The other day I took a drive over to Toby Pond and looked in at the house where I’d spent six months during the Covid lockdown. My favorite room there was a little library. It had two steep book-lined walls and high windows that gave plenty of light for reading. With nothing better to do, I pulled down Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Having read it many years ago, I had failed to appreciate it. This time it bowled me over. Here’s a small excerpt. It offers a taste of one of the novel’s major themes.
Leave It to Flaubert to Tell It as It Is
Three excerpts from the recently published edition of ‘The Letters of Gustave Flaubert,’ edited and translated by Francis Steegmullers, seem to me an apt commentary on our own time.
Malaise . . . In the Middle of Nowhere
Not helped
by late disasters
and no idea
of what to do
but write these lines
and think of better times.
Just in Time for Independence Day
America’s top shitholer goes
whole hog at the public trough,
and never mind the rest of us,
because that is the hog’s nature. …
BEAT SCENE No. 110
Latest Issue Filled With Rich Tales
About Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and Anne Murphy, Charles Bukowski, Herbert Huncke, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Milton Klonsky, Alice Notley, Bernard Kops, Neeli Cherkovski, Emmett Grogan and the Diggers, Martin Bax, the influence of Gertrude Stein, the death of Joan Volmer, and more …
Whimsy and Philosophy: Pictures at an Artist’s Studio
On a visit to Paul Zelevansky’s studio in Manhattan, I took some pictures of the works he had there on display. These are some of the ones I photographed. I post them here without commentary other than their titles for you to decide how they strike you.
With Apologies to Gogol
Suddenly I felt
while massaging my skin
the skeleton within. …
Artists of ‘Harlem Renaissance’ at Metropolitan Museum
Glad I got to the Met for a glimpse before it becomes hotter ‘n hell. Although the museum was jammed, the show itself was comfortable. It was also much larger than I expected. I hadn’t realized how many accomplished painters there were among the Harlem group. For example, I had never heard of Archibald Motley Jr. who I thought pretty much sets the exquisite tone of the show, though by no means exclusively.
Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA
Finally got to see this intimate, brooding retrospective.
‘The Highest and Most Difficult Achievement of Art’
“… is not to make us laugh or cry, nor to arouse our lust or rage, but to do what nature does — that is, to set us dreaming. The most beautiful words have this quality. … They are as motionless as cliffs, stormy as the ocean, leafy, green and murmurous as forests, forlorn as the desert, blue as the sky.” — Gustave Flaubert
New York City Opera
Outdoor Puccini Celebration in the Heart of Manhattan
Huge crowds turned out for two boffo evenings of concert excerpts from Puccini’s operas. It was part of Bryant Park’s free, summer Picnic Performances. Music was provided by New York City Opera, “famously dubbed ‘The People’s Opera’ by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia at its founding in 1943.'” I attended on a beautiful, balmy Saturday evening.
‘Tucked among the illustrious dead . . .’
‘… but still preposthumous, which I prefer to post mortem.’ — jh
That is Brion Gysin pictured on the cover of BEAT SCENE magazine.
Charles Plymell Takes Stage for New and Selected Poems
Plymell has as much in depth to say about death as Hemingway did and a lot more to say about it in terms of the present generation stillborn into a world that can offer nothing. — William S. Burroughs Plymell and his friends inventing the Wichita Vortex contribute to a tradition stretching back from Lamantia […]
Recalling the Fierce Beliefs of Oriana Fallaci
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. …”
‘There he was in a dream . . .’
“He gives me a manuscript
on elegant stationery
with a letterhead of
raised black lettering
in typeface rare & delicate.
He’s terminal. We both
know it. …”
Álvaro Mutis on the Real Nowhere Man
“From his essential dullness,, his useless, worn-out gestures, his equivocal, tenacious desires, his ‘nowhere,’ his walled-in yearning to communicate, his continuous laughable travels, his raising his shoulders like a hungry ape, his conventional, fearful laughter, his impoverished litany of passions …” Or as The Beatles sang it, “He’s a real nowhere man …”
Over the Stage of Kansas
A Lifetime of Charles Plymell’s Inspired Poetry
![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)
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.