And there he was in a dream. We are in some restaurant, a San Francisco dream. He gives me a manuscript to read on elegant Mary Beach / Claude Pélieu stationery with raised black lettering in delicate type. He’s terminal. We both know it. He’s being objective about it. He indicates, somehow without words, not to get worked up about it. Take it as it comes. Happens to all. End of dream.
Are We Past Those Pandemic Ghosts?
A pub directly across the street from the main branch of the New York Public Library has replaced the pub that was shuttered there during the pandemic. Doorway artwork now invites the “thirsty” in for a drink, replacing the two ghostly figures seen there previously.
Éditions Béringuer
Newly Released Bellaart Drawings Connect the Centuries
A graphic narrative with a vocabulary of influences from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.
‘Benevolent Loitering’
‘Unheard and Unseen’ in Istanbul
Having never been to Istanbul, I’ve done the next best thing — or so it feels upon reading ‘The Pleasures of Empty Lots’ by Efe Murad, poet, translator, and scholar extraordinaire. “This humble chapbook,” he writes, “is a record of the unheard and the unseen, which can only be experienced by those who find pleasure in ephemeral escapades. It is a longing for a clean slate, a tribute to benevolent loitering.” It is also more than that. It is in the most vivid, personal terms a manifesto for artistic freedom and — necessarily — social and political liberty.
Is 2023 the Year of Anti-Nihilist Gen Z?
The British magazine Prospect has just published an article making the case —making the claim is perhaps a better way to put it — that “2023 could finally hold a salve to the dark, glittery tunnel we’re living inside.” Mixed metaphor aside, good luck with that.
‘Button Up’ for 2023
Boughs wet with tears
remind the air
of sleep.
Clouds above the lake
scud on
unbuttoned, driven,
the sky beyond
my keep.
‘We bloom just once . . .’
I’m a human drape.
My bones are tight,
not so my skin. It sags
curtainlike from chin.
Pleasurable Reading: Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences
It is filled with wisdom like this: “Life itself is nothing but a contradiction that has to be constantly overcome.”
But Where Are the Towel Racks for Kerouac and Ginsberg?
A San Francisco hotel has installed this towel rack dedicated to the memory of William S. Burroughs.
Alfred Chester, a Double Reading
Who reads Alfred Chester these days? Anyone? His huge, posthumous volume of Moroccan letters is worth every page (even the ones I felt like skipping).
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.”
Defsons for Mustill
We bloom only once
and some of us never bloom —
not even once. You were perennial.
Blogs Are Personal . . .
Keeping Up With a Gen Z Artist’s Recent Drawings
Two bats, one cat, and several people. Also have a look at this art student’s previously posted drawings..
A Straight Up Thanksgiving — It’s a Tradition
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.