Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude
The widespread episodes of pro-Palestinian antisemitism on American college campuses calls to mind an old blogpost about European antisemitism.
“I find it shameful,” Fallaci begins, “that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swastika, incite people to hate the Jews. …”
UPDATED. The overwhelming number of comics, little magazines, books, posters, and all sorts of poetry and radical literature that Charles Plymell has printed during the last half-century is too many to count. All that time he was writing inspired poetry and prose of his own and having it published by a flock of small presses. Now in old age — he turns 89 today — Plymell is getting significantly renewed attention for his poetry with the release of “Over the Stage of Kansas: New & Selected Poems 1966-2023.” To celebrate the book, he will give a reading on May 18 in Hudson, New York. It’s bound to be a grand occasion.
Since today is the 120th anniversary of Willem de Kooning’s birthday, I am reminded by my staff of thousands of his fervent efforts “to break the willed articulation of the image.” Which, as it happens, is not dissimilar to the goal of the cut-up procedure in writing, intended by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs to free the mind and language itself from preconceived formulations. Nor is it a bad follow-up to yesterday’s blogpost about “Cut Up or Shut Up.”
Kevin Ring, the indefatigable editor of Beat Scene magazine, emailed me a few months ago to ask about the new reprint of “Cut Up or Shut Up” released by the German publisher Mokolo Print in a facsimile edition in English with a new cover design by Robert Schalinski and a modest intro by yours truly. Ever curious about all things Beat, Ring wanted to know the back story of the book’s origin and development. Et voilà!
Before I needed to earn a living from writing, I was a member of the avant-garde — fervent and full of high opinion. The other day I came across a typescript of “Synchronic Non-Causative Agent,” an unpublished paper of mine written more than half a century ago. Reading it over, I got the bright idea of posting it here despite its age.
My staff of thousands thinks of it as the “Moby-Dick” of modernism.
A. Robert Lee is such a prolific author in both his creative and academic books that I won’t try to characterize his writings other than to say they invariably illuminate life and literature with a wealth of scholarship, intelligence, and linguistic mastery. I will add, however, that his sense of humor is one aspect of his writings that I most treasure.
In 1952, when the late Gabe Pressman (dean of New York City’s local TV press corps) was a young staff writer at the New York World-Telegram & The Sun, he came across a story tipped to him by a woman from Montreal who’d taken a cab ride in midtown Manhattan. This was the human-interest feature he wrote up. And this is the poem it generated many decades later.
‘These poems are free sonnets of experience that even Blake would favor. They are tears for the tongue to be savoured once tasted, and like a drop for the eye, ear, or mind, they restore perception to its rightful place. They are dark diamonds.’ — David Erdos, MÜ Magazine, London
Nothing like some biblioklept mischief to brighten the day.
‘I have stolen books
from friends and family
books they never cared for
books they never read. . . ‘
‘Sacred Fix’ was published in 1975. ‘Selected Catastrophies’ is the fourth section of the book. The author is an incandescent South African poet, who died in 2000. The poem begins:
“society!
I will not support you
when you shed your hideous electronic disguises
and stagger through the alleyways of oblivion
looking for shelter.
o society you betrayed me
with your promises of paradise . . .”
When I was a salaried reporter, I did pretty well over the course of more than two decades at three major metro dailies in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. It always helped to get freelance work, however.
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.
“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)
At last a first-class appreciation of the recently published ULTRAZONE. When I first read the novel in proof copy, it had me doing cartwheels . Naturally, I wondered how it would be received elsewhere. Now I know.
This ‘deformed sonnet’ was written in memory of Carl Weissner, a great one who was so rudely interrupted 12 years ago today.
That is a key question posed by Jascha Hannover’s “The Books He Didn’t Burn,” a documentary to be featured in its U.S premiere at the Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 15 at Lincoln Center in New York. Its relevance to the beliefs of today’s white supremacists and rightwing Christian nationalists is stunning.
![Charles Plymell [photo by Gerard Malanga]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Charles-Plymell-photo-by-Gerard-Malanga-e1437239454525.jpg)
