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.
If the Revolution Fails…
Weaving Words and Images Together
Jeff Ball, collector extraordinaire, sent this page from the little mimeo mag Ginger Snaps. It brings back memories.
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.
If You Believe in Auguries . . .
. . . the double rainbow over New York City on 9/11/2023 was a good sign. Even if you don’t believe in them, this was wondrous to see. My amateur video was taken from Manhattan overlooking the East River, the 59th Street bridge (since renamed, but never mind), and Roosevelt Island. Too bad the colors are washed out. The real thing was much more impressive. I’ve searched the daily NY newspapers to see whether they ran a photo or a video. Only the NY Post took note here with a video less complete than this one. Another amateur video appeared on TikTok and racked up 6 million views. Television broadcasts also took note. I can’t believe a professional photographer somewhere in the city didn’t capture this in what used to be called “living color.”
Anselm Kiefer’s Large ‘Winter Forest’ Up Close
A mere detail from the central panel of the painting is overwhelming.
Avoid the Obvious
Miles Davis to Herbie Hancock: ‘Don’t play the butter notes’
‘Sometimes our creativity can be flowing. But I’m sure that many of us have experienced periods when there has been some kind of blockage to our imagination.’ — Herbie Hancock
Stadlichter Presse Small Animals Now Published in Bilingual Edition
‘Great beauty from great despair unbends the mind. Achieved or not, that is every poet’s goal.’ Click to enlarge. From the publisher: The author has called his sonnets “wounds that have scabbed over.” They are his rare worldly goods, bringing personal ghosts to life on the page. The poetry critic of the London-based MÜ Magazine, David […]
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.”
American Presidents
A Dirge for Their ‘Greatest’ Racist Hits
“One shocking, grotesque, and racist revelation after another reveals a history of the bigotry of American presidents and how complicit they were in legitimizing American racism.” — Randy Burman
A World of Trouble
Cityscape East River NYC (9-20-2021)
A pair of NYPD patrol boats were stationed in the East River at the approach to the 59th Street Bridge. Each was fitted out with a manned, high-caliber machine gun. There was no boat traffic as there usually is — no barges going upriver, no tug boats churning heavy wakes behind them, no sail boats moving lazily with the current, no speedboats — all apparently prohibited due to the opening session of the U.N. located nearby on the Manhattan bank of the river. Many streets in the surrounding neighborthood were cordoned corral-style into single-file walk lanes. Cops were everywhere, and life was calm and complacent and inconvenient in a world of trouble.
Ivan Turgenev on Aging
‘He Did Not Picture Life’s Sea as the Poets Depict It’
“He fell to thinking . . . slowly, listlessly, wrathfully. He thought of the vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human. All the stages of man’s life passed in order before his mental gaze (he had himself lately reached his fifty-second year), and not one found grace in his eyes.” — Ivan Turgenev, from THE TORRENTS OF SPRING
Out of the Past
Journalism as the Poetry of Fact
Kay Boyle regarded journalism, when it was written well about something important, as “the poetry of fact.”
Art Love Nature Think to Dupe
It was a getaway / from the concrete city. / No bears alas / no porcupines alas / no mosquitos / no lyme-tick bites / one little fruit tree / knocked down by the wind / now gone alas / bears liked its berries / no deer alas
except one on the road / and there I was / alone alas. — jh
At the Gravesite = Small Animals
Cold Turkey Press sees it this way for a card to be published in a limited edition.
GC CUNY at the Center of the Conversation
Peter Baker & Susan Glasser on James A. Baker III, with Kai Bird
“For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without the help of James A. Baker III or ran the White House without his advice. Now two major political journalists, Peter Baker (of The New York Times) and Susan Glasser (of The New Yorker) have written ‘The Man Who Ran Washington,’ a definitive, page-turning biography of the power broker whose impact was unmatched when Washington ran the world and who influenced America’s destiny for generations. The authors join in a discussion with Kai Bird, executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.”
The Holy Grail of the Beat Generation
Neal Cassady: ‘The Joan Anderson Letter’
When Jack Kerouac read Neal Cassady’s spontaneous rush of words, he claimed it was more alive than any piece of writing he had ever seen. In its effusive style, its freewheeling candor, its Proustian (yes, Proustian!) introspection, the letter touched off a response in Kerouac that reshaped entirely his own approach to writing. The result was an explosion of “road” novels, beginning with “On the Road,” in which Cassady is renamed Dean Moriarity and seen as nothing less than “the root, the soul” of Beat legend.
GC CUNY at the Center of the Conversation
The Science of Superheroes
FREE ONLINE EVENT: “The pop-culture universe of superheroes is filled with extraordinary humans and abilities. Captain America, the Hulk, and Black Panther seem to lie firmly in the realm of fantasy, but the technology behind them might not be as farfetched as we think. In his book ‘The Science of Marvel,’ Sebastian Alvarado shows that, using quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and mechanical engineering, we can find real-world parallels to superpowers such as ‘spidey sense’ and Thor’s lightning. He speaks with Shane Campbell-Staton, host of the podcast ‘The Biology of Superheroes,’ about where the science meets the fiction.” — GC Presents