It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. To be clear, Jürgen Ploog is an author who does not write for everyone. The “story” he tells in Flesh Film has the pulpy tone of science fiction, a narrator who sounds like a globe-trotting private […]
Tales of Doomsday Eros
Supervert is — as he writes— “the assumed name of a writer using the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to explore novel sexual pathologies.” His latest book, the fifth in a series of six he has planned, is Apocalypse Burlesque: Tales of Doomsday Eros. You could easily call his books transgressive. Consider the titles: Extraterrestrial Sex […]
How a Brilliant Writer Got in His Own Way
!['Humpty Dumpty' [1924]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/humpty-dumpty-book-cover200-e1388258523554.jpg)
I’m told Ben Hecht was recently inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. That could be why I was asked to write a piece about him for a special “Chicago Issue” of the Chicago Quarterly Review, but something tells me it was pure coincidence. I also have a feeling the Hall of Fame won’t […]
A Poem from the Late 20th Century
The poet Nanos Valaoritis and I were good friends many years ago, in San Francisco. Here’s a poem of his, which I published in 1970, in a broadside edition of 500 or 1,000 copies — I can’t recall exactly. “Endless Crucifixion” is a collector’s item now. Jed Birmingham, who writes the RealityStudio column the Bibliographic […]
HANGING IN WITH GEORGE
By Jan Herman When 1984 came around smack in the middle of the rose-tinted Reagan era, many in the commentariat had a field day noting that George Orwell, for all his genius, had overstated his case. The future he’d warned of in “1984” simply hadn’t come to pass. Yeah, right. Thinking of Bill Moyers this morning, it occurred […]
My Checkered Career
I’ve been a staff writer covering arts and culture at the Los Angeles Times, a reporter and movie reviewer at The Daily News in New York, a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, a senior editor/producer and the theater critic for MSNBC.com, and a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. […]