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.
Archives for January 2022
A Tale by Mohammed Mrabet
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.)