A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
Charles Olson, Projective Verse (1959). Cover by Matsumi Kanemitsu. “On the same small offset press, and as an arm of his magazine Yugen, LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press imprint published thirteen pamphlets, beginning with Diane di Prima’s This Kind of Bird Flies Backward in 1958. The press also published work by Ron Loewinsohn (Watermelons, 1959), Michael […]
Totem Press, Yugen – Imamu Amiri Baraka — 1960s: Days of Rage
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim,sayingly;
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and,ashes)
— E.E. Cummings, ” [into the strenuous briefness],” 100 Selected Poems (Grove Press January 10, 1994) Originally published 1954.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley (1875) Published 1888.
“There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place… do the next thing with diligence and devotion.” In recent seasons of being, I have had occasion to reflect on the utterly improbable trajectory of my life, plotted not by planning but by living. We long…
Carl Jung on How to Live — Brain Pickings
Reflecting philosophically, I have often attempted to examine the notion of bohemianism, to pin it down to some sort of tangible set of ideals and identities: all attempts have thus failed save to say that bohemianism is more a state of mind than anything else…
A friend of mine some time ago told me an anecdote about a group of Italian anarchists who turned up at a protest rally dressed in fine business suits. This clash of images provoked a completely perplexed response from the authorities who could not reconcile their dress code with the contradiction in their actual intentions.
Thus, bohemianism, like anarchism, should best be reserved as a ‘technique of mind’ rather than a code of dress that often presents mere images in place of deeply held sets of ideas or ideals.
[MN] 7 December 2021
“Toward the end of his short life, Jack Spicer began to relax some of his purist principles about the publication and circulation of his poetry. In 1964, impoverished and unable to hold down a job, he consented to allow Lawrence Ferlinghetti to sell his books at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, officially ending his […]
The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (1975) — 1960s: Days of Rage
I ignore and despise grammar, which is at the point of death, but I am a great reader of dictionaries and if my spelling is none too sure it’s because I am too attentive to the pronunciation, this idiosyncrasy of the living language. In the beginning was not the word, but the phrase, a modulation. Listen to the songs of birds!
– Blaise Cendars in Paris Review Interview, The Art of Fiction, no. 38.
“ I think the political and social chaos we are seeing on every side reflects an underlying biologic crisis – the end of the human line. All species are doomed from conception like all individuals. Evolution did not come to a reverend halt with Homo Sapiens. We have the technologies to re-create a broad artifact and to produce improved and variegated models designed for space conditions…”
– William S. Burroughs
When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.
— Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. (Columbia University Press; Reprint edition April 15, 1982)
Julia Kristeva — The Vale of Soul-Making
Originally posted on Progressive Geographies: As the last update on this book said, I was able to make a trip to Paris over reading week. I spent most of the time at the BNF working on archival materials related to The Archaeology of Knowledge. There is a manuscript on philosophical discourse, probably written in 1966, which seems to be an…
The Archaeology of Foucault update 12: archival work in Paris on drafts of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Foucault’s notebooks — Foucault News
Naked Cities Journal 
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