Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Nelson Algren’s Walk Through Appalachia

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I have always loved the way A Walk on the Wild Side begins. Show me a more perceptive opening of an American novel with its historical tracing of an Appalachian clan (let alone the lyrical brilliance of its prose) and I’ll buy you dinner. The novel introduces Fitz Linkhorn on the first page — a […]

This High Jiver Is One Helluva Surviver

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“I am sociable, outgoing, quite extroverted, misanthropic at times yet other times quite philanthropic. I tend to contradict myself, wear a peculiar countenance from lack of sleep, despise insipid conversations, I get on my own nerves, spell like a fifth grader, use my diagnosis of florid ADHD as an excuse for the loquacious tendencies I […]

Poet Takes Aim at Election Campaign

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Health Warning ” … Only the religious slaves / Of a militarized state / Will be elected …” Saturation Coverage Of the US Election Can cause brain damage. For nine months US Supremacism Indulges itself In an election For the US President. Somehow or other This always involves The US electorate Watching candidates Spending billions […]

Journalism as ‘The Poetry of Fact’

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At the Chicago Sun-Times I watched some great wordsmiths up close. Roger Ebert wrote with an ease that seemed miraculous. His profiles flowed like swift streams. David Elliott was another. His reviews had the density of Hart Crane poems. (I exaggerate, but only a little.) And then there was the sportswriter John Schulian, whose graceful […]

Huge Counterculture Archive Comes to Market

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So the Ed Sanders Archive, a massive hoard of literary and countercultural materials, is finally for sale. Steve Clay, the publisher of Granary Books, is the dealer. I have no idea what price is being asked, but you can bet it’s liable to set some kind of record. Beginning with his first poems written while […]

Carl Weissner: Master Writer, Cherished Friend

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A great one died four 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 […]

With Bicycle: Nightmares and Dreams

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Flann O’Brien wrote a comic novel. Kurt Wold made a performance piece. Bicycles figure in both. Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down […]

The Day David Bowie Died, a Poet Wondered Why

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‘What Are People Doing Fucking Dying?’ What are people doing fucking dying? Haven’t they got better things to do? No sooner than you’re on someone’s wavelength Then suddenly they’re whisked away from you. I saw Bowie at the first Glastonbury in 1971.* He was performing at five in the morning. With golden locks he was […]

Abolishing Time: Baudelaire & Cocteau Side by Side

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I have been involved so deeply in so many things that they slip from my memory, and not just one, fifty. A wave from the depths brings them back to the surface for me with, as the Bible says, all that in them is. It is incredible how few traces are left in us of […]

Ben Hecht on the Real Margaret Anderson

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I’ve been re-reading Ben Hecht’s massive 1954 memoir, A Child of the Century, which Gary Giddins rightly calls “his masterpiece.” I think of it as Bennie’s wised-up wisdom book. It reads for delicious stretches like the essays of a Midwestern Montaigne and is filled with scenes of an unforgettable Chicago, where Hecht first came to […]

A Cool Way to End the Year

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The countdown continues at the Bibliographic Bunker, where Jed Birmingham’s top 23 most interesting Burroughs collectibles has reached Carl Weissner’s Klacto 23 International, the seventh of the Klacto zines, which Birmingham terms “one of the great mimeo mags of the post-WWII era.” Coincidentally, a friend stopped by the rare books room at the Strand and […]

In RAIN TAXI: Paul Buhle on ‘The Z Collection’

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“Once, a mere blink in the eye of eternity but actually several generations ago, literary essays were considered a high art form. Not the kind written in pursuit of academic self-advancement …” Click to enlarge. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Brion Gysin: ‘Poets Don’t Own No Words’

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Ian Sommerville programmed software to generate [Gysin’s] computer poems, which was reenacted by Joseph Moore as the “Permutation” software for the exhibition Brion Gysin: Dream Machine (2010) at the New Museum in New York. Postscript: Dec. 14 — Per William Osborne’s comment, here is Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ song “Can’t Hold Us” as performed by […]

Gonzo Style

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Gonzo Today brings us a gonzo poem by Heathcote Williams that begins: The Parisian atrocities were born in Libya / Where Cameron, Sarkozy, and Obama / Murdered twelve thousand Libyans between sips / Of Downing Street and Oval Office coffee. Read the complete poem here. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Say Hello to ‘A Better Goodbye’

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An interviewer recently asked me about influences. I told her about a number of journalists in Chicago back in the day. Among them was John Schulian, a sportswriter whose 1,000-word columns four times a week were graceful tapestries. He wove sentences together like threads of embroidery that gave everything he observed a texture you could […]

Jenny Diski Speaks of Death and Dying

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Jenny Diski learned some months ago that she had inoperable lung cancer and, at best, another three years to live. She now writes about the experience and her treatment. Something she said about writers and writing reminds me of what William Burroughs pointed out (summarized in The Z Collection as “no mummy needed.”) April 28, […]

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