Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Interview: The Skinny on the Beats

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Hilary Holladay: How would you size up the significance of the Beats as writers rather than as personalities? Jan Herman: Kerouac has had a huge influence on readers worldwide. I’m sure that more people have read On the Road than ever read “Howl.” But Ginsberg may be more significant as a writer than Kerouac in […]

Nelson Algren’s Walk Through Appalachia

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I have always loved the way A Walk on the Wild Side begins. Show me a more perceptive opening of an American novel with its historical tracing of an Appalachian clan (let alone the lyrical brilliance of its prose) and I’ll buy you dinner. The novel introduces Fitz Linkhorn on the first page — a […]

This High Jiver Is One Helluva Surviver

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“I am sociable, outgoing, quite extroverted, misanthropic at times yet other times quite philanthropic. I tend to contradict myself, wear a peculiar countenance from lack of sleep, despise insipid conversations, I get on my own nerves, spell like a fifth grader, use my diagnosis of florid ADHD as an excuse for the loquacious tendencies I […]

Poet Takes Aim at Election Campaign

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Health Warning ” … Only the religious slaves / Of a militarized state / Will be elected …” Saturation Coverage Of the US Election Can cause brain damage. For nine months US Supremacism Indulges itself In an election For the US President. Somehow or other This always involves The US electorate Watching candidates Spending billions […]

And the Beat Goes On … And On

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It was too good to pass up this collage by Norman O. Mustill. He made it in 1968 as a comment on the Vietnam War, but it seems to me as accurate now as it was then. The only difference is that the wars have changed. A little “I don’t care” music please … EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Journalism as ‘The Poetry of Fact’

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At the Chicago Sun-Times I watched some great wordsmiths up close. Roger Ebert wrote with an ease that seemed miraculous. His profiles flowed like swift streams. David Elliott was another. His reviews had the density of Hart Crane poems. (I exaggerate, but only a little.) And then there was the sportswriter John Schulian, whose graceful […]

Do You See Something Wrong Here?

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On the left is the cover of the New York Times Magazine for its migrant story, ‘Out of Syria.’ On the right is a condo ad for the one percent on the first page of the magazine. Draw your own conclusion. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Huge Counterculture Archive Comes to Market

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So the Ed Sanders Archive, a massive hoard of literary and countercultural materials, is finally for sale. Steve Clay, the publisher of Granary Books, is the dealer. I have no idea what price is being asked, but you can bet it’s liable to set some kind of record. Beginning with his first poems written while […]

Carl Weissner: Master Writer, Cherished Friend

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A great one died four years ago today. Carl was also a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg), and a literary agent who spread the work of dissident […]

What the Horse’s Mouth Had to Say

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I wanted to get the lowdown, so I went over to the Council on Foreign Depredations. The horse’s mouth was as smart as I expected. But to my pleasant surprise, he was eminently sane, which seemed more important. When Tom Brokaw asked him “how well the country is being served” by the current political debate […]

Honoring MLK With a Clever Starbucks Ad

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Watch Martin Luther King Jr. giving his greatest address, the “I have a dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Listen to his peerless “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of April 16, 1963, in which he defends direct-action nonviolence, explains its principles, expresses his disappointment with […]

Progress for Women at Vienna Philharmonic

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For the first time in three years, William Osborne, an expert on the sociology of German-speaking orchestras, has posted an update about the latest developments at the VPo. “It’s the most positive I’ve ever written,” he tells me. Which is saying a lot when you know how critical he’s been of the orchestra’s all-male ideology […]

Gonzo Style

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Gonzo Today brings us a gonzo poem by Heathcote Williams that begins: The Parisian atrocities were born in Libya / Where Cameron, Sarkozy, and Obama / Murdered twelve thousand Libyans between sips / Of Downing Street and Oval Office coffee. Read the complete poem here. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Rent a Rammer for Homeland Security

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Norman O. Mustill died two years ago today. Here are two postcard he sent his friend Kurt Wold back in the 1980s. Although only postcards, they are like all Norm’s work, as Wold says: “the manifestation of the man.” And they haven’t aged a nanosecond. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Redux: Dear Cannibals, Have a Happy Thanksgiving

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Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill has been a happy pairing. It still is. But the Straight Up staff of thousands added a sweetener, something like cranberry sauce, to last year’s celebration. Here ‘tiz again: Words by Heathcote Williams, narration and montage by Alan Cox. And from Straight Up’s Thanksgiving […]

Carl Weissner: ‘Always These Nightmares . . .’

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Updated below. Carl Weissner’s novel Death in Paris — first published online in 2009, then as a paperback in 2012, and finally as an ebook in 2014 — was about a different kind of death from the terrorist assault on Saturday night. Writing in English, his second language, Weissner drew on the trappings of detective […]

‘Not a One-Trick Pony . . .’

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So says Jed Birmingham in #23: The Dead Star, the first of his picks for “The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.” The Burroughs Nova Broadcast pamphlet, which I published in 1969 and designed as a foldout in covers, is ancient history. It makes me an old pony. But I can live with that. The […]

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