It was a year ago today that I began posting tributes to Carl Weissner (1940-2012), whose unexpected death last January came as a shock. My own words went up with a photo and funeral announcement by the filmmaker Signe Mähler, another of his friends. The poet and performance artist William Cody Maher, the journalist and […]
Algren on Learning to Write by Way of Academia
I noticed an ad in the current issue of The New Yorker for the Yale Writers’ Conference to be held this coming June. Since a bunch of us have been talking about Nelson Algren, the ad couldn’t help reminding me of his essay “Hand in Hand Through the Greenery,” published in The Last Carousel back […]
The Algren I Knew Was No Loser
Taking nothing away from the brilliance of Colin Asher’s biographical essay on Nelson Algren, or my admiration for it, I have a mild but serious objection. I intended to post this earlier but didnt have the time. Now I do. The subhead on the essay calls Algren “the type of loser this country just can’t […]
Algren Gets What He Deserves from Colin Asher
I’m happy to report that Colin Asher’s smart biographical essay on Nelson Algren in The Believer is the best I’ve ever read. I’m also glad I made an unacknowledged contribution, one nearly verbatim. Though small, it reminds me that words have a life of their own, regardless of who wrote them. Postscript: I finally found […]
VDRSVP #2 for Old Times’ Sake
![VDRSVP #3, eds. Jan Herman & Norman O. Mustill [San Francisco, 1969]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/VDRSVP3bothsides560.jpeg)
Now that my venereal staff of thousands has managed to get its shabby act together for VDRSVP #1, I’ll be posting info about the contents of this issue as soon as possible. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘Harry Patch: Anti War Hero’
If journalism is the first draft of history, Heathcote Williams’s poetry is the CAT scan. Text by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
VDRSVP #1 for Old Times’ Sake
![VDRSVP #1 [1969] eds. Jan Herman & Norman O. Mustill](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Screen-shot-2013-01-07-at-2.14.33-PM-e1357586355413.png)
I’ll be posting info about the contents as soon as my venereal staff of thousands manages to get its shabby act together. But first things first: What a great title. Second things first: VDRSVP #2 and #3 are coming too. Postscript: Jan. 9 — The staff finally woke up. Here are the contents of VDRSVP […]
La Môme et de Rouge
!["La Mome et de Rouge" [front cover of four-page folio of the published poem, COLD TURKEY PRESS, 2011].](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/williams_lamome_1-e1357138251842.jpg)
Date: April 26, 2012 11:43:35 AM GMT+02:00 Had a message from Marianne Faithfull . . .. . . ‘Isn’t it time you wrote me another song?’ I said ‘What do you want it to be about?’she said she’d been reading a book about Edith Piaf and was gripped by it.I said I’d have a look. […]
Fresh From My Hot Little Paws
!['Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me' by Malcolm Mc Neill [Fantagraphics, 2012]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/OBSERVED-WHILE-FALLING-cover.jpg)
A review posted at RealityStudio of Malcolm Mc Neill’s spellbinding memoir, Observed While Falling, recently published by Fantagraphics Books, about his relationship with William S. Burroughs and their artistic collaboration. Mc Neill is an artist who can write. Really write. He brings a fresh analytical eye to the familiar Burroughsian fixations — synchronicity and doppelgangers, […]
‘Shelley at Oxford,’ a Timely Polemic for Christmas
Written by Heathcote Williams, montaged and narrated by Alan Cox, it has just arrived on YouTube and begins like this … In Oxford High Street, in 1810, Slatter & Munday’s Bookshop Had a large, bow-fronted window For displaying their latest wares. Aged 19, Shelley flooded it with a pamphlet On ‘The Necessity Of Atheism’. Which […]
Who Is Heathcote Williams? Not for Sale, That’s Who
“He is one of a few of genius who did not sell out and who peaks in (relative) old age. That’s quite something nowadays.” — Gerard Bellaart +++ “Fame is the first disgrace because God knows who you are.” — Heathcote Williams, “The Local Stigmatic” +++ The videos comprise Parts 1 and 2 of a […]
Heathcote Williams on the Real American President
Narration and montage by Alan Cox. Musical accents by Louis Armstrong. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
More Dissident Literature from Cold Turkey Press
The title of Heathcote Williams’s poem puts it country simple. You can’t get more direct than “The United States of Porn.” The poem, which runs to 208 lines, nearly all based on facts, is part of a portfolio called American Porn. It was published in 2011 in a beautifully produced first edition of 36 copies […]
A First-Class Letter From the Lost and Found
When I read Heathcote Williams’s description of a bizzare project that for a time obsessed the South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who wanted to plant “the barren Sahara desert” with “industrial quantities of discarded tea-leaves,” I remembered a letter Carl Weissner once wrote. March 30th, 1971 Dear Sinclair: The Sahara is irrigated. Now what? While […]
In Iowa, ‘The Subversive Culture of Collage and Zines’
The running head on these two pages of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up text “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin” reads: “if you are gay I am right seconds with Karate you are wrong you are he kicks him into 1914 movie.” The spread appeared in an exhibition, “Liberated Images,” at the University of Iowa […]
Teaming Burroughs & Mustill for Thanksgiving
A Straight Up tradition continues. But this year William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day are posted with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. That completes the package. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through […]
The Idiot’s Voice: More Dissidence from Cold Turkey
Leonard Cohen, who is not given to easy praise, has called Sinclair Beiles “one of the great poets of the century.” Meaning the 20th century — they met back in the early 1960s on the Greek island of Hydra. Was Cohen being uncharacteristically hyperbolic? Well, William S. Burroughs, also not given to easy praise, once […]