Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Desktopfun: Boo-hooray’s Burroughs Cut/Up Show

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Boo-Hooray, in collaboration with Emory University, is presenting a William S. Burroughs centenary exhibition dedicated to the Cut-Up technique. On view will be hand-edited typescript drafts from the Nova Trilogy, rarely seen publications like the mimeographed newsletter The Burrough and the Sigma Portfolio, alongside correspondence with Brion Gysin, vinyl releases, as well as the original […]

Another Sonnet Maudit from Cold Turkey Press

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More conventional but still not Petrarchan, Spenserian, or Shakespearean. And not in Ted’s style either. Best of all, it’s presented with Gerard Bellaart’s ‘Morose Delectation,’ chosen by my staff of thousands. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Long-Awaited ‘Algren’ Bows at Chicago Film Festival

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Is this Nelson Algren’s moment? If it is, I don’t think he’d give a damn — not personally — considering he’s gone and how long ago that was. I also don’t think he’d appreciate what has become a cliché of the Algren myth — the forgotten writer. Sure, he’s forgotten. Most writers are. And of […]

Long-Awaited ‘Algren’ Documentary to Open in Chicago

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Is this Nelson Algren’s moment? If it is, I don’t think he’d give a damn — not personally — considering he’s gone and how long ago that was. I also don’t think he’d appreciate what has become a cliché of the Algren myth — the forgotten writer. Sure, he’s forgotten. Most writers are. And of […]

Poet Says, ‘Ecstasy Can Postpone Every Deadline . . .’

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Love in Old Age Someone I’ve known since I was twelve Happened to tell me the other day, ‘We’re now on the shady side of the hill. ‘Not many more days to play.’ But I found myself pretending I hadn’t heard what he’d said — The implication being so unsettling: He was saying we’d soon […]

Supervert’s ‘Vision of the Future’ Has Arrived

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It is possibly Supervert‘s most impressive book beauty to date, judging not only from the immaculate white-and-black antiseptic look of it and the heft of it — the text comes to 240 pages — but also, obviously, from the read of it. At one level POST-DEPRAVITY is a page turner (literally) and at another a […]

Two New Cards from Cold Turkey Press

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My staff of thousands insisted on this posting. Postscript: And before I forget — 9/11: THE DAY OF, THE DAY AFTER, THE WEEK AFTER. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza’

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The brutality of the Israelis in its savage response to Hamas rocket attacks has been documented in photographs so horrendous I can’t bear to look at them. Listening to “An Old Man and a Young Man in Gaza” — as read by Alan Cox in a recent radio broadcast on the KPFA program Cover to […]

‘Killing Kit’ to Be Staged in London Try Out

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Heathcote Williams’s first new play in many years is to open Sept. 21 at The Cockpit, where it received a reading last February. The company advertises itself as a radical fringe “theatre of disruptive panache, angry critique and useful, progressive ideas for the future.” “Killing Kit” traces “the volcanic life and mysterious death of Christopher […]

Cold Turkey Press Does a Nelson Algren Fight Card

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I was having such a great time re-reading one of Nelson Algren’s “lesser” books — Who Lost An American? — that I scanned a little excerpt from the second story, “Down With All Hands,” and sent it to Gerard Bellaart. It struck a nerve. He sent back one of his choice Cold Turkey cards. In […]

‘Dying’s Annoying,’ a poem by Heathcote Williams

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Ever since the death of two close friends, my staff of thousands has had trouble sleeping. Recently a suffocating moment of enlightenment troubled it further. The staff was contemplating an obvious but astonishing fact: When a body expires the person attached to it vanishes. The person has dematerialized. It’s hard to wrap your head around […]

Sanders: ‘Book of Glyphs’ = ‘Smile-Book of Grace-Joy’

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Granary Books has just published a facsimile edition of Ed Sanders’ first book-length work of glyphs, which he created in Florence, Italy, in 2008, using colored pencils and a small sketchbook. The publisher notes: Though each piece stands on its own, collectively the 72 glyphs convey, with characteristic humility and humor, many of the themes […]

Did Frank O’Hara Write ‘Captain Bada’? I Thought So

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I see there’s a 50th anniversary edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems out in hardcover from City Lights Books. It reminds me of a question I’ve had for years about a poem of O’Hara’s that I’ve never had answered. Back in 1967, the year after O’Hara died, the New York poet Jim Brodey came knocking […]

Cold Turkey Press Publishes Portrait of Nelson Algren

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This is a byte of self promotion. A byte? Haw. From the jacket blurb: Who could resist a study of a writer that begins, “if his writing had taken a flying fuck into a deep canyon, it was always balls-to-the-wall”? Jan Herman has borrowed the ghost of Algren’s golden arm with which to write this […]

Touring ‘Poetry Army’ Charts History of Radical Verse

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A posting by the Stop the War Coalition: From The Peasants’ Revolt to recent events at Tahrir Square, this incendiary performance celebrates radical verse in all its glory down through the centuries. The longstanding collaboration between poet Heathcote Williams and performer Roy Hutchins, encompassing such hits as Whale Nation and Autogeddon, continues as Hutchins combines […]

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