“It’s wasted breath to tell a scumbag: ‘It’s not nice to be such a swine. Why don’t you smarten up, get your act together?’ We fail to comprehend that the majority of scumbags are consciously scummy—they are aware of it and would not wish to be any different, as long as they’re able to conceal their scumminess.”
— NARCOTICS by Stanisław I. Witkiewicz
Diane di Prima, R.I.P.
Diane di Prima died several days ago in San Francisco at age 86. The obituaries have poured in, paying tribute to a life devoted to writing—her own and others’. She was a poet, editor, publisher, memoirist, novelist and, not least, a social activist. I believe she will be remembered most for her poetry. What I like is its simplicity. I understand it. I like its rich feeling, which is straightforward and strong and not at all sentimental. Her poems age well. I’d be surprised if her poetry didn’t last longer than the poetry of many of the Beats.
Lear Lite
Shakespeare’s writing—all of it, poetry and plays—was repulsive to Tolstoy, who claimed that whenever he read Shakespeare he was overcome by “repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment.” As for “King Lear,” ranked among Shakespeare’s four greatest tragedies, he found it “at every step,” according to George Orwell, “stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, ‘wild ravings,’ ‘mirthless jokes,’ anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.”
Bob Kaufman: ‘Tin Pan Alley’
“No one has ever written a song about Coronary Thrombosis, / Even though its blessings have been widely recognized . . . / Even though it has saved many people from a lifetime of sorrow . . . / Even though it has rescued many people from bottomless pits of Death . . . / Even though it has provided a good life for millions of doctors, nurses, / Ambulance drivers, morticians, stonecutters and countless others. / Yet, on ungrateful Tin Pan Alley / No one has ever written a song about Coronary Thrombosis.”
Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Comes Alive in London Reading
‘The Odyssey’ tells of the adventures of Odysseus as he tries to get home after the Trojan War, and of his wife Penelope’s struggles to keep their island kingdom from civil war, along with his son Telemachus’ search to find his lost father. This reading brings 72 actors together to perform the epic poem in sequence. ‘The Odyssey’ was first performed by bards across the Mediterranean in the eighth century BCE. The entire reading will remain on YouTube for a week.
Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs
In a Wake Island Broadcast James Grauerholz speaks to Paul Kwiatkowski. Wake Island is a conversation series exploring tone, atmosphere, and aesthetics.
‘Algorithms Will Be the Death of Us All’
So said a friend. To which I add two deformed sonnets and a collage.
Fascinating Passages from Fascinating Books
‘He did not believe that men were born good, and he admitted original perversity as an element to be found in the depths of the purest souls—perversity, that evil counsellor who leads a man on to do what is fatal to himself precisely because it is fatal and for the pleasure of acting contrary to law, without other attraction than disobedience, outside of sensuality, profit, or charm. This perversity he believes to be in others as in himself. . . . As much as possible he banished from poetry a too realistic imitation of eloquence, passion, and a too exact truth.’
Good Question: ‘Who’s Your Death Hero?’
Although Albert Camus does not come up in WHO’S YOUR DEATH HERO? — a conversation between the filmmaker Richard Kern and the writer who goes by the name of Supervert — he would be my candidate in answer to the title. Camus’s declaration, “I want to keep my lucidity to the last and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror,” conveys precisely what this book is about as if he’d read it himself.
Fascinating Passages from Fascinating Books
‘Really, poems by William Burroughs? Yes indeed, and what we know as The Cut-Up Method he initially called ‘Newspeak Poetry,’ making clear his original frames of reference.’ — MINUTES TO GO Redux
Fascinating Passages from Fascinating Books
[Alexander’s father] Philip’s training for power was proceeding along useful if unorthodox lines. His experience as a member of the Macedonian royal household had given him an understandably cynical view of human nature: in this world murder, adultery and usurpation were commonplace. … Philip took it as axiomatic that all diplomacy was based on self-interest, and every man had his price: events seldom proved him wrong.
A New Online Event Series
‘CHANGE’ at The Graduate Center, CUNY
A time of extraordinary social upheaval demands—and presents new opportunities for—CHANGE. In this new weekly series, leading thinkers explore ways to create a more democractic society.
GC CUNY at the Center of the Conversation
Leon Levy Center for Biography to Launch 2020 Events
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. on James Baldwin • Rick Perlstein on Ronald Reagan • Fredrik Logevall on John F. Kennedy • David S. Reynolds on Abraham Lincoln • Judith Thurman to give the Annual Leon Levy Lecture on Biography • David Nasaw on his new book, ‘The Last Million’
William Burroughs’s Prophetic Mutterings
![Burroughs wearing his fedora. [Photo: Harriet Crowder]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Burroughs-fedora360jpg-200x200.jpg)
‘This is Burroughs the self-styled revolutionary at his most historically explicit, the courageous whistle-blower in 1960 denouncing and exposing media magnates, business moguls, bankers, political leaders and scientists as part of a larger, deeper conspiracy at work behind the scenes of the mid-twentieth century.’ By Oliver Harris BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS addresses particular individuals, which marks a […]
Is This a Never-Before-Published Masterpiece
From the Most Dangerous Writer on the Planet?
When a review starts off like this . . . ” ‘BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS’ is the most important new publication by William S. Burroughs not only since the writer’s death in 1997 but quite possibly since ‘The Third Mind’ made it into print in 1978″ . . . attention must be paid.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Sequel
As I continue to read “All the Sonnets of Shakespeare,” edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, I’m more than ever impressed by the remarkable clarity of the presentation. An added bonus is the intimacy of the scholarship, especially for a non-specialist like me. “The year 1591 saw the beginning of a sudden vogue,” they write, “for the composition and publication of sequences of interrelated sonnets initiated by the posthumous publication in that year of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella’.” Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are “on the whole, a collection of often highly personally inflected poems written over at least twenty-seven years, rather than a sequence aimed at catching the mood and developing the taste for a literary fashion. His sonnets are not public poems written and published for money; . . . they were published a decade after the vogue for sonnets had passed, printed only once, and were ‘clearly a flop on their first appearance.’ He seems interested primarily in using the sonnet form to work out his intimate thoughts and feelings.”
A New Way to Look at Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Instead of reading the sonnets in the numbered sequence of the 1609 folio, which is the usual way, the editors of ‘All the Sonnets of Shakespeare’ examine them in what they believe was their order of composition. This puts a special focus on the considerable tinkering that went into them. Their method yields lovely insights that bring us closer to the man himself and his development as a writer.