When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano — but only in the privacy of my own mind. Another strange fact: My correspondence with writers and poets of the Beat, post-Beat and Fluxus periods, along with other literary artifacts, was acquired by Northwestern University Library. In case you're interested, the collection is described in the library's cleverly named Jan Herman Archive. (PDF)

I'm the author of "A Talent for Trouble," the biography of Hollywood director William Wyler. Putnam published it in hardcover. It is now in paperback (Da Capo Press). I'm also the co-author of "Cut Up or Shut Up," experimental fiction written with Carl Weissner and Jurgen Ploog (and with a "tickertape" intro by William S. Burroughs). Of the various books I've edited, I will point out just two: "Brion Gysin Let the Mice In," co-written by Gysin, Burroughs and Ian Sommerville (Something Else Press), and "The Something Else Yearbook," an anthology of the arts.

Writing of mine has appeared in "little magazines," among them VDRSVP, Ricochet, Unmuzzled Ox and John Bryan's Notes From Underground, as well as in Partisan Review, The New York Times Book Review, Trans-Atlantik and The Journal of Film History.

Years ago in one of his many volumes (I think it was "The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America"), the critic Richard Kostelanetz praised me in my youth as a leading avant-garde poet. I might have proved him right and lived up to his expectations, but the promise went unfulfilled.

Instead, I became a journalist. I've been senior editor/producer for Entertainment & Arts at MSNBC.com, a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News and the Los Angeles Times, and a mid-career fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

My literary taste runs to Joseph Conrad, William S. Burroughs and Nelson Algren among the dead, Richard Ford, Michel Houellebecq and Richard Russo among the living.