Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Interview: The Skinny on the Beats

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Hilary Holladay: How would you size up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than as personalities? Jan Herman: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I’m sure that more people have read On the Road than ever read “Howl.” But Ginsberg may be more significant as a writer than Kerouac in […]

‘Buried Child’ Surfaces in New Revival

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Sam Shepard recently referred to “Buried Child” as “the same clunky play” it always was, rewrites notwithstanding. That’s Shepard being candid. That’s Shepard being Shepard. Never mind that awkward dramaturgy and a little too much speechifying dialogue didn’t keep the play from winning the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama or Shepard from being declared the […]

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 […]

And the Beat Goes On … And On

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It was too good to pass up this collage by Norman O. Mustill. He made it in 1968 as a comment on the Vietnam War, but it seems to me as accurate now as it was then. The only difference is that the wars have changed. A little “I don’t care” music please … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]

Here’s a Thrill: Elaine May’s Flick on Mike Nichols

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Just caught the PBS American Masters documentary on Mike Nichols, in essence a smartly made interview directed by Elaine May. It’s thrilling from start to finish — and doubly so because, unexpectedly, he gives Willy Wyler a shout out. I especially appreciated what Nichols said (45 minutes in) about “the froggy conspiracy.” In A Talent […]

Do You See Something Wrong Here?

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On the left is the cover of the New York Times Magazine for its migrant story, ‘Out of Syria.’ On the right is a condo ad for the one percent on the first page of the magazine. Draw your own conclusion. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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 […]

What the Horse’s Mouth Had to Say

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I wanted to get the lowdown, so I went over to the Council on Foreign Depredations. The horse’s mouth was as smart as I expected. But to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane, which seemed more important. When Tom Brokaw asked him “how well the country is being served” by the current political debate […]

Honoring MLK With a Clever Starbucks Ad

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Watch Martin Luther King Jr. giving his greatest address, the “I have a dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Listen to his peerless “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of April 16, 1963, in which he defends direct-action nonviolence, explains its principles, expresses his disappointment with […]

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 […]

Charlotte Moorman Gets a Full-Dress Close-Up

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On a visit I made years ago to Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections its curator at the time, Russell Maylone, showed me a room piled with ramshackle cartons that had recently arrived. He pointed to them with pride and said they were Charlotte Moorman’s archival materials, a lifetime’s worth of hoarding. […]

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 […]

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