September 4th, 2007
Yesterday Lawrence Ferlinghetti was interviewed by Amy Goodman in her show, Democracy Now! The interview can be listened, watched or read on this web page or downloaded on itunes podacast. It’s an hour conversation in which Ferlinghetti talks, among other things, about his poems, about his City Lights bookstore, Allen Ginberg, Jack Kerouac and his visit to Cuba with Pablo Neruda. Don’t miss it!
Here an excerpt:
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Lawrence Ferlinghetti your advice to young people, young poets, to citizens of the world.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Do you have to be a poet? If you don’t have to be a poet, be a prose writer. You’ll get further faster. Poetry — there’s probably more poetry published today than any time in the history of the world. Nevertheless, there is this — people think they have this blindness when they see a line in the typography of poetry, and it just blocks them. So if you can say the same thing in prose, you’ll probably be better off.
August 27th, 2007
Don’t worry, I’m still not ready to let you know my personal feelings about “Revolution”, I mean, political revolution, not now and maybe not in the so near future (but I’m working on it).
A couple of weeks ago I read this good article about Jack London’s memoir “The Road” and its relation with the more famous Kerouac’s Road. The article is a “preview” of the following Jonah Raskin’s anthlogy, “The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution” which it will be published next year. I did’t read much of London, probably something when I was a kid, you know some of “The Call of the Wild”, “White Fang”, that kind of stories. In my mind London’s been for many years a writer of “children stories” and even during college I did’t had the chance to go into his works. I think that, thanks to Raskin’s next book I’d eventually hit the road to London.
August 7th, 2007
We’ve officialy entered the Jack Kerouac Awareness Month as it’s been named today by a nytimes reviewer. It’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of “On The Road”, released the first time on Sept 5th, 1957; a new edition of Kerouac’s most famous book will be published to commemorate the anniversary on August 16th : “On The Road: The Original Scroll”, a must have for every Kerouac die-hard readers (including myself, of course). Alongside this new edition, a couple of other books are going to be released, Jack Leland’s “Why Kerouac Matters” and another memoir, Kerouac’s first wife Edie Kerouac-Parker “You’ll be Ok: My Life With Jack Kerouac”, both out on August 16th, too. I pre-ordered the first two, but honestly I don’t need another memoir, even if it’s from Kerouac’s wife.
In the meanwhile a nice article from The Guardian:
America’s First King of The Road
