B. Kliban’s back cover for Arcade #7, Fall 1976, The Print Mint.
Claes Oldenburg’s response to the hat questionnaire. From, “The Hat Issue,” Milk Quarterly #11 & 12, 1978.
“Don’t Forget Anger” by Ted Berrigan. From Mother #5, Summer 1965.
Amulet, 2025 by Jordan Sullivan (b. 1983)
The Passage, 2022 by Shyama Golden (b. 1983)
“James A. Garfield and All the Shot People”
by
David Berman
Insects are a manifestation of negative will.
—Anon.
I thought I saw an angel below the engine
but it was just vibrating air.
People used to see things
in the woods and the air and the closet:
spirits, dragons, and headless things,
lost and angry floats
conspiring to make every stomach pulse
like an almost accident
and every body’s head come unwound.
Our vision is not so fuzzy now.
We stare into eyes and see their parts,
have cameras, sidewalks, pills,
and other futuristic devices.
Some of our race have counted up into the highest numbers,
the high clear numbers.
Now we know the speed of light,
and that we never see anything just when it happens,
but a part of a second afterwards.
People are getting lost in their own houses,
wandering down hallways and through rooms for years.
We stumble downstairs full of water,
and when I wake up it all pours out of me.
From Caliban #8, 1990.
The issue also contains a few illustrations by Berman, including this one:
“Even Greenland”
by
Barry Hannah
I was sitting radar. Actually doing nothing.
We had been up to seventy-five thousand to give the afternoon some jazz. I guess we were still in Mexico, coming into Mirimar eventually in the F-14. It doesn’t much matter after you’ve seen the curvature of the earth. For a while, nothing much matters at all. We’d had three sunsets already. I guess it’s what you’d call really living the day.
But then, “John,” said I, “this plane’s on fire.”
“I know it,” he said.
John was sort of short and angry about it.
“You thought of last-minute things any?” said I.
“Yeah. I ran out of a couple of things already. But they were cold, like. They didn’t catch the moment. Bad writing,” said John.
“You had the advantage. You’ve been knowing,” said I.
“Yeah. I was going to get a leap on you. I was going to smoke you. Everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough,” said he.
“But it’s not like that,” said I. “Is it?”
The wings were turning red. I guess you’d call it red. It was a shade against dark blue that was mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood. Was the plane bleeding?
“You have a good time in Peru?” said I.
“Not really,” said John. “I got something to tell you. I haven’t had a ‘good time’ in a long time. There’s something between me and a good time since, I don’t know, since I was was twenty-eight or like that. I’ve seen a lot, but you know I haven’t quite seen it. Like somebody’s seen it already. It wasn’t fresh. There were eyes that used it up some.”
“Even high in Mérida?” said I.
“Even,” said John.
“Even Greenland?” said I.
John said, “Yes. Even Greenland. It’s fresh, but it’s not fresh. There are footsteps in the snow.”
“Maybe,” said I, “you think about in Mississippi when it snows, when you’re a kid. And you’re the first up and there’s been nobody in the snow, no footsteps.”
“Shut up,” said John.
“Look, are we getting into a fight here at the moment of death? We going to mix it up with the plane’s on fire?”
“Shut up! Shut up!” Said John. Yelled John.
“What’s wrong?” said I.
He wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t budge at the controls. We might burn but we were going to hold level. We weren’t seeking the earth at all.
“What is it, John?” said I.
John said, “You son of a bitch, that was mine—that snow in Mississippi. Now it’s all shot to shit.”
The paper from his kneepad was flying all over the cockpit, and I could see his hand flapping up and down with the pencil in it, angry.
“It was mine, mine, you rotten cocksucker! You see what I mean?”
The little pages hung up on the top, and you could see the big moon just past them.
“Eject! Save your ass!” said John.
But I said, “What about you, John?”
John said, “I’m staying. Just let me have that one, will you?”
“But you can’t,” said I.
But he did.
Celeste and I visit the burn on the blond sand under one of those black romantic worthless mountains five miles or so out from Mirimar base.
I am a lieutenant commander in the reserve now. But to be frank, it shakes me a bit even to run a Skyhawk up to Malibu and back.
Celeste and I squat in the sand and say nothing as we look at the burn. They got all the metal away.
I don’t know what Celeste is saying or thinking, I am aso absorbed myself and paralyzed.
I know I am looking at John’s damned triumph.
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, 1892 (9th ed.), Signet Classics (no print date; 1958 copyright on Gay Wilson Allen’s introduction). No cover artist or designer credited. 430 pages.
Trying to find some hopeful green stuff woven in the New Year; hell, at this point I’m even open to the idea of the Lord dropping a handkerchief so we might ask, Whose? Seems more like the uncut hair of graves lately. My grass is thirsty.
“On the Beach at Night Alone”
by
Walt Whitman
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef
of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in
different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the
brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any
globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
Stickman, 1946 by George Grosz (1893-1959)
Alasdair Gray, 1934-2019
Bite Your Tongue, 2001 by Leon Golub (1922-2004)
We Can Disappear You #16, 2002 by Leon Golub (1922-2004)
RIP Béla Tarr, 1955-2026
Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed, 1976. Avon Bard Books (1977). Cover art by Andrew Rhodes; no designer credited. 192 pages.
From my 2020 review of the novel:
Flight to Canada features a number of intersecting plots. One of these plots follows the ostensible protagonist of the novel, former slave Raven Quickskill, who escapes the Swille plantation in Virginia. Along with two other former slaves of the Swille plantation, Quickskill makes his way far north to “Emancipation City” where he composes a poem called “Flight to Canada,” which expresses his desire to escape America completely. The aristocratic (and Sadean) Arthur Swille simply cannot let “his property run off with himself,” and sends trackers to find Quickskill and the other escapees, Emancipation Proclamation be damned. On the run from trackers, Quickskill jumps from misadventure to misadventure, eventually reconnecting his old flame, an Indian dancer named Quaw Quaw (as well as her husband, the pirate Yankee Jack). Back at Swille’s plantation Swine’rd, several plots twist around, including a visit by Old Abe Lincoln, a sadistic episode between Lady Swille and her attendant Mammy Barracuda, and the day-to-day rituals of Uncle Robin, a seemingly-compliant “Uncle Tom” figure who turns out to be Reed’s real hero in the end.
ReMass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
From The Portable February by David Berman, 2009, Drag City.
Peasants Washday, 2023 by Justin John Greene (b. 1984)
Biblioklept 