Nothing like some biblioklept mischief to brighten the day.
‘I have stolen books
from friends and family
books they never cared for
books they never read. . . ‘
‘Selected Catastrophies’ from Beiles’s Sacred Fix
‘Sacred Fix’ was published in 1975. ‘Selected Catastrophies’ is the fourth section of the book. The author is an incandescent South African poet, who died in 2000. The poem begins:
“society!
I will not support you
when you shed your hideous electronic disguises
and stagger through the alleyways of oblivion
looking for shelter.
o society you betrayed me
with your promises of paradise . . .”
‘The trick is to get out of your own dead body …’
Cold Turkey Press continues to publish handmade posters printed in editions limited to 36 copies, specializing in avant-garde poets and artists of the past as well as the present. Here is one of the latest, LUDION’S LAMENT.
‘The trick is to get out of your own dead body in one piece. One quick hard twist and you’re out. Next, you turn black all over and taper at the extremities.’ — Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
Downtown Scene
Reclusive Artist Elsa Rensaa Spreads Her Wings
The New York gallerist James Fuentes is presenting Elsa Rensaa’s paintings in a two-part exhibition: OUT OF THE WILDERNESS AND INTO THE BLUE. “Her paintings, rendered with meticulous applications of thin acrylic washes,” he says, “bring forth lush, syncretic visual portals. They draw from a vast and visionary range of references, including Ancient Nordic, Egyptian, and Eastern imagery, in addition to Renaissance, Art Nouveau, and Dada art movements, with a Lower East Side iconography that is distinctly recognizable as Rensaa’s own.”
Making a Living as a Writer Was Never Easy, But …
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.
Carl Weissner Letter to Sinclair Beiles
On the Hitlerology of ‘the Biggest Rat of Them All’
I’ve come to the conclusion that my computer is great at hiding things from me. What prompted me to think so is a letter I came across that I didn’t know I had since it had never turned up before. My great good luck is that I found it by accident, and greater still is that anything written by Carl Weissner is a delight to read. The recipient of the letter (if in fact Carl ever mailed it) was Sinclair Beiles, himself a writer of no small humor. (Fans of William Burroughs will recognize the reference to one of his notorious fictional characters).
Make of It What You Will
Other Minds Always Offers a Musical Change of Pace
Thirty-one years after its founding, Other Minds, the brainchild of Charles Amirkhanian and Jim Newman, is still going strong as a presenter of experimental contemporary music with an emphasis on “the most original, eccentric, and underrepresented creative voices.” Here’s a presentation of Linda Bouchard and the Ensemble TriOcular+.
Mashup of Amanda Gorman and Bach at Carnegie Hall
If I had been asked who would be the main attraction of Saturday night’s Carnegie Hall mashup between the poet and the composer, my guess would have been Amanda Gorman. I would not have guessed it would be the cellist Jan Vogler. As it turned out, however, his performance of three of Bach’s cello suites, more or less interrupted by Gorman’s rap-inflected poetry, made him the star of the show.
Dissident Poetry Festival to Delight Mind and Tongue
In a rare poetry reading organized by Efe Balıkçıoğlu and Sibel Erol and focused on often unacknowledged voices in contemporary Turkey, the works of three dissident authors are to be presented as a serious Turkish delight.
The presentation at NYU on Feb. 23 — both in person and on Zoom — will feature the feminist poet and artist Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, the gay Kurdish poet Fırat Demir, and Nicholas Glastonbury, who has translated the work of the late queer leftist poet Arkadaş Z. Özger.
Because It Is So Touching
“A face long unloved will at some point grow ugly,
As unkissed features untended will as with an unkempt
Garden grow wild . . . ”
— David Erdos
The Bishop and the Butterfly
Political Thriller or True Crime Whodunit? You Decide
“Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. … Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets?” — Union Square & Co. (the publisher)
Nikki Haley Does ‘Patton’
If ever there were a question that political posturing is show biz, Nikki Haley settled it at a rally in South Carolina. She was doing an anemic imitation of a mesmerizing George C. Scott in the opening scene of “Patton.” Missing were the medals and martial music, thank god, which contributed mightily to Scott’s classic performance. Of course Trump has been doing his stale imitation for years.
In His Strike Zone: A Tale of Tangier Ghosts
At last a first-class appreciation of the recently published ULTRAZONE. When I first read the novel in proof copy, it had me doing cartwheels . Naturally, I wondered how it would be received elsewhere. Now I know.
‘There are things closer than rain / that keep hope alive’
This ‘deformed sonnet’ was written in memory of Carl Weissner, a great one who was so rudely interrupted 12 years ago today.
Age Is No Obstacle: Annie Fischer Plays Like an Angel
She’s also smoking a fag, as a Brit might say. Her touch — feathery and liquid both — is sublime. When I listen to her trills, I hear birds singing.
Monet Pays a Visit by iPhone to the East River
Dancing lights at night as photographed from the window.
Pissarro and Cézanne Seared into My Brain
Before it disappears too far into the distance, let me just say how much I enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s recent take in The New Yorker on the relationship between Pissarro and Cézanne: “How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence.” Not least, it gives me the chance to post an etching of the two of them made in the early 1980s by Gerard Bellaart, who has for many years seared into my brain his love of both painters.