• Home
  • About
    • Straight Up
    • Jan Herman
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Recalling the Fierce Beliefs of Oriana Fallaci

May 11, 2024 by Jan Herman

Oriana Fallaci

The widespread episodes of pro-Palestinian antisemitism on American college campuses calls to mind an old blogpost about European antisemitism.

“I find it shameful,” Fallaci begins, “that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swastika, incite people to hate the Jews. …”

Over the Stage of Kansas
A Lifetime of Charles Plymell’s Inspired Poetry

April 26, 2024 by Jan Herman

Charles Plymell [photo by Gerard Malanga]

UPDATED. The overwhelming number of comics, little magazines, books, posters, and all sorts of poetry and radical literature that Charles Plymell has printed during the last half-century is too many to count. All that time he was writing inspired poetry and prose of his own and having it published by a flock of small presses. Now in old age — he turns 89 today — Plymell is getting significantly renewed attention for his poetry with the release of “Over the Stage of Kansas: New & Selected Poems 1966-2023.” To celebrate the book, he will give a reading on May 18 in Hudson, New York. It’s bound to be a grand occasion.

Willem de Kooning On Escaping the Formulaic

April 24, 2024 by Jan Herman

Since today is the 120th anniversary of Willem de Kooning’s birthday, I am reminded by my staff of thousands of his fervent efforts “to break the willed articulation of the image.” Which, as it happens, is not dissimilar to the goal of the cut-up procedure in writing, intended by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs to free the mind and language itself from preconceived formulations. Nor is it a bad follow-up to yesterday’s blogpost about “Cut Up or Shut Up.”

Beat Scene
All About Cut Up or Shut Up (and Weissner, Ploog & Me)

April 22, 2024 by Jan Herman

Kevin Ring, the indefatigable editor of Beat Scene magazine, emailed me a few months ago to ask about the new reprint of “Cut Up or Shut Up” released by the German publisher Mokolo Print in a facsimile edition in English with a new cover design by Robert Schalinski and a modest intro by yours truly. Ever curious about all things Beat, Ring wanted to know the back story of the book’s origin and development. Et voilà!

Influenced by Limitations of a Lifeboat in a Tidal Wave

April 20, 2024 by Jan Herman

​Before I needed to earn a living from writing, I was a member of the avant-garde — fervent and full of high opinion. The other day I came across a typescript of “Synchronic Non-Causative Agent,” an unpublished paper of mine written more than half a century ago. Reading it over, I got the bright idea of posting it here despite its age.

A Marathon Reading
Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans

April 18, 2024 by Jan Herman

My staff of thousands thinks of it as the “Moby-Dick” of modernism.

Something to Surprise You: Everywhere You Look

April 16, 2024 by Jan Herman

A. Robert Lee is such a prolific author in both his creative and academic books that I won’t try to characterize his writings other than to say they invariably illuminate life and literature with a wealth of scholarship, intelligence, and linguistic mastery. I will add, however, that his sense of humor is one aspect of his writings that I most treasure.

Genesis of a Poem
All That Would Ever After Not Be Said

April 13, 2024 by Jan Herman

In 1952, when the late Gabe Pressman (dean of New York City’s local TV press corps) was a young staff writer at the New York World-Telegram & The Sun, he came across a story tipped to him by a woman from Montreal who’d taken a cab ride in midtown Manhattan. This was the human-interest feature he wrote up. And this is the poem it generated many decades later.

Shadow Words
London Literary Critic Calls Them ‘Dark Diamonds’

April 2, 2024 by Jan Herman

‘These poems are free sonnets of experience that even Blake would favor. They are tears for the tongue to be savoured once tasted, and like a drop for the eye, ear, or mind, they restore perception to its rightful place. They are dark diamonds.’ — David Erdos, MÜ Magazine, London

Book Thief

March 30, 2024 by Jan Herman

Nothing like some biblioklept mischief to brighten the day.

‘I have stolen books
from friends and family
books they never cared for
books they never read. . . ‘

‘Selected Catastrophies’ from Beiles’s Sacred Fix

March 25, 2024 by Jan Herman

‘Sacred Fix’ was published in 1975. ‘Selected Catastrophies’ is the fourth section of the book. The author is an incandescent South African poet, who died in 2000. The poem begins:

“society!
I will not support you
when you shed your hideous electronic disguises
and stagger through the alleyways of oblivion
looking for shelter.
o society you betrayed me
with your promises of paradise . . .”

Making a Living as a Writer Was Never Easy, But …

March 5, 2024 by Jan Herman

When I was a salaried reporter, I did pretty well over the course of more than two decades at three major metro dailies in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. It always helped to get freelance work, however.

Dissident Poetry Festival to Delight Mind and Tongue

February 17, 2024 by Jan Herman

In a rare poetry reading organized by Efe Balıkçıoğlu and Sibel Erol and focused on often unacknowledged voices in contemporary Turkey, the works of three dissident authors are to be presented as a serious Turkish delight.
The presentation at NYU on Feb. 23 — both in person and on Zoom — will feature the feminist poet and artist Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, the gay Kurdish poet Fırat Demir, and Nicholas Glastonbury, who has translated the work of the late queer leftist poet Arkadaş Z. Özger.

The Bishop and the Butterfly
Political Thriller or True Crime Whodunit? You Decide

February 5, 2024 by Jan Herman

“Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. … Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets?” — Union Square & Co. (the publisher)

In His Strike Zone: A Tale of Tangier Ghosts

January 27, 2024 by Jan Herman

At last a first-class appreciation of the recently published ULTRAZONE. When I first read the novel in proof copy, it had me doing cartwheels . Naturally, I wondered how it would be received elsewhere. Now I know.

‘There are things closer than rain / that keep hope alive’

January 24, 2024 by Jan Herman

This ‘deformed sonnet’ was written in memory of Carl Weissner, a great one who was so rudely interrupted 12 years ago today.

Can Books Provide an Agenda for Mass Murder?’

January 4, 2024 by Jan Herman

That is a key question posed by Jascha Hannover’s “The Books He Didn’t Burn,” a documentary to be featured in its U.S premiere at the Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 15 at Lincoln Center in New York. Its relevance to the beliefs of today’s white supremacists and rightwing Christian nationalists is stunning.

« Previous Page
Next Page »

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…

About

My Books

Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

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...]

Contact me

We're cutting down on spam. Please fill in this form. … [Read More...]

Archives

Blogroll

Abstract City
AC Institute
ACKER AWARDS New York
All Things Allen Ginsberg
Antiwar.com
arkivmusic.com
Artbook&
Arts & Letters Daily

Befunky
Bellaart
Blogcritics
Booknotes
Bright Lights Film Journal

C-SPAN
Noam Chomsky
Consortium News
Cost of War
Council on Foreign Relations
Crooks and Liars
Cultural Daily

The Daily Howler
Dark Roasted Blend
DCReport
Deep L
Democracy Now!

Tim Ellis: Comedy
Eschaton

Film Threat
Robert Fisk
Flixnosh (David Elliott’s movie menu)
Fluxlist Europe

Good Reads
The Guardian
GUERNICA: A Magazine of Art & Politics

Herman (Literary) Archive, Northwestern Univ. Library
The Huffington Post

Inter Press Service News Agency
The Intercept
Internet Archive (WayBackMachine)
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Doug Ireland
IT: International Times, The Magazine of Resistance

Jacketmagazine
Clive James

Kanopy (stream free movies, via participating library or university)
Henry Kisor
Paul Krugman

Lannan Foundation
Los Angeles Times

Metacritic
Mimeo Mimeo
Moloko Print
Movie Geeks United (MGU)
MGU: The Kubrick Series

National Security Archive
The New York Times
NO!art

Osborne & Conant
The Overgrown Path

Poets House
Political Irony
Poynter

Quanta Magazine

Rain Taxi
The Raw Story
RealityStudio.org
Bill Reed
Rhizome
Rwanda Project

Salon
Senses of Cinema
Seven Stories Press
Slate
Stadtlichter Presse
Studs Terkel
The Synergic Theater

Talking Points Memo (TPM)
TalkLeft
The 3rd Page
Third Mind Books
Times Square Cam
The Tin Man
t r u t h o u t

Ubu Web

Vox

The Wall Street Journal
Wikigate
Wikipedia
The Washington Post
The Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)
World Catalogue
World Newspapers, Magazines & News Sites

The XD Agency

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit
This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in