Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Spanking New German Edition of ‘Royal Babylon’

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And now if you just care to look this way … it’s bi-lingual, too. The dark side of the English royal family From the publisher: Did you know that Queen Elizabeth II is the largest landowner in the world? She owns 10 times more land than the recently deceased King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The […]

Beat Scene Magazine Eyeballs ‘American Porn’

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My staff of thousands tells me that “American Porn” was reviewed in Beat Scene, a British magazine edited by Kevin Ring. That was news to me. Here’s the review: The staff wanted to know what I thought of the review. I said I liked what the reviewer said about the poet: “Heathcote Williams is a […]

Bellaart Paints Homage to Yves Tanguy

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Oil on canvas by Gerard Bellaart (left). Drawing by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, and Man Ray (below). Postscript: June 19 — The work of Gerard Bellaart is a continuous esoteric sub-form of question-and-answer via images. A facetious confession of being, not in the existential sense of painting and sketching, but rather through asymmetry […]

‘The Multimillionaire Arms Dealer — By Appointment’

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A new poem by Heathcote Williams, posted at IT: International Times, begins like this: There’s no difference between being an arms dealer And being a wanted war criminal. Although you don’t have to get your hands bloody The results are equally abhorrent. But arms dealing will suit anyone used to gracious living In one dinosaur […]

The Prison Memoir That Caught Algren’s Attention

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Not long before the recent prison escape that’s been making news, I mentioned to Colin Asher, who is writing a biography of Nelson Algren, that Algren once gave me a copy of Malcolm Braly’s prison memoir. Braly recounts how he broke out of prison one time early in his career as a convicted teenage burglar. […]

Carl Weissner Gets Stellar Notice in Book Podcast

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In his latest podcast at realitystudio.org Jed Birmingham zeroes in on the immensely talented Carl Weissner and his cut-up novel The Braille Film. Birmingham, who met Weissner in New York and Paris, talks about what made him so memorable and how he bought the book at auction some years ago for $75, believing it and […]

Of Poetry and Fakery, Cultural Theft, and Stolen Identity

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The title of Heathcote Williams’s memoir, Of Dylan Thomas and his Deaths, reflects the author’s belief that the great Welsh poet died not once but twice. He writes, “It can be said that he was to suffer no less than two deaths at American hands.” The first death, contrary to the accepted claim that he […]

A New Literary Memoir Recalls Dylan Thomas

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See update. A few weeks ago I remarked that Of Dylan and his Deaths, by Heathcote Williams, was so rich in the author’s personal history and “so evocative of his first inspiration, Dylan Thomas,” that it merited attention as a masterpiece of literary investigation. (The investigative aspect of the essay involves Williams’s indignation over “the […]

‘War Makes People Crazy, Religion Makes It Worse’

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Poking around the web, a friend came across “the strangest article.” It had been posted in the Israel Times in August, 2014, and was later taken down with an apology by the author. It asked, among other things: “If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining […]

Recapped: R. Crumb Epic Home Video (Un, Deux, Trois)

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This video was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City, where the exhibition ran from March 23 to April 30. Curated by Monte Beauchamp, editor of The Life and Times of R. Crumb, the show was a retrospective that presented key pieces culled from the underground art collection […]

New from Cold Turkey Press: ‘Of Dylan and his Deaths’

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A writer as prolific as Heathcote Williams runs the risk of having his poems and prose taken for granted. But this essay — a memoir so rich in personal history, so evocative of his first inspiration, Dylan Thomas, and so indignant about the cultural theft of Thomas’s identity by a famous imposter — merits attention […]

Burroughs Makes Inroads, But What About Algren?

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The British have always shown a serious interest in William Burroughs, evidenced by the fact that the most authoritative Burroughs scholars are or have been Brits such as Eric Mottram, Oliver Harris, and Ian MacFayden, for three examples, and that the most authoritative Burroughs biography, Call Me Burroughs, was written by another Brit, Barry Miles. […]

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