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* Ferlinghetti had gotten “this romantic idea” of a trans-Siberian trip from the poet Blaise Cendrars. “Endless Siberia!” he wrote in his travel journal: “Lost land & Lost people . . . which bled & bled its white blood & its red blood . . .” of the millions of souls, including poets, who haunted those infinite “bare snowfields.” Russian Winter Journal (February-March 1967) in Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 (New York: Liveright, 2019).

* Gaddis refers to Ginsberg’s reading and performance at “A Tribute to William Burroughs” at the Old Vic Theatre. Letter dated December 3, 1978, in The Letters of William Gaddis (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2013).