That is a key question posed by Jascha Hannover’s “The Books He Didn’t Burn,” a documentary to be featured in its U.S premiere at the Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 15 at Lincoln Center in New York. Its relevance to the beliefs of today’s white supremacists and rightwing Christian nationalists is stunning.
‘What a Piece of Work Is a Man’
‘… and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’
The end of the dismal year 2023 brings Hamlet’s soliloquy to mind.
At Year’s End a Lineup from Long Ago
This card from 1968, designed and printed by Graham Macintosh, shows a little mag’s lineup and the subscription-cum-ad rates at the time. Demi Shaft Raven obtained the card from Kevin Ring, editor of Beat Scene, and posted it on Facebutt.
From Phantom Outlaw Editions
SHADOW WORDS: A Selection of Deformed Sonnets
“Shadow words / that beat like hammers.”
The First Folio’s Literary and Commercial Success
“Four hundred years ago yesterday saw the first printing of one of the great wonders of the literary world: Shakespeare’s First Folio. Published in 1623, seven years after he died, it was the first printed edition of the collected plays. Without this achievement, half of Shakespeare’s dramatic work would have been lost.” — Folio 400
The Greatest Poet Was a Great Word Thief
It is widely acknowledged that Shakespeare lacked a university education — there is no record of it — unlike his contemporaries or near-contempories, such as Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, Nashe, Beaumont, Fletcher, so forth. Despite that, he was a greater writer than any of them, and pilfering was part of his toolkit. As Anthony Burgess notes in his biography of Shakespeare, he not only took plots and stories for his plays — this too is widely acknowledged — but also “filched” entire passages (plagiarized them, if you will) and in the process improved them immeasurably.
A True Poet’s ‘Great Balls of Doubt’
The world Mark Terrill sees is “essentially forlorn, if not absurd, if not entirely hopeless. But his poetry is far from hopeless.” — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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.
Walter Isaacson on the Craft of Biography
‘My road to biography began at TIME magazine.’
He titled his lecture ‘Lessons About Living with Geniuses.’ His latest biography is about Elon Musk. His previous biographies were about Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Jennifer Doudna.
Wislawa Szymborska: ‘Negative’
‘You look like a ghost / who’s trying to summon up the living. / (And since I still number among them, / I should appear to him and tap: / good night, that is, good morning, / farewell, that is, hello…)”
Read an Excerpt
Claude Pélieu’s Kali Yug Express via Mary Beach
“A visionary prophetic book written when the Hippies and Yippies were dissolving the Sixties, which didn’t give us the political and social change needed . . . Pélieu saw Céline’s words become the reality: ‘The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy’.”— Charles Plymell
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.
Five Brief Stanzas from a Scottish-born Poet
![Drawing by Malcolm Ritchie [2018]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Drawing-by-Malcolm-Ritchie-2018border-360x528enh-200x200.jpg)
as a brief visitor to my ear
a fly droned on about
some matter or other that
was too brief for me to catch
On Yom Kippur My Atonement Is Weak
Cold Turkey Press published this card four years ago in a limited edition. It applies now more than ever.
Double-Barrelled: From Rainbow to Gunboats
On Sept. 11, 2023, from a perch above the East River you could see a skywide rainbow over New York City. On Sept. 18, from the same perch, you could see U.S. Coast Guard boats patrolling the East River as part of extensive security put in place for the opening of the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
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.