Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

MoMA to Mount Tzara’s Magnum Opus

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Samy Rosenstock’s idea for a great big book is getting a great big show nearly 100 years later. Dadaglobe Reconstructed reunites over 100 works created for Dadaglobe, Tristan Tzara’s planned but unrealized magnum opus, originally slated for publication in 1921. An ambitious anthology that aimed to document Dada’s international activities, Dadaglobe was not merely a […]

Nope! Trump and Clinton Ain’t Neck ‘n’ Neck

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Today’s lead story on the front page of the New York Times, Trump Wins Big and Clinton Ends Sanders’s Streak, which jumps inside to an entire page in the print edition, never mentions the actual number of votes the two winners received — only the percentages. So we read that Donald Trump received 60.5% of […]

Meeting the Hangman

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By Heathcote Williams I used to speak out against capital punishment From a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner. This was when it was thought that hanging people Was helpful in maintaining order. One day someone called Barry Trenoweth came over. His father, Gordon, had been hanged for murder. He’d killed a shopkeeper in Falmouth during the […]

The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter

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My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times. — D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life Why did George Orwell’s widow give the typewriter to the paper? And where was […]

Trump Detour: Via Bernie’s Home State

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Once upon a time — in Vermont, of all places — Sinclair Lewis sat down to write a counterfactual satire about American politics. Never having cracked the book myself, I’m grateful to Chris Braithwaite for relating its details. “If you’ve been as gob smacked as I have by The Donald phenomenon,” he writes in the […]

Trump Detour: Orwell Recalls a Fascist’s Rally

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Eighty years ago today George Orwell witnessed the British Fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley* speaking to a full house at a public meeting in the Yorkshire coal-mining town of Bransley. Orwell was shocked by what happened. It’s worth remembering his notes about the experience, given Donald Trump’s rallies these days. Writing in his diary that “M […]

The Black and Blue of Butterworth’s Diaries

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Michael Butterworth’s new book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order — recently published in the U.K., and just out in the U.S. — tells how he began hanging out with New Order at the London recording studio Britannia Row while the band was making its album Power, Corruption & Lies and […]

Coming Soon: The Wild Tale of the Paneros

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When a young Spanish director began making a film about a mad family of poets “during the waning days of the Franco dictatorship,” Aaron Shulman writes in the current issue of The Believer, it was intended to be a short documentary. Titled “El Desencanto” (“The Disenchanted”), the film “ended up spilling into a ninety-one minute […]

Not a Peep about the Oscars, Thank God

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I’ve said his writing “had the density of Hart Crane poems” and that I was exaggerating “only a little.” That’s because I was recalling his column in the Chicago Sun-Times, when he roved the art galleries reviewing photography shows. (He had been the film critic of the Chicago Daily News before it folded, but that […]

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 …

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.

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 […]

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