Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Personality and personal history are the forward wake of memory. How is a snakeskin like a poem? A really good poem is the sloughed off skin of a snake. Less than a year ago we found a black Mamba skin in our garage. It was warm and delicate. It was slippery and lacy at the same time, and it still held something of the form of the snake. I phoned the neighbours. 'What should we do? There's a black mamba nest in the garage somewhere.' 'There's nothing you can do, they said. Nothing. Nothing. Just put the snakeskin in the bathroom and admire it when you brush your teeth.' A really good poem should be slippery and lacy to the touch and it should take the form of a snake. It should cause you to be alert and to look thoughtfully into shadows. A childhood friend of mine is an artist: Simon. A decade ago, in Mexico, he showed me pictures of his paintings. They were of large interlocking earthworms painted in homemade colours: ochres, browns and red

8/ ?/1941 A Good Friend of Bulgaria Obituary for I. Steinhardt I do not speak Bulgarian. I speak Russian so this translation may not be completely accurate; it is based on my knowledge of Russian. I would love someone to help me translate it. On the 8 th of this month in Prague the famous Czech journalist I. Steinhardt passed  away. He was born in Pol Moravsko in 1873. I Steinhardt completed his education in journalism in Prague and Vienna. Around 1890 I. Steinhardt went to Sophia where he became the editor of the German language paper Bulgarski Trgovski Vestnik (Bulgarian Evening Trader) where he gained a reputation as an excellent journalist and cultural figure. He made a particularly strong impression with his  brilliant reviews of the National Theatre. His articles in the Bulgarian Evening Trader on national and cultural questions were widely read. As the correspondent of the English Daily Mail and the Viennes

Peter Orlovsky, Jack Keruac and William Burroughs in Morroco I have never read William Burroughs though I have glanced at a passage or two of his and have seen a bit of Hollywood's pretentious version of one of his books. I am hardly qualified to pronounce sentence on him, but I will anyway. Burroughs was American. This is important. Burroughs is a flag. Burroughs was supposed to have described what you would find if you stripped the bark off the trunk of American society. Underneath there would be termites. Burroughs was a writer, but also a killer, someone who inadvertently broke the deepest rule of human society. He didn't kill an enemy in the second world war. he wasn't ordered to kill. Ordinary killers are rewarded with medals and processions. He was the executioner, his unconscious was the executioner and the same unconscious was the source of his literary output. He placed an object, drunk, onto his wife's head. He said he would shoot it off her head,

Reconstituted like a Turkey Twizzler - the philosophy of generation X Generation X are those men and women who hide amongst the good people of the 35 to 45 age bracket. They are located right at the rotting end of Thatcherism. They are John Major's children and adopted social Darwinism and the new materialism as their philosophy. To them, not only was greed good, but greed in its component parts was good. They plagiarised madly and shallowly. You can't pilfer in Generation X world. The world of the DJ. Intellectual property is a joke unless it's reconstituted. I was disgusted by it's exponents. The DJs the re mixers. It shows how toxic trickle down philosophy can be when even the wide boys and girls didn't have to finds arguments against thieving other people's music and remixing it. And now intellectual property theft is mainstream. I wonder if John Berger would sanction it? I doubt he would. Give me Julie Birchill any day. Now she was my generation

Maurizio Cattalan donated this sculpture only on condition that the Milan authorities displayed it pointing directly at the office of the head of the stock eschange. In fact I am not representing the people giving the finger to the stockmarket speculators so much as representing the financial speculators giving the finger to us, said the artist. How many of you would sign a petition to have one of the these put up in front of the London Stock Exchange? By Mark in History

 Richard Steinhardt, Isidor Steinhardt and Artur Steinhardt  Regina Steinhardt, Eve Steinhardt (our  mother), and Lisa  Steinhardt in Paris  Artur Steinhardt in Israel during the war  Paula Neumann and Else Steinhardt in front, Regina and Isidor Steinhardt behind. Dear Sir / Madam, I am the great  grandson of Isidor Steinhardt, born in 1873. I have all the  documentation to prove this together with birth certificates and photos. In 1998 my Mother gave me his gold Doxa watch which the King of Montenegro awarded him. I have been researching our family history and writing a biography of my mother who lived in Paris during the war with her mother. Isidor's story is extraordinarily sad. His wife Regina, my Great Grandmother was sent to Terezin and then onto Treblinka and my  great aunt, their daughter was rounded up in Paris and died in Auschwitz. Their oldest son, Arthur emigrated to Israel with his wife Flora and then  went on to live in South Africa. But the i