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Knute Stiles
Knute Stiles (1923-December 1, 2009) was a union organizer, painter, collagist, art critic, poet and entrepreneur. He was born in Minnesota, the son of the state's first female physician. He went to the St. Paul Art School, and after World War II, attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Career Stiles had served in Alaska in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. He returned there annually, spending summers fishing in Alaska through 1956 working salmon boats and organizing cannery workers. From 1946 to 1948, he attended Black Mountain College, near Ashville, N.C. With assistance from the G.I. Bill of Rights, he graduated from the California School of Fine Arts in 1953. From the autumn of 1953 to 1960, he co-owned and co-managed, with fellow former Black Mountain student, artist Leo Krikorian, ''The Place'', an artists' and writers' bar and gallery in North Beach. The bar featured poetry readings and jazz, and hosted the debut showing of artist Jay DeFeo's work. It was k ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and ''Baghdad by the Bay''. San Francisco and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area are a global center of economic activity and the arts and sciences, spurred ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Big Sur (novel)
''Big Sur'' is a 1962 novel by Jack Kerouac, written in the fall of 1961 over a ten-day period, with Kerouac typewriting onto a teletype roll. It recounts the events surrounding Kerouac's (here known by the name of his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz) three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, California, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; at the same time dealing with his increased drinking and declining mental health. It is Kerouac’s first novel to be fully written following his success in the late 1950’s, and thus departs from his previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the character Duluoz is shown as a popular, published author; most of Kerouac's previous novels instead portray him as a bohemian traveller. Synopsis The novel depicts Jack Duluoz's mental and physical deterioration in the late 1950s. Despite having found mainstream success with his work, Duluoz is unable to cope with a suddenly demanding public, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
On The Road
''On the Road'' is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx), and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise. The idea for ''On the Road'', Kerouac's second novel, was formed during the late 1940s in a series of notebooks, and then typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951. It was published by Viking Press in 1957. ''The New York Times'' hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phillip Whalen
Philip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation. Biography Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles from age four until he returned to Portland in 1941. He served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He attended Reed College on the GI Bill. There, he met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, and graduated with a BA in 1951. He read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye. He appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character "Warren Coughlin" in Jack Kerouac's '' The Dharma Bums'', which includes an account of that reading. In ''Big Sur'' he is called "Ben Fagan". Whalen's poetry was featured in Donald Allen's anthology '' The New American Poetry 1945-1960''. Whalen's first interest in Eastern religions centered on Vedanta. Upon release from the army in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lenore Kandel
Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932 in New York City – October 18, 2009 in San Francisco, California) was an American poet, affiliated with the Beat Generation and Hippie counterculture. Biography Her first works of poetry were the chapbooks ''An Exquisite Navel'', ''A Passing Dragon'', and ''A Passing Dragon Seen Again'', published in 1959. Several of her poems also appeared in ''Beat and Beatific II'' in 1959. Although Kandel was born in New York, her family lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania during her childhood. Afterward, she moved to Los Angeles to live with her father, screenwriter Aben Kandel. She returned to New York to attend The New School for Social Research on scholarship for three and a half years before she dropped out. She moved to San Francisco in 1960. She began living in the East-West House co-op, where she met Jack Kerouac, who later immortalized her as ''Romana Swartz'', "a big Rumanian monster beauty", in his novel ''Big Sur'' (1962). In the novel, she is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bay Area Reporter
The ''Bay Area Reporter'' is a free weekly newspaper serving the LGBT communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is one of the largest-circulation LGBT newspapers in the United States, and the country's oldest continuously published newspaper of its kind. Background Co-founded by Bob Ross and Paul Bentley on April 1, 1971, the ''Bay Area Reporter''—known by locals for most of its history by the initials ''B.A.R.'' that were included in its nameplate until April 2011—was originally distributed to gay bars in the South of Market, Castro District, and Polk Gulch areas of San Francisco. Today, the paper is distributed throughout the Bay Area and beyond. History The ''Bay Area Reporter'' has evolved to become one of the most respected LGBT community newspapers in the United States. Its annual Pride issue in June is the largest and most-read edition of the year. It also features its reader's choice awards on its anniversary in the first week of April, with a special "BESTIES: Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lou Welch
The list of ''Babylon 5'' characters contains characters from the entire ''Babylon 5'' universe. The Babylon station was conceived as a political and cultural meeting place. As such, one of the show's many themes is the cultural and social interaction between civilizations. There are five dominant civilizations represented on Babylon 5: humans, the Narn, the Centauri, the Minbari and the Vorlons; and several dozen less powerful ones. A number of the less powerful races make up the League of Non-Aligned Worlds, who assembled as a result of the Dilgar War occurring 30 years before the start of the series. Main characters Jeffrey Sinclair / Valen Jeffrey Sinclair, played by actor Michael O'Hare, is the Commander of the Babylon 5 station in season one. After one full season, O'Hare and series executive producer/creator J. Michael Straczynski made the mutual and amicable decision for the character and actor to depart as a regular. O'Hare subsequently reprised the character of Sincla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Albert Saijo
Albert Fairchild Saijo (February 4, 1926 – June 2, 2011) was a Japanese-American poet associated with the Beat Generation. He and his family were imprisoned as part of the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, during which time he wrote editorials on his experiences of internment for his high school newspaper. Saijo went on to serve in the U.S. Army and study at the University of Southern California. Later he became associated with Beat Generation figures including Jack Kerouac, with whom he wrote, traveled and became friends. Saijo's first solo collection of poetry, ''Outspeaks: A Rhapsody'', was published in 1997. A second collection, ''Woodrat Flat'', was published posthumously in 2015. Saijo was also the author of ''The Backpacker'' (1972), a short book on backpacking, and coauthor of ''Trip Trap'' (1972), a collection of haiku written with Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch. Saijo died in 2011 in Hawaii, where he had lived since the 1990s. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joanne Kyger
Joanne Kyger (November 19, 1934 – March 22, 2017) was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School. Although Kyger is often characterized as a prominent female Beat poet in the predominately male inner circle of Beat Generation writers, she never considered herself as belonging to the Beat movement. Nor did she formally identify with any other movement; her work invokes various schools of poetry without belonging to any of them. In ''Reconstructing the Beats'', Amy L. Friedman calls Kyger "an important link between several major axes of American poetry and writing in the twentieth century." Linda Russo, in the webzine Jacket's edition devoted to Kyger, notes that "there is no one way to talk about her work except as that of a singular individual." Kyger's early poetry was influenced by Charles Olson's "projective verse" co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council. Life and career Early life Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California, to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scottish, Irish and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There, they tended dairy-cows, kept l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claude Dalenberg
Claude Dalenberg (also known as Ananda Claude Dalenberg) (July 2, 1927 — February 18, 2008) was a Zen priest ordained by Shunryū Suzuki and a dharma successor of Tenshin Reb Anderson. Biography Dalenberg was born on July 2, 1927, in South Holland, Illinois. Growing up in a Dutch-Reformist environment, he attended Sunday school, catechism classes, Sunday morning and evening services. After serving in the Navy, Dalenberg enrolled in Northwestern University in the School of Engineering. Dalenberg initially discovered Buddhism after attending a talk by Alan Watts in Chicago in 1949. Dalenberg eventually graduated Northwestern with a degree in Philosophy. After moving to California in the 1950s, Dalenberg began attending the American Academy of Asian Studies where he met D.T. Suzuki, Gary Snyder and others who deepened his interest in Buddhism. Dalenberg was a member of a zazenkai group with Snyder, Philip Whalen, Albert Saijo, and Lew Welch. He studied with Nyogen Senzaki ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
