Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Wonders Never Cease

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EPITAPH FOR MY TYPEWRITER I’ve learned to keep cheerful by committing all my suicides on the typewriter. A shot into the keyboard’s brain equals one p o + e m THE UNIVERSAL BUBBLE* The Universe — more like a great thought than a great machine — a soap bubble with corrugations — not the interior […]

They Had Their Own Fun

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Back in the mid-1960s, when Carl Weissner discovered the British mimeo zine My Own Mag, he struck up a correspondence with its presiding genius, Jeff Nuttall, and soon took My Own Mag as a model for his own mimeo, Klactoveedsedsteen. The two of them became pen pals and freewheeling collaborators — Nuttall in Norwich, Weissner […]

Beckett’s Letters: ‘Dull, Dull, Dull,’ But —

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Serious readers of Samuel Beckett have been treated to four massive volumes of his letters. I haven’t read any of the collections. So I have to take the word of two readers who have, and both tell me the experience has been a form of slow torture. The letters are mundane and largely disappointing: “Dull, […]

Female Power (from Medusa to Merkel)

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I love reading Mary Beard. She may be a professor, the highest of high-brow professors, but she writes — and speaks (albeit with a British accent) — like an actual human. Enjoy. Her talk begins: In 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy […]

Filth Is Good for Something

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This blog has been called a breeding ground for filth. If it were true, I would have no objection. A bit of filth is good for the health of any writer and for any of his readers. Where’s the proof? Frank Harris, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Iceberg Slim, and the Marquis de Sade. […]

Juggling Ideas About the Avant Garde

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So much art is called “avant garde” these days that my tireless staff of thousands wonders whether it’s just a label. Some think that the entire culture, no matter how far out, has gone mainstream and that there’s nothing legitimately avant garde anywhere — not since the good old days of Dada, surrealism, cubism, futurism, […]

James ‘No Name’ Baldwin, the Maverick

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In his critique of “I Am Not Your Negro,” the movie bringing renewed attention to James Baldwin, Hilton Als comments on a key moment: It’s the summer of 1979, and Baldwin is working on a book that he does not want to write but knows he must write. Titled “Remember This House,” it will tell […]

The Gilded Toad & Social Corrosion

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Poem by Heathcote Williams Video Montage and Narration by Alan Cox • From IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance • EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Carl Weissner: Master Writer, Cherished Friend

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A great one died five years ago today. Carl was also a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg), and a literary agent who spread the work of dissident […]

‘American Porn’ for Inauguration Day

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On the day Twitter Fingers is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of “investigative poems about American history, culture and politics” by Heathcote Williams. The […]

Bookstores in Their Anecdotage

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Garrison Keillor, who owns a bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, called Common Good Books, writes in a foreword to FOOTNOTES* from the WORLD’S GREAT BOOKSTORES: *True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers that “the little independent bookstore is dying out, they say. Too bad. Someday mine will, too.” The author […]

The Right Idea: An Illuminating Essay

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The editors of The New York Times Book Review asked “some notably avid readers — who also happen to be poets, musicians, diplomats, filmmakers, novelists, actors, and artists –” to name the books they read this year. About 50 answered the call, listing what must be several hundred titles. I noticed that not one of […]

Why I’m Waiting for Asher’s Algren

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Having said in The Revenge of the Mediocre that both Bettina Drew and Mary Wisniewski fail to capture Nelson Algren’s personality in their biographies of him, I realize I didn’t mention something equally and, some would say, more important. Sure, they get his so-called skid-row lyricism, which Blake Bailey recently harped on, but that shortchanges […]

Going Cold Turkey (in Cyberspace)

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The computer screen has become a substitute for reality, dominating us not just by way of social media but — old news — by making artifacts like books on paper seem obsolete. I plead seriously guilty, witness this blogpost with its images and descriptions. A package that came in the mail with several new items […]

The Revenge of the Mediocre . . .

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. . . upon the great is a risk that every biographer takes. Mary Wisniewski has taken it, and it defeats her. Old friends of Nelson Algren whom he later spurned, to say nothing of his enemies, get their chance to lay into him now, 35 years after his death, in her mistitled and pedestrian […]

Where Black Lives Did Not Matter

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Headline: ‘A Tender Bond Confronts Racism. Racism Wins.’ One can only hope that headline does not apply to the outcome of today’s U.S. elections. In the many years I spent on Grub Street writing about the theater, Athol Fugard and the plays I saw of his stand out in memory for their eloquence and humanity. […]

He Spread Peace, Love, and Booze

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The “first scholarly comic art biography of the legendary John Chapman,” otherwise known as Johnny Appleseed, has arrived. A quick inspection reveals 112 ravishing pages that tell the true story of the man who became famous two centuries ago for “spreading the seeds of apple trees from Pennsylvania to Indiana.” To quote the publisher, Johnny […]

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