Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

David Erdos in His One-Man Show About Lenny Bruce

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At the Cockpit Theatre in London: ‘His Last Cabaret’

Plus his poem, ‘When a Tower Falls,’ which carries on Heathcote Williams’s legacy, but in Erdos’s own key: When a society falls, what you notice first is the rubble, / Seen on TV, ghosted buildings give way to dust / Through bomb blast. Through the sudden heat and the haze, / You will see only the print of lost towers, fading with age: / Time’s fragmented, and your first tasted moments / Clash and mix badly with the afterburn and the bitter / Of what could well be your last. Of course, the world has seen / Towers fall through man made event, false god sanctioned, / But we seem to have made no true effort to rebuild or renew / What was lost. What we lack has been leased and sold again / To new builders who continue to falsify all around us / While tapping us still for the cost. …

This Author Has a Beef With Amazon . . .

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Richard Kostelanetz has produced many titles in his Archae Editions line of books over the past eight years via Amazon’s print-on-demand publishing service. But a few weeks ago they suddenly disappeared from the Amazon site. He was shocked. When he asked to have them restored, he was informed electronically that they had been removed because they contained pornographic images. He disagreed. Nevertheless, he decided to remove the “objectionable” content. Even as he offered to do so, however, he was further informed that his entire Archae Editions account had been closed—permanently. He would not be allowed to publish in the future any Archae books whatsoever. Period. Full stop. End of story. Fuck you.

‘Foolish Enough to Have Been a Poet’

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Asa, translucent Jew,
your eyebrows arched
so high as to hold
nothing excluded that might want in,

it’s proper to come your way
by deflection. Exquisite poet . . .

— Roy Fisher

A Traditional ‘Straight Up’ Thanksgiving

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Our Thanksgiving team of the late William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill has been a longtime happy pairing. It still is. So here they are again sweetened by Heathcote Williams’s words in a narration-cum-montage by Alan Cox. The total combo is delish.

Do Brits Love Obituaries or Poetry—or What?

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Hard to believe, but there it is, Your Obituary Is Waiting, listed at #10 this morning in Amazon UK’s top-seller ranking of obituary books. Which goes to show that Amazon’s rankings are, among other things, ridiculous. My “deformed sonnets” are poems not obituaries. But if British readers don’t complain, why should I? The book is also listed at #272 in its “American poetry” ranking. Which might indicate that Amazon UK hasn’t gone totally nuts—except that when I consider the lack of sales of even one copy of the book in either category both lists make as much sense as Donald Trump.

Out of the Fax Machine and Into the Past

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So I was looking over some documents I had stored away years ago. (When you get old you start looking back, as everybody knows who has ever got old.) Well, I came across this fax from my great old friend, the late Carl Weissner. At first I couldn’t place what he meant by “O’s diary.” But then I realized that “O” was a reference to Orton, the playwright Joe Orton, whose plays I deeply admired and occasionally reviewed, and that I had sent Carl one of them, which is what set him off. As to the Raymond Chandler quotation Carl was thinking of using as a motto for a collection of magazine pieces, it turned out that he used it for his doomsday-lit novel “Death in Paris” instead, which he wrote online and which was published posthumously in paperback and as an ebook. Dear Carl, you are missed.

It Was Nearly Fifty Years Ago . . .

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“I’m holed up in Superville … flat broke … what happened is this: I took off with Dick (you know him) in his Dyno … The idea was to sell it here & score for the uh amenities … By the time we got to Cuneo Lingo the engine broke down … it cost us 200 to get it fixed … That was all the dough we had between us … I tell you we crawled into town on all fours … So we sit in this café nursing a glass of lemon juice & trying to figure out what next … when out of the blue this chick appears & sits down at our table: Suzie Wong (you know her!) … & now dig this: she’s got a Dyno & … well, you can guess the rest … This hick country is strictly from General Motors … & anyone trying to get rid of a European car invariably finds himself facing a solid wall of hostility & suspicion … shoved around by rude inspectors, searched at customs, the works …”

The Week Begins

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . with a stenciled text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . […]

Two New Books That Have Come Our Way

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“Now and again a poet is found who is a complex of many capabilities and patterns, all relating but none so isolating in its practice that the one is lost to the other. I have marveled for years at Gerard Malanga’s articulate endurance as a poet.”— Robert Creeley

“Some memoirs feel more trustworthy than others. Nhi tells her stories not in a straight line but more like a roundelay. Outsider, refugee, immigrant, outsider again…. Some of her memories are horribly sad, others are funny, and all are recounted with a simple grace and an admirable survivor’s strength.” — John Stausbaugh, author of City of Sedition and Victory City.

Andrew O’Hagan on Nelson Algren

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In a rave review of what he calls a “vastly insightful” biography of Nelson Algren, Andrew O’Hagan sums up his admiration for Algren. O’Hagan describes not only what made him a shamefully unsung master who deserves recognition among the greats of the modern American literary canon but also why he was denied it.

Wyler’s ‘Dodsworth’ at New York Film Festival

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“This worldly, richly layered adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s 1929 novel is one of the triumphs of the storied career of director William Wyler—and that’s saying a lot.” (New York Film Festival.) The chapter about the making of “Dodsworth”—and what went on behind the scenes—also was among the most pleasurable to write for my biography of Wyler.

Taking an ‘Opportunity’

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Once upon a time Burt Britton asked me for a self-portrait. He subsequently included it in SELF-PORTRAIT: Book People Picture Themselves. I sent him as minimal an image as I could think of. More than three decades later he put all the originals up for auction. As I wrote at the time, many went unsold—Tomi Ungerer’s, Frank Gehry’s, Jorge Luis Borges’s. Which was ridiculous. More peculiar, mine found a buyer.

Drugs. Guns. Sex. Religion. Politics. Wealth. Fame.

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It’s hard to believe that whoever pasted up these posters did not also rip them up. Hats off to the artist. Found dé-collage in midtown Manhattan. Photographed on the northwest corner of East 47th Street and Third Avenue.

It Was Impossible to Estimate the Damage . . .

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The European Beat Studies network met in Paris to mark the 60th anniversary of the moment in cultural history when William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, the Crick and Watson of the “cut-up” method, turned the dingy Beat Hotel into their literary laboratory.

Fluxus, Intermedia and . . .

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The Something Else Factor: Alison Knowles, Barbara Moore, Martha Wilson and I will be participating this evening in a panel about the glory days of Something Else Press, moderated by Hannah B. Higgins, at the Emily Harvey Foundation. It’s the first of four discussions organized by Christian Xatrec and Alice Centamore. The events are free. RSVP to ehf.nework@gmail.com

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