Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

Poem for the Cleaning Women: ‘We Are All Holy’

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Courtesy of Bart de Paepe’s Sloow Tapes This is a historical recording by Judith Malina, who died two weeks ago. I’ve transcribed the text the way it struck my ear, but its true power can’t be fully appreciated until you’ve heard her read the poem for yourself. — JH every one of the cleaning women […]

The Extinction Lesson of a Comical, Salutary Creature

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But the bird was fearless and easily lured aboard By an offer of unlimited ship’s biscuits. By a miracle the bird survived the crew’s curiosity And their wondering if it tasted delicious. After it had lived out its life in England A taxidermist was called when it died. He stuffed it and, to retain its […]

Algren to Get the Literary Biography He Deserves

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The Leon Levy Center for Biography has awarded fellowships worth $60,000 each to four writers who are currently working on new biographies. One of them is Colin Asher, whose tentatively titled biography of Nelson Algren, But Never a Lovely So Real, is under contract to W. W. Norton & Company. The other recipients are Blake […]

Algren for Real: ‘The End Is Nothing. The Road Is All’

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Here he is on the big screen at last, an hour and a half of who Nelson Algren was and what he meant. It’s a documentary with the sources — authoritative sources (Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel, for example, who give their personal impressions of the man). Radical sources, too (Paul Buhle for one, who […]

Easter Poetry + Hadron Collider = ‘Son of God Particle’

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Poem by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. Art by Elena Caldera and other artists. Some words from the poem: Imagine Christ particles let loose on the one percent, Erasing their fortunes at a key stroke. Imagine airborne Christ particles attacking Wall Street, Penetrating algorhythms in its mainframe computers, Moving columns of figures […]

realitystudio.org Launches Jed Birmingham’s Podcast

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I am STAGGERED! Of course I would be, for obvious reasons. Did I say I want this embedded in my headstone? Click to listen. It is utterly, inescapably humbling. The really wonderful thing about JB’s devotion to books as artifacts is the way he appreciates them as mysteries and teases out their hidden meanings. This […]

Sinclair Beiles: Poet of Many Parts and Places

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Dyehard Press has re-issued Who Was Sinclair Beiles? in a revised and expanded edition. I posted an item about the first edition when it was published five years ago. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. As I wrote then, Beiles was best known for his association with the Beats. He collaborated on […]

Row, Row, Row Your Boat … Across the Ocean Blue

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They call themselves the “Coxless Crew,” and they’re planning to row across the Pacific from San Francisco to Cairns, Australia. Their goal, besides surviving the voyage, is to raise £250,000 for two favorite charities “Walking With the Wounded” and “Breast Cancer Care,” and to show women across the globe that they can do anything they […]

‘Fugitive Literature’: Granary Books Has Done the Deed

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Here’s what happened: I was invited to speak about “little magazines and William S. Burroughs” on a panel with Jed Birmingham and Charles Plymell at the 2014 Burroughs Centennial Conference hosted in New York City by the Center for the Humanities. After my talk, Steve Clay came up to me and asked to publish what […]

I Remember Oriana Fallaci . . .

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You hear a lot about Michel Houellebecq these days. You don’t hear much about Oriana Fallaci. She once was more controversial than Houellebecq for her blistering scorn of Islam and Muslims. Mark Lilla has a big piece, Slouching Toward Mecca, in the current New York Review of Books about Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission, which as […]

From the East Village, ‘Ten Talk New York’

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Thanks to Clayton Patterson, “the great connector,” I met his friend Simon J. Heath the other day. Simon is an Australian-born filmmaker who’s in love with New York City. The latest evidence is “Ten Talk New York,” a fast-moving flick that features interviews with New Yorkers thinking out loud about sex, love, race, and death. […]

A Savoyard’s First Brush With Censorship

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Have a look at this Kickstarter campaign: Savoy Books is an independent publishing house based above a locksmith shop in the South Manchester district of Didsbury, founded and run by Michael Butterworth and David Britton. In 1989 they published Lord Horror, the last book to be banned in the UK under the 1959 Obscene Publications […]

Because She Can . . . Therefore She Is

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Hanne Lippard’s ‘Orbit’ was first posted here last year. I was reminded of it yesterday when she performed the piece at the Kunsthalle Vien as part of an exhibition, “The Future of Memory.”

David Carr Wanted to Get Stuff Right, Large or Small

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Like many NYT readers, I admired David Carr’s media column. It always made the paper worth reading on Monday mornings. Today his final column ran posthumously under the headline “David Carr’s Last Word on Journalism, Aimed at Students.” Cobbled together by his editors from his course curriculum at Boston University, where he’d recently begun teaching, […]

A Poet With a Dark Vision and a Tuned-Up Voice

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The poet Philip Levine has died. Here’s an appreciation, written years ago at the Los Angeles Times, which began like this: Philip Levine, no prodigy, wrote poetry for seven years before his first poem was published in his mid-20s. It took another nine before his first slim volume, On the Edge, appeared in 1963. But […]

Three Expats and One Reporter Explain It All For Us

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In about five minutes, starting roughly 45 minutes into a conversation with NYT reporter David Carr, Edward Snowden explains why President Obama — or for that matter any American president — is captive to the intelligence community and what it means for democratic values. Carr leads him into the explanation by remarking that the Obama […]

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