Straight Up | Jan Herman

This comes from an internist. He has had a primary care practice in the New York metropolitan area for more than 20 years. For obvious reasons, he asks to remain anonymous. I’ve met him and can vouch for his identity. Right now, I have dropped my participation in every insurance plan except Medicare. I can […]

Watch President Obama reiterate his belief in the health care public option just a couple of months ago. “Those ain’t lies. Those are campaign promises.” — William Demarest, in Hail the Conquering Hero. Postscript: Obama’s Trust Problem

$80 billion of WHAT?

Oughta put the cost of U.S. healthcare reform into perspective.Reform would cost $900 billion to $1 trillion over the next 10 years.Which does the American majority prefer — taking lives or saving lives? Consider this trade-off: Taxpayers in New York City, where I live, will pay $30.6 billion for total war spending in Iraq and […]

I know, because I live in one, and I’m doing fine. I haven’t been arrested for jaywalking, littering, loitering, begging, or sleeping under a bridge. I haven’t been arrested for sleeping in a homeless shelter when there’s an outstanding warrant against me for sleeping on a suburban sidewalk. I haven’t been arrested for being someone […]

So I’m reading a Christian Science Monitor article recommended by a friend as “wonderful writing” — A day of reckoning for Bush’s ‘torture’ lawyers, by Ronald Sokol — and I think, Yup, clean, clear, an excellent summary of all that’s been said before many times in many places. But when he writes, “To regain its […]

Our old amigo has written a stunning new book, Death in Paris, which realitystudio.org has just posted online. It’s wild. The epigraph (from Raymond Chandler) sets the tone: “There must be idealism, but there must also be contempt.” Weissner begins with an “Establishing Shot” … He woke at 3 AM. Dim yellow light filled the […]

Jed Birmingham discusses the importance of little magazines to William Burroughs and their role in the publication and reception of Naked Lunch. The video was recorded in Paris on July 3, 2009, at the Naked Lunch@50 conference sponsored by the University of London Institute. The conference marked the original publication of Burroughs’s book by the […]

For the 50th anniversary celebration of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which begins any minute now — it’s scheduled for July 1-3 at the University of London Institute in Paris — have a look at the cover of the original edition brought out in 1959 by French publisher Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press. Have a look, […]

He died earlier this week in San Francisco just short of his 93rd birthday. I met him on a bitterly cold winter day in Paris, in 1962. I was keeping warm sitting in a seedy little cafe behind the Carrefour de l’Odeon. It was a neighborhood hangout where you could buy pot and waste your […]

Spent a few hours listening to the performances at the BANG ON A CAN Marathon 2009 with a friend of mine who has little patience for la sonorité artistique. She described much of what she heard as “beehive music.” I had to laugh. She wasn’t wrong. (One composer, Jeppe Just Christensen, played two pairs of […]

Nails it again with his latest piece of essential writing about the so-called “core American values” and “moral authority” claimed for and by the United States since its founding: “Unexceptional Americans.” The shorter version with the longer title — “Why We Can’t See the Trees or the Forest: The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia” — […]

As usual, he’s right on target … his latest bull’s-eye.

By releasing the torture memos and then rebuffing calls for an independent truth commission, the president is doing much worse than cementing a reputation for compromise: He’s siding with the rightwingnuts and with all the Congressional pols — Republicans and some Democrats — who want to bury the past. Does Barack Obama truly believe that […]

In London The Guardian posted its obit Sunday at 9 p.m., which means it went live in New York at 4 p.m. But this morning’s print edition of The New York Times makes no mention of Ballard’s death. OK, print is slow — but not that slow. And how come there’s no obit on the […]

This is my twitter to the world That never twittered me — The inane things of daily life Deserve obscurity. Incessant streams of messages — They come in starts and fits — What one’s eating, whom one’s dating — A universe of twits! — Leon Freilich (He’s our Calvin Trillin.) Postscript: June 15 — Looks […]

All the Hemingways I saw were going for stratospheric prices. Well, not exactly going. More like asking. If I remember correctly, a signed presentation copy of the rare Paris edition of in our time had a price tag of $465,000. Signed firsts of Ulysses by James Joyce and Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot didn’t come […]