A graphic narrative with a vocabulary of influences from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.
Éditions Béringuer
‘Benevolent Loitering’
‘Unheard and Unseen’ in Istanbul
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.
Is 2023 the Year of Anti-Nihilist Gen Z?
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.
‘Button Up’ for 2023
Boughs wet with tears
remind the air
of sleep.
Clouds above the lake
scud on
unbuttoned, driven,
the sky beyond
my keep.
‘We bloom just once . . .’
I’m a human drape.
My bones are tight,
not so my skin. It sags
curtainlike from chin.
Pleasurable Reading: Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences
It is filled with wisdom like this: “Life itself is nothing but a contradiction that has to be constantly overcome.”
But Where Are the Towel Racks for Kerouac and Ginsberg?
A San Francisco hotel has installed this towel rack dedicated to the memory of William S. Burroughs.
Alfred Chester, a Double Reading
Who reads Alfred Chester these days? Anyone? His huge, posthumous volume of Moroccan letters is worth every page (even the ones I felt like skipping).
A Libertarian Penchant for BS
This video sounds sane, but ‘tiz not my cuppa. As one of S/U’s indefatigable staff of thousands says, “Slickish until it’s obvious what the agenda is.”
Defsons for Mustill
We bloom only once
and some of us never bloom —
not even once. You were perennial.
A Straight Up Thanksgiving — It’s a Tradition
Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill
has been a happy pairing since 2012. It still is. So here they are again, sweetened by Heathcote Williams’s words in a narration-cum-montage by Alan Cox. It’s all so delish.
Designers Pushing the Envelope . . . ?
The New York Times Magazine used to have a nameplate. It still does. Most of the time it’s all there. Sometimes you have to search for it. How come? The designers are: a) being avant-garde, b) reinforcing a theme, c) too clever by half, d) all three, or maybe e) just having fun.
Amélie’s Recent Drawings
What Seahorses and Birds Have in Common
Although seahorses and birds do not share a common link in the fossil record or, as far as we can tell, even in legend, they do share a delicacy of line and boldness of appearance in these two drawings by a teenage artist whose talent and development have caught the attention of this blog.
With Democracy in Peril
May the Midterms Land as Gracefully as Amélie’s Pigeons
The staff here has followed from a distance the drawings of a young Dutch art student, Amélie by name. She was precociously talented at 13, at 14, and at 15. She is now 16, and her studies continue with work more accomplished than ever. Regardless of the midterm outcome, we will be posting some of her other recent drawings soon.
Update Nov. 10 — The Dems oughta take Amélie’s pigeons as their aspirational logo.
Greed, Cheating, and Lies
Top Shitholer Goes Whole Hog at the Public Trough
“This case is about greed and cheating on taxes,” the chief of investigations for the Manhattan District Attorney, told the court and promised the jury it would get the ‘inside story’ of how the scheme was carried out. Unfortunately, the trial has been delayed due to a Covid infection. Until it resumes, here’s the outside story. This item has been updated.
Do You Remember ‘do you remember’ by Emmett Williams?
And is it the most rigorous piece of lyrical whimsy in the American poetry canon? I think so.
The poem, “structured by six vertical progressions,” was first published in “Underground,” in 1966. It appeared the following year in “An Anthology of Concrete Poetry,” published by Something Else Press, and most recently appears in “A Something Else Reader.”
do you remember
when I loved soft pink nights
and you hated hard blue valleys
and I kissed mellow red potatoes
and you loved livid green seagulls
and I hated soft yellow dewdrops
and you kissed hard pink oysters …
A Something Else Reader
Newly Discovered, It Was Hidden Away for 50 Years
” ‘A Something Else Reader’ is a previously unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963, and to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. … He assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal, which went into his archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled it.” — Primary Information