Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude
‘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 . . .”
Cold Turkey Press continues to publish handmade posters printed in editions limited to 36 copies, specializing in avant-garde poets and artists of the past as well as the present. Here is one of the latest, LUDION’S LAMENT.
‘The trick is to get out of your own dead body in one piece. One quick hard twist and you’re out. Next, you turn black all over and taper at the extremities.’ — Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
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.
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).
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.
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.
“A face long unloved will at some point grow ugly,
As unkissed features untended will as with an unkempt
Garden grow wild . . . ”
— David Erdos
“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.
Before it disappears too far into the distance, let me just say how much I enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s recent take in The New Yorker on the relationship between Pissarro and Cézanne: “How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence.” Not least, it gives me the chance to post an etching of the two of them made in the early 1980s by Gerard Bellaart, who has for many years seared into my brain his love of both painters.
‘… and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’
The end of the dismal year 2023 brings Hamlet’s soliloquy to mind.
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.
“Shadow words / that beat like hammers.”
“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
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.
The world Mark Terrill sees is “essentially forlorn, if not absurd, if not entirely hopeless. But his poetry is far from hopeless.” — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
