Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Row, Row, Row Your Boat … Across the Ocean Blue

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They call themselves the “Coxless Crew,” and they’re planning to row across the Pacific from San Francisco to Cairns, Australia. Their goal, besides surviving the voyage, is to raise £250,000 for two favorite charities “Walking With the Wounded” and “Breast Cancer Care,” and to show women across the globe that they can do anything they […]

‘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 […]

David Carr Wanted to Get Stuff Right, Large or Small

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Like many NYT readers, I admired David Carr’s media column. It always made the paper worth reading on Monday mornings. Today his final column ran posthumously under the headline “David Carr’s Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students.” Cobbled together by his editors from his course curriculum at Boston University, where he’d recently begun teaching, […]

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 […]

Three Expats and One Reporter Explain It All For Us

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In about five minutes, starting roughly 45 minutes into a conversation with NYT reporter David Carr, Edward Snowden explains why President Obama — or for that matter any American president — is captive to the intelligence community and what it means for democratic values. Carr leads him into the explanation by remarking that the Obama […]

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 […]

About That Remarkable Surge for Charlie

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I’ve noticed that the “Je suis Charlie” phenomenon has come in for rightwing contempt. The argument goes that it’s self-righteous to claim you stand with the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo when all you do is gather in the street and carry signs. There’s some truth to that, especially when it comes to politicians. But I’ve […]

Posting a Cold Turkey Card While Paris Burns

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By way of explanation, I was occupied searching for word pattern. Found a rangy young man whose authority was roughly 50 words retyped in columns from the beginning more habit-forming than his life. He hunkered across the columns and typed them again. Undsoweiter … And now for R. Crumb’s pièce de résistance: EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Death in Paris’ Struck Prescient Note

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Apropos today’s headline about the hacked U.S. CENTCOM Twitter Account . . . a friend was looking over our late amigo Carl Weissner’s “Doomsday Lit” novel Death in Paris. Boy, is that title apt. Not to mention the chapter headings. How about this one? >im in ur base killin ur d00dz

We Are All Charlie Now

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As many as 100,000 people gathered across France, according to Agence France-Presse. The crowds expressed their solidarity against the Charlie Hebdo attack. At least 35,000 Parisians, by one estimate, gathered at La Place de la République. They were silent at first, then began to sing: “Charlie! Charlie!” “We are Charlie!” “Free expression!” Cartoonists are having […]

Incidental Intelligence: A Portrait of William Burroughs

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I once asked Nelson Algren what he thought of Naked Lunch. He grinned at me, as though he were being entertained by a wiseguy. I knew he had no love for the Beats. He had derided Jack Kerouac as a momma’s boy and dismissed Allen Ginsberg as a publicist. So his answer surprised me: “Burroughs […]

Everyone Is Thinking About the Cops

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Aw gee! David Brooks says “not enough attention is being paid to the emotional and psychological challenges of being a cop.” Such fragile flowers they are. I recall that William Burroughs gave it some thought back in 1968 when Flower Power was in bloom: “The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to […]

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