The Beat Generation

Ned Buskirk says, “I thought you could help spread the word for this guy and help corral some support for the good work he’s doing in the Beat world.”

Here I go – begging for money. Please help in any way you can.

Folks – three years ago The Beat Museum opened its doors at the beginning of probably the worst economic time in most of our lives. We’ve been able to hang on by our fingernails – barely.  And I’ll admit to you it has not been easy.  In fact, truth be told, there have been a few occasions when money was so tight I came very close to simply shutting the doors and walking away.

And frankly, the reason I haven’t done it is because every other day it seems I have someone say to me – “Thank you for doing this.  Thank you for keeping this spirit alive.” And I’ll admit that kind of feedback buoys me. But it doesn’t pay any of  the many overdue bills and it doesn’t keep our creditors from calling demanding payment.

So, I’m turning to you – the core group of people who have helped make The Beat Museum possible from the very beginning. I’m asking for your immediate financial assistance to help us get through the next few months until the tourists start to return to San Francisco in the Spring.

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There’s news floating all around the Internet that Kill Your Darlings, a film about Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the beginning of the Beat Generation, is finally coming together.

It sems like Ginsberg will be played by Jesse Eisenberg, Kerouac by Chris Evans and Carr by Ben Whishaw. The strangest part, though, is that not one of these sources even mentions David Kammerer. Kammerer, of course, was killed by Lucien Carr and would ostensibly have a part in a film that uses his death as its jumping-off point.

Jesse Eisenberg will play poet Allen Ginsberg in “Kill Your Darlings,” an ensemble about the murder that helped spawn the Beat Generation.Chris Evans and Ben Whishaw will also star in the pic, which is helmed by tyro John Krokidas, who penned the script with his onetime Yale roommate Austin Bunn.

Whishaw will play Lucien Carr, the Columbia U. undergrad who brought together Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac (Evans) and William S. Burroughs.

Maybe the part of David Kammerer just hasn’t been filled yet.

Eisenberg to star in Ginsberg film [Variety]

Denis Berry, Trustee of Timothy Leary’s estate, is seeking donations to help with the digitalization of his archives, which could turn out to be great for the future.

We need a significant amount of money to digitize the entire archive. This includes paying for the digitization of the photos, videos, audio, and documents, and also paying staff to research and add the proper metadata to the collection, so it can be searched and accessed for research purposes. (This is a huge task. Remember there are 500,000 documents alone.) 

If you would like to help preserve one of the most controversial periods in recent history and make it available to the public, please donate now!

Send donations by mail to:

The Futique Trust

PO Box 3561

Santa Cruz, CA 95063

For further information on how you may participate or to do an e-bank check, or money transfer contact Denis Berry at 831-566-0325 or by e-mail at denis@timothyleary.org.

Donate to the Timothy Leary Archives [Timothy Leary Estate]

According to news sources, this more than 50-year-old collaborative text between Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs is triumphantly, finally going to be released next month.

Over at the Irish TImes, they’re talking about Kerouac and the genesis of the story:

The extended circle of friends also included Burroughs, a 30-year-old Harvard graduate who lived in Greenwich Village, and David Kammerer, a homosexual book editor who had developed a fixation on Carr and followed him to New York.

In August of 1944, following an evening of drinking in Riverside Park, Carr stabbed Kammerer in the chest with a pocket knife. Believing him dead, he tied his arms together with shoelaces and rolled him into the Hudson River, where, an autopsy subsequently confirmed, he drowned.

Carr eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter. (Kerouac, to whom he had confessed the crime, was briefly jailed as an accomplice.) The salacious details of “the Columbia murder” remained on the front pages of the New York tabloids for weeks, and proved the fodder for a fictional treatment by two unpublished authors.

Alternating chapters, Kerouac and Burroughs produced And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which made the rounds of publishing houses in 1945 and was summarily rejected at each stop. (The title reflected Burroughs’s amused reaction to a radio report of a circus fire.) “It wasn’t a very good piece of work,” Burroughs would later candidly admit. “No publisher was interested, and in hindsight, I don’t see why they should have been.”

Whereas Barbara Hoffert of The Phoenix gave it only a semi-blurbial, cursory mention:

Speaking of fictionalized lives: who knew that WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS and JACK KEROUAC got together to re-create friend Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer? The novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove; November 1), is appearing only now.

Myself?  I’ve always been partial to the excerpts that were published in Word Virus.

You can add Alan Alda, Jeff Daniels and Mary Louise Parker to the list of actors and actresses that will be appearing in the upcoming movie version of Howl. As previously expected, James Franco will be playing Ginsberg. The film, which will cover the obscenity trials that surrounded the poem at the time of its publication, will be directed by Gus Van Sant after all.

This is starting to sound promising in all the right ways. More on this film as it develops.

Full story over at CBC News.

Related:

• Howl under development, obscenity imminent