Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Thanksgiving Team: Burroughs & Mustill, Redux

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A Straight Up tradition continues. William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day paired with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts — thanks for a Continent […]

Antwerp Public Linguistic Poem

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‪ “It doesn’t matter what happens. I like it when there are accidents. If anybody starts to argue that’s OK. … This is a public poem. This is the work I do for 45 years. I am completely meshuga. I do one every year.” — Alain Arias-Misson

Paris Bookfair Focuses on New Practices in Art

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14 Rue Bonaparte, from Nov. 14 to 17. Open to the general public. Free admission. Postscript: Nov. 23 — The bookfair was jammed. Very impressive. The lecture hall was a19th-century amphitheater in back of the main hall.

Chris Burden Saved From the ‘Clutches of History’

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Roberta Smith really digs the Chris Burden show at the New Museum. “Extreme Measures” is not only “a superb survey, but also a kind of transfiguration,” she writes in her NY Times review. “It liberates the Los Angeles-based Mr. Burden from the clutches of history.” I’m uncertain of what she means by the “clutches of […]

19th-Century Balzac Meets 20th-Century Bellaart

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Gerard Bellaart’s masterly washed-pen drawing of Honoré de Balzac testifies to his great admiration for one of France’s most prodigious writers. He is particularly fond of the 19th-century Balzac novel Illusions perdues, about a young poet living in Angoulême, a provincial town in “France profonde,” who is desperate to make a name for himself in […]

Seamus Heaney, R.I.P.

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Seamus Heaney died today Fred just told me. that leaves very few of his caliber. attached an anatomical study as a sign of respect. the drawing was on the desktop when Fred brought me the sad news. I have mailed you the ‘stone from delphi’ which really sums up the poet and man. small precious […]

Back-to-Back Writings From Underground Dos-à-Dos

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+++ Incidental Intelligence: Anyone who cherishes raw truth, and especially those of us who were warmed by Carl Weissner’s friendship, will appreciate EINE ANDERE LIGA as a mammoth achievement. But Milena Verlag ought to correct two claims on its Web site: 1) that this posthumous collection of his underground writings has a foreword written by […]

Brecht Never Taught at Podunk College

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Two staff messages the other day led me to compare them. One went like this: I have a colleague who reads manuscripts for a literary magazine. Recently, I spent two hours looking at the contributions she has to vet. God, the bulk of them are awful. Actually, what makes them awful is their mediocrity. None […]

Connecting Kim Dotcom and Edward Snowden

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To have a staff of thousands that keeps me informed is one of the privileges of this blog. Had I not been tipped about the projection of Kim Dotcom’s face with the words “United Stasi of America” on a wall of the U.S. embassy in Berlin, I would not have made a connection between N.S.A. […]

This ‘Auteur’ Made Some of Hollywood’s Best Films

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I just caught a screening of “Dodsworth” at the New York Historical Society, where Catherine Wyler mentioned in a pre-screening interview with AMERICAN MASTERS creator Susan Lacy that there are two new Wyler books due out soon: one by Gabriel Miller, the other by Neil Sinyard. She hoped it signals renewed interest in her father’s […]

Wrapping Up the ‘Dutch Mordant’ Series

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Cold Turkey Press publisher Gerard Bellaart writes that he “got rather carried away.” There are now about 40 cards in the series. Consequently the 36 portfolios of 12 cards each “will differ slightly in composition.” The “sacred nose” comes from the Bellaart family album, dated 1755.+++ A photo by Frederick Sommer illustrates the “kleine Welten” […]

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