As part of the Beat Hotel crowd in Paris during the late-1950s and early ’60s, Sinclair Beiles collaborated on the first book of avant-garde cut-ups, “Minutes to Go,” with Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. While working at Maurice Girodias’s Paris-based Olympia Press, he was a key editor who helped shepherd Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” into print. It is his incandescent poetry, however, for which he should be most remembered. But despite praise for his poetry from such luminaries as Burroughs and Leonard Cohen, his writing has rarely surfaced outside the small-press literary world. “Catastrophes Choisies” is not Beiles’s first poetry collection to appear in French, but it is the most elaborate..
New in French Translation
The Late Brion Gysin (1916-1986) Is Having a Moment
Over the years he had many, in fact, although few of them lived up to his expectations. But never mind. An updated model of his and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine was recently featured in a symposium on art, AI, and the humanities here in New York; and another will be installed in London at the Tate Modern, in the exhibition “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet,”which will run from the end of this month (Nov. 28) to June 1, 2025. Meanwhile, Roger Knoebber has brought Gysin back to life in a shaggy, unconventional book-length profile, “Hysteresis.”
Buckminster Fuller’s Versified Prose
By my philosophy
The finite, but imponderable
Metaphysical Universe
Embraces the definite,
Ponderable, physical Universe.
‘Finite’ is not unitarily conceptual.
‘Definite’ is unitarily conceptual.
I have mathematical proof …
Does the Dreamachine Elude AI? Yes It Does.
Scholars and specialists addressed ethical and political considerations surrounding AI in collaborations with human creators. Topics ranged from AI aesthetics to the early history of machine learning, from multimedia art to computational research experiments with artificial intelligence, including AI biases and applications.
‘The Hanging’ and ‘Wheel of Fortune’
These drawings, which appear in “di Umbris,” a dossier of Gerard Bellaart drawings just published by Moloko, were not intended as commentary on current events. But I can’t shake the sensation that they are.
A Second Look
Touched by a Documentary Ode to Nelson Algren
Some years ago I criticized Michael Caplan’s documentary ode to Nelson Algren as the cinematic equivalent of a pop tart. Now that I’ve had another look I see that I was very wrong.
Human Figuration as an Expression of Ideas
These drawings move across centuries, from the Middle Ages to our blighted times in an unflinching rawness that gives no comfort. Nothing is omitted. You will find the sexual inscribed like watermarks of passion and anguish. The demonic appears in equal measure with the angelic. Most of all, not unlike cave drawings of prehistoric times, they are an existential record of a particular creature, Bellaart by name.
Lionel Ziprin: ‘One of the Secret Heroes of Our Time’
“I am not an artist. I am not an
outsider. I am a citizen of the
republic and I have remained
anonymous all the time by choice.”
I Guess It Had to Happen
Julian Peters has done Poe, Rimbaud, Frost, Keats, Dylan Thomas, Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, Villon, Yeats, Sassoon, and plenty of others — and they’re all damn well done — so why not T.S. Eliot?
‘Dear Willy’ Tells a War Tale of Love and Hope
The letters that Hollywood director William Wyler and his wife Talli wrote to each other during World War II are the basis of a new documentary directed by Taylor Alexander.
Underground Railroad: Walt Whitman Bears Witness
… to “the runaway slave” in his most famous poem, “Song of Myself,” which first appeared untitled in his self-published collection Leaves of Grass, in 1855.
One More Missive from the Department of Letters
By popular demand, here’s another letter from Nelson Algren, this time a big fat gossipy one apparently in reply to questions that Roger Groening must have posed.
Not a Bad Way to Start the Week
Cleaning out one of my desk drawers, I came across a long-forgotten file folder containing a ream of letters from Nelson Algren to Roger Groening. They are a motherlode of humor, wit, and edifying entertainment, and from time to time I will post more of his letters to Roger..
Tipped by a Friend and Glad to Know
“Thought this would give you a smile,” he wrote. “Look whose book shows up in the first pic of this article.” It appears from the photo that my biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, “A Talent for Trouble,” turned up in the secondhand book sale of the late Robert Gottlieb’s private library.
D. H. Lawrence on the ‘Bitch-Goddess of Success’
The other day I took a drive over to Toby Pond and looked in at the house where I’d spent six months during the Covid lockdown. My favorite room there was a little library. It had two steep book-lined walls and high windows that gave plenty of light for reading. With nothing better to do, I pulled down Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Having read it many years ago, I had failed to appreciate it. This time it bowled me over. Here’s a small excerpt. It offers a taste of one of the novel’s major themes.
Leave It to Flaubert to Tell It as It Is
Three excerpts from the recently published edition of ‘The Letters of Gustave Flaubert,’ edited and translated by Francis Steegmullers, seem to me an apt commentary on our own time.
Just in Time for Independence Day
America’s top shitholer goes
whole hog at the public trough,
and never mind the rest of us,
because that is the hog’s nature. …