It was a year ago today that I began posting tributes to Carl Weissner (1940-2012), whose unexpected death last January came as a shock. My own words went up with a photo and funeral announcement by the filmmaker Signe Mähler, another of his friends. The poet and performance artist William Cody Maher, the journalist and […]
Algren on Learning to Write by Way of Academia
I noticed an ad in the current issue of The New Yorker for the Yale Writers’ Conference to be held this coming June. Since a bunch of us have been talking about Nelson Algren, the ad couldn’t help reminding me of his essay “Hand in Hand Through the Greenery,” published in The Last Carousel back […]
The Algren I Knew Was No Loser
Taking nothing away from the brilliance of Colin Asher’s biographical essay on Nelson Algren, or my admiration for it, I have a mild but serious objection. I intended to post this earlier but didnt have the time. Now I do. The subhead on the essay calls Algren “the type of loser this country just can’t […]
‘tric trac du ciel’
This is a stenciled text by Gerard Bellaart, from a series of more than 500 created in 2005. Bellaart is a Dutch artist and writer, now living in France. He creates etchings, drawings, paintings and monotypes of figures, landscapes, and still lifes, as well as works strictly from the imagination. He notes that he employs […]
Algren Gets What He Deserves from Colin Asher
I’m happy to report that Colin Asher’s smart biographical essay on Nelson Algren in The Believer is the best I’ve ever read. I’m also glad I made an unacknowledged contribution, one nearly verbatim. Though small, it reminds me that words have a life of their own, regardless of who wrote them. Postscript: I finally found […]
VDRSVP #2 for Old Times’ Sake
![VDRSVP #3, eds. Jan Herman & Norman O. Mustill [San Francisco, 1969]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/VDRSVP3bothsides560.jpeg)
Now that my venereal staff of thousands has managed to get its shabby act together for VDRSVP #1, I’ll be posting info about the contents of this issue as soon as possible.
‘Harry Patch: Anti War Hero’
If journalism is the first draft of history, Heathcote Williams’s poetry is the CAT scan. Text by Heathcote Williams. Narration and montage by Alan Cox.
VDRSVP #1 for Old Times’ Sake
![VDRSVP #1 [1969] eds. Jan Herman & Norman O. Mustill](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Screen-shot-2013-01-07-at-2.14.33-PM-e1357586355413.png)
I’ll be posting info about the contents as soon as my venereal staff of thousands manages to get its shabby act together. But first things first: What a great title. Second things first: VDRSVP #2 and #3 are coming too. Postscript: Jan. 9 — The staff finally woke up. Here are the contents of VDRSVP […]
La Môme et de Rouge
!["La Mome et de Rouge" [front cover of four-page folio of the published poem, COLD TURKEY PRESS, 2011].](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/williams_lamome_1-e1357138251842.jpg)
Date: April 26, 2012 11:43:35 AM GMT+02:00 Had a message from Marianne Faithfull . . .. . . ‘Isn’t it time you wrote me another song?’ I said ‘What do you want it to be about?’she said she’d been reading a book about Edith Piaf and was gripped by it.I said I’d have a look. […]
2013 Begins … Let It ‘ROT NOT’
I’m a sucker for Bellaart’s word-image artworks.
We Get New Year’s Cards … This One, for Example
And this:
Fresh From My Hot Little Paws
!['Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me' by Malcolm Mc Neill [Fantagraphics, 2012]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/OBSERVED-WHILE-FALLING-cover.jpg)
A review posted at RealityStudio of Malcolm Mc Neill’s spellbinding memoir, Observed While Falling, recently published by Fantagraphics Books, about his relationship with William S. Burroughs and their artistic collaboration. Mc Neill is an artist who can write. Really write. He brings a fresh analytical eye to the familiar Burroughsian fixations — synchronicity and doppelgangers, […]
‘Shelley at Oxford,’ a Timely Polemic for Christmas
Written by Heathcote Williams, montaged and narrated by Alan Cox, it has just arrived on YouTube and begins like this … In Oxford High Street, in 1810, Slatter & Munday’s Bookshop Had a large, bow-fronted window For displaying their latest wares. Aged 19, Shelley flooded it with a pamphlet On ‘The Necessity Of Atheism’. Which […]
‘Drawing Surrealism’: Arriving Soon at the Morgan
Somebody at the Morgan Library and Museum knows how to tout an upcoming show. Certainly the Morgan knows how to promote a press release, let alone how to have it written. Or maybe it’s a work product of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the show being touted — Drawing Surrealism — has […]
Who Is Heathcote Williams? Not for Sale, That’s Who
“He is one of a few of genius who did not sell out and who peaks in (relative) old age. That’s quite something nowadays.” — Gerard Bellaart +++ “Fame is the first disgrace because God knows who you are.” — Heathcote Williams, “The Local Stigmatic” +++ The videos comprise Parts 1 and 2 of a […]
Heathcote Williams on the Real American President
Narration and montage by Alan Cox. Musical accents by Louis Armstrong.
More Dissident Literature from Cold Turkey Press
The title of Heathcote Williams’s poem puts it country simple. You can’t get more direct than “The United States of Porn.” The poem, which runs to 208 lines, nearly all based on facts, is part of a portfolio called American Porn. It was published in 2011 in a beautifully produced first edition of 36 copies […]