Almost 70 years ago in Prospect Park where the future waited like a whim my childhood slipped through. You held me with my arms around your neck. The carousel goes round with our delicate ghosts like shadows on a scrim. The terrible wind that carries us off has not blown them away. I smell the […]
Archives for June 2018
Your Obituary Is Waiting
(for Philip Larkin) My ego prefers an obit published by the NY Times. But anywhere else will do, even etched into a headstone that nobody reads in a cemetery where nobody ever goes. I don’t know why I care, but I do. I don’t know why anyone should care, but it’s the custom to. —JH […]
Celebrating Carl Weissner, Buk, and Burroughs
![Carl Weissner [Photo by Michael Montfort]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Carl-Weissner-foto-by-Michael-Montfort-200-200x200.jpg)
They say Berlin is the place to be. Since I can’t be there myself, here’s the next best thing . . . This is the Maher-Mähler film about Carl that will be screened as part of the celebration: Always These Nightmares! Toward the end of his life Carl was a writer on a […]
When Language Is Incorrect
Mokusatsu Asked what he’d do first if called upon to rule a nation Confucius replied, “I’d correct language. If language isn’t correct Then what is said is not what’s meant And what ought to be done remains undone. Morals and art deteriorate And justice goes astray – And if justice should disappear Then people will […]
The Nature of the Beast
Furthermore . . . “As Matisse noted, black is a colour too & in certain hands the superior one.” — Gerard Bellaart EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Speaking of Hans Magnus Enzenberger . . .
His poem “last will and testament” begins: “get your flag out of my face, it tickles!” Jerome Rothenberg’s appealing translation from the German continues: and get that tinny wreath off my chest, it’s rattling too much; toss it over with the statues on the garbage heap, and give the ribbon to some biddies to doll […]
‘Majestically lonely and white . . .’
Now that you’ve had a look at the moody green splendor of the moors near Manchester, England, take a look at the brilliant skyscape near Bordeaux, France (courtesy of our staff), and a favorite poem of theirs. ‘A History of Clouds’ Hans Magnus Enzensberger Appearing as they do, overnight, or out of the blue, they […]
From the Pond Across the Street
We would travel light years to find alien beings inhabiting fabulous worlds. — Malcolm Mc Neill Some things just won’t stay down. ‘The permutations are infinite: Whatever it is, the joke is on us.’ EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
The Moody Splendor of Manchester
![The Moors of Manchester [photo by Jay Jeff Jones, 2018] Click to enlarge.](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Moors-behind-Jays-house-560enh-1-200x200.jpg)
I was corresponding by email recently with Jay Jeff Jones, an American expat playwright, journalist, and poet, who is working on a new edition of Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, a long-out-of-print classic about the British counterculture of the 1960s. Jones, who has lived in Manchester, England, for many decades, wrote that he was “in fine […]
The Sorrows
![Drawing © by Gerard Bellaart [Cold Turkey Press, 2018]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/the-sorrows-recto-622-200x200.png)
War is always a poison to the soul, even the most just wars. No more important victory was ever achieved than World War II, but America was poisoned, perhaps fatally, by the aftermath of its own success, because we never faced what war really is. It’s very difficult. There are no words for it. — […]