My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]
Archives for March 2016
Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State
![IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE First edition, 1935 [Doubleday, Doran and Company]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ItCantHappenHere-200x200.jpg)
Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the […]
Headstone With Michaux Text Superimposed
This drawing is from a series of ‘Headstones’ by Gerard Bellaart. “buries everything outside of himself everything he has known up to now everything that surrounds him with scorn” — Henri Michaux And here is the artist Arman’s actual headstone ‘Alone at Last’ in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. The irony of course is […]
Horrorscope
!['Horrorscope' by Jan Herman [Cold Turkey Press, 2016] verso image by Gerard Bellaart](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ct-horoscope-recto-475-200x200.jpg)
Mary Beach could draw horoscope charts in great detail. It was a serious hobby of hers. She only did them for people she knew, and if they piqued her interest. I completely forgot she had done mine — it was so long ago, circa 1967. An old friend reminded me the other day of what […]
There Is Joy in Making Music
In a video trailer for Finnegan Shanahan’s debut album from New Amsterdam Records, David Bloom conducts the new music ensemble Contemporaneous in a passage from “The Two Halves: Music for a Hudson River Railroad Dream Map.” The piece is a 35-minute song cycle described in a press release as “deft violin work and ethereal vocals […]
Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally
Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It’s worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump’s rallies these days. Writing in his diary that “M […]
The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries
![Meng & Ecker No. 5 [Savoy Books, 1992]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/meng-ecker-no.-5-200x200.jpg)
Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]