This drawing is from a series of ‘Headstones’ by Gerard Bellaart. "buries everything outside of himself everything he has known up to now everything that surrounds him with scorn" -- Henri Michaux And here is the artist Arman's actual headstone 'Alone at Last' in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. The irony of course is that when you’re buried at Père-Lachaise you’re never alone. The place is a magnet for tourists. … [Read more...]
Horrorscope
Mary Beach could draw horoscope charts in great detail. It was a serious hobby of hers. She only did them for people she knew, and if they piqued her interest. I completely forgot she had done mine -- it was so long ago, circa 1967. An old friend reminded me the other day of what Mary said the future held for both of us. I'll leave that to the commentary on the card. Postscript: Coincidentally, the very funny palmistry cover for this week's New Yorker offers a lighter touch. … [Read more...]
There Is Joy in Making Music
In a video trailer for Finnegan Shanahan's debut album from New Amsterdam Records, David Bloom conducts the new music ensemble Contemporaneous in a passage from "The Two Halves: Music for a Hudson River Railroad Dream Map." The piece is a 35-minute song cycle described in a press release as "deft violin work and ethereal vocals with sprawling arrangements of strings, horns, percussion, and electronics." The 22-year-old composer is a founding member of the ensemble, which will perform live on Monday in Brooklyn to celebrate the album. Listen … [Read more...]
Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally
Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It's worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump's rallies these days. Writing in his diary that "M is a very good speaker," although the speech "was the usual claptrap ..." Orwell was struck by the "unnecessary violence" of Mosley's Blackshirt minions, who were "on duty" in the hall to enforce order … [Read more...]
The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries
Michael Butterworth's new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order -- recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. -- tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and the single "Blue Monday," which became a dance-club sensation. But Butterwoth's tale really begins in Manchester, where he and his writing partner David Britton founded Savoy Books and where they fought a decades-long battle against … [Read more...]
Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros
When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets "during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship," Aaron Shulman writes in the current issue of The Believer, it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled "El Desencanto" ("The Disenchanted"), the film "ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute feature" and, he reports, has since become "a cult classic in Spain." Shulman is now writing a collective biography of the family, the Paneros, to be published by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco Books, in 2018. Its … [Read more...]
Not a Peep about the Oscars, Thank God
I've said his writing "had the density of Hart Crane poems" and that I was exaggerating "only a little." That's because I was recalling his column in the Chicago Sun-Times, when he roved the art galleries reviewing photography shows. (He had been the film critic of the Chicago Daily News before it folded, but that slot at the Sun-Times was already filled by Roger Ebert.) When he went on to USA Today as its film critic and still later to the San Diego Union-Tribune, it seemed to me he was forced to simplify both the complexity of his ideas … [Read more...]
From ‘Dream of Fair to Middling Women’
He moved with the shades of the dead and the dead-born and the unborn and the never-to-be-born, in a limbo purged of desire . . . If that is what is meant by going back into one’s heart, could anything be better, in this world or the next? The mind, dim and hushed like a sick-room, like a chapelle ardente, thronged with shades; the mind at last its own asylum, disinterested, indifferent, its miserable erethisms and discriminations and futile sallies supressed; the mind suddenly reprieved, ceasing to be an annex of the restless body, the glare … [Read more...]
Extracted, Diffracted, Destroyed
The poem is composed of words extracted from Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March and mashed up in a collage that bends their meaning, so that it’s a diffraction as much as an extraction. The drawing by Gerard Bellaart is titled "Study Apotheosis Lubertus Swaanzwijk." It was executed in 2014, in color pencil and casein tempera, as the basis for an oil painting on canvas. The painting was destroyed in 2015 by a freak tornado that tore apart Bellaart's home and studio in the French countryside. When I look at Bellaart's artworks, I see … [Read more...]
Interview: The Skinny on the Beats
Hilary Holladay: How would you size up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than as personalities? Jan Herman: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I’m sure that more people have read On the Road than ever read “Howl.” But Ginsberg may be more significant as a writer than Kerouac in terms of literary impact because of what I believe is the long-lasting influence of “Howl” on poets and poetry itself. I don’t think On the Road has had an equivalent influence on novelists, notwithstanding its popularity. Both … [Read more...]
‘Buried Child’ Surfaces in New Revival
Sam Shepard recently referred to "Buried Child" as "the same clunky play" it always was, rewrites notwithstanding. That's Shepard being candid. That's Shepard being Shepard. Never mind that awkward dramaturgy and a little too much speechifying dialogue didn't keep the play from winning the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama or Shepard from being declared the meatiest playwright of his generation. (For that matter, similar problems didn't keep Eugene O'Neill from being hailed as America's greatest dramatist of the 20th-century.) The revival of … [Read more...]
Nelson Algren’s Walk Through Appalachia
I have always loved the way A Walk on the Wild Side begins. Show me a more perceptive opening of an American novel with its historical tracing of an Appalachian clan (let alone the lyrical brilliance of its prose) and I'll buy you dinner. The novel introduces Fitz Linkhorn on the first page -- a "man so contrary," someone says, "he'd float upstream": Six-foot-one of slack-muscled shambler, he came of a shambling race. That gander-necked clan from which Calhoun and Jackson sprang. Jesse James' and Jeff Davis' people. Lincoln's people. … [Read more...]
This High Jiver Is One Helluva Surviver
"I am sociable, outgoing, quite extroverted, misanthropic at times yet other times quite philanthropic. I tend to contradict myself, wear a peculiar countenance from lack of sleep, despise insipid conversations, I get on my own nerves, spell like a fifth grader, use my diagnosis of florid ADHD as an excuse for the loquacious tendencies I can't seem to control. I was born with red hair, I still have red hair. I have an opened mind with a critical eye. I am deeply affected by art and pathos. I have a pernicious suspicion toward bigots. I do not … [Read more...]
Poet Takes Aim at Election Campaign
Health Warning " ... Only the religious slaves / Of a militarized state / Will be elected ..." Saturation Coverage Of the US Election Can cause brain damage. For nine months US Supremacism Indulges itself In an election For the US President. Somehow or other This always involves The US electorate Watching candidates Spending billions On trying to persuade it To elect murderers. Only the religious slaves Of a militarized state Will be elected. No applications From pacifists or humanists Will be … [Read more...]
And the Beat Goes On … And On
It was too good to pass up this collage by Norman O. Mustill. He made it in 1968 as a comment on the Vietnam War, but it seems to me as accurate now as it was then. The only difference is that the wars have changed. A little "I don't care" music please ... … [Read more...]
Journalism as ‘The Poetry of Fact’
At the Chicago Sun-Times I watched some great wordsmiths up close. Roger Ebert wrote with an ease that seemed miraculous. His profiles flowed like swift streams. David Elliott was another. His reviews had the density of Hart Crane poems. (I exaggerate, but only a little.) And then there was the sportswriter John Schulian, whose graceful columns seemed like actual literature. You couldn't be around writers like that without learning something. But long before I got to Chicago, a transplanted Canadian by the name of Chris Braithwaite showed … [Read more...]
Here’s a Thrill: Elaine May’s Flick on Mike Nichols
Just caught the PBS American Masters documentary on Mike Nichols, in essence a smartly made interview directed by Elaine May. It's thrilling from start to finish -- and doubly so because, unexpectedly, he gives Willy Wyler a shout out. I especially appreciated what Nichols said (45 minutes in) about "the froggy conspiracy." In A Talent for Trouble, I pointed out (as recently mentioned here) that Wyler's movies had been "the touchstone for an entire generation but were later dismissed by auteurist snobs." Here's what Nichols says: The … [Read more...]