Essays

“Rexroth is a faker. Ask him what he thinks about [Robinson] Jeffers.”

“Do you ever see Bukowski?” Rexroth asked.

I told him I saw him all the time.

“Well, tell him this: If I ever meet him around anywhere, I’ll come after him with a telephone pole and beat him till he can’t walk. Will you tell him that personally for me? Promise?”

Ben Pleasants on Rexroth, Bukowski, Ezra Pound and the poetry wars.

As he acted, or stripped away the actor’s tricks, Cassavetes taught her what a director should be. How to look for the moment to shut up and let the actor work. How to listen for what was inside the face of a human being giving what he really is. How to wait for the pauses that are true to life. They all knew they had something magical in twenty-four hours.

Ben Pleasants meets film director Tamar Simon Hoffs.

Tall, gaunt, with either beret pushed forward or straggly hair pushed back over his forehead, Raymond — in both French and English — talked about his writing and adventures, his hatred of the British police force, and his literary heroes — Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis. Although the sound quality of the print was poor, the documentary showed us Robin Cook as his friends in the audience remembered him — passionate, darkly flamboyant, and extraordinarily well spoken. Watching him sing along to the Pogues while drinking his bottles of beer and glasses of red wine, one could just imagine him in The French House, Gerry’s Club, or The Coach and Horses (his “office”) in Soho.

Steve Finbow and co. gather in Euston to commune with the late Derek Raymond.

It began with a murder straight out of a grisly pulp paperback. The New York Times reported “the discovery of a bound and stabbed body…in the murky waters of the Hudson River.” Several days previous, Lucien Carr had been hanging around the shorefront, drinking with an associate David Kammerer in the early hours. A fight broke out, during which Carr lodged his penknife into Kammerer’s chest. He died almost instantly. Panicking, Carr tied the body up and dragged it out into the water. Then he fled to a friend’s house; a certain William Seward Burroughs.

Darran Anderson takes a look at the books that came back from the grave.

During the break Kendra told me that they’d found some rotten spring onions in a bin on the way there, and she and Tao planned to throw them at Zachary while he read. He read about fifteen short poems from The Name of This Band is the Talking Heads in a disinterested fashion, and didn’t laugh or smile much. Everyone else laughed a lot. It felt like Zachary German was playing around with monotony and finding something new in it. The spring onions got thrown near the end, but missed.

Chris Killen reports from an Offbeat gathering in New York.

The woman must have been three hundred pounds; pregnant, acne-ridden with thick red glasses, and chain smoking. The man only two hundred, maybe two-fifty; bald, genial, wrestling fanatic, chain smoker. Her name was Julie and I think his name was Kurt or Larry or something. Their story went something like this; She had a huge trust fund from her family and he delivered newspapers for a living. I think he was only engaged to her for her money. She smoked while pregnant because she had done it before and it never hurt the baby, even though her first had ended up dying later.

By Barrett Dylan Brown.

What is this silence within The Hour of the Star? In Rodrigo S.M.’s narration? In Clarice Lispector’s writing itself? Clarice Lispector once proclaimed The Hour of the Star as a book made without words. Lispector’s silence is Macab éa’s sorrow, and just because we never hear it, this doesn’t mean that it’s not there throughout. It is Macab éa’s bona fide voice; and this silence in The Hour of the Star is the power of Clarice Lispector as a writer: knowing just what to leave out.

Lee Rourke on Clarice Lispector‘s The Hour of the Star.

Questions are only the interesting things in life, as Cartier-Bresson so wisely stated. As I walked out onto the pavement and looked at two little girls squealing with delight at the window display for the show, I leant over and saw that it was a window full of earth, and all the creepy crawly things that come with it were escaping from its brown grey weight and into the light. Ah, so maybe there is a chance that we will escape I thought, as I happily skipped off down the road.

Sophie Parkin reviews Group Show‘s current exhibition in London.

I am standing at the back of The Roundhouse, but during “When You Wake You’re Still In A Dream” I am starting to shake from the floor. And by the time they hit the twenty-three minute version of “You Made Me Realise”, this is the equivalent of standing under a jet plane taking off. The sound is so loud that I want to vomit, but somehow I start to wonder if Kevin Shields planned this all along? Purification via noise terrorism. I can feel every vein in my body. From the spleen outwards my head pounds, and fingers shake.

Adelle Stripe reviews My Bloody Valentine live in London.

Lacan’s concept that words generate meanings which are beyond the understanding of those who use them, causing a chasm between what you want to say and mean to say hence the misunderstandings and apologies of daily life, is perfect for now. The desire-based consumerism and jargon-based governments of our age are becoming ever more soul-destroying, lacking integrity and genuine human connection.

Georgia de Chamberet‘s Parisian column returns.

I had no doubt that I was, in part, displaying the first classic symptoms of a midlife crisis. Fooling myself into thinking that by buying up old stapled together pieces of folded coloured paper, I could recapture lost youth. I was regressing, doping myself on nostalgia, taking refuge in the illusory certainties of the past. After all, don’t they say collectors are often the kind of people who do so precisely in order to cover up hidden anxieties and insecurities?

Mark Czanik reflects on his favourite comics store.

One of the creeping, unanalysed myths of our time is that it is somehow wrong to dislike Islam, or any part thereof, and wrong to take a dim view of its tenets and demands, and wrong to take a still dimmer view of the figure who founded it. I can practically hear the distant tutting and grunts of disapproval. Poor Islam. Poor Muslims. Their beliefs are being mocked. How hurtful. How “racist”. How terribly unfair.

David Thompson‘s final column for 3:AM.