Straight Up | Jan Herman

“They have reduced themselves to a cipher.They vote. The vote totals up. But it means nothing.” Flickr / Nick Bygon He tells Chris Hedges at truthdig: “The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes. The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats. […]

She was that rare human being whose identity transcended all the categories that defined her — poet, teacher, novelist, feminist, human-rights activist for prisoners and migrant farmworkers. Janine Pommy Vega died on Dec. 23. She was 68. Here’s her obit in today’s NYT. The last time I saw her was on the Lower East Side […]

A thought for 2011 from the smartest guy on the planet. OK, one of the smartest …

Click for the TV interview. It’s in German. In this TV interview about the German literary scene, old amigo Carl Weissner, author of Death in Paris and Manhattan Muffdiver — and translator of too many books to list — sounds as if he’s sitting in a bar gossiping about gangsters. “Right,” he messages in an […]

Julian Assange speaks to David Frost. A friend writes: “I see an escalating need for him to break himself down to subatomic particles and travel by solar wind…” (For continuing updates go to Nemesis a k a Mr. Wikileaks and scroll down.)

Here’s Joe “Good Guy” Biden contradicting himself about Wikileaks. Sickening isn’t it. Thank you, Glenn Greenwald. (Update: Dec. 19 — Really sickening, to say nothing of U.S. officials calling European standards for human rights an “irritant.”) Which brings me to Paul Krugman’s blogpost “Decade of the Living Dead.” Krugman’s blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, […]

The roundup and the rap continue …

Violence in the streets scares the shit out of the authorities. More than guerrilla geeks, student rioters in the streets send the authorities into a panic, making them so repressive that the violence boomerangs. The authorities lose control of the situation and whatever moral highground they may claim. Guerrilla geeks also frighten the authorities, but […]

Is Operation Payback “the first great cyber war” or just a “major shitstorm?” Are the mounting cyberattacks in support of Wikileaks something like the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s? Remember Mario Savio? Remember his prescient speech on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964? There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes […]

Here’s one way the print version of a daily newspaper beats the online version. Paul Krugman’s NYT column this morning, Freezing Out Hope, begins: After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he […]

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks.‬ The U.S. government doesn’t think so, of course. It is frantic about today’s “expected release of up to three million confidential diplomatic communiques by the Wikileaks website.” (Scroll down for continuing updates.) Update: “US embassy cables: browse the database” — via The Guardian WASHINGTON — A cache of […]

It’s the week of Thanksgiving, after all: Words of Gratitude. And here’s more Burroughs … on Jesus … the A-Bomb … the Titanic … Doctor Benway … you get the idea. It’s a 1989 reading. He was doing perfected shtick by then. The automatic audience adulation, which was unavoidable under the circumstances — he was […]

This report from Athens under the Greek military junta 42 years ago turned up in a batch of old letters and postcards that a friend found the other day in a forgotten file. “How I come to have it,” he writes, “is a mystery.” Well, mystery solved: He and I were doing VDRSVP at the […]

Kant was also born in 1724, a coincidence not lost on Editions Silverbridge, the French publisher of Birth of the Cunt. The video was recorded Nov. 5, 2010, at the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair, taking place this weekend at MoMA P.S. 1 in Queens, New York. On the soundtrack that’s Spike Wilner noodling […]

…and Matt Lauer is his enabler. “I really don’t care about perceptions at this point in time. … I’m a content man.”— George W. Bush Postscript: Nov. 7 — It’s worth mentioning Robert Fisk’s perceptions in this context. He writes almost daily, and his stuff is incomparable. These two recent columns are just two back-to-back […]

Gone. He was a real mensch. I had a short conversation with him in 2006 and asked him a few questions on the chance that he’d actually give me an answer. Which he did. This is what he said: Ted Sorensen’s Italics and Starry Rearview Mirror. (Crossposted at HuffPo) Postscript: Nov. 3 — And now […]

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography – Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo. Thanks for the tip, Tom.