In June 2009, a group of Britain’s leading actors gathered to perform a celebration of the work of playwright Harold Pinter, for one night at London’s National Theater. The cast included Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Gina McKee, Lindsay Duncan, Jeremy Irons, Kenneth Cranham, Susan Wooldridge, Michael Sheen and Henry Woolf. Jude Law and Penelope Wilton had to dash from their matinee performance of Hamlet to take part. The quality of this ensemble gives an idea of the respect with which Pinter is regarded.

The group of actors then presented a selection of extracts from Pinter’s plays, writing and poetry. The set was simple, with the cast remaining seated on stage throughout. The evening of celebration opened with Stephen Rea reading “Death,” written and published in 1997, the year Pinter’s father died. This was followed by an excellent selection from the playwright’s writings, notable amongst which were: Douglas Hodge’s reading of the playwright’s memoir “Mac,”  a comic tale of his early career in repertory theater with the famed Irish actor Anew McMaster; David Bradley eking out all of the comedy and pathos to the character of the tramp, Davies from The Caretaker; Colin Firth also delivers superb performance as the character Aston, talking about his electro-shock therapy, from the play; while Janie Dee and Michael Sheen in Betrayal, and Jude Law and Indira Varma in The Lover, bring out the strong sexual tensions inherent in both plays.

Filmed for BBC’s Arena, Harold Pinter: A Celebration is a remarkable piece of theater.
 

 
Throughout his long career, Allen Ginsberg was keenly aware of the power of music—and an association with generationally key musicians, like Bob Dylan and The Clash—as the candy-coated bullet to see his poetry and ideas for social and political transformation reach the younger generation.

“The Ballad Of The Skeletons” with Philip Glass, Lenny Kaye, session guitarist David Mansfield, Marc Ribot and Paul McCartney (on organ, maracas and drums) was Ginsberg’s final 1996 release and in many ways, it’s probably the best of his recorded work. Even at nearly 8-minutes in length, the number never never gets dull—well with a backing band like that one...—as Ginsberg voices the lines of 66 skeletons representing American culture and hegemony. The poem was first published in the pages of The Nation in 1995.

Gus Van Sant directed a video for “The Ballad of the Skeletons” with a visually arresting Día de Muertos-style that saw the clip become an MTV “buzz clip.” Ginsberg told Steve Silberman:

“He went back to old Pathé, Satan skeletons, and mixed them up with Rush Limbaugh, and Dole, and the local politicians, Newt Gingrich, and the President. And mixed those up with the atom bomb, when I talk about the electric chair– ‘Hey, what’s cookin?’–you got Satan setting off an atom bomb, and I’m trembling with a USA hat on, the Uncle Sam hat on. So it’s quite a production, it’s fun.”

 
The Beat bard and Sir Paul perform “The Ballad of the Skeletons” at the Royal Albert Hall, October 16, 1995. During a visit with McCartney, Ginsberg mentioned that he was looking for a guitarist to back him during this performance. Macca said “What about me?” and below we can see the closest Allen Ginsberg ever got to being a Beatle. There’s more information about the song at The Allen Ginsberg Project.
 

 
h/t WFMU on Twitter!

 
Patti Smith has a passion for the Bloomsbury Group, the influential set of upper-middle class writers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals, who came to prominence in England during the early twentieth century and lasted, in various forms, until the 1960s.

The Bloomsbury Group took its name from the district in London where its main associates lived and worked. These included the writers Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey; the artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Dora Carrington; economist John Maynard Keynes; and diarist Frances Partridge.

When not in London, the Bloomsbury Group gathered at their rural retreat Charleston Farmhouse, in Lewes, Sussex—the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. In recent years, one of Charleston’s regular visitors has been Patti Smith, who describes the farmhouse as “like home.”

In 2006, Smith was interviewed by the BBC’s Culture Show at Charleston Farmhouse, where she was photographing the “tea cups and saucers,” the bed where Vanessa Bell died, and the personal accoutrements of the artistic life.
 

 
On his fortieth birthday in 1993, Alan Moore openly declared himself to be a magician, something he discussed in an interview with The Guardian in 2002:

“One word balloon in From Hell completely hijacked my life… A character says something like, ‘The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind’. After I wrote that, I realized I’d accidentally made a true statement, and now I’d have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician.”

For Moore, his writing is his magic and his magic is his artform. In The Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary, he states rather unequivocally:

“I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.”

Consider the truth of that statement in terms of Moore’s very own work and say… the Occupy movement or Anonymous.

God, I love Alan Moore. May he have the best birthday ever this year (and every year).

Click here to read about “Who Strips the Strippers?” Excelsior Burlesque’s tribute to Alan Moore.

Below, a video of Alan Moore’s complete lecture at Northampton College on September 26, 2013. The mage of comics reads an extract from his book, The Mirror of Love and offers insights on being a writer.
 

 
Next spring Hunter S. Thompson’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky will unveil a public mural banner on a downtown building honoring him as one of their Hometown Heroes, nine years after his death. The banner will feature a portrait of HST by his friend and collaborator, Ralph Steadman, the British artist whose drawings appropriately illustrated Thompson’s work: wild, flowing, surreal, sometimes elegant, other times grotesque, and wildly funny.

Why has it taken so long? The Greater Louisville Pride Foundation’s president admitted that Thompson had “some issues with his life that didn’t really qualify for the banners.” Even so, fans, family, and friends, including Louisville poet Ron Whitehead, have been lobbying for some kind of major memorial for eight years.

Louisville’s list of native heroes is thick with athletes and seriously short on people from the arts. Come on, Louisville, don’t be like those po-dunk small towns who can only be bothered to honor natives who went on to professional sports or marriage to William Shatner. 

Here is a list of all the people, institutions, and entities already declared heroes: boxing legend Muhammad Ali, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, jockey Pat Day, broadcaster Bob Edwards, NBA star Darrell Griffith, sculptor Ed Hamilton, Louisville Slugger inventor Bud Hillerich, Heisman Trophy winner Paul Hornung, musician Patrick Henry Hughes, The Kentucky Derby, surgeons Dr. Harold E. Kleinert and Joseph E. Kutz, New York City Ballet principal dancer Wendy Whelan, whiskey distiller George Garvin Brown, University of Louisville men’s basketball coach Denny Crum, explorer Tori Murden McClure, Olympic swimmer Mary T. Meagher, Hall of Fame baseball player “Pee Wee” Reese, KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders (I am not kidding), TV journalist Diane Sawyer, New York Giants quarterback and sports commentator Phil Simms, and welterweight boxer Rudell Stitch. It would be nice to see a banner for The Gits’ Mia Zapata someday too.

Steadman wrote to Roger Riddell of Louisville Magazine in 2012:

Who in all of Louisville is blameless that they should throw the first stone? Is there such a person in all the world who can claim such an awesome distinction? C’mon, good folks! Own up and celebrate the life of a man who wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade… I believe that the citizens of Louisville should feel real proud to call ‘HST,’ one of their favorite sons, a true Kentucky pioneer!

Ron Whitehead produced The Hunter S. Thompson Tribute in Louisville in December 1996, where Mayor Harvey Sloane presented Thompson with the key to the city, and Governor Paul E. Patton bestowed the title of Kentucky Colonel on Thompson, as well as his pals Whitehead, Johnny Depp, and Warren Zevon. The Hometown Hero banner proves that all the upstanding people who held a grudge against him for writing “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” are probably long gone. Res ipsa loquitur.

Below, Hunter S. Thompson is confronted by an angry Hells Angel on Canadian television in the late 1960s:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Double Gonzo: Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards

 
Have you ever received a letter from a friend you haven’t heard from for a while, or even an email? And then you wanted to respond right away but you wanted to do it right, not just dash something off, so you put it off a day, and the next time you thought of it, eight days had passed, and it became a thing where too much time had passed for you to write the reply straight, and you felt awkward about it, so you put it off some more, and then every day that passed made it harder to respond forthrightly? And then it turned into this odd kind of guilt, and you found yourself actually harboring hostile feelings towards your friend for having put you in that position in the first place?

Has anything like that ever happened to you? Because something quite like that happened to Harlan Ellison on the most colossal scale imaginable. The nightmare was primarily of his own making, and he didn’t handle it at all well.

Before we get into this, Ellison is a tremendously talented and accomplished guy, and nothing I write here is intended to gainsay that premise. He’s also known for being kind of a difficult guy, and well, this story has a bunch of that.

Strangely, this story revolves around a set of books that can be thought of as a kind of precursor to Dangerous Minds—the title of the project was almost identical. In addition to all of the tremendous short stories Ellison penned, one of the most impressive accomplishments on his C.V. was his involvement in publishing two highly influential and successful sci-fi anthologies. The first one was called Dangerous Visions (1967) and the second one was called Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). The debacle came when Ellison attempted to publish the third volume, which was to be called The Last Dangerous Visions. It was supposed to be published by about 1974 or so. At least 100 and maybe as many as 150 prominent and not-so-prominent sci-fi authors submitted stories with the expectation that something like that would happen.

They’re still waiting—the ones who are still alive, anyway. Actually, truth be told, they’re probably not expecting anything to happen. In short, The Last Dangerous Visions became something like the Moby-Dick of science-fiction circles for a decade or two at least.

In the 1960s something special was brewing in the world of sci-fi. After having been a ghetto for dime-store practitioners for a generation or so (with a few exceptions), science fiction was on the verge of crossing over, breaking through, becoming real literature with a grown-up audience to match. The first Dangerous Visions featured talents as notable as Carol Emshwiller and J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany and, of course, Ellison himself. It was a massive critical and commercial success, a true turning point for the genre. Five years later, Again, Dangerous Visions was also a hit, featuring Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut and Piers Anthony and Ray Bradbury and Andrew J. Offutt and James Sallis and so on. By this time the Dangerous Visions books had entered the culture—they had an authentic audience who was eager to hear the details of the third volume. The literary brouhaha that would ensue wasn’t something that took place among a mere coterie, which gives the whole affair that much more bite.
 

Dangerous Visions, 1967
 
The events surrounding the massive and ever-delayed third volume, to be called The Last Dangerous Visions, were described with great vitriol by Christopher Priest, a British sci-fi writer who was just starting his career around the time The Last Dangerous Visions started to be a thing, in a 1987 pamphlet called The Last Deadloss Visions (it was later published by Fantagraphics under the title The Book on the Edge of Forever, an allusion to Ellison’s Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”). Priest submitted a story, and then at some point withdrew it from the anthology. For writers whose pay depended on the royalties from anthologies, one of the main undercurrents of the The Last Dangerous Visions affair is that the many stories Ellison collected for it were essentially trapped as long as he had them—the writers couldn’t really shop them around anywhere else, as they grew more dated and less relevant with every passing year.

The Last Deadloss Visions has existed in a couple different forms, but suffice to say that it’s very long and impassioned and well argued (you can read it on the Internet Archive).
 

Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972
 
I’ll leave you to read it yourself—it takes an hour or so, and is well worth it—but I’ll divulge a few basic facts about it for those who don’t want to delve. What makes the situation surrounding The Last Dangerous Visions so jaw-dropping was the sheer scale of it—as many as 150 writers submitted stories, and by some calculations the number of words that the third book would have featured swelled as high as 1.3 million—this is twice as many as in War and Peace, or the same as perhaps an armful of regular-sized novels. According to Priest (his documentation is meticulous), Ellison on many occasions released statements to the effect that publication was just around the corner, he had “just dropped it off to the publisher” and so forth—none of which appears to have been true, and all of which had the effect of stringing the contributors along for another agonizing year or two. Ellison seems not to have behaved well in the affair, bullying, haranguing, and generally manipulating people, and even by 1975 or so—just three years—The Last Dangerous Visions had become something of a joke or an object of fascination in the sci-fi community. It’s the science fiction equivalent of Elastica’s second album, if you remember that length of that wait, although at least that album eventually was released. Lastly, I mentioned the death toll—which quickly became an index for the incredible time The Last Dangerous Visions was taking—by now the project is in its fourth decade, and the number of writers involved who have passed on to a different plane (according to Wikipedia) is forty-three.

Remarkably, Ellison, who today is 79 years old, has stated as recently as 2007 that he intends to publish the book.

It still hasn’t happened.

Below, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe discuss science-fiction writing with Studs Terkel and Calvin Trillin on a program called Nightcap: Conversations on the Arts and Letters in 1982:

 
The list of prominent Hollywood people who wooed J.D. Salinger for the rights to The Catcher in the Rye is long and impressive—Elia Kazan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harvey Weinstein, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Marlon Brando, and Billy Wilder, according to A Reader’s Companion to J. D. Salinger’s the Catcher in the Rye, by Peter G. Beidler. In 1960 Salinger told Newsweek’s Mel Eflin that he replied to one suitor, “I cannot give my permission. I fear Holden wouldn’t like it.”

One would-be Holden that stands out, partly because it’s so bizarre, is Jerry Lewis. In his 1971 book The Total Film-Maker—published, incidentally, right around the same time he was directing and starring in his legendary, seldom-seen movie project The Day the Clown Cried, to give you an idea of his state of mind—Lewis wrote:
 

I have been in the throes of trying to buy The Catcher in the Rye for a long time. What’s the problem? The author, J.D. Salinger! He doesn’t want more money. He just doesn’t even want to discuss it. I’m not the only Beverly Hills resident who’d like to purchase Salinger’s novel. Dozens have tried. This happens now and then. Authors usually turn their backs on Hollywood gold only because of the potential for destruction of their material. I respect them for it! Why do I want it? I think I’m the Jewish Holden Caulfield. I’d love to play it!

 
It’s a testament to Salinger’s writing powers that a figure like Lewis could even for a moment imagine himself in the role—perhaps his readerly identification was that strong. One wonders if Jerry really understood anything about The Catcher in the Rye. Jewish or not, the obvious problem with casting Lewis to play Holden is age. In the novel, Caulfield has been kicked out of Pencey Prep, and is thus too young for college. At the time The Total Film-Maker was published, Lewis, born 1926, was 45 years old! Compared to the age issue, even the clear tonal difficulties of representing Holden as a goggle-eyed, guffawing spaz like Lewis seem positively manageable.

Salinger’s lover and later memoirist, Joyce Maynard, wrote in her book At Home in the World that Salinger told her that “Jerry Lewis tried for years to get his hands on the part of Holden…. Wouldn’t let up.” In Maynard’s opinion, “The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been Jerry Salinger.” It’s unclear whether this is a reference to something that almost happened: rather remarkably, at one point Salinger considered allowing a stage adaptation—“with the author himself playing Holden.”

In 1957, Salinger replied to a fan named “Mr. Howard” who had written him to inquire why the novelist had not granted permission for The Catcher in the Rye to be made into a movie. Salinger’s reply went as follows:
 

The Catcher in the Rye is a very novelistic novel. There are readymade “scenes”—only a fool would deny that—but, for me, the weight of the book is in the narrator’s voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it, his personal, extremely discriminating attitude to his reader-listener, his asides about gasoline rainbows in street puddles, his philosophy or way of looking at cowhide suitcases and empty toothpaste cartons—in a word, his thoughts. He can’t legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique. True, if the separation is forcibly made, there is enough material left over for something called an Exciting (or maybe just Interesting) Evening in the Theater. But I find that idea if not odious, at least odious enough to keep me from selling the rights…. And Holden Caulfield himself, in my undoubtedly super-biased opinion, is essentially unactable.

 
Now that Salinger is dead, the path is probably clear for the inevitable Catcher adaptation with … Michael Cera or Justin Bieber or someone.

But at least the role won’t go to Andy Dick…

 
The thing I enjoy most about reading published journals and diaries are those wee gems of anecdote and information that often fail to be included in biographies and memoirs.

Take for example this (possibly apocryphal) tale from the author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles, which is included in volume one of his Journals:

”...[A]n amusing story about Allen Ginsberg, one of the new American literary clique—the Beat Generation—who came to Oxford to lecture to the Jesus College Literary Society. Ginsberg started his lecture by saying that he had landed in Ireland before coming on to England.

‘Soon as I landed, I felt a kind of weight pressing on the top of my head. And I knew what it was. I knew what it was. It was the Church. And you know what I did? I went straight into the first church, and I went straight up the aisle of that church, and I stood before the altar. I stood right there in front of the altar. And you know what I did? I masturbated, right there. And that was good. That was real.’

The Literary Society, said Podge, rose to a man and hurled him gently out of the room.”

The “Podge” who told Fowles this story was Fred Porter, a university friend and later a respected Marxist and teacher at Magdalen College School, Oxford.

I thought I’d check the veracity of this amusing anecdote against Bill Morgan’s biography I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, which recounts events very differently:

”...[Ginsberg] pushed on to Oxford University. There he gave a reading to a small group of about twenty enthusiastic students. Since he hadn’t read in quite a while he was a little hesitant, but once he began speaking it felt great to be in front of an audience again. He wept as he read Howl, and then recited some Creeley, Whalen, and Levertov poems to the students. Triumphant afterward, he walked along a quiet stream near the college towers and listened to the bells ringing peacefully as they had for hundreds of years.”

I prefer Podge’s version to Morgan’s, as it was possible that Ginsberg may have read his poetry before recounting his activities in Ireland, and then being ejected. Morgan’s version reads like the description to a closing scene from a cliched Hollywood biopic.

Anyway, for those who love Ginsberg, here he is talking about The Beats, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and censorship. Alas, he makes no reference to his onanistic protest against the Catholic Church.
 

 
Well-known character actor Michael Madsen, who most memorably played Mr. Blonde in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 movie Reservoir Dogs, is a published poet, and he’s way more serious about it than, say, Ally Sheedy (just a single volume of poetry: Yesterday I Saw the Sun).

Contrariwise, Madsen has published a whole shelf of ‘em: Beer, Blood and Ashes, Eat the Worm, Burning in Paradise, A Blessing of the Hounds, 46 Down: A Book of Dreams and Other Ramblings, American Badass, and Expecting Rain. Madsen’s poetry fits squarely (ahem) into the Beat tradition, unrhymed, discursive sentence-like verse à la Allen Ginsberg. Sometimes he ventures into shape poetry in the manner of E.E. Cummings.

In 2005, 13 Hands published The Complete Poetic Works of Michael Madsen. 13 Hands is also running a blog dedicated to Madsen’s poetry.

Here’s a poem from Madsen’s 1995 collection Eat the Worm:
 

“Clint Eastwood”

One night in Arizona:
I was just out of jail and
walking across a parking lot
with a guy named Mike.
We both got released
at the same time.
There were some Mexicans in a car
and they wanted us to come over.
They had bad intentions, so
we kept walking.
Then Mike turned
back and said,
“Fuck you, stupid spics.”
and the—shit—hit—the—fan.
I got one in a headlock
and got a few good shots to his face.
Mike ran off and the others
made themselves happy
jumping on my back
and kicking the living—shit—out—of—me.
I held me own for as long as I could;
even walking up the street while they
kept kicking
and punching me,
yelling for me
to run,
but I thought about it
and didn’t want to give them
the satisfaction,
so I just walked and took the hits
until they gave up.
When I got to the corner
Mike was crying, “I’m sorry man…
I pussied out.”
over and over again.
My face was puffed up and
one eye I couldn’t open.
Right before we were let out of jail
I had thought Mike looked like Clint Eastwood…
all I could think of
at that moment, was that
he sure didn’t act like him.

 
Its author was a literary scoundrel par excellence, its very existence was long considered a hoax until it resurfaced in the 1990s, and its many boosters consider it a scurrilous lost masterpiece worthy of comparison to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I refer to Léon Genonceaux’s 1891 novel The Tutu. Last month it appeared in English translation for the very first time.

I have never read The Tutu—indeed, I heard of it for the first time just a few days ago—but the claims made about the apparently scandalous work and its enigmatic author are quite remarkable. Genonceaux’s birth and death dates are always represented as (1856—?), which inevitably raises an intrigued eyebrow. Genonceaux was the first to publish talents as disparate as Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. Convicted of publishing an “indecent” novel that featured lesbian material in 1892, Genonceaux fled to London, returned to Paris around 1900, and then fell off the face of the earth for good around 1905. Nobody knows what happened to him.

Information on Genonceaux is scarce; he doesn’t have a Wikipedia page—not even on wikipedia.fr! Nicole Albert, in her essay in Disorder in the Court: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century (edited by George Robb and Nancy Erber), explains that Genonceaux, after departing for England, was sentenced in absentia to thirteen months in prison and a fine of 3,000 francs for the crime of publishing a “Sapphic” novel called Zé-Boïm (the title is the Hebrew word for “Gomorrah”). Michael R. Finn, in his book Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-siècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde, passes along the description in the court records of the cover Genonceaux concocted for his edition of Zé-Boïm (the book had already appeared in previous editions) thus: “the drawing represents a half-recumbent woman, her chest naked, one finger of her left hand pointing upwards and, between her legs, the head of a cat.”
 

The French first edition of Le Tutu (1891), which was printed but never sent to bookstores [Correction: This is obviously the Spanish edition, as commenters pointed out. The first French edition is here.]
 
The noted Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo has written of the book: “The Tutu has been described as the most mysterious novel of the nineteenth century, it is probably one of the strangest, and certainly one of the most fascinating. … We find in it a clear presentiment (one cannot say influence, since no one read this book) of the audacities of Jarry, Roussel, Breton, Ionesco and Queneau….”

And get a load of this promotional text from Atlas Press, publisher of The Tutu: “Genonceaux appears to have been intent on outraging just about everyone, and The Tutu is gleefully Nietzschean in its dismemberment of contemporary morality. It is simultaneously a sort of ultimate ‘decadent novel’ and outlandishly modern; it is also repellent, infantile and deeply cynical. Yet despite all its absurdities and extravagances, in the end it somehow manages to appear compassionate, poetic, funny… and even—most absurdly of all—rational.” Wow!

Here’s the Artbooks website on the book:
 

The Tutu is one of those mythical beasts—a great lost book; a book that, if it had been published when it was written (in 1891), would have been one of the defining works of late nineteenth-century French literature. … Willfully scatological, erotic and gleefully Nietzschean in its dismemberment of fin-de-siecle morality, The Tutu is at once a sort of ultimate Decadent delirium and also a proto-modernist novel in the vein of Ulysses. Its existence was first posited in 1966 by a famous literary hoaxer, and until a handful of copies turned up some years later, in the early 1990s, it was presumed to be a fabrication.

 
On the same website, Marc Lowenthal of Wakefield Press adds,
 

When I first read about this book’s forthcoming publication, it had almost sounded like a literary artifact that Atlas Press would have had to invent if it hadn’t existed. Now that I’ve read it, it still seems too good to be true: the missing, unknown link between the French fin-de-siècle and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi and all that was to follow.

 
I don’t know about you, but this book sounds utterly fantastic. Hell, maybe all of these protestations of the Atlas Press “having to have invented it” and its previous status as “a hoax” are playful winks to the audience? Maybe The Tutu really IS too good to be true, maybe this book will turn out to be a retro-engineered literary masterpiece? I really hope not, but either way, I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
 
via Writers No One Reads