The artist Annish Kapoor captures British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a delicious drawing and caption.
The Beast Is Back
The editors of the London Review of Books say their first edition of The Beast of Brexit, the late Heathcote Williams’s takedown of Boris Johnson, sold out “in a matter of weeks” just before the Brexit referendum in 2016. After it went through several reprints, the book was published in a second edition “with a […]
Encore: A Little ‘Newspaper Music’
This reading of a Fluxus piece by Alison Knowles from 1962 was recorded probably in 1967. The cassette tape was salvaged from a recent basement flood and digitized by the indefatiguable S|U staff. Ear plugs may be helpful in some passages.
Alison Knowles: ‘Proposition #2 for Emmett Williams’
A transcript of this piece was published under the title “A house of dust, computer poem” in FANTASTIC ARCHITECTURE edited by Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins (Something Else Press, 1969). The reading, on a cassette recording made ca. 1967, was salvaged from a recent basement flood at S|U’s Manhattan perch. It features four readers, including Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins. Any help identifying the two other voices would be appreciated.
Mother Nature Is a Muthafucka
Just back from Botswana. Before I crash from jetlag, here’s an iPhone shot with magic in it. The photo was taken in the bush via focus thru binoculars, a brilliant trick. The leopard, not more than 20 to 30 feet away, looks very handsome. After gorging on his kill, he also looks mighty satisfied. The impala, cleanly butchered by an expert, looks sadly dead.
Remembering Heathcote Williams . . .
![Heathcote Williams [Photo: JH, 2013]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/heathcote-williams-photo-copy-200x200.png)
Nimble as you were in your ‘hey’day, / Your ‘wow’zone resplendent, / whenever your / Writing and way claimed a mind. / Those still on the planet salute you in love, / Winking our wish through the cosmos, / Broadcasting life’s message that yours / Is the path still to find. It used to lead / To Oxford, but now, it stretches on . . . —David Erdos
What Happened to Nelson Algren?
Nearly three months after Colin Asher’s biography of Nelson Algren was published, and just in time for readers to take a break from serious books as they head off on vacation to escape the summer heat, our dearly beloved newspaper of record has deigned to take notice of Never a Lovely So Real. But let’s put that aside because Susan Jacoby’s review, which will appear Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times Book Review, is not only honest, clear, and well reported, it sets a judicious standard. Which gives it credibility.
We’re Listening to Some Cool Music
This is a recording of the WHRB radio program JAZZ SPECTRUM broadcast on April 25, 1995. Olivia Herman was the deejay.
Strictly Unpaid Advertising
Your humble blogger has published a new collection of poems. Moloko will bring it out in a bilingual English-German edition in Germany. In the meantime, however, an American edition is now available without the translations but with a complement of images. ‘All That Would Ever After Not Be Said’ is composed of forty-two deformed sonnets of mine and forty-two collages by the late Norman O. Mustill.
From Mayor to Nightmare
!['Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare' by Heathcote Williams [Public Reading Rooms, 2016]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Brexit-Boris-cover351-200x200.jpg)
‘The Dark Side of Boris Johnson’: Now that he is on his way to becoming the new Prime Minister of the U.K., the staff believes this blogpost of Aug. 24, 2016 is worth reposting: Back in April, before the Brexit vote [on June 23, 2016], Heathcote Williams wrote a merciless pamphlet, subtitled “A Study in Depravity,” about the most notorious cheerleader for the British exit from the European Union.
Alchemical Poetry
LET US WRITE poems easy to read / simple to understand— / not the kind of thing / that Donne or Milton / wrote, nor the Bard’s / still greater brand, / the kind of thing / we make for children / who don’t know how / to read, for grownups / who forgot or never / learned to understand— / for the dead, perhaps, / to hear the damned.
Poems Midwifed by Cold Turkey Press
“an unknown power / the glass bell of midnight / neither sends nor tracks / whatever the hour / the quivering eye / everything human / the nearness of clouds / bright sun in blue sky” — J.H.
“Pay no heed to society. Wear the mask / of the beast over your animal face. / … Breathe through the nostrils of the dead / and witness how the evening mountains / devour the entrails of the sky.” — M.R.
Folio designed by Gerard Bellaart, with detail of a painting by Constable.
A Dialogue: ‘All That Would Ever After Not Be Said’
Norman Ogue Mustill (1931-2013), longtime friend and collaborator, was a little-known master collagist. His collage is from ‘Flypaper,’ originally published by Beach Books, Texts and Documents, and is not intended to illustrate the deformed sonnet facing it (which owes a debt to Evelyn Waugh). Nor is the sonnet meant as commentary on the collage. The juxtaposition was determined by chance. The dialogue between them simply honors a friendship.
From Emerson to Whitman to Ferlinghetti to Ginsberg
This teaser appeared today at Arts & Letters Daily in its “New Books” column: “‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career,’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote Allen Ginsberg. … Thus began the effort to publish Howl, a landmark case of attempted censorship…” The teaser linked to an article that appeared recently in Spiked apropos the publication in the U.K. of The People v. Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which, it so happens, is closely related to I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1997, published four years ago here in the U.S. Why do I mention all of this?
They Want to Cancel R. Crumb
Robert Crumb has come in for severe disapproval. In which case, the censors will hate this old video. It was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City. The laid-on soundtrack is “Pennies From Heaven,” from “Ben Webster: King of the Tenors”; a selection from Satie’s “Nocturnes,” played by Aldo Ciccolini; and “Honeysuckle Rose,” played by Count Basie & His Orchestra.
‘If I Die Ahead of Time . . .
Nelson Algren died 38 years ago today. The staff here hasn’t forgot. Hi, Nelson.
‘Trans-Am Totem’ and ‘Autogeddon’
A friend sent this photo of Marcus Bowcott’s “Trans Am Totem,” which stands amid the traffic in Vancouver. As you see, five cars are stacked (four of them crushed) on top of a base made from a single tree trunk. What you cannot see is that the Cedar trunk is signed by a Native First Nations Carver who carved a Bear Paw & Claws symbol into the foot of the trunk.