Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

I Remember Oriana Fallaci . . .

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You hear a lot about Michel Houellebecq these days. You don’t hear much about Oriana Fallaci. She once was more controversial than Houellebecq for her blistering scorn of Islam and Muslims. Mark Lilla has a big piece, Slouching Toward Mecca, in the current New York Review of Books about Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission, which as […]

A Savoyard’s First Brush With Censorship

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Have a look at this Kickstarter campaign: Savoy Books is an independent publishing house based above a locksmith shop in the South Manchester district of Didsbury, founded and run by Michael Butterworth and David Britton. In 1989 they published Lord Horror, the last book to be banned in the UK under the 1959 Obscene Publications […]

Because She Can . . . Therefore She Is

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Hanne Lippard’s ‘Orbit’ was first posted here last year. I was reminded of it yesterday when she performed the piece at the Kunsthalle Vien as part of an exhibition, “The Future of Memory.”

A Poet With a Dark Vision and a Tuned-Up Voice

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The poet Philip Levine has died. Here’s an appreciation, written years ago at the Los Angeles Times, which began like this: Philip Levine, no prodigy, wrote poetry for seven years before his first poem was published in his mid-20s. It took another nine before his first slim volume, On the Edge, appeared in 1963. But […]

Some Got Plenty and Some Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’

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Five years after the Wall Street crash of 1929, George Gershwin wrote what he called a “banjo song” for “Porgy and Bess.” It turned into “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” with lyrics by Edwin DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. The second verse goes like this: De folks wid plenty o’ plenty Got a lock on […]

Burroughs Central This Is Not

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Anyone who thinks this blog is Burroughs Central has no idea. The fact is, I’m just skimming. The real Burroughs Central is RealityStudio, where the true aficionados congregate for deep postings by Jed Birmingham’s Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker. For example, he recently made the case that le maître’s cut-ups in the mimeo mags of […]

By Burroughs Possessed >>>>>> Burroughs 101

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Being a serious writer hardly means leading the life of a saint. In 1951, in Mexico City, long before the publication of Naked Lunch, which made him famous, William S. Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken stunt. He was trying to prove his marksmanship William Tell-style. Instead of […]

In Memory: Carl Weissner, So Rudely Interrupted

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Carl died unexpectedly three years ago today. On the first anniversary of his death, I posted a tribute from friends and others. Here’s a photo from a trip he took to Marseille, where he was gathering impressions for a novel he wanted to write, which wasn’t all that long before he died. His absence among […]

Kick That Habit? Bellaart Does Burroughs

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This pencil drawing of William S. Burroughs by Gerard Bellaart is one of two portraits. It’s the introspective Burroughs. The other drawing, a charcoal sketch to be posted soon, catches Burroughs in a wholly different state of mind, as if possessed by the Ugly Spirit that Burroughs believed had dogged him throughout his life. The […]

Beckett But Not Beckett: ‘Being Human’

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It begins in blackness with whispers. Jumps to a face with eyes closed. The eyes open. Words form: “I was almost human. But then something went wrong. I was a human being. But then I became a victim. I was almost a human being but then I ran out of time.” I wish I could […]

Posting a Cold Turkey Card While Paris Burns

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By way of explanation, I was occupied searching for word pattern. Found a rangy young man whose authority was roughly 50 words retyped in columns from the beginning more habit-forming than his life. He hunkered across the columns and typed them again. Undsoweiter … And now for R. Crumb’s pièce de résistance:

‘Death in Paris’ Struck Prescient Note

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Apropos today’s headline about the hacked U.S. CENTCOM Twitter Account . . . a friend was looking over our late amigo Carl Weissner’s “Doomsday Lit” novel Death in Paris. Boy, is that title apt. Not to mention the chapter headings. How about this one? >im in ur base killin ur d00dz

Consumer Poem for the Occasion: A Global Love Bomb

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The wisdom of the words, the wit of the montage — to say nothing of the pitch-perfect narration — make “True Love in the Impossible Emporium” a media keeper for this holiday season and all the ones to come. Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. The poem, which begins like this, […]

Incidental Intelligence: A Portrait of William Burroughs

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I once asked Nelson Algren what he thought of Naked Lunch. He grinned at me, as though he were being entertained by a wiseguy. I knew he had no love for the Beats. He had derided Jack Kerouac as a momma’s boy and dismissed Allen Ginsberg as a publicist. So his answer surprised me: “Burroughs […]

Music Theater: ‘Street Scene for the Last Mad Soprano’

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This performance was recorded in Taos, New Mexico, in September 2014. The piece had its world premiere in Germany at Theater K-9, in Konstanz, in 1996. Abbie Conant, Soprano & Trombone / William Osborne, Music Text and Video From William Osborne’s brief description: Imagine a singer living among the dumpsters behind the Met. Tomorrow is […]

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