I love reading Mary Beard. She may be a professor, the highest of high-brow professors, but she writes -- and speaks (albeit with a British accent) -- like an actual human. Enjoy. Her talk begins: In 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy about a nation of women -- and women only -- that has existed for two thousand years in some remote, still unexplored part of the globe. A magnificent utopia: clean and tidy, collaborative, peaceful (even the cats have … [Read more...]
Lynne Stewart, R.I.P.
The radical leftist civil rights attorney has died. She was among the bravest. Some background. The feds were aiming to fry her. She served four years of a 10-year sentence when she was granted "compassionate release" on New Year's Day, 2014, due to a terminal case of late-stage breast cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. Thousands of supporters had signed a petition seeking her release. … [Read more...]
Filth Is Good for Something
This blog has been called a breeding ground for filth. If it were true, I would have no objection. A bit of filth is good for the health of any writer and for any of his readers. Where's the proof? Frank Harris, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Iceberg Slim, and the Marquis de Sade. … [Read more...]
Juggling Ideas About the Avant Garde
So much art is called "avant garde" these days that my tireless staff of thousands wonders whether it's just a label. Some think that the entire culture, no matter how far out, has gone mainstream and that there's nothing legitimately avant garde anywhere -- not since the good old days of Dada, surrealism, cubism, futurism, serialism, modernism, postmodernism (insert your favorite "ism" here). Well, Marc James Léger has news for the staff. He has put together an anthology, The Idea of the Avant Garde and What it Means Today, filled with an … [Read more...]
This Dog Has the Right Idea
My tireless staff of thousands sent a one-minute video. Banksy doesn't do it better. The little flourish at the end is priceless. And for your further diversion, catch this: The Statue of Liberty’s Burka. … [Read more...]
‘Why Are Americans So Stupid?’
My staff of thousands has reminded me of an opinion piece that appeared a little more than a dozen years ago in the Oslo-based Norwegian newspaper VG. I had stashed it away and forgot about it. Notice the dateline: September 30, 2004. Since my piece never appeared in English, here it is -- a little dated, but (leaning heavily on Thomas Frank, Louis Menand, and Michael Moore) a lot prescient. The headline that editor-translator Yngve Kvistad put on it still applies: "Why Are Americans So Stupid?" The great American guessing game about who … [Read more...]
James ‘No Name’ Baldwin, the Maverick
In his critique of "I Am Not Your Negro," the movie bringing renewed attention to James Baldwin, Hilton Als comments on a key moment: It’s the summer of 1979, and Baldwin is working on a book that he does not want to write but knows he must write. Titled “Remember This House,” it will tell the story of America through the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, all of whom were Baldwin’s friends, and whom he wrote about in his underrated 1972 book, “No Name in the Street.” (One wonders why he chose to revisit the … [Read more...]
The Gilded Toad & Social Corrosion
Poem by Heathcote Williams Video Montage and Narration by Alan Cox • From IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance • … [Read more...]
Picturing the President
Insect brain, cold-blooded eye, bared teeth of a human predator. The total obscenity of the American Dream Comes to fruition in Donald John Trump ... -- Heathcote Williams, from a poem in American Porn The collage was published in 2016 by Verlag Peter Engstler in Paulus Böhmer das es Euch gibt: Collagen, a collection of 62 of Böhmer's collages printed in full color. It is used here courtesy of the publisher. The caption was provided gratis by S/U's tireless staff of thousands. Feb. 2: -- Crossposted at IT: International Times, The … [Read more...]
Carl Weissner: Master Writer, Cherished Friend
A great one died five years ago today. Carl was also a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg), and a literary agent who spread the work of dissident writers even further. Manuscript page of Carl's "The Marseille Stories": … [Read more...]
‘American Porn’ for Inauguration Day
On the day Twitter Fingers is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of "investigative poems about American history, culture and politics" by Heathcote Williams. The titular poem, "The United States of Porn," reflects the fact that America "owes its very name to an early Italian pornographer" (Amerigo Vespucci) and that a nation "steeped for centuries in violence, … [Read more...]
Meryl Streep’s Truth to Power
Her remarks ran for four minutes, 55 seconds. At two minutes in, she said this: There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I … [Read more...]
Now a Country Named for Him
When Twitter Fingers takes the oath of office, we will have official confirmation that we are now living in the United States of Trumpistan. So add it to the list. Whoever coined the term "Trumpistan" deserves attribution in the O.E.D. The earliest reference I can find is from eight years ago -- Jan. 10, 2009, to be exact -- in an anonymous comment on a blogpost at Undernews, the online report of The Progressive, about high rents in NYC and the prototype of a "homeless chateau" designed for poor artists living in warehouses. These … [Read more...]
Bookstores in Their Anecdotage
Garrison Keillor, who owns a bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, called Common Good Books, writes in a foreword to FOOTNOTES* from the WORLD'S GREAT BOOKSTORES: *True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers that "the little independent bookstore is dying out, they say. Too bad. Someday mine will, too." The author of the book, New Yorker cartoonist Bob Eckstein, hopes not. He spent two years collecting more than 300 bookstore stories from around the world, narrowing his selection down to 75 and pairing them … [Read more...]
The Right Idea: An Illuminating Essay
The editors of The New York Times Book Review asked "some notably avid readers -- who also happen to be poets, musicians, diplomats, filmmakers, novelists, actors, and artists --" to name the books they read this year. About 50 answered the call, listing what must be several hundred titles. I noticed that not one of them named any books by the Beats. No Kerouac. No Ginsberg. No Burroughs. This, at a time when the literary influence of the most famous Beats reached a highwater mark with the Nobelization of Bob Dylan. But there was also no … [Read more...]
Trump’s America
Here's to the end of a lousy year, with no apologies for our tinkered layout: … [Read more...]
Horse’s Mouth Changes His Tune
Or maybe I was hearing the wrong tune when I went to listen to what the horse's mouth had to say at the Council on Foreign Depredations. At the time, last January, I wrote "to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane." At one point, speaking of Putin, he said that unlike Bush, who claimed he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul, “I looked into his eyes and saw a stone-cold killer.” Now the horse's mouth has not only strongly endorsed Putin's longtime business associate Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, he's responsible for … [Read more...]