Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Speaking for Myself

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Death comes in all sizes / — sequoia, oak, and elm / maple, birch, fir, and pine, / elephants and whales / bumble bees and snails, / the Jews in the ovens, / Armenians slaughtered, / all the genocides before / and since. I am also dead . . . EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Fourteen: Deformed Sonnets

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What I’m saying here is not, I agree, poetry, As poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, Under unbearable duress and only with the hope That good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. — Czeslaw Milosz IV I was there in asphalt in ozone dreams. I was waiting for a cool stare […]

A Burroughs-Gysin ‘Motherlode’

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SEE UPDATE BELOW My staff of thousands informs me that the Smithsonian Institute has posted scans of three notebooks by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin dating from 1963 to 1973, and 1977. It was described to me as “a motherlode” of writings and collages. And indeed it is. Have a look by clicking the […]

R. Crumb Classic Portraits

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Charles Plymell writes: I sent Robert some old political cartoons on crumbling paper from 20’s-30’s & some extra sheets of the plain parchment which had beautiful tan sheen like I ran the first ZAP on. I had remembered the old comics I found in Lawrence of Andy Gump & another one of The Katzenjammer Kids […]

Thinking of Auden . . .

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Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives. — W.H. Auden EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Grub Street Deformation

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BEACHED On the sunny island of friendship ash was falling from our faces. “This is not subtle,” the doc said. He prescribed a regimen of pills the size of Montaigne’s chateau. My head shrank to a bungalow in Far Rockaway, and I recalled the ghost ship of our childhoods beached against the boardwalk where a […]

Screwed Beyond Repair?

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UNPATCHED for Simon Schama At the secular end of days when unconfined freedom means gusts of opportunity for all our computers to screw every one of us beyond repair, will the unspeakable terrors reappear? What tech service will patch our human flaws? Not the rolling disaster of holy water & passwords. Not infernal church bells […]

Is Dante for Our Time?

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‘Forget your hopes.’ (As quoted in a modern translation by Clive James) Traditionally: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Take your choice. One or both may help. For those with the ears and minds to hear them, the notes of pianos are full of ghosts. Each piano hammer and string is different, as is […]

Two Sides of a ‘Small Electrical Storm’

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Nearly 50 years ago, Gary Lee-Nova sent a pair of two-sided silkscreen prints to Marshall McLuhan. He had seen McLuhan’s copy of Finnegans Wake with handwritten comments on a subject Joyce had treated: “the electrification of the entire world.” He says his print drawing “was a crude, almost rude emulation of the comments.” If the […]

Acker Awards to Honor One-of-a Kind Artists

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I don’t know what the late Kathy Acker would think of an award given in her name to non-conforming artists. I assume an experimental punk novelist and poet would like the idea of supporting artists who don’t conform. Although awards are besides the point especially for non-conformists, they do generate publicity. And unless I’m wrong, […]

Michelangelo, poet

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Before Michelangelo, Divine Draftsman & Designer leaves The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, here’s a sweet little item from the show. It’s about how he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and it brings him down to earth. Jackson Pollock anyone? I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture, Hunched up as […]

McLuhan’s Notes on Finnegans Wake

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When Gary Lee-Nova read a recent blogpost about a new posthumous collection of Mary Beach’s writings, Electric Bananas, it drew him to Marshall McLuhan’s notated copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Gary was kind enough to send along a couple of sample pages of those notations, as well as McLuhan’s comment about “stupidity” and “indifference.” […]

Among the Laptoppers

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MORTAL COIL for Heathcote The coffee house loop that never ends sounds heavenly among the laptoppers. Failure is not an option. The fanfare of the horns and the swell of the hi-hat roll on like spooky dreams. Fingers dance — they fly like bats in a cave. The gods if there are any shall protect […]

The Lust to Consume

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“The people who run Tesco’s must be Buddhists. You go in there … and there is nothing you could possibly want.”–Heathcote Williams Tesco PLC is a global retailer based in the U.K. It owns and operates supermarkets throughout Europe and in recent years has expanded to Turkey, China, Thailand, and the U.S. the Middle East, […]

A Book That Brings Her Back Alive

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Mary Beach’s Electric Bananas, a brilliant posthumous collection put together by her daughter Pam Plymell, uncovers a writer who has the kind of filthy wit that belongs in James Joyce’s league. Beach is more dangerous, however, because she is more accessible. She has mastered a style along the lines of Finnegan’s Wake, but simplified it. […]

Goodbye to a Depressing Year

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The image is a detail from a drawing by Paul Klee. The poem owes a debt to George Grosz and Gerard Bellaart. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

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