Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Huge Counterculture Archive Comes to Market

by

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

by

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

by

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

by

‘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

by

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

by

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

by

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’

by

“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’

by

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

by

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’

by

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

by

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, […]

Redux: Dear Cannibals, Have a Happy Thanksgiving

by

Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill has been a happy pairing. It still is. But the Straight Up staff of thousands added a sweetener, something like cranberry sauce, to last year’s celebration. Here ‘tiz again: Words by Heathcote Williams, narration and montage by Alan Cox. And from Straight Up’s Thanksgiving […]

I’m Getting My 15 Minutes . . .

by

If you think my staff of thousands doesn’t appreciate that, you don’t know how hungry they are to promote my new book. In this age of shameless self-promotion, it’s all about me, me, me. So I made a deal with them. One click gets them a penny, five gets them a dime. Make them rich. […]

Carl Weissner: ‘Always These Nightmares . . .’

by

Updated below. Carl Weissner’s novel Death in Paris — first published online in 2009, then as a paperback in 2012, and finally as an ebook in 2014 — was about a different kind of death from the terrorist assault on Saturday night. Writing in English, his second language, Weissner drew on the trappings of detective […]

‘Not a One-Trick Pony . . .’

by

So says Jed Birmingham in #23: The Dead Star, the first of his picks for “The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.” The Burroughs Nova Broadcast pamphlet, which I published in 1969 and designed as a foldout in covers, is ancient history. It makes me an old pony. But I can live with that. The […]

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog