Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

On Burroughs, The Adding Machine, & Blurbophobia

by

I see that Grove Press has just put out a spanking new edition of The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs. I also see it has what Grove calls on the front cover a “new” introduction by James Gauerholz, the numero uno keeper of the righteous Burroughs flame. Since there never was an old introduction, […]

Nelson Algren on Frank Lloyd Wright

by

This is Algren reading his poem “On the Heart It Don’t Matter How You Spell It.” It’s from a 1972 recording. Frank Lloyd Wright was the saint of American architecture. He liked steel buildings, stone buildings, tall buildings, low buildings. He liked new buildings and old buildings. He like dry buildings and damp buildings. He […]

Terkel Reads from ‘Chicago: City on the Make’

by

I’ve been going through all my old Nelson Algren files to give to Colin Asher. He recently landed a contract to write Algren’s biography for Norton — that’s W.W. Norton & Co. (one of the last big indie publishers, and a great one, too). My files include all sorts of primary documents, among them a […]

‘Aletheia,’ a Work-in-Progress

by

“Aletheia” is chamber music theater work about a musician in a dressing room preparing to perform for a gala benefit for an opera house that is taking place in the courtyard below her window. Though excited at first, she can’t bring herself to go down and perform. As her sense of isolation increases, she becomes, […]

Rotterdam Dress Code

by

Ben Schot, Straight Up’s man in Rotterdam, sent the photo. He noted in an email message: “I met the kid in the street on my way to the post office exactly in the spot where the graffiti was. Spooky figure, especially at night when the skeleton print on this suit lights up in the headlights […]

A Great One Died Today

by

Click and click and click and click and click and click and click and click again. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

‘Every Crumb Can Become a Piece of Cake’

by

Here are a couple of Hanne Lippard’s vocal tone poems. She combines a voice and accent to kill for with a witty, whimsical sense of humor. The words and the way she says them are a kick. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

A Thanksgiving Team: Burroughs & Mustill, Redux

by

A Straight Up tradition continues. William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day paired with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts — thanks for a Continent […]

Antwerp Public Linguistic Poem

by

‪ “It doesn’t matter what happens. I like it when there are accidents. If anybody starts to argue that’s OK. … This is a public poem. This is the work I do for 45 years. I am completely meshuga. I do one every year.” — Alain Arias-Misson EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Paris Bookfair Focuses on New Practices in Art

by

14 Rue Bonaparte, from Nov. 14 to 17. Open to the general public. Free admission. Postscript: Nov. 23 — The bookfair was jammed. Very impressive. The lecture hall was a19th-century amphitheater in back of the main hall. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Einstein’s Brain

by

Words by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Some Notes Toward ‘Death in Paris’

by

Not long ago Walter Hartmann sent me photos of several Moleskin notebooks that our cherished friend Carl Weissner left behind when he died. They’re captivating. Many of the handwritten notes made their way into Death in Paris, Carl’s bravura novel about a serial killer. “It is not quite natural for a guy around 50 who’s […]

Harold Norse: ‘Take a Chance In The Void’

by

Via sloowtapes: During the early ’60s Harold Norse was living in Paris at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, later known as the Beat Hotel. Also living there were William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Gregory Corso, and Sinclair Beiles. All of them experimented with cut prose, a form of collage applied to texts and audiotapes. Norse made the technique […]

Gay ‘Kit’ Marlowe: Poet, Spy, Elizabethan Proto-punk

by

LATEST UPDATE: Sept. 1 — “Killing Kit” is to be staged in a London try out. The production opens at The Cockpit on Sept. 21. FURTHER UPDATE: Feb. 15 — The reading came off well, I’m told. Somebody in The Cockpit audience tweeted: “Beautiful, meaty, dangerous Elizabethan play for today’s Elizabethans. Real writing. Great night.” […]

New From Cold Turkey: ‘Pricelessly Outrageous’

by

When Carl Weissner died, unexpectedly, he was only 71. “Le Regard d’Autrui,” now published for the first time, posthumously, by Cold Turkey Press, was written in English. Why in English and why with a French title are unclear. What is clear, however, is that the tale shows him to have been a master storyteller as […]

Algren Actually Had Some Hope for Kerouac, at First

by

Anyone interested in Nelson Algren’s opinion of Jack Kerouac would get the impression from an item I posted several years ago that he was less than enamoured of him. Which would be accurate. After all, the item — about Algren’s indelible review of Kerouac’s 1965 novel Desolation Angels — was titled “The Beats Left Algren […]

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog