Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Bellaart Paints Homage to Yves Tanguy

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Oil on canvas by Gerard Bellaart (left). Drawing by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, and Man Ray (below). Postscript: June 19 — The work of Gerard Bellaart is a continuous esoteric sub-form of question-and-answer via images. A facetious confession of being, not in the existential sense of painting and sketching, but rather through asymmetry […]

Of Poetry and Fakery, Cultural Theft, and Stolen Identity

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The title of Heathcote Williams’s memoir, Of Dylan Thomas and his Deaths, reflects the author’s belief that the great Welsh poet died not once but twice. He writes, “It can be said that he was to suffer no less than two deaths at American hands.” The first death, contrary to the accepted claim that he […]

Recapped: R. Crumb Epic Home Video (Un, Deux, Trois)

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This video was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, where the exhibition ran from March 23 to April 30. Curated by Monte Beauchamp, editor of The Life and Times of R. Crumb, the show was a retrospective that presented key pieces culled from the underground art collection […]

New from Cold Turkey Press: ‘Of Dylan and his Deaths’

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A writer as prolific as Heathcote Williams runs the risk of having his poems and prose taken for granted. But this essay — a memoir so rich in personal history, so evocative of his first inspiration, Dylan Thomas, and so indignant about the cultural theft of Thomas’s identity by a famous imposter — merits attention […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

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