Nelson Algren is always associated with Chicago, where he grew up and where many of his books are set, including Never Come Morning and The Man With the Golden Arm, as well as The Neon Wilderness and Chicago: City On the Make. But the official launch of Colin Asher’s Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren will take place in Brooklyn at the Community Bookstore, not far from where Asher lives. Does everything happen these days in Brooklyn? Next week he will discuss the biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, where everything used to happen.
Archives for April 2019
William Levy, R.I.P.
William Levy, sometimes called “the Talmudic Wizard of Amsterdam,” has died at the age of 80. A prolific expatriate American writer and editor, he left the United States in 1966 and earned a reputation as one of the leading intellectual and sexual subversives in Europe. Levy was a master of literary outrageousness, an editor of The Insect Trust Gazette, International Times, publisher and editor of Suck magazine, and producer of the Wet Dreams Film Festival, as well as a poet and radio broadcaster.
René Char on Rebirth and Phantoms
From le maître Bellaart come two short excerpts taken from the WWII writings of René Char. One concerns a walnut tree; the other speaks about the phantoms of our “empirical souls.”Why post them? And why now? Read them.
A Political Observation
The United Nations Secretariat Building overlooks the East River in New York City. On my walks through Manhattan I sometimes stop and gaze at it to admire the impressive facade. And then I think that what I’m looking at is really a mirage. Here is one reason.
Home Again
Home again. / They were / her last words. / She never / had a home. / She slept in ditches / under bridges / near old / railroad tracks. . . .
Nelson Algren’s Strange Midnight Dignity
In straightforward yet graceful prose and with deep insight—let alone an immense amount of meticulous research—Colin Asher has produced a major literary biography. “Never A Lovely So Real’ testifies to the richness of Algren’s genius as a writer and explains the misunderstood nature of the man. It reveals what made him tick, exposes the legends, and brings him to life in a way no previous biography has. It certainly changed my perception of him. And if there’s any justice, it will put Algren’s books back into the heart of the 20th-century American canon.
‘Flesh Film’: A Book as Artist’s Fever Dream
When a book reads like an hallucination and looks as magnificent as Flesh Film, it’s an artist’s book as much as a writer’s. The designer Robert Schalinski has given the author’s text the appearance of a manuscript duplicated on an old copying machine and punctuated it with the author’s visual collages. It’s gorgeous stuff, published in English by the German publisher Moloko Print, and it’s available for the first time in the U.S. from printedmatter.org.
Variation on a ‘Clap Trap’ Theme
Personally, I prefer Brion Gysin’s versified lines: “In the beginning / was the Word— / been in You / for a toolong time /I rub out the word . . .” But unlike that one, this one was made to order.