Nelson Algren died 38 years ago today. The staff here hasn’t forgot. Hi, Nelson.
‘Trans-Am Totem’ and ‘Autogeddon’
A friend sent this photo of Marcus Bowcott’s “Trans Am Totem,” which stands amid the traffic in Vancouver. As you see, five cars are stacked (four of them crushed) on top of a base made from a single tree trunk. What you cannot see is that the Cedar trunk is signed by a Native First Nations Carver who carved a Bear Paw & Claws symbol into the foot of the trunk.
Clayton Patterson and the Front Door
Artists and retail stores have a history. Bonwit Teller on 5th Avenue featured avant-garde art from 1929 to 1980, starting with Salvador Dali in ’29 and including Jasper Johns in 1957. Warhol in the 1950s did windows for Tiffany’s. In that tradition Cody Simon has curated a show at Sneakersnstuff-NYC featuring Clayton Patterson’s Front Door photo series. The photos, taken at his Lower East Side storefront gallery and living quarters on Essex Street, go back to the mid-1980s up through 2019. They include a large Hispanic collection and are also multigenerational. Some of Patterson’s subjects now have children older than he was when he first photographed them.
A Transgressive Manifesto from ‘A Void’
On Holloway Road in north London there’s a black door leading into Ram Books, “a smut emporium with more than 100,000 vintage titles.” So said the email, which went on to say: “This astonishing place became A Void magazine’s power centre when we upscaled our priorities to cater for obscene tastes.” This led me to poking around the magazine’s website, where I found “The Sick and the Damned: A Manifesto” by The Patients’ Collective. It talks about capitalism, the “memes and myths of Social Darwinism,” and “the normalization of overwork.” Though I dislike the manifesto’s takedown of liberalism, I can’t help being impressed by its seductive intelligence.
Brooklyn Book Launch: ‘Never A Lovely So Real’
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.
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.
Butterworth’s Post-Atomic Wasteland
Michael Butterworth started writing short fiction in 1966 for the British science-fiction magazine New Worlds when its editor was Michael Moorcock. He was one of the younger exponents of that New Wave of science fiction, as the movement became known, and he continued contributing to New Worlds until the editions most closely associated with Moorcock came to an end in 1979. Now he has two new books out that collect the fiction of those early years which he had thought “lost for good.”
Power Malu Shines at 2019 Ackers
The honorees at the 2019 NY Acker Awards made some terrific statements about the history of the Lower East Side and their commitment both to the community and to the arts, but a rap performance by Power Malu about the devastation in Puerto Rico, where people are still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria and from the Trumpistan government’s failure to provide proper help, was the most notable of the evening.
‘Prisoner: Come Out!’
“In the beginning was the Word—been in You for a toolong time.I rub out the word. You in the Word and the Word in You is a word-lock like the combination of a vault or a valise. If you love your vaults, listen no further. I spin the lock on your Interior Space Kit. Prisoner: Come Out!” — Brion Gysin
City Lights: The Little Bookshop That Could
As San Francisco prepares to celebrate Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday on Sunday, City Lights Books will be the focus of much attention. The little paperback bookshop he launched in 1953 is now so large that it occupies an entire block of storefronts and doubles as a North Beach tourist attraction. This is what the storefront […]
2019 NY Acker Awards Held at Theater for the New City
The Acker Awards, now in their sixth year, are a tribute given to members of the avant-garde arts community who have made outstanding contributions in their discipline in defiance of convention, or else served their fellow writers and artists in outstanding ways. The award’s novelist namesake, in her life and work, exemplified the risk-taking and […]