Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude
Anyone who has seen the 1954 movie “Friendly Persuasion” might wonder if Gerard Malanga was the precocious child actor cast for comic relief with a pet goose that keeps chasing him around the family farm.
Of course he wasn’t. That was Richard Eyer. Malanga is the noted poet and photographer who once was part of Andy Warhol’s inner circle.
Elsa Triolet’s short memoir of Vladimir Mayakovsky gives both an intimate view of the man and a broader sense of the stature he enjoyed in his time. What intrigued me most, however, was the chapter about a little book he wrote, “How Verses Are Made.”
‘Great beauty from great despair unbends the mind. Achieved or not, that is every poet’s goal.’
Now that the German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s famous 1928 antiwar novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” has won best picture at the British equivalent of the Oscars, the staff here thought it worth noting that Remarque lived for the last 20 years of his life neither in Germany nor the UK but on Manhattan’s East Side.
‘Death is divorce in its most basic sense …
This is how it was with my parents
Who when I was 15 split apart
Bound by the need to move on
Despite the connection between them …’
For more than 25 years, Stadtlichter Presse has brought out poetry books in bilingual (German-English) editions with a special interest in Beat literature and its post-Beat legacy.
SHOOTER: A Fragment is the tale of Jerry Crane, a photographer for the tabloids. Born Jiri Kiranek, he’s a truthtelling fabulist, tall and lean, a refugee from wealth and privilege. In his younger days he was often high on speed, always riffing, full of imagination. Having reached almost middle age, he still has a facile street-smart intellect. He tells ambling, long-limbed tales. It’s a peculiar form of truth-telling. When he decided to ambush Rod Bangs for a tabloid shoot, he expected the usual rock star excess: party drugs, sex, fancy toys, bad taste. But white supremacy did not make the list … until now.
For more than half a century the dissident British author, editor, and underground publisher Michael Butterworth has been “a quiet unobtrusive voice in poetry, with roots both in the small press poetry journals of the 1960s and ’70s and New Wave science fiction.”
‘Or shall we / bite our elbows / to the bone?’
And there he was in a dream. We are in some restaurant, a San Francisco dream. He gives me a manuscript to read on elegant Mary Beach / Claude Pélieu stationery with raised black lettering in delicate type. He’s terminal. We both know it. He’s being objective about it. He indicates, somehow without words, not to get worked up about it. Take it as it comes. Happens to all. End of dream.
A graphic narrative with a vocabulary of influences from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.
Having never been to Istanbul, I’ve done the next best thing — or so it feels upon reading ‘The Pleasures of Empty Lots’ by Efe Murad, poet, translator, and scholar extraordinaire. “This humble chapbook,” he writes, “is a record of the unheard and the unseen, which can only be experienced by those who find pleasure in ephemeral escapades. It is a longing for a clean slate, a tribute to benevolent loitering.” It is also more than that. It is in the most vivid, personal terms a manifesto for artistic freedom and — necessarily — social and political liberty.
The British magazine Prospect has just published an article making the case —making the claim is perhaps a better way to put it — that “2023 could finally hold a salve to the dark, glittery tunnel we’re living inside.” Mixed metaphor aside, good luck with that.
Boughs wet with tears
remind the air
of sleep.
Clouds above the lake
scud on
unbuttoned, driven,
the sky beyond
my keep.
I’m a human drape.
My bones are tight,
not so my skin. It sags
curtainlike from chin.
It is filled with wisdom like this: “Life itself is nothing but a contradiction that has to be constantly overcome.”
A San Francisco hotel has installed this towel rack dedicated to the memory of William S. Burroughs.
