Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

TLS Review: Brion Gysin Let the Mice In (and More)

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‘Brion Gysin Let the Mice In’ is a key collaborative work. it represents those late 1950s to early 1960s years when Beat writing met European experimentalism. The most sophisticated intelligence of the Beat Generation was permanently affect.

Gysin is a lucid and witty writer. He gives glimpses of Burroughs at the moment when ‘Naked Lunch’ was being edited for Olympia Press — as he “ranted through the gargantuan roles of Doc Benway, A.J., Clem & Jody,” or as a drug addict, “through the shadows from one pharmacia to another, hugging a bottle of paregoric … his raincoat glinting like the underbelly of a shark.”

Trump Centaur, Redux

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An insult to pigs . . . and a liar to the marrow of his bones. “The Republican Party has become the most dangerous organization in world history.” — Noam Chomsky

Last Breath

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There are things / closer than rain / that keep hope alive— /
tenement flowers / seasoned with heartbreak, / chattering weeds / and the silence of fireflies— / things that may not be / more brilliant / than a ​wine-stained shirt / and crow’s-feet eyes. / ​But they will do …

King’s Dream Deferred

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Whatever the blowhard president of Trumpistan says in his official proclamation to honor Martin Luther King Jr., rest assured it is phony to the last pixel and not worth the time to read it. (To save you the trouble, here’s a sample: “My Administration works each day to ensure that all Americans have every opportunity to realize a better life for themselves and their families regardless of race, class, gender, or any other barriers that have arbitrarily stood in their way.”) And for the record let’s not forget that when King made his historic “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, it was hardly noticed by the nation’s most widely circulated newspapers. Have a look at King delivering that speech and be reminded of what they missed.

Kurt Wold: ‘Stradoferous’

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“I dreamt I could play the bicycle. This performance artwork plays with a number of themes, not the least of which is the continual contemporary pressure to present oneself as larger-than-life, in the hope that one might be noticed in a distracted culture. Of course the work also revels in those distractions.” — Kurt Wold

And From the Outlaw End of the Writing Spectrum

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“At age 84, Plymell continues to write, publish and perform—“doing nuttin”, as he says—from his home in Cherry Valley, New York. His activities keep Plymell in steady correspondence with a crowd of like-minded hellions, including rockabilly’s Bloodshot Bill, Sonic Youth founders Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, bassist Mike Watt, filmmaker Mark Hanlon, guitarist Bill Nace, photographer Philip Scalia and musicologist Byron Coley. Plymell and his wife, Pam, first happened upon Cherry Valley in late 1969 in coming to visit Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky at their East Hill farm. Moving there for good in early 1970, the Plymells have set into adding to their immense creative legacy.” – Benito Vila

Poetry in Prose: Cheever’s Domestic Confessions

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‘I make no headway, and yet it seems best to come here every day and try. It is not easy. I have had winters before and will have them again, and do not seriously doubt that they will end—the winters—but it is not easy. I am reminded of the weeks and months in Rome when I saw nothing with the right eyes but a cobweb gleaming in the sunlight and an owl flying out of a ruin.’ — John Cheever, from his journals

A Blogpost for the Ages

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This was it, Jan. 12, 2017 . . . It began like this: ‘On the day Twitter Fingers is sworn in as the preening el presidente of a tin-pot United States of Trumpistan, enabling him to run the country like a division of his family-held company . . . ‘ and continued with a 17-minute recording of Heathcote Williams reading his poem “The United States of Porn.” That reading alone puts the blogpost in a class of its own.

Before the Day Is Over . . .

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… and the occasion becomes a nothing burger, here are a few greetings for the New Year … from Jürgen Schneider, Frank Diersch, Gerard Bellaart, and Charles Plymell.

NYT Magazine’s Designers Push the Envelope

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The print edition of the New York Times this morning made note of the “Corrections We Remembered in 2019” (see the renamed, redesigned online version), pointing out that correcting a mistake is “more than a procedural obligation … it’s ‘an ethical responsibility.’” In that spirit I might as well point out that The Times can screw up badly when its highly trained and forward-looking designers push the envelope too far, particularly in the print edition of the magazine.

‘When Tarnish Stalked the Dust of Fabulous Dreams’

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Charles Plymell’s poems are hard-core gems dug out of the earth. Yet they seem effortless to me. Without the slightest hint of literary elbow grease, they shine like polished jewels. I should have published more of them back in the day, but at least there was this one. It’s as gorgeous now as it was then.

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