Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill
has been a happy pairing since 2012. It still is. So here they are again, sweetened by Heathcote Williams’s words in a narration-cum-montage by Alan Cox. It’s all so delish.
Designers Pushing the Envelope . . . ?
The New York Times Magazine used to have a nameplate. It still does. Most of the time it’s all there. Sometimes you have to search for it. How come? The designers are: a) being avant-garde, b) reinforcing a theme, c) too clever by half, d) all three, or maybe e) just having fun.
Amélie’s Recent Drawings
What Seahorses and Birds Have in Common
Although seahorses and birds do not share a common link in the fossil record or, as far as we can tell, even in legend, they do share a delicacy of line and boldness of appearance in these two drawings by a teenage artist whose talent and development have caught the attention of this blog.
With Democracy in Peril
May the Midterms Land as Gracefully as Amélie’s Pigeons
The staff here has followed from a distance the drawings of a young Dutch art student, Amélie by name. She was precociously talented at 13, at 14, and at 15. She is now 16, and her studies continue with work more accomplished than ever. Regardless of the midterm outcome, we will be posting some of her other recent drawings soon.
Update Nov. 10 — The Dems oughta take Amélie’s pigeons as their aspirational logo.
Do You Remember ‘do you remember’ by Emmett Williams?
And is it the most rigorous piece of lyrical whimsy in the American poetry canon? I think so.
The poem, “structured by six vertical progressions,” was first published in “Underground,” in 1966. It appeared the following year in “An Anthology of Concrete Poetry,” published by Something Else Press, and most recently appears in “A Something Else Reader.”
do you remember
when I loved soft pink nights
and you hated hard blue valleys
and I kissed mellow red potatoes
and you loved livid green seagulls
and I hated soft yellow dewdrops
and you kissed hard pink oysters …
A Something Else Reader
Newly Discovered, It Was Hidden Away for 50 Years
” ‘A Something Else Reader’ is a previously unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963, and to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. … He assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal, which went into his archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled it.” — Primary Information
Tent Shaker Vortex Voice
A Poet Inspired by Lucretius and Lauren Eisley
Charles Plymell’s extraordinary chapbook “Tent Shaker Vortex Voice” has just been released in a fourth printing by Bottle of Smoke Press. In a new prefatory essay to the long poems “We Heard the Game Lord Speak …” and “Planet Chernobyl,” he writes that he has “drawn upon Lucretius and Loren Eisley,” along with “many great thinkers from Darwin to modern atomic theorists” as well as Shakespeare. Plymell, who recently turned 87, is the author of two dozen books of poetry and prose.
‘wintry winds / inter these refugees’
silent armies
still gather
within …
heart-sick, we await
a new year of war
without
‘The archetypes are in us, and eternal’
“I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude and the dark were my hell.” — Charles Lamb, as quoted by John Gross.
Lamb believed that superstition could have generated the apparitions he feared. But at bottom he discounted that. “These terrors are of older standing. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal,” he wrote. I thought of him last week when I saw this painting.
Orwellian Chuckle
Press Freedom in Full Squeak (replayed)
From a lifetime ago, though in fact it’s only been six years . . . and now what?
When a Poet Takes a Walk With Book and Camera
A I R F I E L D
‘Now that my hand just
reached into the book shelf
and grabbed your book,
it looks like you’ll be walking
out on the airfield with me …’
Day of Atonement: No Headline Needed
BRIGHTLY
Let us enter
the pure diamond
of evening
bound by nothing
but the pinprick
of the stars. . . .
Rimbaud’s Death Is Still Traveling
Efe Murad’s Turkish translation of “Rimbaud. Death in Marseille” has just been published. Carl Weissner’s small masterpiece — small only because it isn’t longer — is now a Turkish delight. Murad is a poet and historian, as well as a translator.
Jack Kerouac at 100, the Beats in Ruigoord
Kerouac fans In The Netherlands have been celebrating his centennial with readings, film presentations, and concerts throughout 2022. The celebration will culminate on Oct. 9 at the artists’s village of Ruigoord, near Amsterdam. An international gathering of writers, performers, and scholars will pay tribute, along with keynote speakers Joyce Johnson and Ed Sanders, who are to participate via Zoom.
A Hero of Our Time
Lermontov + Edward Gorey + Nabokov = Paperback Keeper
The cover of this mass-market paperback of Mihail Lermontov’s 1840 novel, “A Hero of our Time,” was designed by Edward Gorey. It is taken from a portion of a painting by Lermontov. The typography is also by Gorey. I show it here because it is such a gem, and because a cover of this caliber doesn’t often come along. The 1951 paperback edition was the first publication of of Vladimir Nabokov’s translation from the Russian in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov.
‘The Sex Pistols Had the Royals in Their Sights’
or ‘Off With Their Heads’ . . . from ‘An Investigative Poem’ by Heathcote Williams” (for those disgusted by the nauseating glorification of the House of Windsor).
Of Plumbers and Philosophers
Some old proto-Freudian
out of the German Yellow Pages
is looking up at me
from the kitchen floor
where he’s installing a new P-trap
under my kitchen sink,
telling me about how things are
and how they used to be . . .