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Goodbye Moon

Andrew O’Hagan: Me and the Moon, 25 February 2010

The Book of the Moon 
by Rick Stroud.
Doubleday, 368 pp., £16.99, May 2009, 978 0 385 61386 6
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Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon 
by Craig Nelson.
John Murray, 404 pp., £18.99, June 2009, 978 0 7195 6948 7
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Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon 
by Buzz Aldrin and Ken Abraham.
Bloomsbury, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2009, 978 1 4088 0402 5
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... the picture-postcard commentary he has always been asked to provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we ...

Diary

Amit Chaudhuri: Modi’s Hinduism, 17 December 2015

... an incredibly sophisticated culture could have produced a figure like Ganesh,’ Allen Ginsberg once said) made far less sense to him than the Renaissance and Enlightenment realism which, in a weirdly distorted form, has shaped the BJP as well as its secretive cultural-militant wing, the RSS. The BJP’s violence towards Islam emanates ...

Strange Stardom

David Haglund: James Franco, 17 March 2011

Palo Alto: Stories 
by James Franco.
Faber, 197 pp., £12.99, January 2011, 978 0 571 27316 4
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... He has made short films interpreting recent American poems. He did his best to impersonate Allen Ginsberg in the well-intentioned but misshapen Howl. He has just finished writing, directing and starring in The Broken Tower, an apparently straightforward biopic about Hart Crane. ‘I was really taken with his life,’ Franco says. ‘He had the ...

But I wanted a crocodile

Thomas Meaney: Castro in Harlem, 4 February 2021

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s 
by Simon Hall.
Faber, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2020, 978 0 571 35306 4
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... The egalitarian spectacle became a press sensation, and the city’s dissident intelligentsia – Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, I.F. Stone – flocked to the Theresa’s ballroom, with Henri Cartier-Bresson on hand to capture it all. Other Third World leaders in New York that week could only complain of stolen limelight. Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked in ...

Post-Modern Vanguard

Edward Mendelson, 3 September 1981

After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde 
by Christopher Butler.
Oxford, 177 pp., £7.95, November 1980, 0 19 815766 5
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... it from Futurist manifestos of fifty years before is its tone of lumpen disgruntlement. Allen Ginsberg, quoted in one of Butler’s epigraphs, says: ‘there is nothing to be learned from history any more. We’re in science fiction now.’ This remark, differing only in vocabulary from claims made early in this century for the new machine ...

Tomb for Two

Adam Mars-Jones, 10 February 1994

The Father 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 88 pp., £6, February 1993, 0 436 33952 8
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The Sign of Saturn 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 92 pp., £8, March 1991, 0 436 20029 5
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... out to be just such an epic use, and the poem ends:I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,Allen Ginsberg. I have done this thing,I and the other women this exceptionalact with the exceptional heroic body,this giving birth, this glistening verb,and I am putting my proud American boastright here with the others.This works perfectly well as satire ...

The First Person, Steroid-Enhanced

Hari Kunzru: Hunter S. Thompson, 15 October 1998

The Rum Diary 
by Hunter S. Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 204 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 9780747541684
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The Proud Highway: The Fear and Loathing Letters. Vol. I 
by Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Douglas Brinkley.
Bloomsbury, 720 pp., £9.99, July 1998, 0 7475 3619 8
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... who invited them to Kesey’s La Honda ranch for a party that has since, in accounts by Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and others, achieved mythic status. La Honda, with its gang of fancy-dress hippies, was ‘one of the strangest scenes in all Christendom – a wild clanging on tin instruments on a redwood hillside, loons playing flutes in the darkness, mikes ...

Charmed Quarantine

James Wood, 21 March 1996

Soul Says: On Recent Poetry 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 266 pp., £15.95, June 1995, 0 674 82146 7
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The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 100 pp., £18.95, January 1996, 0 674 08121 8
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The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition 
by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 137 pp., £7.99, April 1995, 0 571 17078 1
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... first two. (But then she will surprise, as she should, by praising Donald Davie, or attending to Allen Ginsberg.) If the lyric poem is self-contained and in some sense self-adjusting, then it follows that poets tear this membrane when they press too hard. Such forcing can be almost anything; it will be defined post hoc, by the size of the rent it has ...

Zeitgeist Man

Jenny Diski: Dennis Hopper, 22 March 2012

Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel 
by Peter Winkler.
Robson, 376 pp., £18.99, November 2011, 978 1 84954 165 7
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... composed ‘So What’, on Kind of Blue, inspired by Hopper’s repeated use of the phrase), with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and Warhol and Lichtenstein. He bought paintings that became a major Pop Art collection and took photographs that were published by glossy art and fashion magazines. He had a good eye and a sense of what was going to ...

Elegy for an Anarchist

George Woodcock, 19 January 1984

... as the ‘godfather of the Beats’, a title he disdained, though he chaired the occasion on which Allen Ginsberg first read ‘Howl’ (which Kenneth incidentally called ‘the confession of faith of a generation’), and recognised the relevance of such poets to their time in a way few other observers did in the beginning. That the works of ...

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
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... Communist Party allegedly referred to such techniques as hsi nao, ‘washing the brain’.In 1951, Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer, was appointed the CIA’s deputy director for plans. Dulles, who was convinced that the future would belong to the world power that could master the new ‘brainwashing’ technologies, was instrumental in shifting the ...

Knights of the Road

Tom Clark: The Beat generation, 6 July 2000

This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris 
by James Campbell.
Vintage, 320 pp., £7.99, May 2000, 0 09 928269 0
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... When Allen Ginsberg’s Beat vision-quest came through England in the spring of 1965, I was appointed by this famous renegade minstrel to set down his legend for the Paris Review. Ginsberg’s last words in our interview came in response to an inquiry about the role of command in the compositional process ...

Bad News

Iain Sinclair, 6 December 1990

Weather 
by John Farrand.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 239 pp., $40, June 1990, 1 55670 134 9
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Weather Watch 
by Dick File.
Fourth Estate, 299 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 1 872180 12 4
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Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment 
edited by J.T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins and J.J. Ephraums.
Cambridge, 365 pp., £40, September 1990, 9780521403603
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Crop Circles: The Latest Evidence 
by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews.
Bloomsbury, 80 pp., £5.99, October 1990, 0 7475 0843 7
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The Stumbling Block, Its Index 
by B. Catling.
Book Works, £22, October 1990, 9781870699051
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... of Liberation for the Demystification of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice ...

When students ruled the earth

D.A.N. Jones, 17 March 1988

1968: A Student Generation in Revolt 
by Ronald Fraser.
Chatto, 370 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 7011 2913 1
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Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties 
by Tariq Ali.
Collins, 280 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 9780002177795
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Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades 
by David Caute.
Hamish Hamilton, 464 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 241 12174 4
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Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report 
by Hans Koning.
Unwin Hyman, 196 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 9780044401858
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... attraction and repulsion, he engages with sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll ’n’ Allen Ginsberg. His special interest seems to be the events in France. Sitting in the Black Dwarf office, striving to keep up with the worldwide insurrections and improvisations, I was less captivated than my colleagues by the news of the French students. I ...

Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square

Christopher Hitchens: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 4 June 1998

1968: Marching in the Streets 
by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins.
Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £20, May 1998, 0 7475 3763 1
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The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 
by Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn.
Verso, 175 pp., £10, May 1998, 1 85984 290 9
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The Love Germ 
by Jill Neville.
Verso, 149 pp., £9, May 1998, 1 85984 285 2
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... elements and internal affairs, gave way before wit and music and understatement – just as if Allen Ginsberg had fulfilled his dream of levitating the Pentagon. To the extent that 68 metamorphosed into 89, then, it carried its point. But no date will ever mark history’s high tide.In a work-camp of enthusiasts which I attended in Cuba that ...

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