Straight Up | Jan Herman

Does the Council on Foreign Relations Depredations merit another name change, i.e. the Council on Foreign Federal Depredations? To judge by Patricia Cohen’s report on its recent conference about the Great Depression, I think so. She writes that New Deal critics like the author and syndicated columnist Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow at the council […]

…from Hassan Sabbah: Listen to my last words, anywhere! Listen all you boards, governments, syndicates, nations of the world, And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory, To take what is not yours … Read along if you like. I bear no sick words junk words love words forgive words from Jesus […]

Nelson Algren, most quotable of writers, was born 100 years ago today. I’ve posted many items about him over the past few years, including what his friends had to say: Roger Groening, for instance, and Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel. Some of my own comments and memories, too. A few years ago, I mentioned that […]

“As boring to watch as a space walk,” a friend said about Barack Obama’s latest round of media appearances, including the best one Sunday night, on “60 Minutes.” Paul Krugman, whose wisdom I also trust, is worse than bored this morning. He’s filled “with a sense of despair.” Krugman has been feeling that way for […]

So now it’s the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Folded. Not completely. There will be a much-reduced online version. But the old P-I is gone from print. Only the name remains. What I said when the Rocky Mountain News folded goes double for the P-I, which helped me survive as a freelance many years ago by buying stories […]

Henry Kisor has posted on his news blog an item called The ‘Inept Blob’ vs. the ‘Inhuman Turd,’ about the nasty friction between the novelist Nelson Algren (a literary great, in my opinion) and the editor William Targ (a not-so-great, in Algren’s opinion). Which reminds me: Dan Simon’s Seven Stories Press has just published “Algren […]

A moment of silence, please, for the Rocky Mountain News, which published its final edition. I have a sentimental attachment to the paper because many years ago it helped me survive as a freelance. Its feature editors bought the arts stories I pitched them. They didn’t have a large freelance budget, so they didn’t buy […]

The classical music editor of The New York Times takes up his longtime role once again as chief media apologist for the Vienna Philharmonic. In a promotional article about the orchestra, James Oestreich plants a big wet kiss on Clemens Hellsberg, its chairman and archivist, lauding him as “a force for change.” He dismisses the […]

A laid-back tune for a lazy afternoon. It’s by Fats Waller for a song he wrote with lyricist Andy Razaf. That’s Dick Hyman playing. The video was recorded by yours truly on Feb. 18, 2009, at the Living Room of Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan (Lexington Avenue & 54th Street). Hyman was appearing in a […]

Obama preserved his civility. Too bad he still hasn’t found a way to deep-six the deep voodo of Republican assholes like John McCain. Or reverse his own unwillingness to nationalize the banks. At least not so far. Ugh! (Crossposted at HuffPo)

Obama knocked it out of the park tonight at the Abe Lincoln bicentennial dinner in Springfield, Illinois. Stunning. He created an unexpected word picture: Here in Springfield, it is easier, perhaps, to reflect on Lincoln the man rather than the marble giant, before Gettysburg and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Bull Run, before emancipation was proclaimed and […]

I came across this KPFA-FM radio recording by accident. It totally suprised me. I had no memory of it until I tuned in. The archive at radiOM.org notes: In a program that was recorded on Feb. 13, 1970, [in Berkeley, Cal.], Jan Herman reads from the 5th issue of his magazine “San Francisco Earthquake.” The […]

The one-stop shop for all things William Burroughs, RealityStudio, has had a design overhaul. “I was really anxious not only to spruce up the site a bit, but to make the range of content more apparent,” RS godfather Supervert says. “With the old site, a random visitor would have had no idea just how much […]

Wanna see a cool slide show? Click the image of the collage, taken from an eye-popping exhibition of collages by Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach that was curated by John McWhinnie in New York, in 2007. I wrote about the exhibition when it opened. Click for the side show. Ginger Killian Eades created the slide […]

There is much to say about China. But I’m not the one to say it. The world there was more or less opaque to me. Not surprising, given the fact that I can’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin, or any of their other languages. I did have a grand time in Hong Kong, a city that […]

Blogging to resume … … when jet lag relents.