March 2011 Archives

"The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man." -- Nelson Algren

He would have been 102 today. Algren was the author of more than a dozen books. Born on March 28, 1909, in Detroit, he lived in Chicago for most of his life. In 1975, he left Chicago for New Jersey, then moved to Sag Harbor, N.Y., where he died on May 9, 1981, and where he is buried. I'm betting his two best-known novels -- The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side -- will last longer than any of the novels by Mailer, Vidal, Updike, Cheever, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth, Bellow, Doctorow, or Bukowski.

If it's true that professional boxing now has 68 world title holders in 17 weight classes, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, then it's not surprising that
AT THE FIGHTS: American Writers on Boxing, a new anthology from The Library of America, reads like an elegy for the fight game.

More than five dozen world champs are too many to take seriously. "It's harder to find great boxing writing these days simply because it's harder to find great fighters and great fights," John Schulian, who co-edited the anthology with George Kimball, says in a downloadable interview posted online by the publisher. Which helps to explain why so few of the selections in their 517-page anthology date from recent times.

This is hardly a demerit ... unless you'd rather not read H.L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Edward Hoagland -- to name five literary writers included in this anthology who are not usually associated with boxing -- or unless you'd prefer to ignore the class of the field that decades ago established boxing reportage as a literary specialty: A.J. Liebling, W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Jimmy Cannon, Pete Hamill, George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Pete Dexter, and too many others to name.

It turns out that great boxing writing was not always, or only, about great fights and fighters. Take Paul Gallico's "Pity the Poor Giant," about Primo Carnera, an "unfortunate pituitary case, who might have been Angoulaffre, or Balan, or Fierabras, Gogmagog, or Gargantua himself." Carnera was, in fact, just "a poor simple-minded peasant" owned by American mobsters and discarded "when his usefulness as a meal ticket" ran out. Or consider Schulian's own "Nowhere to Run," which demonstrates that a great boxing story may be precisely the opposite of a tale about a great fighter. His subject -- a former welterweight champ, "the one the fight crowd used to call Honey Boy" -- is totally forgotten, a "lost soul dozing in the corner" of a cheap hotel lobby.

He lives in a world that skirts reality, a world filled with panhandling buddies and visions of old movies, a world where no one can hurt him. Late at night, when he is alone in the lobby, alone with his jumbled thoughts, he will rise from the couch where he sleeps and slowly walk toward the full-length mirror. He will raise his fists and bend at the knees and, suddenly, he will be Johnny Bratton, welterweight champion, once again. Never mind that his hair is more gray than black or that he is an easy fifty pounds over his fighting prime. You can't take the past away from him.

Of course, any anthology of this kind does require stories about top fighters and top fights: Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis, Archie Moore, Rock Marciano, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, and so on. AT THE FIGHTS has plenty of those, though not necessarily the kind you might expect.

"Bradley Manning has been stripped naked every night and made to parade in front of his officers and guards in the nude" for the past nine days, according to The Guardian, which has just published Manning's own description of his treatment. It is the first time Manning has spoken out about the details of his solitary confinement in the brig at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia.

Amnesty International, which has denounced his treatment, is calling for protests.

Manning's statement, "in an 11-page legal letter released by his lawyer," according to The Guardian, describes how he has been "left to languish under the unduly harsh conditions of max [security] custody" ever since he was brought from Kuwait to the military brig eight months ago ... how he was put on suicide watch in January, how he is currently being stripped naked every night, and how he is in general terms being subjected to what he calls "unlawful pre-trial punishment."

Mike Lawrence sends word that he's "off and running on BACH & more friends," a companion film to his previous Bach & friends. "I have several players lined up, and I've contacted a bunch of big guns," he says in an e-mail. He's still waiting to hear whether the big guns will participate. That's what big guns do. They make you wait.

Ian MacFadyen's astounding book-length essay about the avant garde artist-poet-novelist Brion Gysin, "A Trip from Here to There," knocked me out. It had just been posted at RealityStudio, so I was raving about it -- couldn't help myself -- to anyone within listening distance.

Along came a savvy, multilingual writer I'm acquainted with, precisely the kind of guy I figured would be interested: an intellectual world citizen, so to speak, a self-described "outsider" born in Egypt, educated at Harvard, now an erudite graduate professor of comparative literature in New York, not to mention an authority on Proust and the author of a highly regarded memoir, a collection of essays, and a couple of novels.

Well ... he drew a blank. Gysin? Never heard of him. He had heard of William Burroughs, though. Hooray for that.

Here's a video clip of Gysin with Burroughs in an excerpt from a 1966 film by Antony Balch, which illustrates some of what MacFadyen is talking about:

And for the benefit of that writer-professor and anybody else who has never heard of Gysin, here are three excerpts from MacFadyen's huge essay. Not an "easy read," it's a brilliant piece of devoted scholarship that moves between two poles: clear narrative material often based on biographical facts and abstruse speculation based on linguistic and visual analysis ... in other words, lingo spew of a very high order.

Even more than William Burroughs's belief in Gysin ("He was the only man I ever respected. I have admired many others, esteemed and valued others, but respected only him."), MacFadyen's homage -- the depth of it, the weight of it, the insights and style of it -- is the truest ballast of the BG sailship.