‘Sometimes our creativity can be flowing. But I’m sure that many of us have experienced periods when there has been some kind of blockage to our imagination.’ — Herbie Hancock
Avoid the Obvious
Stadlichter Presse Small Animals Now Published in Bilingual Edition
‘Great beauty from great despair unbends the mind. Achieved or not, that is every poet’s goal.’ Click to enlarge. From the publisher: The author has called his sonnets “wounds that have scabbed over.” They are his rare worldly goods, bringing personal ghosts to life on the page. The poetry critic of the London-based MÜ Magazine, David […]
A Libertarian Penchant for BS
This video sounds sane, but ‘tiz not my cuppa. As one of S/U’s indefatigable staff of thousands says, “Slickish until it’s obvious what the agenda is.”
American Presidents
A Dirge for Their ‘Greatest’ Racist Hits
“One shocking, grotesque, and racist revelation after another reveals a history of the bigotry of American presidents and how complicit they were in legitimizing American racism.” — Randy Burman
A World of Trouble
Cityscape East River NYC (9-20-2021)
A pair of NYPD patrol boats were stationed in the East River at the approach to the 59th Street Bridge. Each was fitted out with a manned, high-caliber machine gun. There was no boat traffic as there usually is — no barges going upriver, no tug boats churning heavy wakes behind them, no sail boats moving lazily with the current, no speedboats — all apparently prohibited due to the opening session of the U.N. located nearby on the Manhattan bank of the river. Many streets in the surrounding neighborthood were cordoned corral-style into single-file walk lanes. Cops were everywhere, and life was calm and complacent and inconvenient in a world of trouble.
Ivan Turgenev on Aging
‘He Did Not Picture Life’s Sea as the Poets Depict It’
“He fell to thinking . . . slowly, listlessly, wrathfully. He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human. All the stages of man’s life passed in order before his mental gaze (he had himself lately reached his fifty-second year), and not one found grace in his eyes.” — Ivan Turgenev, from THE TORRENTS OF SPRING
Out of the Past
Journalism as the Poetry of Fact
Kay Boyle regarded journalism, when it was written well about something important, as “the poetry of fact.”
Art Love Nature Think to Dupe
It was a getaway / from the concrete city. / No bears alas / no porcupines alas / no mosquitos / no lyme-tick bites / one little fruit tree / knocked down by the wind / now gone alas / bears liked its berries / no deer alas
except one on the road / and there I was / alone alas. — jh
At the Gravesite = Small Animals
Cold Turkey Press sees it this way for a card to be published in a limited edition.
GC CUNY at the Center of the Conversation
Peter Baker & Susan Glasser on James A. Baker III, with Kai Bird
“For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without the help of James A. Baker III or ran the White House without his advice. Now two major political journalists, Peter Baker (of The New York Times) and Susan Glasser (of The New Yorker) have written ‘The Man Who Ran Washington,’ a definitive, page-turning biography of the power broker whose impact was unmatched when Washington ran the world and who influenced America’s destiny for generations. The authors join in a discussion with Kai Bird, executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.”
The Holy Grail of the Beat Generation
Neal Cassady: ‘The Joan Anderson Letter’
When Jack Kerouac read Neal Cassady’s spontaneous rush of words, he claimed it was more alive than any piece of writing he had ever seen. In its effusive style, its freewheeling candor, its Proustian (yes, Proustian!) introspection, the letter touched off a response in Kerouac that reshaped entirely his own approach to writing. The result was an explosion of “road” novels, beginning with “On the Road,” in which Cassady is renamed Dean Moriarity and seen as nothing less than “the root, the soul” of Beat legend.
GC CUNY at the Center of the Conversation
The Science of Superheroes
FREE ONLINE EVENT: “The pop-culture universe of superheroes is filled with extraordinary humans and abilities. Captain America, the Hulk, and Black Panther seem to lie firmly in the realm of fantasy, but the technology behind them might not be as farfetched as we think. In his book ‘The Science of Marvel,’ Sebastian Alvarado shows that, using quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and mechanical engineering, we can find real-world parallels to superpowers such as ‘spidey sense’ and Thor’s lightning. He speaks with Shane Campbell-Staton, host of the podcast ‘The Biology of Superheroes,’ about where the science meets the fiction.” — GC Presents
Free Online Event / Friday / Oct. 30 / 12 p.m.
Bend Your Mind: Artificial Intelligence and Art
“Today’s computers compose music that sounds “more Bach than Bach” and turn photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” They also write screenplays. But are algorithms truly creative—or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers?” — Creative GC: Art and Science Connect
This Side of Grub Street
Readers wanted to know all about their celebrities, or at least about my encounters with them. From A-listers and B-listers right down to Z-listers. The whole stupid alphabet top to bottom. Names to be forgotten one day. They needed the publicity and I needed the job. I wasn’t a star fucker—I’ll say that, having come from the newsroom with no more interest in celebrities than any routine reporter. I was a stand-in for star fuckers.
Genes of Irish Genius in ‘Blooming Molly Malone’
A friend writes: A little re-Joyceing in this wee lonesome blooming Molly Malone. You can hear the genes of Irish genius in the DNABC of this little clamourer. You feel she’s on the verge of channelling Beckett, Behan, O’Casey, O’Brien, Yeats et al, at any moment. A true antidote to popery and nunnery, and the cold, cold kiss of Covid. A little four-leaf clover complaining from beneath the cloven hoof of parental devilry. She must have been fed Guinness in the womb, there’s so much blarney in her tongue. Man, you feel she possesses such alchemical witchery, she could eat Covid, and shit it out the other end as an emerald. A rare little island of hope.
For Carl Weissner’s Would-Be 80th
Coming on June 16th: “Death in Marseille,” the last words of Arthur Rimbaud as imagined by Carl Weissner. To be published in a limited handmade edition designed by Gerard Bellaart, and translated and edited from the German by Keith Seward & Jan Herman.
Memento Mori
snow again today / and the wind / came like a freight train / then blue sky