Mary Beach’s Electric Bananas, a brilliant posthumous collection put together by her daughter Pam Plymell, uncovers a writer who has the kind of filthy wit that belongs in James Joyce’s league. Beach is more dangerous, however, because she is more accessible. She has mastered a style along the lines of Finnegan’s Wake, but simplified it. […]
Archives for 2017
Ending the Year With a Cosmic Joke
WELCOME TO 2018 The image is from Victor Hugo, 1854. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Goodbye to a Depressing Year
The image is a detail from a drawing by Paul Klee. The poem owes a debt to George Grosz and Gerard Bellaart. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Quad Cinema Hosts Wyler Festival
WNYC’s Sara Fishko has produced a terrific audio piece about William Wyler and two of his best films — “Dodsworth” and “The Best Years of Our Lives” — both of which are playing among the 25 being screened at the Quad through Dec. 11. Listen: Click for the schedule. “Jan Herman’s biography of William Wyler […]
Amazon Cashes in on AIDS
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A Magazine for Word and Image
Andreas Hansen 3 Sabine Vogel 84 Tone Avenstroup 6 Caroline Hartge 86 Joshua Groß 7 Christian Geissler 88 Katja Horn 10 Sabine Peters 90 Wolf Ways 11 Bert Panenfuß 91 Kai Pohl 12 Stefan Döring 94 Kristin Schulz 15 Karl Krüll 95 Alexander Krohn 16 Monika Rinck […]
2017: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan
A Straight Up greeting to mark the moment. From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands … thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . thanks […]
As the World Turns
Separated by 500 years and $450 million. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘Give Peace a Chance’
here’s my attempt at images for oil transfer. wrote it on the full page ad in NYT, as you can see. Yoko Ono takes out the ad each year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s birthday. first wrote it with the carbon paper layered underneath the paper i wrote on. didn’t work. so i then […]
Had the Algorithm Been Misplaced?
Drawing by Gerard Bellaart The corpse blinked. Dead but alive dreaming awake. Had the algorithm been misplaced? Was it “life-in-death” within the winding sheet or “death-in-life”? Signaling the dreamer, the corpse winked but could not speak — or would not. I woke and no sleep came. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘Just Like Real Life’
William Cody Maher & Signe Mähler “two people who have been living together for a long time have learned how to live together with the objects and the thoughts and the feelings that they have had for each other and when the thoughts and feelings and the rooms and the objects change and even the […]
Another Cold Turkey Card
Drawing by Gerard Bellaart Past hopes rise like a ghost. Immutable. Indifferent. Are there no triumphs? Will dreams perform miracles? Strindberg said, “I dream, therefore I exist.” Stalked by a crazy sage dressed in weeds, I scribbled. The unguarded self is burdened with weariness like a dog shitting on the sidewalk. — Jan Herman (Indebted […]
Yes, Please
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‘That man is killing everybody!’
From ‘Sonnet II’ in FOURTEEN Deformed Sonnets, published by Peter Engstler Verlag [2017]: . . . The ballroom of history bumped and cried. “Look out! That man is killing everybody!” The word SHAME crawled across the screen like broken teeth in the fist of time. A wilting sun had set. The night was threadbare. “This […]
Writer on a Rampage
In a tribute to the late German author Carl Weissner, who wrote experimental fiction in both English and German in addition to translating more than 100 books by dissident American and British authors, the literary scholar Tomasz Stompor delivered a paper on Weissner’s novel, Death in Paris, at a recent meeting of the European Beat […]
Created Image = Moment in Time
Speaking of maps (per William Burroughs), Malcolm Mc Neill has something to say: MAPS from Malcolm Mc Neill on Vimeo. Music from “Elements” by Ludovico Einaudi. A CREATED IMAGE is the map of a moment in TIME, embedded within it are all the energies that occurred during its making: the sounds, the feelings, the people, […]
Are You a Facebook Lemming?
I disliked Facebook from the very beginning. Resisted it at first. Refused to open an account. But everybody was using it, so I figured I had to see what it is. To do that required an account. As soon as I opened one, I decided Facebook wasn’t for me. I tried to close the account […]