Our good friend, David S Wills, over at Beatdom, has two informative and provocative recent pieces on his always-entertaining site. The first of them, an experiment, done, confessedly, “out of silliness and morbid curiosity rather than any genuine interest in the technology’s potential” – (yes, we return to the embattled subject of artificial intelligence!) – Howl and AI– an examination of the current intelligence of popular generative AI.
“I was curious”, he writes, what would happen if I asked ChatGPT to rewrite Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem, “Howl”. The results were, not unsurprisingly, underwhelming. “Angelheaded wanderers, burning for some ancient, heavenly link, searching through the night’s machinery and the starry skies above” was its suggestion for Allen’s famous line “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. Grok, (the AI component of Twitter/X) scarcely did much better – ” “Visionary rebels, yearning for the celestial link to the cosmic engine humming through the night“.
Wills was impressed with one artificially-created line – “In their destitution, with eyes like hollow moons, they inhaled the mystic gloom of unheated lofts, drifting over cityscapes, lost in the rhythm of jazz“. (from Allen’s “who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz”)
He also experimented with possible analysis of the poem (“reasonable but not hugely insightful or original”) and “suggestions for improvement” (“This (was) where the analysis really fell apart. However, I gave it a stupid task, so I should have expected a stupid response”), as well as suggestions for a possible book-cover and an image (generated image) of Allen writing the poem.
Read the whole piece here
David Wills also reviews a book we’ve noted and reviewed in these pages, Leon Horton‘ and Michele Macdannold‘s stunning and illuminating Corso compendium, Gregory Corso – Ten Times A Poet
“This is a great book and much needed in the Beat world, where Corso—though admired by many—is too often omitted or consigned to a footnote role.. This is definitely a book any self-respecting Beat fan should have on their shelf.”
Read that whole piece – here
Queer – Luca Guadagnino‘s “Queer”, his William Burroughs adaptation – following its premier at the Venice Film Festival, continued with showings at the London and Toronto Film Festivals and continued to garner rave reviews
Metacritic, when we last looked, cited 22 reviews, 16 of them positive (some of them effusively so), 6 of them “mixed” (a few concerns and reservations), and not a single one negative. Rotten Tomatoes, surveying 37, gave it a 78% rating (again, notably enthusiastic).
Among the observations:
David Fear, writing in Rolling Stone – “It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material…” – “Whether or not Luca Guadagnino‘s screen adaptation will change the book’s standing remains to be seen — but this sordid, steamy, and exceedingly swooning take on Burroughs’ novel will certainly move you to appreciate how he makes the author’s amour fou tale his own.”
David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter (setting the background) – “The jazzy experimental style of the Beat Generation writers has made their work notoriously tricky to adapt for the screen.Walter Salles’ On the Road, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch took stabs at it with varying degrees of success. John Krokidas’ under-appreciated Kill Your Darlings arguably came closer to capturing the rebellious energy of the literary movement by tracing a formative episode in the lives of the writers themselves. In Queer, Luca Guadagnino meets William S. Burroughs on the iconoclast’s own slippery terms and the result is mesmerizing.”
We mentioned it last week but it’s worth quoting this week – from Damon Wise at Deadline:
“Landing three years before Ted Morgan’s for-a-long-time-definitive biography Literary Outlaw (until Barry Miles’ Call Me Burroughs followed it 10 years ago), Queer was the Rosetta Stone that gave Burroughs’ admirers the insight they were looking for: While still writing in the hip but elegantly literary streetwise style that made him an idol to the likes of Lou Reed and Patti Smith, Queer expressed a so-far-unseen tenderness to his work, a deep-seated need that suddenly made everything about him make sense — not just his addiction but the entirety of his prolific output, in novels and shortform…”
“..In Luca Guadagnino’s incredibly insightful adaptation, Daniel Craig plays Bill Lee, the pseudonym Burroughs used to spare his wealthy family from the indignity of being related to the author of a lurid paperback called Junkie (1953). Lee both is Burroughs and yet not Burroughs, but the two overlap, notably in the expression of their sexuality..”
Wise goes on, recounting the sexual yearning that is at the heart of the film, and then concludes:
“..With this film, Guadagnino and Craig have succeeded where David Cronenberg failed, in humanizing a man whose preference for the company of cats was construed as misanthropy. Burroughs wanted to communicate without speaking, and with this highly intelligent film, Guadagnino has done that for him, translating into ravishing visuals the final words he entered into his journal before his death in August 1997, aged 83: “Love?” he wrote. “What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”
Tomorrow – Roger Jackson at Jewel Heart (starting at 10 am. EST) will be presenting an on-line program on “Buddhism and The Beats” – see here
Dick McBride – we wrote about him here – has a fresh and lively website
The great American poet – we wrote about him here – Paul Blackburn died on this day
Friday 13th? who cares?