Woody Haut

Who would have thought... So happens that the Annihlation of Fish is the one CB film I haven't seen.

YouTube video by CRITERION Charles Burnett, Danny Glover, and Sheryl Lee Ralph on TO SLEEP WITH ANGER

There are many things I love about C. Burnett's To Sleep With Anger: my old SF State comrade Danny Glover, Mary Alice, Ethel Ayler. The way CB depicts families and kids. If you haven't seen To Sleep... or his other early films, you don't know what you're missing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMk7...

Where have I been that I haven't read Scott Wolven before? As far as I can tell, he's clearly the Isaac Babel of noir fiction.

Found and treasured... And one of my favourite poets.

Walking down Judd Street, WC1. Maybe a sign that I dip into his autobiography yet again?

YouTube video by Erlendur Svavarsson Erroll Garner in London - PENTHOUSE SERENADE

It's Dilla Time with Erroll Garner. From Dan Charnas's incredible book and playlist. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYX3...

My other world...
J. Hoberman strikes again.

Late Andy Bey always reminded me of Shirley Horn, both vocally and, on the piano, harmonically. Too bad they never mad a record together. Perhaps somewhere or other they are doing so at this very moment.

Spent a good portion of May Day reading Mark Nowak's excellent collection of documentary poems, Shut Up Shut Down, with an Afterword by Amiri Baraka.

The Ankh and the Ark, by Sun Ra and Henry Dumas 1 track album

A must listen for anyone who's read and appreciated Henry Dumas's The Metagenesis of Sun Ra (Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction...). sunramusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-an...

Noah Davis's incredible paintings at the Barbican. Not to be missed.

I believe it was a question, but who can say for sure when the person saying it apparently hadn't spoken for a number of years.

Reading Szwed's Sun Ra book. Well-researched with plenty of rabbit holes to go down. & stories e.g. Ra playing at a Chicago mental hospital, where a woman who hadn't moved or spoken for years, rose, walked to the piano and cried out, "You call that music!" Proof to Ra of the healing power of music.

A visit to Highgate cemetery. Of course paid homage to K. Marx but also writer/painter B. Bainbridge.

My poem du jour : Anslem Berrigan's homage to Raymond Chandler, I Felt Like An Amputated Leg: "He looked about as/inconspicuous as a/tarantula on a slice/of angel food." Or: "It was him all/right, taken in a strong/light, and looking as/if he had no more/ eyebrows than a French roll."

When I arrived in San Francisco in 1965, Lami by Alden Van Buskirk was "the book" every young street poet was reading. It would eventually be immortalised by David Rattray in How I Became One of the Invisible, with further immortalisation by way of Rachel Kushner's The Hard Crowd.

Hitting the Oulipian and Zazie-infested Parisian streets with Raymond Queneau.The poems superbly translated by Rachel Galvin. E.g.: after a litany of 20th century stupidities: "and all that makes a real story/which settles over the city/in traces more or less futile/that we decipher like scribbles."

Definitely a must-read for all Ross Macdonald fans. Not just for the stories, which are, of course, great, but for Tom Nolan's incredible introduction which is, in fact, a biography of Lew Archer. An extraordinary piece of writing, not to mention the reading and research entailed in producing it.

Re-reading Night Soldiers, Alan Furst first in his series of spy novels, which I hadn't read since the late 1980s. I'd forgotten just how much of a debt it owes to Victor Serge's classic, even modernist, political spy novels, The Unforgiving Years and, to a lesser extent, Midnight in the Century.

A bit obscure for anyone except San Francisco music lovers of a certain era. But sighed as I read August Kleinzahler's poem The Magic Flute: "Flynn on his stool,/holding court down the block/at the Magic Flute,/his hound at his feet while the old LP's/hissed and popped through the weekend."

Barry Schwabsky in the New Left Review on the under-appreciated, if not forgotten, poet N.H. Pritchard newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

I hadn't thought of that, but you're right.

My favourite photo of Kenneth Fearing.

For me, Edward Wilson's novels constitute a political history of the post-WW2 relationship between the US and the UK, and the relationship between on the intelligence services of both countries. Here's a review of his latest Farewell Dinner For a Spy. woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2025/02/mons...

This is one I've been after for a long time. Thanks to my local Amnesty International bookshop. Long live Kenneth Fearing!

"Cloud fields change into furniture
furniture metamorphizes into fields
an emphasis falls on reality."
Barbara Guest

Looks like we are all living in Jim Thompson's kingdom of El Rey. Here's an article- It's a Noir World- Noir Fiction in the Age of Trump- I wrote at the beginning of the first Trump presidency. Clearly it applies even more so these days. woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2018/07/its-...

It's a Noir World- Noir Fiction in the Age of Trump “It’s a screwed up, bitched up world…” (Lou Ford in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me)                                           ...

Here something I wrote at the beginning of the first Trump presidency: woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2018/07/its-...