Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

The Nature of the Beast

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Furthermore . . . “As Matisse noted, black is a colour too & in certain hands the superior one.” — Gerard Bellaart

Speaking of Hans Magnus Enzenberger . . .

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His poem “last will and testament”  begins: “get your flag out of my face, it tickles!” Jerome Rothenberg’s appealing translation from the German continues: and get that tinny wreath off my chest, it’s rattling too much; toss it over with the statues on the garbage heap, and give the ribbon to some biddies to doll […]

The Sorrows

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War is always a poison to the soul, even the most just wars. No more important victory was ever achieved than World War II, but America was poisoned, perhaps fatally, by the aftermath of its own success, because we never faced what war really is. It’s very difficult. There are no words for it. — […]

Streaming What We Breathe

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Quantum Words for Bill Osborne Stealthy quantum words phantoms of expectation and suicides of time riddle us with springs and traps. Self-delusion streaming what we breathe we who breathe in silence holding worlds together   &    apart like ancient beacons bearing witness in halos of fading light. — JH

Edward Snowden on The Intercept

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Since I don’t tweet, this is the next best thing. Click to listen. Edward Snowden discusses surveillance, tools to help protect your privacy, and the likelihood of a Trump-Putin deal to extradite him.

‘Meeting Jim’ (Who’s Having the Time of His Life)

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I’ve never met Jim. We’ve only corresponded by email about the strange case of Orwell’s typewriter. But I know that Jim Haynes is a man for all reasons — pleasure, food, sex, mind, books, theater, life — and that to meet him in person all you have to do is show up at his door […]

Tribute to John Bryan from Cold Turkey Press

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John Bryan published so many underground papers and magazines over three decades — beginning in 1962 with renaissance, a San Francisco literary journal inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (which John said he read “half a dozen times,” and which turned him onto LSD) — that Warren Hinckle called him “the Peter Zenger of […]

Connecting With Burroughs

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I was walking down Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan the other day when I saw someone reading Naked Lunch. I know the shot looks posed, but it wasn’t. This is exactly how he was sitting (below left). The guy was in front of an office building at 777 Third Ave., between E. 48 and E. […]

Trump’s Corrupt Precursor

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Carl Weissner and I made this track in 1971 during the Vietnam War before Nixon resigned his corrupt presidency. The collage shows Nixon’s customary “V” for victory salute, which was as hollow and phoney as he was, with his wife Pat behind him looking over his shoulder against a backdrop of two pots, one clean […]

‘Peculiar Shortcomings’

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A word of warning from a century ago … Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred […]

‘Officially Verboten’

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U.S. cities with the fastest-growing wealth gaps. Monster Nor’easter The first day of spring a blinding white curtain kidnapped the cit​y. It was a true blast of winter. We solemn jurors braved the monster nor’easter and did our solemn duty at forty dollars a day, the price of a shovel. Like heavily falling snow white […]

C.L.R. James: Cricket Shaped Him

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I know nothing about cricket. My only sense of the game came from Frank Harris’s portrait of H.G. Wells. But now that I’ve read The Young C.L.R. James: A Graphic Novelette (PM Press Pamphlet), which traces the early development of the Pan-Africanist writer and Trotskyite revolutionary who was a cricket star as a young man […]

Filthy Rotten T.S. Eliot, the Mofo

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When my staff of thousands sent me this book cover, APRIL IS A MOTHERFUCKER, by none other than T.S. Eliot, it put me in mind of Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917, which includes Eliot’s fithy rotten early poems. They are so much fun, despite their sometime racism, that they naturally give the P.C. […]

What Would Daumier Make of Trump?

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Here’s the perfect hint: A mocking depiction of King Louis-Philippe as the Rabelais character Gargantua. The caricature might as well be Trump. He feeds on bundles of swag delivered by his obsequious minions and, from his outhouse throne, he shits out appointments, titles, and other rewards for the privileged class. Not incidentally, Honoré Daumier went […]

Once Upon a Time in India . . .

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There was a mimeo magazine called ppHOO69 *Intercontinental*1969. It was edited by Pradip Choudhuri and published by Subhas Ghose, with a front cover by Alejandro Jodorowsky and a back cover by Claude Pélieu. The poems and prose were divided into two sections, one in Tamil and one in English (with some French). CLICK THE IMAGES […]

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 . . .

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 […]

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