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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Straight Up Thanksgiving — It’s a Tradition

November 23, 2022 by Jan Herman

Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill
has been a happy pairing since 2012. It still is. So here they are again, but sharpened
by the spice of Heathcote Williams’s words in a narration-cum-montage by Alan Cox.

Collages © 1967 by Norman O. Mustill, excerpted from ‘Flypaper’
[Beach Books, San Francisco, 1967]

And here are Burroughs’s words of gratitude.  Listen. They’re delish:

Thanks for the wild turkey
and the passenger pigeons,

destined to be shit out
through wholesome American guts —

thanks for a Continent to despoil
and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM
to vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through —

thanks for the KKK,
for nigger-killin’ lawmen,
feelin’ their notches,
for decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces —

thanks for “Kill a Queer for
Christ” stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the
War against Drugs —

thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind his
own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes,

thanks for all the
memories … all right let’s see
your arms …
you always were a headache and
you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

© 1986 by William S. Burroughs

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Filed Under: Art, Literature, main, Media, News, political culture

Comments

  1. Howard Mandel says

    November 24, 2022 at 10:58 am

    How jolly! Thanks for the truth, Jan. Here’s hoping we can rectify our wrongs, however long it takes.

  2. Gerard Malanga says

    November 24, 2022 at 7:14 pm

    Yes! Yes! Yes!

  3. Mike says

    November 26, 2022 at 6:30 am

    Pathetic. It is chilling to think that the poison you are spewing actually has a few fans. Wherever did you come up with this ? Who abused you many years ago ? Call the authorities on them while they are still alive, if they are, in the hope that excising this boil on your life will let you do some self reckoning with this deep bitterness you seem to have taken toward so many, without it being a completely devastating experience for you to do that. I’m not perfect but this is beyond sick. Get help !

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
Another strange fact... Read More…

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Straight Up

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

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