"Learning a hieroglyphic language is excellent practice in the lost art of inner silence." -- William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind "Cup of tea at dawn a room with rose wall paper wind stirs cigarette ash on a naked thigh calm miracle of apomorphine dawn . . . . ." Burroughs Lecture Series: Iain Sinclair from The Photographers' Gallery on Vimeo. … [Read more...]
The Evolving NY Times Nameplate
From 1851, to 1857, to 1896, to 1914, to 1967, to last week: David W. Dunlap's story, "Modern Identity in Ancient Lettering," does not include a reference to the overprinting that the designers of The NYT Magazine prefer. (Style aside, Matthew Shaer's interview did deserve that kind of prominence.) … [Read more...]
Norman Mailer on Almost Everything
If there's a richer radio archive of interviews with cultural figures and others from all walks of life than the one amassed by Studs Terkel, I'm unaware of it. Here, for example, is Norman Mailer talking with him on March 17, 1960, about writing, critics, self-censorship, and American life. It's great stuff. Mailer offers his thoughts about "affirmative" literary works, apathy, and a lack of passion in modern life generally; about Samuel Beckett and theater; about Jack Kerouac and Beat writers, and their reception in the United States; and … [Read more...]
When Trump Hog Called His Cabinet: Sooie!
Trump's first cabinet meeting was the perfect reminder of one of William S. Burroughs's most satirical "routines." Burroughs wrote the piece in 1953 and had it published for the first time in a little mimeo magazine called Floating Bear. Since then it's been reprinted many times, most famously as a mimeographed booklet by Fuck You Press. It begins like this: Immediately after the Inauguration the President* appeared on the White House balcony dressed in the purple robes of a Roman emperor and, leading a blind toothless lion on a gold chain, … [Read more...]
Rauschenberg Had a Sense of Humor
And it's now on view at MoMA, too. To hell with the god of music, poetry, and art ... … [Read more...]
Please Insert
My staff of thousands thinks this paragraph by Barrett Brown should be inserted like an unsheathed stallion's penis into every last one of the obituaries plaguing us about the late Roger Ailes . . . just in case the corpse hasn't been properly mounted: I don’t really mind Fox on ideological grounds, as a nation with this many prisons and military bases clearly merits at least one openly fascist news network, but I do object to the shamelessness with which it insists on coarsening the culture. For half a century, there was an unspoken … [Read more...]
On View: Mary Beach’s Witty ‘Illaminations’
Mary Beach deserved to be an art star. Her collages are in a class with Richard Hamilton's. But she was incapable of bullshitting her way to the top. She also submerged whatever ambitions she may have had to advance the work of her partner Claude Pélieu. She translated him, published him, promoted him and, when she had money, supported them both on their restless odyssey from Paris to San Francisco to Hawaii to London to New York and other landing points before finally touching down in upstate NY's Cherry Valley. Mary died in 2006. She would … [Read more...]
As the French Say: Dégoûtant!
The print edition logo for Michael Kinsley's new opinion slot in The New York Times says it all. Well, almost all. What it doesn't say is how disgusting it is. Kinsley's first column is not only awful, but worse, he will be "revisiting this theme regularly." It looks like The Times is repositioning -- a better term might be auditioning -- to accomodate el presidente Twitter Fingers and his tweet followers. Which is even more disgusting. Postscript: May 8 -- This is the tagline for the column: The president’s flaws are well known to … [Read more...]
360 Degrees of Separation . . .
. . . from Madhattan . . .... where Straight Up's tireless staff of thousands took a break. … [Read more...]
From a Secret Location
Once upon a time hundreds of editors, mainly poets, and all manner of bohemian riffraff took to their mimeo machines. They produced an avalanche of little magazines, lovingly collected by Granary Books as a wonder of the age. This literary avalanche was documented in "A Secret Location on the Lower East Side," a 1996 exhibition at the New York Public Library. The curators also produced a catalogue with the same title. Unlike the mimeos it describes, the catalogue was not mimeographed. It is still in print (also unlike the mimeos). The "mimeo … [Read more...]
A Man With Moxie Plus
When Asger Jorn heard that he'd been awarded a Guggie, he told them to fuck off. … [Read more...]
What Algren’s Legacy Doesn’t Need …
... is a museum for tourists that perpetuates clichés about him. The Northwest Indiana Times reports that a new museum, which opened Sunday in Gary, Indiana, where Nelson Algren once had a cottage, is being advertised by a "huge 8-foot-by-10-foot photo" of him "leaving a Gary liquor store with a six-pack." A founder of the museum said he hopes "the life-sized poster would become an attraction all its own, and draw photographers and selfie-takers the way Felix 'Flex' Maldonado's nearby Jackson 5 mural has." To complete the selfie … [Read more...]
Poetry of the Absurd
This is a tape cut-up I made with Carl Weissner way back in 1971. We used a recording of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley speaking to members of the city council. We "cut" the tape electronically, not manually, on a big old reel-to-reel that I had at the time. You can hear the cuts. Technically speaking, they could have been smoothed over. But we were having too much fun going for the absurd "poetry" to fix them. Daley's poem: Today to my surprise I find that I must rise To press my lips on my toe tips Can they be mine? Can they be … [Read more...]
What Went Wrong
Spineless Democrats and Republican thugs: A 30-minute rap on why we are where we are. … [Read more...]
Wonders Never Cease
EPITAPH FOR MY TYPEWRITER I've learned to keep cheerful by committing all my suicides on the typewriter. A shot into the keyboard's brain equals one p o + e m THE UNIVERSAL BUBBLE* The Universe -- more like a great thought than a great machine -- a soap bubble with corrugations -- not the interior of the soap bubble but its surface and the substance of the soap film -- empty space wedded on to empty time. *based on a passage from The Mysterious Universe by Sir … [Read more...]
Beckett’s Letters: ‘Dull, Dull, Dull,’ But —
Serious readers of Samuel Beckett have been treated to four massive volumes of his letters. I haven't read any of the collections. So I have to take the word of two readers who have, and both tell me the experience has been a form of slow torture. The letters are mundane and largely disappointing: "Dull, dull, dull," I'm told. I'd bet that Beckett himself would agree. Nevertheless, the volumes do contain dozens upon dozens of interesting items, like the note to the composer William Osborne that appears in the latest collection, The Letters of … [Read more...]
Female Power (from Medusa to Merkel)
I love reading Mary Beard. She may be a professor, the highest of high-brow professors, but she writes -- and speaks (albeit with a British accent) -- like an actual human. Enjoy. Her talk begins: In 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy about a nation of women -- and women only -- that has existed for two thousand years in some remote, still unexplored part of the globe. A magnificent utopia: clean and tidy, collaborative, peaceful (even the cats have … [Read more...]