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. . . ‘
‘Selected Catastrophies’ from Beiles’s Sacred Fix
‘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 . . .”
Making a Living as a Writer Was Never Easy, But …
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.
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.
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)
In His Strike Zone: A Tale of Tangier Ghosts
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.
‘There are things closer than rain / that keep hope alive’
This ‘deformed sonnet’ was written in memory of Carl Weissner, a great one who was so rudely interrupted 12 years ago today.
Can Books Provide an Agenda for Mass Murder?’
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.
‘What a Piece of Work Is a Man’
‘… and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’
The end of the dismal year 2023 brings Hamlet’s soliloquy to mind.
At Year’s End a Lineup from Long Ago
This card from 1968, designed and printed by Graham Macintosh, shows a little mag’s lineup and the subscription-cum-ad rates at the time. Demi Shaft Raven obtained the card from Kevin Ring, editor of Beat Scene, and posted it on Facebutt.
From Phantom Outlaw Editions
SHADOW WORDS: A Selection of Deformed Sonnets
“Shadow words / that beat like hammers.”
The First Folio’s Literary and Commercial Success
“Four hundred years ago yesterday saw the first printing of one of the great wonders of the literary world: Shakespeare’s First Folio. Published in 1623, seven years after he died, it was the first printed edition of the collected plays. Without this achievement, half of Shakespeare’s dramatic work would have been lost.” — Folio 400
The Greatest Poet Was a Great Word Thief
It is widely acknowledged that Shakespeare lacked a university education — there is no record of it — unlike his contemporaries or near-contempories, such as Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Nashe, Beaumont, Fletcher, so forth. Despite that, he was a greater writer than any of them, and pilfering was part of his toolkit. As Anthony Burgess notes in his biography of Shakespeare, he not only took plots and stories for his plays — this too is widely acknowledged — but also “filched” entire passages (plagiarized them, if you will) and in the process improved them immeasurably.
A True Poet’s ‘Great Balls of Doubt’
The world Mark Terrill sees is “essentially forlorn, if not absurd, if not entirely hopeless. But his poetry is far from hopeless.” — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Walter Isaacson on the Craft of Biography
‘My road to biography began at TIME magazine.’
He titled his lecture ‘Lessons About Living with Geniuses.’ His latest biography is about Elon Musk. His previous biographies were about Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Jennifer Doudna.
Read an Excerpt
Claude Pélieu’s Kali Yug Express via Mary Beach
“A visionary prophetic book written when the Hippies and Yippies were dissolving the Sixties, which didn’t give us the political and social change needed . . . Pélieu saw Céline’s words become the reality: ‘The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy’.”— Charles Plymell
Patagonia as Metaphor: Expressing the Off-Beat
Presiding writers, for their part, bequeath journeys.
Homer to Ithaca. Basho to Deep North Honshu.
Coleridge to Xanadu. Yeats to Byzantium.
Journeys full of imagining.