Beatdom

02/11/2024

Our next book comes out next month. It's about William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol. It's currently available at a discount and we will send out the pre-ordered copies soon, so people who buy now might get it before the official release date.

New William S. Burroughs book coming December 2024.

31/10/2024

Happy Halloween.🎃

30/10/2024

The official trailer for Q***r, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel, has just been released by A24. It features a cover of Nirvana's "All Apologies."

The release date is now given as 27th November.

SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/A24subscribeFrom Academy Award winning director Luca Guadagnino, written by Justin Kuritzkes and based on the novel by William S. Bu...

28/10/2024

"Whatever image of myself or Kerouac or Burroughs or Warhol was spread in the sixties began with a smelly inarticulate image passed through the hands of the CIA and transformed to become a sort of bum kick."
--Allen Ginsberg

24/10/2024

"Society bleeds geniuses."
--Jack Kerouac

20/10/2024

This photo is from a 1975 San Francisco Examiner article about City Lights. In it, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (far left) talks about why he succeeded in San Francisco when New York was then the centre of publishing:

"I came here because New York was all sewed up, because there was no hope in New York of a young guy getting anything that was interesting. It was too hard to live there and make it. I would never have dared to open a book store in New York because it would have had to be too commercial and the only way to make it in New York is to be commercial on one level or another. There was no room for anything new. Things are still open out here. It’s still the last frontier."

18/10/2024

Friday's Weekly Round Up - David Wills on The Six Gallery, City Lights on Literary Censorship, Ginsberg and Carolyn Cassady, "a fractious relationship" - https://allenginsberg.org/2024/10/f-o-18-688/

18/10/2024

"Both men thought they were going to meet the other man’s image."
-- Victor Bockris on bringing together Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs

15/10/2024

"I’ve often been asked if I have some words of advice to young people, and I indeed have a few..."

-- William S. Burroughs, City Lights Review #6 (1994).

10/10/2024

"I write about 10 feet in a good day."

--Jack Kerouac, San Francisco Examiner interview, 1957 (reprinted in Empty Phantoms)

08/10/2024

"I had the sense that the continent had tilted up, with the whole population sliding to the west."
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the emergence of a West Coast counterculture in the 1950s.

That was the topic of Beatdom #24, which we released in May of this year. In it, we talked about West Coast writers like Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth. You can find it on Amazon.

07/10/2024

This photo shows the stage at the back of the 6 Gallery, where Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl" 69 years ago today.

Most descriptions of the reading mention how small it was but this really drives home the fact that it was a tiny little raised platform. The poets sat in a semi-circle on folding chairs, with each of them standing at the front, behind a tiny lectern-like sculpture by Fred Martin. Kerouac in his own words "sat on the right side of the stage giving out little wows and yesses of approval and even whole sentences of comment with nobody's invitation but in the general gaiety nobody's disapproval either."

The origin of this photo is unknown but I strongly suspect it was taken by Nata Piaskowski at the opening of the 6 Gallery about one year before the reading.

02/10/2024

"Part collage, part montage and part a cultural history of rock‘n’roll, experimental film and avant-garde art, this 204-page volume brings together a large cast of unforgettable characters, from Mick Jagger and Patti Smith to Allen Ginsberg and Lou Reed, all clustered around those two multi-media mega stars of the twentieth-century: William Burroughs, the master of the cut-up, and Andy Warhol, the master of Pop Art."

Cultural giants and their famous circles explored

02/10/2024

“I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
📷: Jack Kerouac Estate

30/09/2024

“Original exploration of the craft alone expresses a poet’s individual soul & conscience.”

--Allen Ginsberg

29/09/2024

An exciting event for the upcoming LCK festival in Lowell.

A stunning new mural commemorating legendary Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac will be officially unveiled at St. Jean Baptiste Church on Sunday, October 13th, from 11AM to 1PM as part of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac. The former church, where Kerouac once served as an altar boy, is the proposed futur...

27/09/2024

"I consider criticism a secondary form of creation, but also an interesting one.”
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Ferlinghetti: A Biography, Neeli Cherkovski, p.76)

"One of my favorite art critics was Lawrence Ferlinghetti."
-- Wally Hedrick (Exposee Summer 1985)

Kenneth Rexroth helped Ferlinghetti find a job as an art critic for Art Digest, a position he held between 1953 and 1955. Ferlinghetti took his role seriously and wrote thoughtful reviews that Hedrick considered unusually poetic and perceptive. Perhaps this stems from the fact that Ferlinghetti considered himself more of a painter than a poet at that time.

Interestingly, Ferlinghetti reviewed the 6 Gallery not long after its opening. He would become famously linked to the gallery in October 1955 after hearing Allen Ginsberg read "Howl" there. The reading supposedly prompted the owner of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers to offer to publish "Howl" (but in fact that agreement had been made a month earlier).

26/09/2024

"The Beats revolutionized literature and tore apart societal norms, but most importantly, they were the predecessors of the great counterculture movements of the 20th century. Kerouac and his friends emerged at a pivotal moment in America’s history. Fresh out of a World War fought abroad and recovering from the Great Depression, mid-1940s America was witnessing an unprecedented economic boom. Below the picturesque American dream was an underlying dark reality, one of obsessive consumerism and devout materialism."

The Beat Generation brought changes in literature, philosophy, and form. In their themes of interest, the Beats spoke of society, the soul, and one’s purpose.

23/09/2024

One of the great legacies of the Beat Generation was its fight against censorship. Various Beat texts have been banned with several famous court cases changing both public opinion and the law, expanding the freedoms of artists to express themselves.

Consider celebrating this week by reading and sharing your favourite banned books. Always stand in opposition to the censorship of books and the right to free expression.

20/09/2024

Here are some of our books about the . We have another coming later this year and several more planned for 2025 and 2026.

18/09/2024

"If he keeps going, Ginsberg will be the first genuinely popular, genuine poet in over a generation"

--Kenneth Rexroth, The Evergreen Review Vol. 1 Number 2, 1957

16/09/2024

Coming soon: "The Burroughs-Warhol Connection" by Victor Bockris.

This book contains interviews, journal entries, essays, and almost 100 photos of William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol. It is a vast, visually complex book that functions as a collage tribute to two of the 20th century's most provocative and brilliant artists.

13/09/2024

We are currently open to submissions for Beatdom #25. This issue will be devoted to the San Francisco Renaissance. Details in the link.

Beatdom literary journal is now open to submissions for its 25th issue, set for release in late 2025.

12/09/2024

"He could type faster than any human being you ever saw."

-- Philip Whalen on Jack Kerouac (Off the Wall, p. 82)

10/09/2024

“As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking o***m in a yellow pongee suit. They sniffed co***ne in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”

--William S. Burroughs, Word Virus, p.16