, of languages and literary traditions. As political and economic union brings more and more people together, nevertheless the Europe of Joyce faces the ongoing threat of resurgent nationalisms. The modernity of Europe and of the European culture Joyce assisted in imagining is one that requires an ongoing, creative intellectual vigilance. Revisionism threatens to rob Joyce’s European heritage of its universal aspirations and reinstate a type of academic provincialism. This applies equally to the ongoing project of literary modernity for which Joyce remains a contemporary interlocutor.

Proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes duration are welcome on any aspect of Joyce studies, especially those that focus on the relationship of Joyce to Prague and the heritage of Central European modernism in the arts, philosophy and theory-particularly the legacies of structuralism and the Prague linguistic circle.

All paper proposals must be submitted individually, by completing the required fields in the symposium Registration form (https://secure.cbttravel.cz/jamesjoyce10/registration-online.php).

Extended deadline for submission of proposals: 15 April 2010

Programme specials include welcoming reception at the Karolinum Ceremonial Hall, Charles University, several book launches and an exhibition opening, the Bloomsday symposium banquet (at the Pilsen Restaurant, Municipal House, Prague), and the closing Vltava River boat cruise.

Plenaries include Prof. Daniel Ferrer, Prof. David Hayman, and Prof. Marjorie Perloff, representing the academic side of the reception of Joyce´s work, and Karen MacCormack, Steve McCaffery, and Tom McCarthy, who will speak as contemporary writers about Joyce´s legacy and influence on experimental literature.

A volume of Symposium proceedings will be published by Litteraria Pragensia, before the end of 2011.

Contact: jamesjoyce2010@gmail.com
Website: http://www.jamesjoyce.cz

I recently read about how there are several people celebrating Neal Cassady’s birthday, most notoriously his Denver town’s My Brother’s Bar. Here is a rundown of the event.

John Hamm, James Franco compare Prop 8 fight to “Howl” ban.

At a Sundance press conference, Hamm and Franco likened that long-ago obscenity trial and fight for Ginsberg’s Beat Generation poem “Howl” to be published to today’s ongoing struggle for equality and the passage of Proposition 8, banning the right of homosexuals to marry in the state of California.