Woody Haut
heywoodmike.bsky.social
Woody Haut
@heywoodmike.bsky.social
Author: Pulp Culture, Neon Noir, Heartbreak & Vine, Cry For a Nickel Die For a Dime, Days of Smoke, On Dangerous Ground.
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...
Charles Burnett, Danny Glover, and Sheryl Lee Ralph on TO SLEEP WITH ANGER
YouTube video by CRITERION
www.youtube.com
August 28, 2025 at 1:57 PM
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.
August 24, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Found and treasured... And one of my favourite poets.
July 27, 2025 at 2:10 PM
Walking down Judd Street, WC1. Maybe a sign that I dip into his autobiography yet again?
July 26, 2025 at 5:56 PM
It's Dilla Time with Erroll Garner. From Dan Charnas's incredible book and playlist. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYX3...
Erroll Garner in London - PENTHOUSE SERENADE
YouTube video by Erlendur Svavarsson
www.youtube.com
June 13, 2025 at 1:11 PM
My other world...
J. Hoberman strikes again.
June 10, 2025 at 12:59 PM
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.
May 3, 2025 at 10:16 AM
May 3, 2025 at 10:15 AM
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...
The Ankh and the Ark, by Sun Ra and Henry Dumas
1 track album
sunramusic.bandcamp.com
April 20, 2025 at 9:09 AM
Noah Davis's incredible paintings at the Barbican. Not to be missed.
April 11, 2025 at 10:48 AM
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.
April 8, 2025 at 1:12 PM
A visit to Highgate cemetery. Of course paid homage to K. Marx but also writer/painter B. Bainbridge.
April 5, 2025 at 5:28 PM
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."
April 1, 2025 at 2:16 PM
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.
March 17, 2025 at 12:56 PM
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."
March 16, 2025 at 11:26 AM
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.
March 13, 2025 at 6:31 PM
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.
March 10, 2025 at 9:26 PM
March 3, 2025 at 9:24 PM
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."
February 24, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Barry Schwabsky in the New Left Review on the under-appreciated, if not forgotten, poet N.H. Pritchard newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
February 24, 2025 at 3:20 PM
My favourite photo of Kenneth Fearing.
February 23, 2025 at 4:51 PM
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...
February 23, 2025 at 11:48 AM
This is one I've been after for a long time. Thanks to my local Amnesty International bookshop. Long live Kenneth Fearing!
February 12, 2025 at 4:23 PM
"Cloud fields change into furniture
furniture metamorphizes into fields
an emphasis falls on reality."
Barbara Guest
February 12, 2025 at 2:47 PM
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-...
February 8, 2025 at 1:35 PM