‘The eyeballs of an overpaid narcissus
begin to leak all sorts of nothing
and you smell the auric waste
of the languidly famous …’
—Jay Jeff Jones
Brion Gysin Uncut
Have you ever seen a more revealing photo of Brion Gysin than the one on the cover of “His Name Was Master: Texts; Interviews”? It shows a profound sense of dislocation, something Gysin often talked about but rarely showed in his demeanor—which was characteristically grand and worldly and often laced with humor. This sprawling book by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge with Peter Christoferson and Jon Savage offers Gysin in talking mode. It is Gysin uncut. Having already been comprehensively reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, it needs no review from me. More interesting than anything I might have to say is Gysin’s account of his brief, teenage involvement with the Surrealists. The disappointment, not to say trauma, of that experience was a harbinger of later ones.
John Butler Yeats’s Sublime Ignorance
‘I had in my only philosophy a faith founded like that of Socrates upon the basis of my conscious ignorance—it is a sort of sublime optimism, and I am very satisfied with my ignorance as my betters are with their knowledge …’ — John Butler Yeats in a letter to his son William Butler Yeats
Once When High on Hash (Two Versions)
Baudelaire drew his self-portrait under the influence of hashish (ca. 1842). As for me, ‘I wore no topcoat … / and no comet struck / me from a morbid sky … ‘
Supervert’s New Translation of ‘To Arthur Rimbaud’
Your blast calculations were
right on the money, my boy
the armored wall of poetic imagination
collapsed under your hand
But what the hell
happened to your right leg?
The knee is swollen like a pumpkin
in the African grass of your fervid nights.
Why didn’t the ship’s boilers explode
on the high seas
and put an end
to your misery?
Samuel Beckett: ‘Spring’
‘The strange, gentle pleasures I feel at the approach of spring are impossible of expression, and if that is a sentence inviting ridicule, so much the worse for me.’ — Samuel Beckett
Becoming ‘Nobody’
“This seems about right at any time but especially in the time of #MeToo.” — Yakov Boyarsky
Pandemic in India
Pradip Choudhuri, R.I.P.
“He was perhaps one of the most reliable links that Bengal and India had to the counter-culture movements across America and Europe. His lifelong friend, French poet and collagist Bruno Sourdin called him, ‘The sacred fire of Bengal.’” — Sreemanti Sengupta, The Wire
Taking a Break
Back soon.
At the Gravesite = Small Animals
Cold Turkey Press sees it this way for a card to be published in a limited edition.
This Blogger Needs to Take a Break
We weep
to leave behind
the sun
lightly pencilled in,
nothing left of the eternal. …
We are still
only small animals.
Rich Allen’s Film Dances to the Music
‘Lost in Lydia City’: Four minutes of pure sad funny nostalgic joy.
Underground: To a Remaindered Poet
An ancient shadow led the exiled Dante
through the hell of his neurotic soul.
Yet you, oh poet, are silent about your escape
and slipped into the brown hide of a bookseller
to sell me your remainder of 2000 sonnets.
You did not die like the laurel-wreathed tribune
under a cloak of daggers.
No, not you, rebellious citizen . . .
Gone But Not Forgotten
The Pyramid Club on the Lower East Side
Gone, finished, closed, shut forever. Though less well known than CBGB, Webster Hall, The Palladium, the Continental, it gave birth to much LES culture. Over the last few years, the Pyramid Club struggled to stay alive. Then came the Covid-19 death grip.
Transubstantiation
Christopher Hitchens Would Be Chortling
Words by Heathcote Williams. Montage and narration by Alan Cox.
Video redux for Easter Sunday 2021.
He Had A Dream
He was assassinated fifty-three years ago today. His dream did not die with him.
Day and Night
There are day poets and night poets. Here is one of each: A. Robert Lee (whose SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES was recently published) and Helmut Maria Soik (whose RIMBAUD UNDER THE STEEL HELMET has been translated from the German by Georg M. Gugelberger and Lydia Perera). I should perhaps mention, in case anyone gets the wrong idea, that I make no value judgment as to the greater or lesser worth of “day” vs. “night.” I had so much fun reading “Suspicious Circumstances” that it felt as good as getting high, no drugs needed. The wit and wisdom of its vignettes—really prose poems laced with laughter—dissect the customs and dispel the dreariness of ordinary life. They are a much-needed provocation, like Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen” turned inside out.