Episodes

  • EBSN Talking Beats #1: BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS: William Burroughs at 110

    EBSN Talking Beats #1: BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS: William Burroughs at 110
    Mar 14 2024
    “Talking Beats” is a new live video chat series open to all members, designed to get the conversation started. It aims at making Beat scholarship more accessible by opening up live dialogue and debate, while allowing scholars a platform to share their insight and scholarship. The live events will be advertised on the website, with video and audio later made available to all, for free. Episode 1 features writer and academic Alex Wermer-Colan in conversation with EBSN president and eminent William Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris. Our Patreon page

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    1 hr and 54 mins
  • Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 8

    Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 8
    Feb 18 2022

    The 9th annual conference of the EBSN took place virtually 29-31 October 2021. This is one of a series of recordings from that event. More info, including participant bios, is on the website: https://ebsn.eu/ebsn-2021/

    This panel, chaired by Peggy Pacini and moderated by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, is titled "Art and the Beat Generation"

    Panelists/papers:

    Beatriz Cordero: “Abstract Expressionists and the Beat Generation”

    Daria Baryshnikova: “Art Language Radically Revised”

    Tanguy Harma: “Counterculture, Counterpower? Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation”

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    1 hr and 33 mins
  • Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 7

    Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 7
    Dec 14 2021

    The 10th annual conference of the EBSN took place virtually 29-31 October 2021. This is the first part of a series of recordings from that event. More info is on the website: https://ebsn.eu/ebsn-2021/


    Conference organizers Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Benjamin J. Heal, and Chad Weidner introduce the event, with a short speech from EBSN president Oliver Harris. The panel titled "Spiralling Back to the Beats’ Spiritual

    Roots, Spiralling Forth to the Beats’ Neo-Shamanic Potential" is chaired by Franca Bellarsi.


    Panelists/papers:

    Sarah Biratate: “A Wordsworthian

    Reading on Diane di Prima’s Quest for

    Interfusion”


    Anikó Juhász: “‘The Skeleton of My

    Poetry’: The Beat Generation’s Influence

    on Ferenc Juhász”


    Jeremy Wastiaux: “The Ecopoetics of

    Jack Kerouac: Dissipative Structures in

    Visions of Cody and Mexico City Blues”

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    1 hr and 51 mins
  • Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 6

    Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 6
    Aug 12 2021

    Interview with Austria-based Beat Scholar, poet, filmmaker and musician Thomas Antonic. Discussion includes updates on the upcoming EBSN virtual conference EBSN2021, new content on the EBSN website, before focusing on the connections between the Beats and Austria, ruth weiss (including Thomas’s upcoming co-edited volume ruth weiss Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art , and film ruth weiss: One More Step West Is the Sea), and his recent Moloko Press book on William Burroughs’ time in Austria.


    Ralf Friel's Moloko Records compilation featuring tracks utilizing cut-up techniques, including a track by Thomas: http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Label&content=89


    The re-issue of the 50 track William S. Burroughs Hurts album mentioned in the podcast was also released by moloko in 2019: http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Label&content=77

    A new William S. Burroughs Hurts single will come out later this year. Bandcamp page: https://wsbh.bandcamp.com/


    The Fenn O'Berg track played is on this MEGO compilation: https://bleep.com/release/20813-fenn-oberg-magic-return


    A cd featuring a ruth weiss performance Thomas recorded in oakland in 2017 came out on absurdia records in 2018, mastered by kramer: https://absurdia.bandcamp.com/releases


    Benjamin J. Heal's third album under the name Coaxial came out this year on Cruel Nature Records: https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/neo-ism

    His other albums (including a cut-up inspired by Burroughs expert Jim Pennington) can be found here: https://coaxial.bandcamp.com/

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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 5

    Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 5
    Jul 18 2021
    Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.Abstract:The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?Spain Beat: Influence and Assimilation of the Beat Generation in Spanish Poetry. PresenterEstíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain) Abstract InfoWhile the Beat Generation foundational texts were published in the mid to late 1950s – Howl (1956); On the Road (1957); and Naked Lunch (1959) – one had to wait over a decade for the first serious translations of Beat poetry to crack through a Spain still under Franco’s dictatorship. As if slipping through the fissures of the “apertura” (opening), the so-called diplomatic and economic new phase of Franco’s regime, Beat poetry started to slowly but steadily infiltrate the Spanish poetic sphere. Nowadays, six decades after the first hints and murmurs about Beat poetry in Spain, a Beat ethos reverberates ever so strongly in different generations of Spanish poets. Beatitud: Beat Generation Visions (2011) and Hey Jack Kerouac: Beat Footprints in Spanish-speaking Poetry (2017), two recent anthologies which collect Spanish and Latin American poets directly influenced by the Beat Generation, attest to the still growing relevance of the Beat Generation across international waters. As the more than sixty poets included in their pages show, and as collections such as A. Robert Lee’s The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature (2018) or Erik Mortenson’s Translating the Counterculture (2018) also demonstrated, the Beat movement, more than quintessentially American, translates well internationally.This presentation maps the influence and assimilation of the Beat Generation in Spanish poetry. After a brief contextualization of the Spanish literary scene when the first Beat encounters took place, this presentation focuses on the different ways in which contemporary poets such as Uberto Stabile (1959), Ángel Petisme (1961), Antonio de Egipto (1975), or Mónica Caldeiro (1984), transpose Beat aesthetics, themes, and sensibilities into their poetry. Through varied and heterogeneous strategies, these and other Spanish poets revisit and revive the Beat poem to fit their own artistic vision.Speaker Bio Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, currently a lecturer at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain), specializes in gender and feminist discourses in postwar and avant-garde American poetry. Her research focuses on the poetry and art of poets like Anne Waldman, ruth weiss, Joanne Kyger, and Diane di Prima. Recent publications include “Shifting the Mythic Discourse: Ambiguity and Destabilization in Joanne Kyger’s The Tapestry and the Web” (Amaltea, 2020), “Intertextuality in Diane di Prima’s Loba: Religious Discourse and Feminism” (Humanities, 2018), “Beat Affinities in Spanish Poetry” (The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Poetry, 2018) and “Femmes: la Beat Generation (re)revisitée” (Beat Generation, 2018). She’s also coeditor of ruth weiss: Beat Poetry, Jazz, and Art (De Gruyter, to be published in 2021). Digging the Digital: The Beats and Video Games PresenterTomasz Sawczuk University of Bialystok (Poland) Abstract InfoEver since setting their foot on the social and cultural landscapes of the post-war world, the Beats have been both the ...
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    1 hr and 49 mins
  • Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 4

    Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 4
    Jul 18 2021
    Benjamin J. Heal and Erik Mortenson present an EBSN panel titled "Beat Internationalism" for the American Comparative Literature Association annual conference, April 2021. The recording of day 1, featuring Sonya Isaak and Esther Marinho Santana was unfortunately lost.Abstract:The Beat Generation as literary movement is usually regarded as quintessentially American, rooted in the great American tropes of free expression, border crossing and anti-materialism. Often overlooked in favor of other literary movements, this seminar proposes to look beyond the familiar figures of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs to investigate the relations between their works, aesthetics and techniques and those of Beat voices from across the globe. The shock waves of Howl's radical poetics, publicized via the anti-obscenity court case, and the success of On the Road, reverberated globally, and can be seen to form a foundation for experimental, politically radical works published around the world. Building on the developing and widening formulations of ‘Beat’ by scholars such as Jimmy Fazzino, this seminar will work towards a definition of ‘Beat Internationalism’ as applied to the works examined, and consider areas of convergence. More theoretical questions pertaining to the transnational turn in American literary studies, and the para-textual nature of Beat literature are also welcome. The Beat legacy continues to be felt across popular culture; with retrospectives and exhibitions featuring work by the Beats continuing to be a success. What do the Beats mean to contemporary audiences, and how are their techniques and styles employed in the works of contemporary writers and artists? How has the radicalism of the Beats manifested internationally?Li Yuan-chia’s Art and Transnationalism, a Connection with the Beat Generation. PresenterYa Chu Fu Independent Scholar Abstract InfoThe article discusses how the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia’s life philosophy and experiences as well as his art style resonates with the Beat Generation, in terms of the historical context of the Post-World War 2 period and their similar experimentalism and transnationalism. Li was born in China, and he later moved to Taiwan, Italy, and finally settled in the UK. The reason he kept moving has a lot to do with historical context in Taiwan, for instance, the 2nd KMT-CPC civil war（1945-1950), and the ‘White Terror’ (1947-1987). At the same time the writers, and often overlooked artists, of the Beat Generation- were experiencing similar political events, the Cold War between the US and Russia, and McCarthyism, in the US. Li Yuan-chia’s art utilizes the simplicity and minimalism of East-Asian visual art and Japanese Haiku and combines with Western Avant-guard styles, such as abstract expressionism. He often paints with calligraphic symbols with ink backgrounds and abstract blocks of colors. Interestingly, one of the artists associated with the Beat Generation, Brion Gysin, also experimented with abstract ink roller poems. If we put their works together, we can see a lot of similarities between them. This paper will explore Li Yuan-chia’s Beat connections and make comparisons between his life and work and that of Beat artists and writers, for example, Brion Gysin's paintings and permutation poems, and Bernice Bing and Jay DeFeo's abstract and minimalistic artworks and Beat sensibility.Speaker Bio Fu Ya Chu, graduated in 2019 from National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, with a first-class honors degree in Psychology and Philosophy. She has an ongoing interest in visual art, literature, and translation, having translated letters of Taiwanese Modernist novelist Qi Deng Sheng and Professor A Robert Lee's poetry. She plans to study for a master's degree in comparative literature in the UK, and continue her research on Li Yuan-chia and Hong Kong writer Eileen Chung. Hsia Yu: Translingual Cut-ups PresenterBenjamin Heal - National Chung Cheng University Abstract InfoTaiwanese poet Hsia Yu has developed an iconic presence in her native country. Her sinophone works appear with a transnational flavor, inflected with French sensibilities and Western “Beat Generation” derived stylistics, incorporating a visual aesthetic best demonstrated by her most well known work, the self-published Pink Noise (2007), printed as a trilingual text on transparent acetate. Pink Noise utilizes the semantic problems with bi- and trilingual translation with texts composed in English auto-translated into Mandarin, allowing the breakdown of meaning that results from the over-literal auto-translation to become part of the poetry. This paper explores the poet’s experimentation with translingualism, from these experiments with the liminal spaces presented by machine translation to the broader pursuit of Beat experimentation that marks her work. As J.B. Rollins states, Hsia Yu’s ‘refusal to be cowed by cultural essentialism and her sense of the ...
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    1 hr and 53 mins
  • Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 3

    Playback - The EBSN Podcast Episode 3
    Jul 18 2021
    Estíbaliz Encarnación Pinedo presents a panel titled “Beat generation goddess ruth weiss (re)considered” for the British Association of American Studies digital conference, April 8, 2021, in support of the book ruth weiss Beat Poetry, Jazz, Art (De Gruyter 2021).European Beat Studies NetworkBAASChad Weidner Reaching Towards the Light: Transitory Spaces and the Negated Material Body in Selected Texts by ruth weissBen Heal ruth weiss: Transnationalism and ResistancePolina Mackay ruth weiss and the Poetics of the DesertEstíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo Gender and identity in ruth weissStefanie Pointl Place, Movement, and Identity in ruth weiss’s PoetryPeggy Pacini ruth weiss: a poetics grounded in intermediality and performanceFrida Forsgren ruth weiss and painted haikusThomas Antonic The ruth weiss PapersAbstract: This session brings together a selection of European Beat Studies Network members toredress, and in some cases introduce, the work produced by Beat-associated poet ruth weiss (1928-2020). Conceived as flash presentations (limited to 10 minutes followed by workshop-like discussions)the aim is to offer a wide selection of critical and aesthetic points of entrance into weiss’s work.Chair: Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedoruth weiss: Transnationalism and ResistanceBenjamin J. Heal resituates and recovers the work of weiss through a transnational context of poeticexperimentalism, outlining the many liminalities in her life, art and writing, with a particular focus on her ongoing attack on the conventions of authorship and constructions of the singular literary geniusthrough the use of contradiction, collaboration and various forms of multimedia expression.ruth weiss and the Poetics of the DesertPolina Mackay explores ruth weiss’ depiction of the desert as a multifaceted symbol of contrastingvalues. She compares weiss’s images of the desert as a local of both light and shadow or life and death to the socio political poems of poets like Sandra Osborne which write against America’s wars beyond its border (e.g., invasion of Iraq). The aim is to encourage discussion on ruth weiss’s relevance to current concerns in American poetry.Gender and identity in ruth weissEstíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo explores ruth weiss’s complication and blurring of establishedcategorizations through which she documents both the struggle and the balance, the exclusion and the dissolution of the (de)gendered selves that inhabit her work. To study the ways in which weiss’sresolves these tensions, she analyzes the thematic traits as well as the stylistic choices that allow weiss to write beyond gender in collections such as Steps (1958), Desert Journal (1977) or Single Out (1978).The ruth weiss PapersThomas Antonic delivers an overview and evaluation of the ruth weiss papers. The aim of it is toprovide scholars with information about the content and extent of published and unpublished writtenand audiovisual material, as well as other documents such as photographs and correspondence. It isintended, for future analyses, to make scholarship aware of the vast amount of works ruth weiss hascreated over the past seven decades which go far beyond the scope of her published poetry collections that were the only subject of studies to date.Place, Movement, and Identity in ruth weiss’s PoetryStefanie Pointl examines the representation of movement in ruth weiss’s autobiographical poetry,arguing that weiss, as an Austrian American Beat writer and Holocaust survivor, provides an alternative perspective on the recurrent Beat theme of mobility. In her writing, she constructs a transnational identity founded on border-crossing movements and the resulting interpersonal connections. Through depictions of both physical and metaphorical journeys, weiss’s poetry portrays movement as a unifying link between people from different cultural backgrounds that replaces national origins as a source of identification.ruth weiss: a poetics grounded in intermediality and performancePeggy Pacini focuses on weiss's performance at the Summer of Love 2007 to examine how this shedslight on the essence of her poetry composing and performing practice. A series of micro-analysis of “the audiotext" and of contextual factors will contribute to comprehend how this performance releaseswhat weiss herself defined as the “free flowing force moving outward from the unconscious towardsself and other” (Grace 2004:58) that not only defines her poetic language, but a poetics grounded inintermediality and performance.Reaching Towards the Light: Transitory Spaces and the Negated Material Body in Selected Texts byruth weissChad Weidner focuses on what an environmental understanding can bring to many Beat-affiliatedwriters like ruth weiss. weiss contributed to the international flourishing of Beat poetics, but questionsremain: To what extent can green criticism benefit by engaging unfamiliar and experimentaltransnational texts written by women? Can Beat ...
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    1 hr and 28 mins
  • Playback - The EBSN Podcast - Episode 2

    Playback - The EBSN Podcast - Episode 2
    Dec 27 2020

    Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo interviews esteemed Beat scholar  Nancy M. Grace, Virginia Myers Professor and Chair of  Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the College of Wooster, US. She is a founding member of the Beat Studies Association and the editor of The Journal of Beat Studies.  The discussion includes the future direction of Beat Studies, Women of the Beat Generation, transnationalism in Beat Studies, and the legacy of the Beat Generation.

    Selected publications by Nancy M. Grace:

    Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers, with Ronna C. Johnson. University Press of Mississippi, 2004.

    The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Mellen, 1995.

    Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation, with Ronna C. Johnson. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

    Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 

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    44 mins