March 2009 Archives

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 Nelson's 28-page poem, "Ode to Kissassville," once appeared as an epilogue in 100 copies of a 1961 reprint edition of "Chicago: City on the Make," but never anywhere else. It should have been included in the 50th anniversary edition that the University of Chicago Press reprinted in 2001. It wasn't.

Maybe it will appear in "Entrapment and Other Writings," due out any day now from Seven Stories Press and said to contain an "unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays." Hope so, especially since the title of the collection seems to be taken from a stanza in the ode about two undercover cops "entrapping two derelicts into a feeble attempt at mugging ..."

Show me another city so proud to be alive
That it can fit two citizen-dress men into false bras
And tight gowns
Then send them down Skid Row bravely swinging handbags
And hips rolling.
What New York's police would like to do, Chicago's really can
In that contented evening hour when we learn to Trap Our Man.

Entrapment indeed.

"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 some time now. Here's why. Postscript: 4:38 p.m. -- Today's Dow rally notwithstanding.

PPS: March 25 -- Continuing right along, here's Tuesday night's prime-time press conference:

Say what you will -- that he is the Professor Prez or the Puppy-Dog Prez or the Pragmatic Prez -- it's more than obvious that Obama is a huge reprieve from the Bullshitter-in-Chief whose head was stuck so far up his ass he sounded like the talking asshole with a Texas twang. "... a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell," as William Burroughs once wrote in "Naked Lunch." Listen to Burroughs tell you all about it.

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 I pitched them.

"Watchmen," the movie, caused a stir at the box office when its opening weekend nabbed $55 million, the highest opening gross of the year and third-highest March opening ever.

It's a shame that none of the money will trickle down to the artist Malcolm Mc Neill, whose image of the Mayan Death God (right) in an unheralded collaboration with William S. Burroughs served as a pictorial template for the "Watchman"'s godlike character Dr. Manhattan (below).

Alan Moore, who wrote the screenplay, has acknowledged that Burroughs' work with Mc Neill was "one of his main influences during the conception" of his Watchmen superhero comic book series, the basis for the movie.

Moore has said he admired the use of "repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning" in "THE UNSPEAKABLE MR HART," a comic strip that Mc Neill drew and Burroughs wrote before they undertook Ah POOK IS HERE.

Meanwhile, the Italians are interested in Mc Neill's work with Burroughs, especially the MR HART series. Have a look at another HART strip, and another. The strips were published in the British underground comics magazine Cyclops, in 1970.

Perhaps that will generate interest in Mc Neill's memoir about Burroughs and their relationship, Observed While Falling, which remains unpublished.

In any case, his recent show in New York, featuring his artwork for "Ah POOK IS HERE," has moved on to California, where it opens in Santa Monica at Track 16 on April 4. See the invitation and read the details.

Postscript: March 16 -- Just to follow up, ticket sales for "Watchmen" this past weekend dropped off a cliff. The gross came to an estimated $18 million, down 67 percent from the opening. Since the flick cost $150 million, there's a good chance it will end up in the red. But talking Hollywood numbers like these, whether profits or losses, can't help distorting one's grasp of reality. So I'll stop now.

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 at Sea," a centennial edition that combines two out-of-print books ("Notes From a Sea Diary" and "Who Lost an American?"). Algren was born 100 years ago this month -- on March 28, to be exact.

Seven Stories describes the two-fer as "travel writings," and that's accurate up to a point. But the pieces are much more than that, a lot of them deeply considered cultural essays and many others pure entertainment. For instance, this satirical vignette about Alfred Kazin (someone else Algren didn't think was so great) begins like this:

I once went to New York for the skating at Rockefeller Plaza and was sharpening my skates when the telephone rang. A woman's voice, sounding like a cross between a crow's and a barbed-wire fence, informed me, "Alfred Bovine would like you for dinner."

"I don't blame him," I assured this charmer, and hung up. The phone rang right back.

"Don't you like lasagna?" the same voice inquired.

Realizing that Bovine had altered his plan of attack, I went down to the lobby with my skates under my arm.

They were waiting for me. I didn't place him right off, but he had the air of a pool-hustler who works days in an embalming parlor. He liked me too.

All the way to the restaurant they took turns recommending the lasagna.

"I'm a meat-eating mouse," I had to let her know.

We entered one of those Italian joints where all the waiters look like they want another crack at Ethiopia.

"Three orders of lasagna," Bovine decided.

Algren, the most quotable of authors, continues:

... I'd finally placed him as a distributor of well-packaged precepts whom a friend of mine had once described as "too timid to damn and too stingy to applaud." But all that had been before my time. ...

"I'm doing a critique on Hemingway for Commentary," Bovine let me know. "Where are the great writers?"

"I read your papers on the Failure of Steinbeck, the Failure of Faulkner, the Failure of Fitzgerald, the Failure of Wolfe, and the Success of Irving Shulman," I filled him in. "I can hardly wait to read this one."

And so on. Is it any wonder that Kazin, among his many chores, made it his business to write on the Failure of Algren, too?

Just how wrong Kazin was can be seen at Seven Stories, which has thrown Algren a beautiful posthumous lifeline. It has now brought out eight of his books, including six that had been out of print, one that had never been published, and a 50th anniversary critical edition of his most famous novel, "The Man With the Golden Arm," plus a book of vintage photographs by Art Shay that capture Algren in his old Chicago haunts. Another collection of unpublished fiction and essays is due out in April. I'm waiting for the day when Farrar, Straus and Giroux lets my favorite Algren novel, "A Walk on the Wild Side," go out of print, so it can join the Seven Stories lineup. Where it belongs.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)