…the whole first name/last name thing. I ran into this in my post on Combo when I found myself having to refer to–er–K. Silem Mohammad, Katie Degentesh, and Michael Magee all in a single sentence. Now I don’t know Katie Degentesh or Michael Magee, so I referred to them with their last names. But I do know, um, Mr. Mohammad,…

What cheered me up last night was Stephanie’s copy of Combo 12, which Stephanie pulled out of her bag and let me read at dinner and then just let me keep–I tried to give it back but she insisted, the logic being, I think, that the Bay Area had plenty of Combos and maybe I needed to spread the gospel…

If you do want to hear something decent on Ginsberg, though, you should get yourself to San Diego between Christmas and New Year’s and look for some spiky-haired Asian kid in a suit talking about “Auto Poesy: Allen Ginsberg’s Poetics of Transcription”: This paper examines the original recordings of Allen Ginsberg’s “auto poesy,” poems dictated into a portable tape recorder…