Before it disappears too far into the distance, let me just say how much I enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s recent take in The New Yorker on the relationship between Pissarro and Cézanne: “How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence.” Not least, it gives me the chance to post an etching of the two of them made in the early 1980s by Gerard Bellaart, who has for many years seared into my brain his love of both painters.
Can Books Provide an Agenda for Mass Murder?’
That is a key question posed by Jascha Hannover’s “The Books He Didn’t Burn,” a documentary to be featured in its U.S premiere at the Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 15 at Lincoln Center in New York. Its relevance to the beliefs of today’s white supremacists and rightwing Christian nationalists is stunning.
At Year’s End a Lineup from Long Ago
This card from 1968, designed and printed by Graham Macintosh, shows a little mag’s lineup and the subscription-cum-ad rates at the time. Demi Shaft Raven obtained the card from Kevin Ring, editor of Beat Scene, and posted it on Facebutt.
The First Folio’s Literary and Commercial Success
“Four hundred years ago yesterday saw the first printing of one of the great wonders of the literary world: Shakespeare’s First Folio. Published in 1623, seven years after he died, it was the first printed edition of the collected plays. Without this achievement, half of Shakespeare’s dramatic work would have been lost.” — Folio 400
A True Poet’s ‘Great Balls of Doubt’
The world Mark Terrill sees is “essentially forlorn, if not absurd, if not entirely hopeless. But his poetry is far from hopeless.” — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Wislawa Szymborska: ‘Negative’
‘You look like a ghost / who’s trying to summon up the living. / (And since I still number among them, / I should appear to him and tap: / good night, that is, good morning, / farewell, that is, hello…)”
Read an Excerpt
Claude Pélieu’s Kali Yug Express via Mary Beach
“A visionary prophetic book written when the Hippies and Yippies were dissolving the Sixties, which didn’t give us the political and social change needed . . . Pélieu saw Céline’s words become the reality: ‘The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy’.”— Charles Plymell
On Yom Kippur My Atonement Is Weak
Cold Turkey Press published this card four years ago in a limited edition. It applies now more than ever.
‘The Undying Guest’
Roving Poet With a Painter’s Eye
Mark Terrill’s latest book fits gemlike and exquisite in the palm of your hand. Yet it spreads like a flower deep in your head. Probing daily life for meaning in far-flung places, this sea-going, globe-trotting author is a roving poet with a painter’s eye. If it’s possible to be Kerouacian without the mawkishness and Baudelaireian without the derision, Terrill is both.
A Different Kind of Mushroom Cloud
Recalling the first Trinity nuclear blast, which is being memorialized by the new Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer,” I couldn’t help thinking of the last collage that Norman O. Mustill made and his first using digital tools.
A Proper Obituary for Jay Jeff Jones (1946-2023)
Jay Jeff Jones was born in in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1946. His parents, Nelson and Lila Fay Jones, both hailed from Cherokee ancestry. Raised in and around San Francisco, Jay joined the Hell’s Angels in the early 1960, riding his Harley Davidson around the city. As a teenager, he hung around North Beach, acting with the Mime Troupe, later working as a copy boy for the San Francisco Examiner. Frank Herbert, author of “Dune,” was one of his bosses.
William Cody Maher
‘If you don’t have a present, you always have a past’
‘A man is looking into his past. Let’s see what he finds there.’ — William Cody Maher, poet / writer / performance artist
Menus Animaux Is Coming Soon from Cold Turkey Press
… in a brilliant French translation by Bertrand Grimault.
The Philosopher’s Sling
Whatever you load into this self-purging contraption will hit the back of your head.
Jay Jeff Jones, RIP
Playwright, Essayist, Critic, and Such a Fine and True Poet
He died Saturday, May 20, 2023. He was 77. After theater studies and acting with The Mime Troupe in San Francisco, he moved to England, where he mostly lived since. In London he worked for Transatlantic Review, the British Drama League, and Running Man Press — and later edited the quarterly New Yorkshire Writing and co-curated (with Douglas Field) exhibition “OffBeat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground” at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which drew 130,000 visitors. He published poetry, essays, reviews, and fiction in many magazines and anthologies.
Mary Beach: A Pair of Dry Transfer Letraset Pieces
‘vuv’ was published in the little magazine Earthquake in 1967. The untitled piece was never published. James Horton discovered it in Carl Weissner’s Klactoveedsedsteen archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Too Funny to Forget
Christopher Hitchens Would Be Chortling
And the staff here hopes, so will you.