Thinking of rasPutin, we laughed when a friend joked about the availability of refurbished Geiger counters on Amazon. Gallows humor helps to ease the anxiety of current conditions. Here’s a serious kind of distraction: Moloko Print’s volume of selected poems, ‘That’s the Way to Travel,” by Jan Heller Levi, with illustrations by Marlies Pekarek. (Levi’s first book, “Once I Gazed at You in Wonder,” earned the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.)
That’s the Way to Travel
Zelensky Thanks Russian Anti-War Protesters
… especially this one: Marina Ovsyannikova, who held up an anti-war sign on Russia’s main TV news broadcast. She was reported missing but has now appeared in court.
Until There Is No Dream to Dream
This is balm for dreamers.
‘Dream’ by George Herms
Where does George Herms and his 1985 assemblage “Dream” fit in the continuum of American art? After reading “The Nature of Art” by Armand Marie Leroi and having a look at the Connect Vermeer website, I wondered whether a similar analysis could be done about Herms and “Dream.”
Vlad the Impaler
‘You’re occupiers. You are fascists. Why the fuck did you come here with your guns?’ Ukrainian woman confronting Russian soldiers in Henichesk, in southern Ukraine. ‘Take these seeds and put them in your pocket so, at least, sunflowers will grow on your graves.’ (Translated by Alex Abramovich)
‘Bells ring / silently the evening / rolls in its void’ — Paul Celan
To Kingdom Come?
life is / kkkkrrrraaaazzzzy / for reasons / having nothing / to do with / rasPUTIN but / he could spitball / a nuke our way / in the time / it takes to say / ”oh shit.”
‘Escuela de Corte’ — ‘Last Time We Play Hooky’
A still shot from Rich Allen’s latest movie. If you look at the shoes .. well, the sneakers … you can see these kids were not actors.
‘A Poem for Patriots’ and ‘Upside the Morning’
Two books by Mark Terrill have arrived with ekphrastic poems of great appeal: “The Salvador-Dali-Lama Express” and “Great Balls of Doubt.” Here are two poems with images from daily life and the thoughts they arouse.
World of Trouble
New Folio from Cold Turkey Press
The epigraph (“I’ll do penance with farts and groans / Kneeling on my marrowbones”) comes from a poem by James Joyce. The folio includes four deformed sonnets (“Cursed,” “Her Days All Flee,” “World of Trouble,” “Mirage”) and a poem (“After Carl”).
A Documentation by Florian Vetsch
The Garden by Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles wrote a short story called “The Garden” in 1963. Three years later Joseph McPhillips asked him to dramatize the story for students at the American School of Tangier. Bowles, who was in Thailand at the time and about to leave for Morocco by ship, wrote scenes for the play on his way back and airmailed them to McPhillips, who immediately started rehearsals. Following Bowles’s advice, McPhillips involved artists and writers such as Marguerite McBey, Ira Belline, Brion Gysin, and John Hopkins. The play was staged in Tangier in April 1967, but was never published. This documentation offers the original text of the play (translated as well into German) with an evocative motherlode of illustrations that trace the play’s genesis from page to stage.
Let’s All Say Goodbye to Spotify
The music-streaming service claims that “listening is everything.” But it’s tone deaf. And many agree. As do we.
A Tale by Mohammed Mrabet
As Told to Paul Bowles and Transcribed by Mark Terrill
Mohammed Mrabet, a young Moroccan painter from Tangier, met the American ex-patriate composer and writer Paul Bowles in 1965. Bowles, who lived in Tangier for decades, taped many of Mrabet’s spontaneous stories and translated them into English, eventually resulting in the publication of more than a dozen books. Mark Terrill, himself an American ex-pat writer and poet, recalls that during a kif-fueled visit with the two of them, in 1985, Mrabet began “improvising some of his crazy tales while Paul simultaneously translated for my benefit, and I quickly jotted this one down.” Terrill bought several of Mrabet’s drawings, including the one that illustrates this newly printed poster from Cold Turkey Press.
Translator, Author, Cherished Friend
A Great One Died 10 Years Ago Today
Carl Weissner was a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Charles Plymell, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen), as well as a literary agent who spread the work of dissident writers even further. “Le Regard d’Autrui,” published posthumously in 2019, shows him to have been as magnetic a storyteller as any of the celebrated writers he translated.
Four Books That Recently Came Our Way
Poetry by Leia John, by William Cody Maher, by Ira Cohen, and a memoir by Theo Green. Have a look and please don’t take offense at the explicitness of John’s lines.
(Yesterday this blogpost disappeared from the site, inexplicably, so the staff has re-posted it. Apologies to all who clicked on it and were directed to a dead end.)
Pandemic Ghosts?
Not long before the pandemic this was the artwork at the entryway to a pub on Fifth Avenue located directly across the street from the entrance to the main branch of the New York Public Library, famed for its vast holdings and archival collections. Like many enterprises here in the city, the pub is now gone. So is the artwork. It’s reassuring to report, however, that the library and its holdings are still there.
After Carl
I awoke from a bad dream with these lines drumming in my head long after he died. I mean Carl Weissner, cherished friend and writer sans pareil. A staffer here recently found the lines written down among drafts of unfinished poems.
News as Muse
David Erdos: ‘A Penis for Christmas’
In the grand tradition of Heathcote Williams’s verse polemics, the poet David Erdos rounds on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the latest scandal of his corrupt administration.