I have been involved so deeply in so many things that they slip from my memory, and not just one, fifty. A wave from the depths brings them back to the surface for me with, as the Bible says, all that in them is. It is incredible how few traces are left in us of […]
Search Results for: cold turkey press
Mike Lesser, R.I.P.: ‘In Conversation With a Dying Friend’
Heathcote Williams’s elegy is a meditation on death. Alan Cox reads it. The collage portrait of Mike Lesser as a young man is by Claire Palmer. The text of ‘In Conversation With a Dying Friend’ is posted for reading at IT: International Times. “ . . . my atoms will just disappear. “There’ll be a […]
Li Po Refills His Cup: A Little Song for All Seasons
“Life in the World is but a big dream …”
A New Literary Memoir Recalls Dylan Thomas
See update. A few weeks ago I remarked that Of Dylan and his Deaths, by Heathcote Williams, was so rich in the author’s personal history and “so evocative of his first inspiration, Dylan Thomas,” that it merited attention as a masterpiece of literary investigation. (The investigative aspect of the essay involves Williams’s indignation over “the […]
The Extinction Lesson of a Comical, Salutary Creature
But the bird was fearless and easily lured aboard By an offer of unlimited ship’s biscuits. By a miracle the bird survived the crew’s curiosity And their wondering if it tasted delicious. After it had lived out its life in England A taxidermist was called when it died. He stuffed it and, to retain its […]
Sinclair Beiles: Poet of Many Parts and Places
Dyehard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his association with the Beats. He collaborated on […]
A Balzac Reminder for 2015: ‘Flee, Hide & Be Silent’
The Cold Turkey Press card for the New Year bears the Latin words that Balzac saw on a monk’s cell and took for his own motto.
C.I.A. Refutes Torture Report, Tells Us: ‘Lick That Boot’
Our objection to the C.I.A.’s defiant pushback is best expressed by Norman O. Mustill’s collage, because words will not suffice.
Poet Says, ‘Ecstasy Can Postpone Every Deadline . . .’
Love in Old Age Someone I’ve known since I was twelve Happened to tell me the other day, ‘We’re now on the shady side of the hill. ‘Not many more days to play.’ But I found myself pretending I hadn’t heard what he’d said — The implication being so unsettling: He was saying we’d soon […]
‘Glory, in Our Time, Smiles Only on the Rich …’
Apparently not much has changed since Céline wrote that 82 years ago in Journey to the End of the Night, his first semi-autobiographical novel. The narrator Ferdinand Bardamu is talking about the Joseph Bioduret Institute, which “is clearly the Pasteur Institute,” according to Ralph Mannheim, who translated the novel. Here’s the complete passage: Glory, in […]
In a Light Mood: ‘No Severed Bodies or Bloody Stumps’
The front of this hallucinatory postcard, published by Cold Turkey Press in a limited edition of 36 copies, shows a collage by the late Norman Ogue Mustill. It is “Mustill in a light sorta mood, or so he thought,” I wrote Ben Schot, Cold Turkey’s distributor. “Light for him, anyway: no severed bodies or bloody […]
‘Eating the Rich and Famous, or Celebrity Roadkill’
“Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” — Thomas Jefferson, from his letters Words by Heathcote Williams. Montage and narration by Alan Cox. “I have been […]
The Poet Sinclair Beiles Spoke of Being ‘Dispossessed’
Last week I took an astral trip. I left my body and cavorted about the universe. I needed a rest. It’s tiresome living in the same body all the time I needed a change of scene. I was very careful.
‘A tiny smudge on the horizon at Ard na Caithne’
30 VIII 2013Prolific as ever, Heathcote Williams wrote this poem in sublime tribute to Seamus Heaney on the day he learned of his fellow poet’s death.
New Arrival: Ira Cohen’s From Journey West
Sea Urchin Editions maestro Ben Schot writes: The summer of 1975 was hot. A heatwave of eighteen consecutive days singed Western Europe and turned its capitals into seething cauldrons. Ira Cohen landed on the soft tarmac of Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, in August — his mind still filled with the opiate clouds over Kathmandu, […]
Wrapping Up the ‘Dutch Mordant’ Series
Cold Turkey Press publisher Gerard Bellaart writes that he “got rather carried away.” There are now about 40 cards in the series. Consequently the 36 portfolios of 12 cards each “will differ slightly in composition.” The “sacred nose” comes from the Bellaart family album, dated 1755.+++ A photo by Frederick Sommer illustrates the “kleine Welten” […]
Antonin Artaud’s ‘Rotten Meat’
I’d bet the quotes on this card from Cold Turkey Press won’t be found in the search engines. +++ Here are some other recent Cold Turkey cards that quote Artaud: No Words, No Thought; Artaud’s Hammer; Plague of My Tongue, 1; Plague of My Tongue, 2. Additionally, Cold Turkey publisher Gerard Bellaart, writer and artist […]