“If Sylvia Plath would likely not have chosen to be buried in Heptonstall, Asa Benveniste definitely chose the location of his own grave, having spent the final years of his life in Hebden Bridge, the valley town that adjoins Heptonstall.” — Jay Jeff Jones
Archives for September 2022
Jack Kerouac at 100, the Beats in Ruigoord
Kerouac fans In The Netherlands have been celebrating his centennial with readings, film presentations, and concerts throughout 2022. The celebration will culminate on Oct. 9 at the artists’s village of Ruigoord, near Amsterdam. An international gathering of writers, performers, and scholars will pay tribute, along with keynote speakers Joyce Johnson and Ed Sanders, who are to participate via Zoom.
Celebrating Sylvia Plath
A Poet’s Flame Burns Brighter Than Ever
“It’s a late winter’s afternoon on the top of Cross Hill, with Hardcastle Crags on one side and Colden Valley on the other. Down in their depth of hibernating trees and gritstone slabs, darkness isn’t coming down — it’s rising like a cold damp tide.” So begins Jay Jeff Jones’s uncommonly rich meditation on the poetic afterlife. It arrives nicely timed to an upcoming celebration of Sylvia Plath for what would have been her 90th birthday.
A Hero of Our Time
Lermontov + Edward Gorey + Nabokov = Paperback Keeper
The cover of this mass-market paperback of Mihail Lermontov’s 1840 novel, “A Hero of our Time,” was designed by Edward Gorey. It is taken from a portion of a painting by Lermontov. The typography is also by Gorey. I show it here because it is such a gem, and because a cover of this caliber doesn’t often come along. The 1951 paperback edition was the first publication of of Vladimir Nabokov’s translation from the Russian in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov.
Any of You Like to Try Propping up the Queen of Denmark?
![Portrait of William S. Burroughs © by R. Crumb [1985]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RCRUMB-portrait-of-Burroughs-366x470-200x200.jpg)
“The queen is an alien symbol basically Germanic in origin. The queen is also a white symbol. The White Goddess in fact. Young people want that. White people want that. Black people want that.” — William S. Burroughs
‘The Sex Pistols Had the Royals in Their Sights’
or ‘Off With Their Heads’ . . . from ‘An Investigative Poem’ by Heathcote Williams” (for those disgusted by the nauseating glorification of the House of Windsor).
Heathcote Williams
Uncensored, ‘Advertisement’ for a Supermarket
![Heathcote Williams [Photo: JH, 2013]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/heathcote-williams-photo-copy-200x200.png)
‘The people who run Tesco must be Buddhists / You go in there and things are exactly as they should be / There is nothing that you could possibly want / Bits of telepathic animals neatly shrouded in heat-raised polystyrene / With Magic-Maker gravestones. / Dyed tomato mulch slobbering to itself in lead-lined tubular coffins, / Zilched by monosodium glutomate.’ — Heathcote Williams
Of Plumbers and Philosophers
Some old proto-Freudian
out of the German Yellow Pages
is looking up at me
from the kitchen floor
where he’s installing a new P-trap
under my kitchen sink,
telling me about how things are
and how they used to be . . .