|
Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century. Overview It was a "class 13" hotel, meaning bottom line, a place that was required by law to meet only minimum health and safety standards. It never had any proper name – "the Beat Hotel" was a nickname given it by Gregory Corso, which stuck. The rooms had windows facing the interior stairwell and not much light. Hot water was available Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The hotel offered the opportunity for a bath – in the only bathtub, situated on the ground floor – provided the guest reserved time beforehand and paid the surcharge for hot water. Curtains and bedspreads were changed and washed every spring. The linen was (in principle) changed every month. The Beat Hotel was managed by a married couple, Monsieur and Madame Rachou, from 1933. After the death of Monsieur Ra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinclair Beiles
Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930 - 2000, Johannesburg) was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature. Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book ''The Beat Hotel'' (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored ''Minutes to Go'' with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch''. He worked with the Greek artist Takis and read his magnetic manifesto -- "I am a sculpture... I would like to see all nuclear bombs on Earth turned into sculptures"—in 1962 in Paris at the Iris Clert Gallery. At this event he was famously suspended in mid-air by a magnetic field from a powerful magnet in a sculpture develop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. Allen Ginsberg's ''Howl'' (1956), William S. Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch'' (1959), and Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'' (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.Charters (1992) ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Both ''Howl'' and ''Naked Lunch'' were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.Ann Charters, ''int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eddie Woods
Eddie Woods is an American poet, prose writer, editor and publisher who lived and traveled in various parts of the world, both East and West, before eventually settling in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where in 1978 he started ''Ins & Outs'' magazine and two years later founded Ins & Outs Press. He was born on May 8, 1940 in New York City. According to Stanford University Libraries, which house Woods' archive: "In his role as a cultural impresario and artistic entrepreneur, Eddie Woods... is an important presence, both in American expatriate circles and among European avant-gardists. Woods' promotional activities made him, in short, a crucial center to the movement, and his archive documents his close connections with its leading figures..." Early to middle years After not quite finishing high school, Woods worked for two years in Manhattan as a first-generation computer programmer, until in 1960 he joined the U.S. Air Force for a four-year stint, three years of which were spent in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Watson (author)
Steven Watson (born 1947) is an author, art and cultural historian, curator, and documentary filmmaker. His 1991 book ''Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde'' was called "a chapter in our national biography" by Stefan Kanfer for the ''Los Angeles Times'' and "a marvelous group portrait of a band of cultural renegades" by ''Publishers Weekly''. Watson has written five books about 20th century American avant-garde and counterculture movements, curated two exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery ("Group Portrait, The First American Avant-Garde" and "Rebels: Painters and Poets of the 1950's"), and served as consultant curator for the Whitney Museum exhibition "Beat Culture and the New America". Biography Watson was born in 1947. He grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota and graduated from Mound High School. He majored in English at Stanford University and participated in anti-Vietnam War protests, including a guerrilla theater piece called ''Alice in RO ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Chapman
Harold Stephen Chapman (26 March 1927 – 19 August 2022) was a British photographer noted for chronicling the 1950s in Paris. Biography Chapman was born in Deal, Kent on 26 March 1927. He produced a large body of work over many years, with his most significant period from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, when he lived in a backstreet Rive Gauche, Left Bank guesthouse in Paris later nicknamed (by Verta Kali Smart) ‘the Beat Hotel’. There he chronicled in detail the life and times of his fellow residents – among them Allen Ginsberg and Allen's lover Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, Harold Norse, and other great names of Beat Generation poetry and art. When the Beat Hotel closed its doors in 1964, Chapman was the last guest to leave. The collection of photographs he had taken there provide an artistic and historic record, and became the mainstay of his reputation. Chapman's other works attract worldwide attention, and in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Jacques Lebel
Jean-Jacques Lebel (born in Paris on June 30, 1936) is a French artist. His father was also a poet, translator, poetry publisher, political activist, art collector, and art historian. Besides his heterogeneous artworks and poetry, Lebel is also known for his very early work with Happenings, as an art theory writer with close ties to the American scene, and as an art curator. He is the son of Robert Lebel (art critic), Robert Lebel art critic and close friend of Marcel Duchamp. Life and work Lebel had his first exhibition in 1955 at Galleria Numero in Florence, Italy. After a brief period of time with Surrealists, Lebel exhibited in Milan and Paris, and then went on to exhibit at various museums and galleries around the world. He has regularly collaborated with artist and writer Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux. Beginning in 1955, Lebel published a poetry journal called ''Front Unique'' and organized various nomadic poetry festivals, such as ''La Libre Expression'' (''Free Expression'') in 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mushroom Cloud
A mushroom cloud is a distinctive mushroom-shaped flammagenitus cloud of debris, smoke and usually condensed water vapor resulting from a large explosion. The effect is most commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, but any sufficiently energetic detonation or deflagration will produce the same effect. They can be caused by powerful conventional weapons, like thermobaric weapons, including the ATBIP and GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast. Some volcanic eruptions and impact events can produce natural mushroom clouds. Mushroom clouds result from the sudden formation of a large volume of lower-density gases at any altitude, causing a Rayleigh–Taylor instability. The buoyant mass of gas rises rapidly, resulting in turbulent vortices curling downward around its edges, forming a temporary vortex ring that draws up a central column, possibly with smoke, debris, condensed water vapor, or a combination of these, to form the "mushroom stem". The mass of gas plus entrained moist ai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kaddish (poem)
"Kaddish" also known as "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894–1956)" is a poem by Beat writer Allen Ginsberg about his mother Naomi and her death on June 9, 1956. Background Ginsberg began writing the poem in the Beat Hotel in Paris in December 1957, completing it in New York in 1959. It was the lead poem in the collection '' Kaddish and Other Poems'' (1961). It is considered one of Ginsberg's finest poems, with some scholars holding that it is his best. The ''Kaddish'' of the title refers to the mourner's prayer or blessing in Judaism. This long poem was Ginsberg's attempt to mourn his mother, Naomi, but also reflects his sense of loss at his estrangement from his born religion. The traditional Kaddish contains no references to death, but Ginsberg's poem is riddled with thoughts and questionings of death. Stage version Ginsberg wrote a screenplay based on the poem. Robert Frank was to direct it, but money could not be raised for the project. In 1972, Robert Kalfin readapted the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yale University Press
Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous. , Yale University Press publishes approximately 300 new hardcover and 150 new paperback books annually and has a backlist of about 5,000 books in print. Its books have won five National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards and eight Pulitzer Prizes. The press maintains offices in New Haven, Connecticut and London, England. Yale is the only American university press with a full-scale publishing operation in Europe. It was a co-founder of the distributor TriLiteral LLC with MIT Press and Harvard University Press. TriLiteral was sold to LSC Communications in 2018. Series and publishing programs Yale Series of Younger Poets Since its inception in 1919, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition has published the first collection of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of ''The Glass Menagerie'' (1944) in New York City. He introduced "plastic theatre" in this play and it closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' (1947), ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof'' (1955), ''Sweet Bird of Youth'' (1959), and ''The Night of the Iguana'' (1961). With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences. His drama ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's '' Long Day ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cut-up Technique
The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts. Technique The cut-up and the closely associated fold-in are the two main techniques: *''Cut-up'' is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text, such as in poems by Tristan Tzara as described in his short text, ''TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM''. *''Fold-in'' is the technique of taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page, such as in '' The Third Mind''. It is a joint ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.JPG "Click for more on -> Jean-Jacques Lebel")
._Tennessee_Williams_age_5.jpg "Click for more on -> Tennessee Williams")