Nearly three months after Colin Asher’s biography of Nelson Algren was published, and just in time for readers to take a break from serious books as they head off on vacation to escape the summer heat, our dearly beloved newspaper of record has deigned to take notice of Never a Lovely So Real. But let’s put that aside because Susan Jacoby’s review, which will appear Sunday in the print edition of The New York Times Book Review, is not only honest, clear, and well reported, it sets a judicious standard. Which gives it credibility.
Strictly Unpaid Advertising
Your humble blogger has published a new collection of poems. Moloko will bring it out in a bilingual English-German edition in Germany. In the meantime, however, an American edition is now available without the translations but with a complement of images. ‘All That Would Ever After Not Be Said’ is composed of forty-two deformed sonnets of mine and forty-two collages by the late Norman O. Mustill.
From Mayor to Nightmare
!['Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare' by Heathcote Williams [Public Reading Rooms, 2016]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Brexit-Boris-cover351-200x200.jpg)
‘The Dark Side of Boris Johnson’: Now that he is on his way to becoming the new Prime Minister of the U.K., the staff believes this blogpost of Aug. 24, 2016 is worth reposting: Back in April, before the Brexit vote [on June 23, 2016], Heathcote Williams wrote a merciless pamphlet, subtitled “A Study in Depravity,” about the most notorious cheerleader for the British exit from the European Union.
Alchemical Poetry
LET US WRITE poems easy to read / simple to understand— / not the kind of thing / that Donne or Milton / wrote, nor the Bard’s / still greater brand, / the kind of thing / we make for children / who don’t know how / to read, for grownups / who forgot or never / learned to understand— / for the dead, perhaps, / to hear the damned.
Poems Midwifed by Cold Turkey Press
“an unknown power / the glass bell of midnight / neither sends nor tracks / whatever the hour / the quivering eye / everything human / the nearness of clouds / bright sun in blue sky” — J.H.
“Pay no heed to society. Wear the mask / of the beast over your animal face. / … Breathe through the nostrils of the dead / and witness how the evening mountains / devour the entrails of the sky.” — M.R.
Folio designed by Gerard Bellaart, with detail of a painting by Constable.
A Dialogue: ‘All That Would Ever After Not Be Said’
Norman Ogue Mustill (1931-2013), longtime friend and collaborator, was a little-known master collagist. His collage is from ‘Flypaper,’ originally published by Beach Books, Texts and Documents, and is not intended to illustrate the deformed sonnet facing it (which owes a debt to Evelyn Waugh). Nor is the sonnet meant as commentary on the collage. The juxtaposition was determined by chance. The dialogue between them simply honors a friendship.
From Emerson to Whitman to Ferlinghetti to Ginsberg
This teaser appeared today at Arts & Letters Daily in its “New Books” column: “‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career,’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote Allen Ginsberg. … Thus began the effort to publish Howl, a landmark case of attempted censorship…” The teaser linked to an article that appeared recently in Spiked apropos the publication in the U.K. of The People v. Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which, it so happens, is closely related to I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1997, published four years ago here in the U.S. Why do I mention all of this?
They Want to Cancel R. Crumb
Robert Crumb has come in for severe disapproval. In which case, the censors will hate this old video. It was recorded on April 29, 2011 at the Society of Illustrators in New York City. The laid-on soundtrack is “Pennies From Heaven,” from “Ben Webster: King of the Tenors”; a selection from Satie’s “Nocturnes,” played by Aldo Ciccolini; and “Honeysuckle Rose,” played by Count Basie & His Orchestra.
‘If I Die Ahead of Time . . .
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.
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.