Month: July 2015

Kenneth Irby (November 18, 1936 – July 30, 2015)

Profound sadness at the passing of an old friend, a major poet — whose work is way underappreciated in this, his country —, a great lover of literature, landscape and music. Below a poem from the sixties — p. 133 in his indispensable The Intent On (Collected Poems 1962-2006), North Atlantic Books 2009 — one of the poems I came across early on in his book Relation, and that introduced me to a part … Read more Kenneth Irby (November 18, 1936 – July 30, 2015)

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James Hansen & Climate Danger in the ‘Hyper-Anthropocene’ Age

Here the two concluding sections of J. Hansen et alii‘s paper: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming is highly dangerous. You can find the whole paper, footnotes, bibliography & figures here. (…) 7 The Anthropocene The Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), the era in which humans have contributed to global climate change, is usually assumed to … Read more James Hansen & Climate Danger in the ‘Hyper-Anthropocene’ Age

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Lee, Again

As I opened the beautiful Fulcrum Press hard-cover edition of Lee’s The White Room, out fell a letter and typescript of the poem “Old Bosham Bird Watch”, which you can read in toto in the available extracts from the Collected. Here the first page of Lee’s typescript:

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Lee Harwood (1939-2015)

Sad to see an old friend and a poet I admired very much leave our world. You should check out his Collected Poems published by Shearsman Books in 2004. Download a PDF sampler from this book here. Below, a poem from the early 70s: Five postcards to Alban Berg 1 waves break over the headland the pain of closeness  / “to a lover” The mountains walk in the mountains The lightness of touch … Read more Lee Harwood (1939-2015)

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Neo-Beat Amazigh Band

It was a pleasure last week to get together with poet El Habib Louai & his band — for their lovely gig in Brooklyn that included Louai’s Arabic translation of Ginsberg’s “America” & plenty of other goodies, poetry- and music-wise. They are a treat! Catch them if you get a chance…

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Tomorrow: 50th B-Day of Dylan going Fender Stratocaster

As Carl Wilson remarks on Slate reviewing Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties: “Because history is told by the victors, rock lore holds up the Newport tale as the fierce nonconformist standing up to the timid crowd, but on a deeper level it was one nonconformity against another, a dispute about what it meant to rebel.” And the famous myth about … Read more Tomorrow: 50th B-Day of Dylan going Fender Stratocaster

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Tariq Ali on Greece

Diary Tariq Ali LRB July 2015 In the early hours of 16 July, the Greek parliament voted overwhelmingly to give up its sovereignty and become a semi-colonial appendage of the EU. A majority of the Syriza Central Committee had already come out against the capitulation. There had been a partial general strike. Tsipras had threatened to resign if fifty of his MPs voted against him. In the event six … Read more Tariq Ali on Greece

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“Ulysses already wanted to go to Europe:”

Raoul Schrott on the Mediterranean An excellent poet, translator (of the Odyssey & the Iliad, among others), essayist, travel writer, born in Germany and living today in Austria, Raoul Schrott, whom I have been reading for some 20 years now, is virtually unknown, because untranslated, in this country — which is a crying shame! In the context of a series of articles concerning the politics & cultures of the Mediterranean basin … Read more “Ulysses already wanted to go to Europe:”

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Carl Weissner Gets Stellar Notice in Book Podcast

via Jan Herman’s ever so valuable Straight Up blog & : June 8, 2015 by Jan Herman In his latest podcast at realitystudio.org Jed Birmingham zeroes in on the immensely talented Carl Weissner and his cut-up novel The Braille Film. Birmingham, who met Weissner in New York and Paris, talks about what made him so memorable and how he bought the book at auction some years ago for $75, … Read more Carl Weissner Gets Stellar Notice in Book Podcast

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Uri Avnery on Israel & the Iran Treaty

Uri Avnery July 18, 2015 The Treaty AND WHAT if the whole drama was only an exercise of deception? What if the wily Persians did not even dream of building an atomic bomb, but used the threat to further their real aims? What if Binyamin Netanyahu was duped to become unwittingly the main collaborator of Iranian ambitions? Sounds crazy? Not really. Let’s have a look at the facts. IRAN … Read more Uri Avnery on Israel & the Iran Treaty

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