Rejuvenating powers of a misspent life
BBC Arena documentary on William S. Burroughs, who died this day 1997 (via Darran Anderson).
the Wrestlers’ Series
the last line of my manifesto
is this
living as I do at the end of my days
at the ungentrified end of New Jack City
a Pugilist-Poet viewing the gradual diminishment
of his Franchise & powers
a pink bee on an orange leg crouching
behind the set In order to avoid
the cop rays
with hindsight mince
is a noun
& a verb
in this life (it says here)
the moniker “Mr TV” could be confusing
By Tim Atkins.
Report from the East End
Goldman has been called “a sort of Proust of the Whitechapel Road” and compared – favourably – with Dickens, Gissing and Gorky, yet his work has suffered neglect since the ’40s, even East End My Cradle. His photo in Penguin New Writing of 1940 is placed alongside those of Eliot, Auden, Isherwood, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene and a handful of others, yet of them, his name alone is not widely recognised. Yet this is the literary company he really belongs in, though to be sure he can be discussed alongside such Jewish writers of the East End as Israel Zangwill and Simon Blumenfeld. He can, that is to say, be bracketed with ‘Jewish [or Anglo-Jewish] writers’ or with ‘working-class writers’ but his quality transcends the limitations implied by these categories.
Bill Goldman on his father, Willy Goldman.