Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

The Extinction Lesson of a Comical, Salutary Creature

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But the bird was fearless and easily lured aboard By an offer of unlimited ship’s biscuits. By a miracle the bird survived the crew’s curiosity And their wondering if it tasted delicious. After it had lived out its life in England A taxidermist was called when it died. He stuffed it and, to retain its […]

Algren to Get the Literary Biography He Deserves

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The Leon Levy Center for Biography has awarded fellowships worth $60,000 each to four writers who are currently working on new biographies. One of them is Colin Asher, whose tentatively titled biography of Nelson Algren, But Never a Lovely So Real, is under contract to W. W. Norton & Company. The other recipients are Blake […]

Algren for Real: ‘The End Is Nothing. The Road Is All’

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Here he is on the big screen at last, an hour and a half of who Nelson Algren was and what he meant. It’s a documentary with the sources — authoritative sources (Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel, for example, who give their personal impressions of the man). Radical sources, too (Paul Buhle for one, who […]

Easter Poetry + Hadron Collider = ‘Son of God Particle’

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Poem by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. Art by Elena Caldera and other artists. Some words from the poem: Imagine Christ particles let loose on the one percent, Erasing their fortunes at a key stroke. Imagine airborne Christ particles attacking Wall Street, Penetrating algorhythms in its mainframe computers, Moving columns of figures […]

realitystudio.org Launches Jed Birmingham’s Podcast

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I am STAGGERED! Of course I would be, for obvious reasons. Did I say I want this embedded in my headstone? Click to listen. It is utterly, inescapably humbling. The really wonderful thing about JB’s devotion to books as artifacts is the way he appreciates them as mysteries and teases out their hidden meanings. This […]

Sinclair Beiles: Poet of Many Parts and Places

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Dyehard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his association with the Beats. He collaborated on […]

‘Fugitive Literature’: Granary Books Has Done the Deed

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Here’s what happened: I was invited to speak about “little magazines and William S. Burroughs” on a panel with Jed Birmingham and Charles Plymell at the 2014 Burroughs Centennial Conference hosted in New York City by the Center for the Humanities. After my talk, Steve Clay came up to me and asked to publish what […]

I Remember Oriana Fallaci . . .

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You hear a lot about Michel Houellebecq these days. You don’t hear much about Oriana Fallaci. She once was more controversial than Houellebecq for her blistering scorn of Islam and Muslims. Mark Lilla has a big piece, Slouching Toward Mecca, in the current New York Review of Books about Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission, which as […]

A Savoyard’s First Brush With Censorship

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Have a look at this Kickstarter campaign: Savoy Books is an independent publishing house based above a locksmith shop in the South Manchester district of Didsbury, founded and run by Michael Butterworth and David Britton. In 1989 they published Lord Horror, the last book to be banned in the UK under the 1959 Obscene Publications […]

Because She Can . . . Therefore She Is

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Hanne Lippard’s ‘Orbit’ was first posted here last year. I was reminded of it yesterday when she performed the piece at the Kunsthalle Vien as part of an exhibition, “The Future of Memory.” EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

A Poet With a Dark Vision and a Tuned-Up Voice

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The poet Philip Levine has died. Here’s an appreciation, written years ago at the Los Angeles Times, which began like this: Philip Levine, no prodigy, wrote poetry for seven years before his first poem was published in his mid-20s. It took another nine before his first slim volume, On the Edge, appeared in 1963. But […]

Some Got Plenty and Some Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’

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Five years after the Wall Street crash of 1929, George Gershwin wrote what he called a “banjo song” for “Porgy and Bess.” It turned into “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” with lyrics by Edwin DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. The second verse goes like this: De folks wid plenty o’ plenty Got a lock on […]

Burroughs Central This Is Not

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Anyone who thinks this blog is Burroughs Central has no idea. The fact is, I’m just skimming. The real Burroughs Central is RealityStudio, where the true aficionados congregate for deep postings by Jed Birmingham’s Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker. For example, he recently made the case that le maître’s cut-ups in the mimeo mags of […]

By Burroughs Possessed >>>>>> Burroughs 101

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Being a serious writer hardly means leading the life of a saint. In 1951, in Mexico City, long before the publication of Naked Lunch, which made him famous, William S. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken stunt. He was trying to prove his marksmanship William Tell-style. Instead of […]

In Memory: Carl Weissner, So Rudely Interrupted

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Carl died unexpectedly three years ago today. On the first anniversary of his death, I posted a tribute from friends and others. Here’s a photo from a trip he took to Marseille, where he was gathering impressions for a novel he wanted to write, which wasn’t all that long before he died. His absence among […]

Kick That Habit? Bellaart Does Burroughs

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This pencil drawing of William S. Burroughs by Gerard Bellaart is one of two portraits. It’s the introspective Burroughs. The other drawing, a charcoal sketch to be posted soon, catches Burroughs in a wholly different state of mind, as if possessed by the Ugly Spirit that Burroughs believed had dogged him throughout his life. The […]

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