I’ve come to the conclusion that my computer is great at hiding things from me. What prompted me to think so is a letter I came across that I didn’t know I had since it had never turned up before. My great good luck is that I found it by accident, and greater still is that anything written by Carl Weissner is a delight to read. The recipient of the letter (if in fact Carl ever mailed it) was Sinclair Beiles, himself a writer of no small humor. (Fans of William Burroughs will recognize the reference to one of his notorious fictional characters).
Archives for February 2024
Carl Weissner Letter to Sinclair Beiles
Make of It What You Will
Other Minds Always Offers a Musical Change of Pace
Thirty-one years after its founding, Other Minds, the brainchild of Charles Amirkhanian and Jim Newman, is still going strong as a presenter of experimental contemporary music with an emphasis on “the most original, eccentric, and underrepresented creative voices.” Here’s a presentation of Linda Bouchard and the Ensemble TriOcular+.
Mashup of Amanda Gorman and Bach at Carnegie Hall
If I had been asked who would be the main attraction of Saturday night’s Carnegie Hall mashup between the poet and the composer, my guess would have been Amanda Gorman. I would not have guessed it would be the cellist Jan Vogler. As it turned out, however, his performance of three of Bach’s cello suites, more or less interrupted by Gorman’s rap-inflected poetry, made him the star of the show.
Dissident Poetry Festival to Delight Mind and Tongue
In a rare poetry reading organized by Efe Balıkçıoğlu and Sibel Erol and focused on often unacknowledged voices in contemporary Turkey, the works of three dissident authors are to be presented as a serious Turkish delight.
The presentation at NYU on Feb. 23 — both in person and on Zoom — will feature the feminist poet and artist Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, the gay Kurdish poet Fırat Demir, and Nicholas Glastonbury, who has translated the work of the late queer leftist poet Arkadaş Z. Özger.
Because It Is So Touching
“A face long unloved will at some point grow ugly,
As unkissed features untended will as with an unkempt
Garden grow wild . . . ”
— David Erdos
The Bishop and the Butterfly
Political Thriller or True Crime Whodunit? You Decide
“Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. … Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets?” — Union Square & Co. (the publisher)