A Beat Generation exhibition is coming to its end at the Pompidou Centre. It's good looking and witty. I especially liked the row of Bakelite telephones looking like the hotel lobby in a Hitchcock film, waiting for Cary Grant to make a call to his pneumatic blonde. Call any number, said the caption, to hear a Beat poem.

I didn't dial. The risk was simply too great that I'd hear an Allen Ginsberg poem. And Ginsberg is a grift perpetrated by the US literary-industrial complex. Translated to France, but not French, it looks like this