Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Louise Landes Levi
A Voyager’s Magnum Opus: ‘The Goddess’

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There are many kinds of poets. Among them are the voyaging / visionary poets, like Allen Ginsberg and Ira Cohen, both of whom were mentors to as well as models for Louise Landes Levi, who has not only traveled widely, as they did, but has turned her voyaging — that is what her kind of travels must be called — into a life of poetry and music and, not least, who has created an extraordinary literary chronicle of her experience.

In St. Gallen, Switzerland
They Love Books . . . Even American Poetry

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One pleasure of walking the streets of St. Gallen, a town near the foothills of the Swiss Alps, was climbing its steep alleys and staircases through winding passages, and then, surprisingly, coming upon a kiosk that advertised the Wortlaut literary festival, where I would be reading alongside the American poet Jan Heller Levi.

Seeking to Sue the NYPD
Noted Author Richard Kostelanetz Writes . . .

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“On 9 May 2024, five days before my 84th birthday, twelve NYPD raided my studio/home in Queens, NY, looking initially for printed child pornography, following the receipt of a few mostly innocuous images from a book written by someone else that I tried to publish through Amazon KDP. Finding nothing in my collection of 25,000 books, they then filched all my MAC computers and backups — my lifework as a writer & artist — that I neglected to store externally. … [He has since learned that he’s not “a person of interest,” meaning he’s not suspected of a crime.] The NYPD still has invaluable material ten months later destroying my professional career. … I’d like to sue them for the return of my work and professional damages incurred.”

Kostelanetz is seeking an attorney to press his case.

Jim Jarmusch Talks About Kenneth Koch

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The indie filmmaker was one of many notable speakers at “Kenneth Koch at 100: A Celebration,” held last month at The New School’s Auditorium in Greenwich Village. Kenneth Koch was Jarmusch’s teacher at Columbia, “a kind of godfather to me, aesthetically,” he said, noting further that the “so-called New York School of poets in general remain as my godparents in almost anything I create.” Among the more interesting tributes were Maxine Groffsky’s and, via video, Alex Katz’s. I found Jarmusch’s the most amusing.

Reading at the Palace [Updated]

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It’s getting closer to our poetry reading at the Palace, where Florian Vetsch will host the poet Jan Heller Levi, winner of the Walt Whitman Award given by the Academy of American Poets, and yours truly, along with Clemens Umbricht. DJ Soulsonic will do his thing with the music we selected.

I’m With Amélie Cardy and Cézanne on This

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Cold Turkey Press is publishing an illustrated, four-page folio of “Frankly Speaking” with a drawing by the young British artist Amélie Cardy in an edition limited to 36 copies. And a poster of the poem with a drawing by Cézanne is seeking a publisher.

‘American Porn’ for the Orange Man’s Inauguration Day

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Here we go again. To mark the resumption of our long nightmare, my staff of thousands thought it apt to repost this from 2017:

On the day he is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company, Thin Man Press will release American Porn, a collection of “investigative poems about American history, culture and politics” by Heathcote Williams.

New in French Translation
Sinclair Beiles’s Selected Catastrophies & Other Poems

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As part of the Beat Hotel crowd in Paris during the late-1950s and early ’60s, Sinclair Beiles collaborated on the first book of avant-garde cut-ups, “Minutes to Go,” with Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. While working at Maurice Girodias’s Paris-based Olympia Press, he was a key editor who helped shepherd Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” into print. It is his incandescent poetry, however, for which he should be most remembered. But despite praise for his poetry from such luminaries as Burroughs and Leonard Cohen, his writing has rarely surfaced outside the small-press literary world. “Catastrophes Choisies” is not Beiles’s first poetry collection to appear in French, but it is the most elaborate..

The Late Brion Gysin (1916-1986) Is Having a Moment

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Over the years he had many, in fact, although few of them lived up to his expectations. But never mind. An updated model of his and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine was recently featured in a symposium on art, AI, and the humanities here in New York; and another will be installed in London at the Tate Modern, in the exhibition “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet,”which will run from the end of this month (Nov. 28) to June 1, 2025. Meanwhile, Roger Knoebber has brought Gysin back to life in a shaggy, unconventional book-length profile, “Hysteresis.”

Buckminster Fuller’s Versified Prose

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By my philosophy
The finite, but imponderable
Metaphysical Universe
Embraces the definite,
Ponderable, physical Universe.
‘Finite’ is not unitarily conceptual.
‘Definite’ is unitarily conceptual.
I have mathematical proof …

Does the Dreamachine Elude AI? Yes It Does.

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Scholars and specialists addressed ethical and political considerations surrounding AI in collaborations with human creators. Topics ranged from AI aesthetics to the early history of machine learning, from multimedia art to computational research experiments with artificial intelligence, including AI biases and applications.

‘The Hanging’ and ‘Wheel of Fortune’

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These drawings, which appear in “di Umbris,” a dossier of Gerard Bellaart drawings just published by Moloko, were not intended as commentary on current events. But I can’t shake the sensation that they are.

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