Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Connecting With Burroughs

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I was walking down Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan the other day when I saw someone reading Naked Lunch. I know the shot looks posed, but it wasn’t. This is exactly how he was sitting (below left). The guy was in front of an office building at 777 Third Ave., between E. 48 and E. […]

Not Witty Enough

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A promo from The Paris Review: Withering maybe, but hardly a quip. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Art Shay, Man With a Camera, R.I.P.

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He was 94. His classic book of photographs, Nelson Algren’s Chicago, was published three decades after shooting them for Life during the height of Algren’s fame in the 1950s. The magazine never used them. Shay was kind enough to sign a copy of the book for me. According to Shay’s obit in the Chicago Tribune […]

‘Peculiar Shortcomings’

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A word of warning from a century ago … Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred […]

C.L.R. James: Cricket Shaped Him

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I know nothing about cricket. My only sense of the game came from Frank Harris’s portrait of H.G. Wells. But now that I’ve read The Young C.L.R. James: A Graphic Novelette (PM Press Pamphlet), which traces the early development of the Pan-Africanist writer and Trotskyite revolutionary who was a cricket star as a young man […]

Filthy Rotten T.S. Eliot, the Mofo

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When my staff of thousands sent me this book cover, APRIL IS A MOTHERFUCKER, by none other than T.S. Eliot, it put me in mind of Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, which includes Eliot’s fithy rotten early poems. They are so much fun, despite their sometime racism, that they naturally give the P.C. […]

What Would Daumier Make of Trump?

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Here’s the perfect hint: A mocking depiction of King Louis-Philippe as the Rabelais character Gargantua. The caricature might as well be Trump. He feeds on bundles of swag delivered by his obsequious minions and, from his outhouse throne, he shits out appointments, titles, and other rewards for the privileged class. Not incidentally, Honoré Daumier went […]

Once Upon a Time in India . . .

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There was a mimeo magazine called ppHOO69 *Intercontinental*1969. It was edited by Pradip Choudhuri and published by Subhas Ghose, with a front cover by Alejandro Jodorowsky and a back cover by Claude Pélieu. The poems and prose were divided into two sections, one in Tamil and one in English (with some French). CLICK THE IMAGES […]

Speaking for Myself

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Death comes in all sizes / — sequoia, oak, and elm / maple, birch, fir, and pine, / elephants and whales / bumble bees and snails, / the Jews in the ovens, / Armenians slaughtered, / all the genocides before / and since. I am also dead . . . EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Fourteen: Deformed Sonnets

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What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry, As poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, Under unbearable duress and only with the hope That good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. — Czeslaw Milosz IV I was there in asphalt in ozone dreams. I was waiting for a cool stare […]

A Burroughs-Gysin ‘Motherlode’

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SEE UPDATE BELOW My staff of thousands informs me that the Smithsonian Institute has posted scans of three notebooks by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin dating from 1963 to 1973, and 1977. It was described to me as “a motherlode” of writings and collages. And indeed it is. Have a look by clicking the […]

R. Crumb Classic Portraits

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Charles Plymell writes: I sent Robert some old political cartoons on crumbling paper from 20’s-30’s & some extra sheets of the plain parchment which had beautiful tan sheen like I ran the first ZAP on. I had remembered the old comics I found in Lawrence of Andy Gump & another one of The Katzenjammer Kids […]

Thinking of Auden . . .

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Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives. — W.H. Auden EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Grub Street Deformation

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BEACHED On the sunny island of friendship ash was falling from our faces. “This is not subtle,” the doc said. He prescribed a regimen of pills the size of Montaigne’s chateau. My head shrank to a bungalow in Far Rockaway, and I recalled the ghost ship of our childhoods beached against the boardwalk where a […]

Screwed Beyond Repair?

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UNPATCHED for Simon Schama At the secular end of days when unconfined freedom means gusts of opportunity for all our computers to screw every one of us beyond repair, will the unspeakable terrors reappear? What tech service will patch our human flaws? Not the rolling disaster of holy water & passwords. Not infernal church bells […]

Is Dante for Our Time?

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‘Forget your hopes.’ (As quoted in a modern translation by Clive James) Traditionally: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Take your choice. One or both may help. For those with the ears and minds to hear them, the notes of pianos are full of ghosts. Each piano hammer and string is different, as is […]

Two Sides of a ‘Small Electrical Storm’

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Nearly 50 years ago, Gary Lee-Nova sent a pair of two-sided silkscreen prints to Marshall McLuhan. He had seen McLuhan’s copy of Finnegans Wake with handwritten comments on a subject Joyce had treated: “the electrification of the entire world.” He says his print drawing “was a crude, almost rude emulation of the comments.” If the […]

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