Nova Broadcast
San Francisco, 1970
Doll No Mori
2012
Milena Verlag
Vienna, 2010
Milena Verlag
Vienna, 2011
!['Eine Andere Liga' ('A Different League') by Carl Weissner [Milena Verlag, 2013]](http://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Eine-Andere-front-cover-140.jpg)
Milena Verlag
Vienna, 2013
Carl was also a “little magazine” editor, a radio playwright, German translator of more than 100 books (but principally of Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, Nelson Algren and J.G. Ballard, also of Frank Zappa and Allen Ginsberg), and a literary agent who spread the work of dissident writers even further.
Interesting about Carl’s fondness for dissident writers. In his little book “Nonconformity,” Algren wrote, “You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Later he adds that a poet’s greatest motivation is getting even. And how if they ever get even, they are out of business. It made me think of how many of the greatest writers were the ones who were never able to get even. Like Dante, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Primo Levi, Samuel Beckett, Burroughs, or Bukowski, they chose wars that could not be won. Carl chose hopeless battles. He was a great writer.
And of course Algren never got even either. Much thanks for your comment, Bill.
Beautiful comment, Bill. Sartre said “poetry is a case of the loser winning.”
I just thumbed through some of Carl’s books as a way of saying hi to the master writer during his period of retreat. Came across this in Death in Paris:
“I was going to kill somebody and forgot all about it because I had a great idea for a book — which I never wrote. Wasted trip. You want to kill somebody, never ride on a bus with them for an hour. You’re bound to get distracted.”
That’s my Carl in a few phrases — black, funny, literate, and precise as a laser.