A journal account of the poet's emotions, affairs, friendships, family relationships, and travels during the mid-1950s and of the events and discoveries that shaped his controversial poetry

Journals Mid-Fifties 1954-1958: Allen Ginsberg ; Edited by Gordon Ball

Biographies & Memoirs

GINSBERG, ALlen

Ball, Gordon

Arts & Literature

Harpercollins

Journals: Mid-Fifties:1954-1958: Mid-fifties (1954-58) (Penguin Classics)

Penguin Classics

Fiction. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. Edited by Susan Gardner. These twenty–three short stories reaffirm author Gordon Ball's absorption with, and illumination of, "vanished" people, places, and times. Following on the heels of three memoirs, ON TOKYO'S EDGE re–creates the texture of life among a rarefied group of relatively isolated foreigners in American–Occupied Japan and the decade following Occupation. Peopling these interrelated short fictions are a great range of vivid characters, including schoolmates, lovers, military men, chemistry teachers, maids, a lustful preacher, and a missionary of exemplary character. Many of the tales focus on young Robert La Salle, suddenly transplanted at age five to a culture 8,000 miles distant and who, as year follows year, confronts levels of "foreignness" within himself and his family as well as the strange larger world around him. "ON TOKYO'S EDGE is a wonderful collection of stories about a young boy coming of age in a foreign land. The stories draw us into his world and let us learn with him what happens when two cultures collide. Ball's gentle, patient nature and his affection for this vanished world shines through vivid and undimmed by time. Beautifully written, it's a book I couldn't put down." — Bill Morgan "ON TOKYO'S EDGE gorgeously evokes the privileged world of American expats in 1950's Occupied Japan. Among them is Robert La Salle, a young boy, uncomfortably aware of being an outsider in a defeated country and keenly alert to adult foibles. In crisp, ringing detail, the story reveals a tightly–knit American community that is reshaping Japan even as Japan refashions its place in the world. Like the re–emerging nation, Robert is coming of age. His progress is poignant, funny, and vastly entertaining." — Cary Holladay "Gordon Ball has proven himself to be a first–rate memoirist, whether he's recalling his role as an observer/participant in the mid–Sixties New York alternative film community (66 Frames) or remembering his job at controlling the mayhem of Allen Ginsberg's upstate New York farm (East Hill Farm). In this collection of short stories, he has taken the shards of his memory as a youth growing up in Japan, shaped then with the tools of fiction, and crafted them into wonderful tales and anecdotes. He has accomplished what good fiction sets out to do." — Michael Schumacher

On Tokyo's Edge - Gaijin Tales From Postwar Japan

Literature & Fiction

United States

Red Mountain Press

A sixties memoir and an intriguing slice of avant garde film history.

66 Frames

Coffee House Press

This was Allen Ginsberg,” Gordon Ball declares after recounting intimate moments with the cultural icon and beloved Beat Generation poet on East Hill Farm, outside Cherry Valley, New York. During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was a haven for comrades in distress” in rural upstate New York. First described as an uninspiring, dilapidated four-bedroom house with acres of untended land, including the graves of its first residents, East Hill Farm became home to those who sought pastoral enlightenment in the presence of Ginsberg’s brilliance and generosity. A self-declared member of a ragtag group of urban castoffs” including Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Herbert Huncke, and the mythic Barbara Rubin, farm manager Ball tends to a non-stop flurry of guests, chores, and emotional outbursts while also making time to sit quietly with Ginsberg and discuss poetry, Kerouac, sex, and America's war in Vietnam. In honest and vivid prose, Ball offers a rare intimate glimpse of the poetic pillar of the Beat Generation as a striving and accessible human being at home on the farm and in the world.

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

Counterpoint

This was Allen Ginsberg,” Gordon Ball declared after recounting intimate moments with the cultural icon and beloved Beat Generation poet on East Hill Farm, outside Cherry Valley, New York. During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of the Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was a haven for comrades in distress” in rural upstate New York. First described as an uninspiring, dilapidated four-bedroom house with acres of untended land, including the graves of its first residents, East Hill Farm became home to those who sought pastoral enlightenment in the presence of Ginsberg’s brilliance and generosity. A self-declared member of a ragtag group of urban castoffs,” including Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Herbert Huncke, and the mythic Barbara Rubin, farm manager Ball tended to a non-stop flurry of guests, chores, and emotional outbursts while also making time to sit quietly with Ginsberg and discuss poetry, Kerouac, sex, and America's war in Vietnam. In honest and vivid prose, Ball offers a rare intimate glimpse of the poetic pillar of the Beat Generation as a striving and accessible human being at home on the farm and in the world.

Catapult

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ball, Gordon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ball, Gordon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ball, Gordon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Journals Mid-Fifties 1954-1958: Allen Ginsberg ; Edited by Gordon Ball

Journals: Mid-Fifties:1954-1958: Mid-fifties (1954-58) (Penguin Classics)

On Tokyo's Edge - Gaijin Tales From Postwar Japan

66 Frames

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg