Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Difference Between the 16th Century and the 21st

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When I sent Heathcote Williams a photo of the Francis Bacon plaque in the Library Walk series … He replied with an ironic poem, like so … … which illustrates a difference between the 16th century and the 21st, doncha think? EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

From Laugharne Boathouse to Library Walk

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On my way to work I sometimes take a street in midtown Manhattan where an unsung marvel known as “Library Walk” celebrates the world’s great books and writers. For the length of two city blocks I’m distracted by bronze reliefs in granite plaques set into the sidewalk. They are beautiful to look at and inspiring […]

Unbuttoned: Samuel Beckett Meets William Osborne

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I knew my friend Bill Osborne and Samuel Beckett had met and spoken about Osborne’s musical settings of Beckett’s plays. But I had never heard the details. Now at last the full story! By William Osborne I spent seven years doing nothing else but setting the works of Beckett to music. At the end in […]

An Absurd Debate About the Last Word

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Following up on the previous blogpost, Gerard Bellaart sent a superimposition of several lines on Beckett’s short dramatic monologue “Not I.” Bellaart also sent an excerpt from Michael Maier’s paper, “GEISTERTRIO: Beethoven’s Music in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Ghost Trio.’” To which, Bellaart says: “The debate as to whether music has the last word is rather like […]

‘Sacred Elephant’ Is Coming to New York’s La MaMa

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I haven’t seen much theater lately, for reasons I may already have mentioned — so much is dull dull dull — but the dramatization of Heathcote Williams’s epic poem, “Sacred Elephant,” has got my attention as nothing has in years. The show, not yet officially announced, is coming in September to La MaMa‘s First Floor […]

‘Gossip Column’ Cut-Up by Rooney & Beiles

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Found in a drawer 44 years later. Still funny, too. And maybe you’ll recognize the references. Click the photos if you don’t know who they are. I almost forgot Dick Rover. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Taking the Piss’ That May Pass for Shakespeare

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I spent more than a decade reviewing theater for a major metro daily and I’d never heard the term “nubbing (or taking the piss).” Hmmph. Heathcote Williams shows how it’s done in a sweet folio about to be published by Gerard Bellaart‘s Cold Turkey Press. As my good friend N.O. Mustill says via email, “me […]

‘Peter Bayliss and the Breatharians’

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The obituary in The Telegraph, in 2002, said: “He wanted no memorial, but his near-lunatic appetite for life will be impossible to forget.” The poet Heathcote Williams certainly remembers Peter Bayliss. He remembers, too, “the Bayliss Mischief” that “might still be working / From beyond the grave.” Here given their due are the vaunted philanthropic […]

MacFadyen Takes ‘Front Porch’ Look at Burroughs

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I knew when RealityStudio posted Ian MacFadyen’s review of “The Name Is Burroughs: expanded media at the ZKM, Karlsruhe” that it would be a major critique. I had already read his “Codename Burroughs,” the pamphlet that accompanied the retrospective, which was excerpted from a more complete text in MacFadyen’s book, William S. Burroughs. Cut. With […]

Bukowski & Catullus: Let Us Compare Obscenities

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The other day a friend of mine said, “I’m not sure a living human has written a good poem since Bukowski died.” His all-time Buk favorite is “The Best Love Poem I Can Write at the Moment.” Coincidentally, I came across a review by Michael Hinds of The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and […]

‘Artaud Fragmentations’

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And now for another kind of poem, as unlike “Death Is a Wind That Will Carry You Off” as day from night. It’s part of a large series of stenciled texts by the Dutch artist and writer Gerard Bellaart. At the urging of my staff of thousands, examples from Bellaart’s word-based series of artworks have […]

‘Death Is a Wind That Will Carry You Off’

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This poem is not intended as a companion piece to “Music for the End of Time.” The tone is entirely different, not at all apocalyptic. But it covers the same or similar ground, and I can’t help thinking that the difference in treatment is a merely a matter of temperament. Which is enough: Death is […]

VDRSVP #3 for Old Times’ Sake

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Someone told me he knew what RSVP stands for. But what did VDRSVP mean? “Black humor,” I said. No point giving away the joke. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Three ‘Not Poems’ by Stephen Schneck

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I remember meeting Stephen Schneck in San Francisco at City Lights Bookstore, where I was clerking at the time. He had published The Nightclerk, which won the International Formentor Prize, and I was starting a “little” magazine. He offered three “Not Poems” for the first issue. His novel, translated into 12 languages but banned in […]

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