Regarding Nelson Algren 7/25/21

The halfway house has wifi which I can access with my flip phone. I need to read and so I will probably burn out what is left of my eyes. Meanwhile…

Reading about Nelson Algren on Lithub makes me wonder if I have engaged enough with the marginalized, with criticizing those in power. 

I read A Heroic Line of Losers by Brook Horvath which is just one of the pieces to be found about how great a writer Algren was and why he is now such an obscure one. Long-Awaited ‘Algren’ Documentary to Open in Chicago is another but has the advantage of a video excerpt. (Now I have to spend time on YouTube not looking up Pretenders videos.) There is an interview with his latests biographer here: Nelson Algren’s Strange Midnight Dignity. This one may explain why Algren does not go away:

J.H.: Yours will be the third biography of Algren. Most writers are lucky (or unlucky) to get one. Why do you think there has been so much interest in his life?

C.A.: The simplest answer is also the truest: Algren’s life remains interesting because of his work.

Algren’s writing has several things going against it. He uses vernacular extensively, which can be difficult to parse now that it is decades old. His books are lightly plotted, and his protagonists are deeply flawed. The environments he conjures are brutal. And yet, Algren’s books have aged well. One reason for that is the singularity of his prose. It’s possible to orient Algren’s work within the American tradition—his stuff contains some of the naturalism in Farrell and early Steinbeck; he writes with a rhythm that’s reminiscent of Hemingway, occasionally; and he uses imagery that has echoes of Carl Sandburg’s poems—but he was not derivative; as a stylist, he stood alone. He consciously tried to appeal to the eye and the ear simultaneously, and as a result his work is complex, closely observed and precise, but also propulsive and pleasurable to read. 

‘Because of the singularity of Algren’s style, people still feel they’ve discovered something new when they first encounter his work.’

A brief anecdote: I recently introduced an acquaintance to Algren. Trying not to say too much or sell too hard, I suggested she read The Man with the Golden Arm. When I saw her the following week, she enthused: “The book reads like poetry. The sentences have a rhythm. I can hear the rhythm of the El tracks in everything.”

Because of the singularity of Algren’s style, people still feel they’ve discovered something new when they first encounter his work. I had that experience with his writing, and I have heard the same from many people since. Given that Algren wrote his best work more than sixty years ago, and millions of copies of his books have been purchased, this is a remarkable phenomenon, and goes a long way toward explaining why people remain interested in his life.

But Algren’s subject matter is also a factor in his enduring relevance. It’s a cliché to say that a writer whose career peaked and then faded suffered because he was ahead of his time, but in Algren’s case it’s true.

Algren focused almost exclusively on the lives of people who, he felt, had been marginalized or discarded by America—prisoners, itinerant laborers, alcoholics, morphine addicts, petty criminals, prostitutes, and boxers. Other writers, of course, have done the same. But Algren’s work is distinct because of the convictions that motivated it. He chose his characters advisedly, and saw their stories as an integral part of the American story. He focused on the portions of society that benefit least from America’s wealth because he believed the quality of their lives was an accurate gauge of the country’s moral health, that the struggles they faced foretold the challenges the remainder of society would soon face. This insight allowed him to produce insights that were decades ahead of their time.

LitHub has a podcast link of an interview with the the same biographer under the title of On the Excoriating Speech Nelson Algren Delivered to College English Students.  Oh, it kept me listening.

The Nation reviews this biography under Rediscovering Nelson Algren, which includes this paragraph:

Does Algren matter? His legacy across the decades has been kept alive by other writers (Don DeLillo, Barry Gifford, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Russell Banks, his good friend Studs Terkel, among many others); a handful of academics (Malcolm Cowley, Brooke Horvath, William Savage, Carlo Rotella, Hazel Rowley); and a belief in him that’s a powerful mixture of loving the work and loving the man. He was lovable and beloved, not simply because the things he stood for still hold true and remain important, even if we believe they do, but because he embodied them and couldn’t help himself. Algren wasn’t against selling out; he just couldn’t do it, even when he tried. How can you not love someone who is incapable of profiting, whose anti-capitalism runs that deep?

I wonder if I understood A Walk on the Wild Side - if having come to it late I am confusing what Algren did first with his successors. Something I called long ago the Chuck Berry effect - people had heard Chuck’s songs by others and failed to give him credit for starting the whole mess.

Nonconformity comes under discussion which left me thinking I understood that book.

In fact, "Nonconformity" could hardly be more relevant to our own time -- when lawmakers can speak without blinking of "cutting the budget" as they actually cut the throats of various powerless classes of people. American writers, says Algren, must report "the defeats in which everything is lost . . . [that] cost everything of real value." They must write from "ruthlessness and alienation" of "the unswept streets where most of humanity has always lived." Their attitude to both politicians and society must be: "This ain't what you rung for, Jack -- but it's what you're damned well getting." Smugness and tidiness must be tossed in the garbage can, along with the other accoutrements of a literary career. "American literature isn't anybody phoning to anybody or anybody writing about anybody," he holds. "American literature is the woman in the courtroom who, finding herself undefended on a charge, asked, `Isn't anybody on my side?' "

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Nelson Algren 8-16

Keep reading here and you will learn my fascination with Nelson Algren. Today, I found some articles I want to pass along. I pass them along in the hope you will read him.

Cybersoleil Journal reviews Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing.

About the novel, the reviewer writes:

The tone of Nelson Algren’s novel Walk on the Wild Side is not macabre, gothic, or noir; nor does it encapsulate the idea of enchantment, although the spirit of joie de vivre is definitely evident in this work of picaresque fiction. And while the landscape Algren paints with concrete and vivid language has the ability to disturb the reader’s sensibilities with an unrelenting portrayal of a vagrant transient who is at home in some of the world’s most contemptible places, a certain lightness of air seasoned with a palatable sprinkling of satiric commentary compels the reader to travel along with Dove Linkhorn on an episodic adventure that often mirrors the sights and sounds of a carnival midway. 

About Nonconformity, a book that slapped me upside my head, the reviewer makes this point about writers and writing:

For the reader to understand the nature of the story, perhaps Nelson Algren’s ideas about writing a novel will provide some insight. He writes in his nonfiction work Nonconformity: Writing on Writing that, “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.” He goes on to add, “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.”

Kurt Jacobsen discusses Nonconformity under the heading of Lost and Found Books

makes this point (amongst several other excellent points):

Rather than smarmy beady-eyed Horatio Algers, Algren lauds Dreiser, Mencken, Veblen, Steffens, and Lewis. Our singular American genius Mark Twain towers among even that splendid company. Algren skewers popular novelists who disingenuously yearn only ‘to give pleasure to the reading public” and plead they have “no right to impose [their] views on race and religion.” So then, Algren deduces, ‘if it isn’t the writer’s task to relate mankind to the things of the earth, it must be his job to keep them unrelated.’ Repelled by the businessman’s creed that “no values are greater than thrift, self-preservation, and piety,” Algren speaks of outward show, of a ‘neon wilderness’ (an Algren title) dominated by whitewashed high-rise sepulchers full of schemers. He flatly accused the American middle class of adoring “personal comfort as an end in itself” which “is, in essence, a denial of life.”[20] He detested cozy ingrown literary cliques, pulling themselves up the ladder by each other’s Gucci bootstraps. “When [a writer] sees scarcely anyone except other writers,” says Algren,  “he is ready for New York” and what Algren terms “bellhop writing” – writing to order.  “No book was ever worth writing that wasn’t done with the attitude that ‘This ain’t what you rung for, Jack – but its what you’re damned well getting.”

Back in 2019 Colin Asher wrote a new biography of Algren and was interviewed and I found this paragraph may explain a bit of what I liked when I re-read A Walk on the Wild Side:

J.H.: Yours will be the third biography of Algren. Most writers are lucky (or unlucky) to get one. Why do you think there has been so much interest in his life?

C.A.: The simplest answer is also the truest: Algren’s life remains interesting because of his work.

Algren’s writing has several things going against it. He uses vernacular extensively, which can be difficult to parse now that it is decades old. His books are lightly plotted, and his protagonists are deeply flawed. The environments he conjures are brutal. And yet, Algren’s books have aged well. One reason for that is the singularity of his prose. It’s possible to orient Algren’s work within the American tradition—his stuff contains some of the naturalism in Farrell and early Steinbeck; he writes with a rhythm that’s reminiscent of Hemingway, occasionally; and he uses imagery that has echoes of Carl Sandburg’s poems—but he was not derivative; as a stylist, he stood alone. He consciously tried to appeal to the eye and the ear simultaneously, and as a result his work is complex, closely observed and precise, but also propulsive and pleasurable to read.

Algren was known as a Chicago writer. 

Liebling's "rhapsodist" label fits Chicago's business boosters well enough and embraces as well some of the critical boosters of its literary golden age, but the label fits badly with important elements of Chicago's literary tradition. Even Sandburg's canonical "big shoulders" poem, relentlessly quoted and misquoted by civic boosters, devotes itself as much to considering the industrial city's endemic brutality as it does to valorizing its heroic productivity. Algren and the other neighborhood novelists who dominated Chicago writing in the 1930s and 1940s—Farrell and Wright chief among them—were in no sense rhapsodists: social and cultural critics might be a more accurate label. But Algren did see himself as the last figure in a line of Chicago writers that extended back to Sandburg, Dreiser, and other writers of a clearly defined golden age. When Algren discussed Chicago, he did not mean the Chicago of boosters who "talked of growing bigger than New York"; but he did mean, at least in part, the composite Chicago assembled by a set of writers who aspired to literary significance in representing the city that exemplified industrial urbanism. One important chapter of the narrative of decline recounted the fading from prominence of a literary tradition that drew imaginatively upon the rich materials of Chicago to assemble a Chicago of feeling—a "Chicago Dream" built by writers.

***

If Algren was the last of the Chicago writers, a label applied to him by more than one narrator of decline, it meant that he was the last well-known writer in Chicago with generally acknowledged ties running all the way through that tradition. Liebling presents Algren, who was in 1949-51 enjoying his greatest popular success following the publication of The Man with the Golden Arm, as the last of the Chicago writers who "had stuck by his West Side Poles after all the rest of the stark Chicago realists had fled to Hollywood." In Liebling's account, Algren becomes a 1930s writer adrift in midcentury Chicago. "Still wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and a turtle-neck sweater"—which Liebling apparently regarded as an outdated proletarian-intellectual uniform—a forlorn Algren makes the rounds of dull literary parties at which he eats the free turkey, Virginia ham, and cocktail shrimp ....

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

SCH 

James T Farrell and Nelson Algren

While reading up on James T Farrell I wondered if he had crossed paths with Nelson Algren. After all both were living in Chicago at the same time Google satisfied my curiosity.

Back in 1983, The New York Times published TWO REALISTS FROM CHICAGO, a review of both authors' final novels:

DURING their lifetimes Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell were often discussed together as two very similar and clearly important novelists of the Depression thirties, although neither was considered quite worthy of promotion to first-rank eminence. But they did in fact have a good deal in common besides their modesty of status. Both were committed social realists who at various stages of their careers were in and out of sympathy with the Marxist movement. Both spent most of their lives in Chicago and chose as the central subject of their fiction closely related and at times overlapping areas of urban proletarian experience. Farrell wrote his best novels - the Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill series - about the Chicago Irish working class in which he grew up and from which, like Danny, he ultimately managed to escape. Algren had far more flamboyant tastes and became a kind of Rabelaisian bard of the ghetto underworld of drug addicts, prostitutes, pimps, thieves and con men.

The reviewer only likes Algren's novel,

Although both wrote a quantity of books - Farrell 52 and Algren almost a dozen - and continued to write into their last years, neither gained significantly in reputation after the success of his earlier work. Farrell in his prime had a higher standard with the critics and a much larger readership than Algren enjoyed. Yet he remained through most of his career best known for his first books, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, and eventually won a curious kind of respectful infamy for the sheer volume of his production, his seemingly heroic and quite thankless dedication to the task of creating ever so slight variations on essentially the same story in novel after novel after novel. Algren remained forever identified with his third and best novel, 'The Man With the Golden Arm,' published in 1949, and made into a famous film. Both men died in their 70's, Farrell in 1979, Algren in 1981, and now two publishers have brought out their final novels. It would be pleasant to be able to say that these books bring to an appropriate and honorable conclusion the long and industrious careers of their authors. But that can only be said of one of them, Algren's 'The Devil's Stocking,' which confirms one's impression that Algren remained to the end the better writer. He had far richer verbal gifts than Farrell, and he had a much more vital relation with his materials as well as a larger and freer range of imaginative inventiveness.....

Woody Haut's Blog mentions Farrell in his article on Algren's Entrapment: 

Algren was part of a generation of writers that included James T. Farrell (in fact, there is a short piece in Entrapment which constitutes Algren's apology for dissing Farrell on ideological grounds and recognising that, though Farrell was not a great stylist, Studs Lonigan affected a generation of people), John Dos Passos, Richard Wright whose last remaining personage was probably Studs Terkel. They were all political radicals with a sense of the street and literary enough to hold their own with more established types. Algren has been compared favorably to Faulkner, and one can see why. Okay, so maybe he's more erratic, but at his best he is every bit Faulkner's equal.

The Houston Seminar describes the relationship like this:

...Between Dreiser and Saul Bellow, there was James T. Farrell, who wrote the Studs Lonigan trilogy and set the tone for tough guys and ethnic types like Nelson Algren whose Chicago: City on the Make (1951) has the swagger and unavoidable sentimentality Dreiser avoided....

 

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On The Novel: Thank You, Milan Kundera I

If you are not interested in writing fiction, or my navel-gazing meditations on my own writing, feel to move on. I continue what I started in Cormac McCarthy's Style - Commentary on MFAs Writing the Future. Here I am thinking out loud and keeping notes for myself and offering ideas for others. That my "Love Stinks" has received rather negative views has been a bit of a shock. Working through this shock, the material coming out when Kundera died, impelled this run of writing.

By the way, The prison writing group liked "Love Stinks" with one exception.

See, I wrote "Love Stinks", I was under the influence of Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel.

I found the following when I started drafting this post. I add them in lieu of my boxed away notes. Some will be critical of Kundera's ideas.I add my own comments, but do so briefly.

 Review: Milan Kundera, L'Art du Roman from Reading This Book, Cover to Cover ... blog:

At the end of it all, Kundera formulates a definition of the novel:

“La grande forme de la prose où l’auteur, à travers des egos expérimentaux (personnages), examine jusqu’au bout quelques grandes thèmes de l’existence » ( page 179)

This is, of course, written not without irony but it does identify the Things Good To Think With ( les choses bonnes à penser – Lévi-Strauss) with which the novelist specifically works: characters.

One might say (and I tried to say this in the lectures on aesthetics which I gave in the 1980s and 1990s – see www.selectedworks.co.uk) that each of the traditional and great art forms has its own specific things “good to think with” or perhaps more accurately “good to express with”. For the potter, it is clay. For the sculptor, stone or metal. For the composer, sound and silence. And so on. 

When the novelist works with characters, he or she has the chance to discover and bring into focus ways of human being and possibilities of existence which would have eluded discovery in mere prose.

Nelson Algren's Nonconformity pointed me towards what could be written. 

 Rather than smarmy beady-eyed Horatio Algers, Algren lauds Dreiser, Mencken, Veblen, Steffens, and Lewis. Our singular American genius Mark Twain towers among even that splendid company. Algren skewers popular novelists who disingenuously yearn only ‘to give pleasure to the reading public” and plead they have “no right to impose [their] views on race and religion.” So then, Algren deduces, ‘if it isn’t the writer’s task to relate mankind to the things of the earth, it must be his job to keep them unrelated.’ Repelled by the businessman’s creed that “no values are greater than thrift, self-preservation, and piety,” Algren speaks of outward show, of a ‘neon wilderness’ (an Algren title) dominated by whitewashed high-rise sepulchers full of schemers. He flatly accused the American middle class of adoring “personal comfort as an end in itself” which “is, in essence, a denial of life.”[20] He detested cozy ingrown literary cliques, pulling themselves up the ladder by each other’s Gucci bootstraps. “When [a writer] sees scarcely anyone except other writers,” says Algren,  “he is ready for New York” and what Algren terms “bellhop writing” – writing to order.  “No book was ever worth writing that wasn’t done with the attitude that ‘This ain’t what you rung for, Jack – but its what you’re damned well getting.”

I gave up my ideas of writing fiction when I saw no way to do with Indian what Faulkner did with Mississippi, and could not find my world in what Saul Bellow had written in Humboldt's Gift. But in Algren's people I recognized many of my clients, several of my friends, and many acquaintances. Character being what comes from the press of history and environment is one thing is that I got from Algren. More importantly, he reminded me what Henry David Thoreau also taught me - the virtues of nonconformity. Kundera emphasizing the character as the cornerstone of the novel, pointed me to how to write. Not that the characters of my "Love Stinks" are Algren's downtrodden, they are the middle-class types I knew of in an Indiana factory town - hanging on to their existence in the face of economic and environmental changes. Albeit my characters are more improvisational, more non-conformist than some of my acquaintances. Follow this link to what I have written on Algren.

From Welcome to ME blog, Notes on The Art of the Novel:

How does the necessary complexity get into Kundera’s fiction? The process is illuminated in The Art of the Novel by two dialogues which draw on detailed illustrations from his novels and which valuably help one to understand how they work. Although Kundera throws away much traditional apparatus – elaborate description of character and setting, psychological realism, interior monologue, historical background, and so on – he insists that the concentration on his characters’ existential situations that this permits does not make them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation.

 From Books & Boots blog, The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera (1986):

There is no mention of American fiction: from Melville through Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner (OK, Faulkner is mentioned right towards the end as one of the several authors who want nothing written about their lives, only their works), Updike or Roth or Bellow. No reference to science fiction or historical fiction or thrillers or detective fiction. Or children’s fiction. There is no mention of South American fiction (actually, he does mention a novel by Carlos Fuentes), or anything from Africa or Asia.

Some exceptions, but by and large, it is a very very very narrow definition of the Novel. Kundera can only talk as sweepingly as he does because he has disqualified 99.9% of the world from consideration before he begins.

This might be the one criticism, I will criticize. Well, quibble over. It is true, but the context is of European, perhaps even more accurately Central European writing. Another writer who opened my eyes to what could be done with the novel was Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude. Not that "Love Stinks" has anything smacking of magical realism. That is to be found in other stories. I point this out, just as noted Algren above, is to, in some degree, in response to this point. Follow this link to what I have written about Marquez. 

Two other Latin American writers I found influential: Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist and Carlos Fuentes' This I Believe (for pointing me also towards Don Quixote.) Follow this link to what I have written about Llosa.

***

According to Kundera, before one writes one must have an ontological hypothesis, a theory about what kind of world we live in. For example The Good Soldier Švejk finds everything about the world absurd. At the opposite pole, Kafka’s protagonists find everything about the world so oppressive that they lose their identities to it.

After all, What is action? How do we decide to do what we do? That is, according to Kundera, the eternal question of the novel. (p.58)

Through an analysis of the plots of the three novels, Kundera concludes that what Broch discovered was the system of symbolic thought which underlies all decisions, public or private.

***

Specific words are more important to Kundera than other novelists because his novels are often highly philosophical. In fact, he boils it down: a novel is a meditation on certain themes; and these themes are expressed in words. Change the words, you screw up the meditations, you wreck the novel.

If anything, "Love Stinks" is about themes, but ones that are in all of my fiction - history, memory, epistemology, economic systems, colonialism, ethics. These I see making up the world, and people either follow along or fight against the effects of each.

***

The greatest promoter of kitsch is the mass media which turns the huge human variety into half a dozen set narratives designed to make us burst into tears. We are confronted by a three-headed monster: the agélastes, the nonthought of received ideas, and kitsch.

Kundera sees European culture as being under threat from these three forces, and identifies what is most precious about it (European culture), namely:

• its respect for the individual
• for the individual’s original thought
• for the right of the individual to a private life

Against the three-headed monster, and defending these precious freedoms, is set the Novel, a sustained investigation by some of the greatest minds, into all aspects of human existence, the human predicament, into human life and interactions, into human culture.

It seems to me today (7/21/2023) what Kundera feared is to be feared even more now. It might sound as if he were biting off a lot for the novel, so was Algren. You should get a copy of Nonconformity from here.

John Milbank's Beyond Progressivism: Toward a Personalist Metaphysics of History from The Hedgehog Review feels pertinent. Milbank argues that Western culture is decadent, with its emphasis on identity and disdain for rationality. He offers the possibility of a solution from the Russians, and (while passing over the influence of Orthodox Christianity in the following) one that I see as encapsulating the prime purpose of the novel: capturing persons in their complexity.

To answers these questions in turn, we might draw on those Russian thinkers whose situation “between” Europe and Asia tended to encourage them to make this combination. I am thinking especially of Vladimir Solovyov and another one of his of his followers, Lev Karsavin, whose thought is only now emerging from its Soviet-era obscurity.⁹

For both thinkers, the key to a metaphysics of history was not rational logic, material exigency, or disembodied spirit, but the embodied or incarnate person. Their rigorous skepticism, anticipating the postmodern, disallowed any traceable rational or material necessary links between unity and variety, despite the inescapable truth that all our reality consists in such. For Solovyov and Karsavin, the only clue to this linkage lay in our experience of interpersonal love: Both individually and collectively, personality expresses and realizes ineffably an erotic-agapeic fusion of the one with the many.

It is just for this reason that “character” is the most palpable yet most elusive reality, the most predictable yet most inexhaustibly unpredictable. Always and everywhere, universal realities are constituted only by individual examples, yet these examples exhibit what the genus consists of far more than any abstracted generalization can. A single human being shows us what humanity consists of more than any summation of common attributes does. If this is indeed the case, it is more logical that we think of general humanity as a single archetypal “man,” as did Gregory of Nyssa and other Church Fathers.

For the mystical Russians, their personalism cohered naturally with a Platonic account of genera as transcendent “ideas.” In the case of a third thinker in the tradition of Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, both person and idea can equally be thought of as “icons.”¹⁰ The primacy of the personal always goes along with the primacy of the symbolic, because a personalist philosophy understands the rationally “expressed” to be but the ineffable mingling of two impenetrable sources: of the depths of material world, on the one hand, and the heights of spiritual inspiration, on the other. Without the “passionary” meeting of these two, human reason is ultimately void of all but formal and self-referring content.¹¹

From The Irish Times, Old Favourites: The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher (1986):

Fittingly, Kundera is a stern defender of the “great European art” he practised: “A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.” He celebrates the novel’s spirit of complexity, irony and moral ambiguity, and calls for an art of “radical divestment” – that is, for novelists to pare away as much superfluity as possible and “always head straight for the heart of things”. Fellow practitioners could do worse than to write by Kundera’s core maxim: “The novel’s sole raison d’être is to say what only the novel can say.”

The Literary Review's Man of Sixty-Two Words The Art of the Novel By Milan Kundera can be read in full only by subscribers, but I went there and it did not feel complete without mentioning this review.

 My own notes are so buried in the boxes of paper I here, I worry my memory has forgotten too much, might have led me astray. Kundera led me to think of the novel-as-collage; which is confusing most of my readers out here. I did like the novelistic essay, and even more, putting short story into the novel. No one out here has yet seen that section of the novel. Unlike Kundera, I did try to give a reason for character. But it is character that is caught in history and memory and eventually their culture, which I think is made of history and our internal reaction to history.

Quick takes for Kundera: Is a good novel smarter than its author? Kundera thought so…

Next, I will go to Kundera in his own words, which will go up here tomorrow.

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Books to Spark Your Creativity; 11-25-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. This may have been for a presentation in one of the community college classes I sgned up for. sch 4/22/2025]

1. Diary of Ann Frank (diary)
2. Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (Memoir)
3. Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob Dylan (Memoir)
4. X-Ray, Ray Davies (Memoir)
5. The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, Joyce Carol Oates (Memoir)
6. Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup *  (Memoir)
7. The Story of My Life, Booker T. Washington * (Memoir)
8. Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou (Memoir)
9. Tibetan Peach Pie, Tom Robbins (Memoir)
10. Couldn't Keep It To Myself, Wally Lamb and the Women of York Prison (Memoir)
11. The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell (Memoir)
12. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain (Memoir)
13. Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck (Memoir)
14. The Outsider, Richard Wright (autobiographical fiction)
15. Typee, Herman Melville (autobiographical fiction)
16. Bird on Bird, Anne Lamott (memoir plus how-to-write)
17. On Writing, Stephen King (autobiographical fiction)
18. If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Chester Himes (fiction by felons)
19. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (fiction by felons)

I did not get a chance to present my list last Wednesday. We - my group - decided to go on rather than await an extension cord for the projector. That list contained only books in the prison library, or I knew were on the compound. I picked them with an emphasis for familiar types in prison. The idea is creativity vented stress and was for the Success and Wellness class, so I think you can see the connection between stress relief and the requirements of the class.

I will add these for you:

1. Milan Kundera, Art of the Novel
2. Albert Camus, The Rebel
3. Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
4. Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
5. W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
6. Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy
7. Susan Sontag, At the Same Time
8. Joyce Carol Oates, Faith of a Writer
9. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
10. V.S. Naipaul, Writer's People
11. Edward Said, On Late Style
12. Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
13. Nelson Algren, Nonconformity

Is 32 books too much?

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[* These books were ones I had not read and still have not. And in the process of adding hyperlinks to my list, I came across the following:

1. Review: Letters to A Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (January Magazine)
2. Lost and Found Books: Nelson Algren's Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998) (Logos Journal)
3. On Late Style By Edward W Said (The Independent)
4. How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity (The Marginalian)
5. Hatred and Self Loathing: Naipaul’s colonial shame (The Elephant)
6. (Zinta Reviews) The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates
7. "Same Time: Essays and Speeches" by Susan Sontag (A Gathering of the Tribes)
8. The Summing Up - W. Somerset Maugham (My Maugham Collection)
9. Analysis of Milan Kundera’s Novels ( Literary Theory and Criticism)

sch 4/22/25]

Reason to read Nelson Algren #37

We Are All Members of One Another, a new introduction to a new edition of Nelson Algren's Man With the Golden Arm, came in last night, and I did not read it until today when I got back from Carmel. Talk about the unexpected places to learn things.

My sister and I were talking about her eldest son and ourselves. It was a continuation of a conversation we had on the way down, about changing ways. E has told me she thinks I need to write a book about aftercare; I am not sure what I have done can be replicated, or taught. Anyway, I was stumbling around for the exact word to described what my nephew needed to do to change his life. I said reflection, as in he needs to reflect on what went wrong with his life and where he wants to go. This describes what I did. Never have I felt it quite encompassed all that I went through during prison - it gets the method right without me understanding why I chose to change in the first place.

Reading the above essay, I think I saw the word I was missing: ambition. One must have the feeling they can change, that the change will not be purposeless. Finding myself alive and having put myself in a position where I put off suicide for the eventual demise of my lungs, I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. In that decision was ambition.

CC told me this past Sunday she does not know if she can change her life or what good it would do her. She lacks both self-esteem and ambition. Death will come for her before she believes enough in her ambition to try living. I hope the same is not true of my nephew.

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Midwest Writing, Part IV - Blogs, Sites

A bit more from the Google query I used in Part III, and also a second query ("blogs midwestern literary"). No sermons from me, but maybe a few quick comments on what I see. I am not putting up all I see, nor am I going past page 4 of the Google returns. Only so much time remains to me in this life. Besides, it will give you something to do! 

The following order is what was in the tab left of this one in my Firefox browser.

Midwest Review: "...an annual literary magazine that features work by writers, photographers, and artists who live in, have lived in, or have spent time in the Midwest...." I cannot tell when they have an open submission period, or being an annual, if they remain n operation. I will check back with this one.

From there I found two connected sites: Pardeep Toor and Christopher Chambers.

Midwest Mixed:

Black, Indigenous & POC of all skin tones and across the gender and sexuality spectrum who identify as or connect to the experiences of being mixed-race, multiracial, biracial, multiethnic, or as transracial and/or transnational adoptees. We also hold space for interracial couples and multiracial/mixed families.

Midwest Fiction Writers: Minneapolis romance writers.

Catherine Lanser - Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, and the Brain - aspiring Wisconsin writer; I really like her from her "About" page.

The Chicago Blog - University of Chicago - if you are looking for books, more than writers.

Milkweed: Minneapolis publisher of books.

Literary Journals: The Midwest (20111). This is all I can find about him and the Midwest, but I do like the following:

The Midwest. The flyover, where even the towns have fled to the margins, groceries warehoused in Wal-Marts hugging the freeways, the red barns of family farms sagging, dismantled and sold as “distressed” wood for McMansion kitchens, the feedlots of agribusiness crouched low to the prairie ground. Of all the American regions, the Midwest remains the most imaginary, ahistorical but fiercely emblematic. It’s Nowheresville. But it’s also the Heartland. That weight again: the innocent middle. Though it isn’t innocent. It’s where the American imagination has decided to archive innocence.

The New Territory concerns itself with the states of and around Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska; what it calls the Lower Midwest.

The book’s collaboration has grown and spread slowly and carefully over the seasons, finding its right place in the hills, plains, and bookshelves of Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Northwest Arkansas. When it feels right, we color outside those border lines. 

Some things have never changed.

We know there’s something alive in this landscape that we share.

We explore it with tenderness. We ask it question after question to try and understand its many faces. We want and expect the best for its future.

We try to capture the region’s essence even though we know it can’t be contained. Not by words, not by pictures. Not even by stories, into which we put so much faith. Nevertheless, we keep collecting. We keep printing.

And twice a year, when a new issue comes out, we feel incredibly honored to add to the body of regional literary journalism, fiction, poetry, art, humor and imagination. Readers tell us they think differently about places they’ve lived their whole lives. You can subscribe here and see if that holds up.

 From Reedsy comes The Best Literary Agents Seeking Submissions in Chicago. I cannot tell how old is this list, but I hope it helps as a start.

The Guardian published Chicago: reading the midwestern metropolis of American literature in 2014 and an interesting history, if I did notice the absence of Nelson Algren. Also from The Guardian: Your favourite Chicago books: check our readers' list; which also excludes Algren.

Mark Athitakis in GoodReads reviews The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt. This looks to be from 2017. I am thinking this might let you who want to write and who think the Midwest is not the place for writers a place to learn.

Thornfield Hall, a book blog from the Midwest, not a writer's blog but one I like all the same.

The Omaha Public Library posted 2022 Reading Challenge: Read a Book by a Midwestern Author, with links to Midwestern writers, some very current ones. 

I found on the South Dakota Public Broadcasting site Recentering Midwestern Literature and History, an interview with from 2019 with Jon K. Lauck, a historian, who wrote From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism 1920-1965:

KB: "Chapter One discusses the myth of the Midwestern 'revolt from the village.' To what does this revolt refer and why do you deem it a myth?"

JKL: "There was a construction advanced in the 1920s by a writer for The Nation, given the title 'The Revolt From the Village' and this referred to a group of works that he thought showed that Midwestern writers were attacking or rebelling against or being critical of their region. He’s referring to people like Sinclair Lewis in Main Street and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio, Edgar Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology, etc. So, this little construction of the revolt from the village has kind of passed into literary history and to historical outlines and, you know, this idea is referred to often. And I taught it that way when I was -- well, three or four years ago before I dug into this, I used to teach this like 10-minute aside in a history survey course, this was the revolt from the village. All these writers turned against the Midwest. Well, I finally started digging into this in a lot more detail and turns out, this thing is completely misleading. All three of those writers vehemently denied attacking the Midwest. They said the revolt from the village is completele bologna. And if you look at the books they wrote and the essays they wrote outside of the books just cited in this Nation article, they said a lot of positive things about the region. So, at the worst, they were highly ambiguous. I think in many ways they were quite favorable toward the region. So, that’s why I call it a myth. This revolt of from the village idea really needs to be dispensed and not used anymore because it’s so inaccurate."

###

KB: "In the book, especially in the conclusion, you say that one of the main reasons Midwestern regionalism has, and you wrote, 'retreated so far into the recesses of the historical imagination is due to the omnipresence of mass culture.' And you call it the 'flood of outside generica and other sundry coercions' -- which is a great line. And you think regionalism can reinvigorate local communities if it’s given its due. So, can you tell me specifically what elements of mass culture are deadening to regionalism? What specific elements of South Dakota regionalism would you see as an antidote to that generica?"

JKL: "Well, this is particularly a concern of parents. If all our kids do is consume mass culture, which is produced in Hollywood and Manhattan, people lose their sense of connection to a particular place. They lose their sense of rootedness. And they may see their own region as something boring where nothing happens and fly-over country. So they want to move to the coasts. This is one of the problems that people in South Dakotan wrestle with. You know, the younger kids moving to other places. Part of that is they don’t really know the full story of their own place. They don’t know their own identity because it’s not taught. So, what we need to do, along several different levels, is start to teach this a little bit. It will help people. If you have a good sense of identity, in who you are and where you come from, it just makes it easier to navigate the world. And makes you more cosmopolitan in the end because you don’t really understand other places in the world unless you understand where you came from. Otherwise, you’re just kind of floating about like an atom in space, tethered to nothing. So, some of these universities put a lot of money into global studies programs, etc., which is great, but you need a place to begin from. You need to know your own space and your own history so you have some way of comparing. Otherwise, you don’t really understand why another place is the way it is. So, I think regional studies should be a part of those kinds of programs. And it’s easy for us to do in South Dakota if we just rearrange the curriculum a little bit and teach some books that are connected to this place and if we’re just conscious in our universities. And you know, South Dakota universities are much smaller. But some of these big universities, these flagship universities in particular, need to do a much better job. I was at the University of Michigan this week in Ann Arbor and was talking to the person in the American Studies department. They don’t do any of this. They don’t teach Midwestern literature or history. I mean, this is a very large department with a lot of people. So, the leadership needs to come from them. And then, young grad students come into those programs and they maybe want to get a PhD, maybe some of them will say, 'that’ll be interesting. I’ll do a dissertation on this and I’ll work with Professor X who is the expert on Midwestern studies.' But those people don’t even exist now, so you’re not teaching the next generation how to carry on this cultural tradition."

There is more, I suggest anyone living in the Midwest, anyone writing about the Midwest, read it.

The Midwestern Pastoral Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland by William Barillas from the Ohio State Press with this blurb:

The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest.

Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others.

From a 1990 Iowa Review: Is There a Midwestern Literature? by Michael J. Rosen 

Now that I'm in over my head, Imight aswell enjoy the plunge by proposing that Midwestern literature has less interest in experimentation and more in oral histories and dialogue, clear narrative and genuine conflict, and that this is attributable to the possibility that a vocation inwriting for someone in the Midwest has been, until recently, less a recognizable, knowable choice. The creative writer was less available in the form of mentors, communities, creative writing classes, bookstores. There had
been no cachet to being aMidwestern writer. Until the last two decades, writing as a voluntary enterprise (as opposed to technical writing or business writing) hasn't been held at any premium, except in elementary schools, or in some private colleges. The professions of fiction and poetry (as decidedly different from the widespread amateur's interest) weren't as imaginable, so that one critical aspect underlying much of Midwestern lit erature?and its popularity?could be this very ingenuousness about being awriter, a refreshing innocence about the plausibility of the Midwest as the setting for literature. Perhaps this lack of a late style and its problematic thrashings is what appeals to contemporary readers....

I like his metaphor of a constellation for Midwestern literature. Also, the emphasis on place influencing character. 

H-Midwest under Midwestern Literature? has a bunch of links, some I have already found.

And another book: Old-Fashioned Modernism Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature by Andy Oler from LSU Press. The website summarizes the book this way:

In Old-Fashioned Modernism, Andy Oler explores how midwestern literature produces specific forms of regional modernity through male protagonists who both fulfill and resist traditional American narratives of economic advancement, spatial experience, and gender roles. Focusing on images of men from the rural Midwest who face the tensions between agricultural production and mass industrialization, Oler examines novels by Sherwood Anderson, William Cunningham, Langston Hughes, Wright Morris, and Dawn Powell, as well as the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. By reading literary representations of the Midwest alongside artifacts of material culture from the region, Old-Fashioned Modernism demonstrates how midwestern regionalism negotiates the anxieties and dominant narratives of early- and mid-century rural masculinities by planting formal innovations in the countryside and pitting nostalgic pastoralism against the byproducts of industrial modernity.

There I will close out. I hope I have found something useful to the Midwestern writer and the would-be writer. Good luck.

sch 11/10/22 

Update: Chicagoan Joe Meno's website, and Sound and Silence: The Millions Interviews Joe Meno:

Joe Meno’s new novel, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies, is told through the eyes of twentysomething musician Aleks, who is the product of a gifted, exceedingly odd family and—in an especially cruel twist of fate—has lost much of his hearing. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 economic meltdown, Book of Extraordinary Tragedies is an incisive exploration of ethnic identity, uneasy family legacies, thwarted ambitions, and the city of Chicago itself.

This is a new name for me, but is that not the problem? Midwestern writers going under the radar? 

sch 11/12/22

I found Storm Cellar, a literary journal, today: 

Storm Cellar is a literary journal of safety and danger. We place a special emphasis on the Midwest, but even more emphasis on amazing writing and art. We aim to display aesthetic ambition as well as the work of authors and artists who are under-represented in the Anglophone literary world. We want everybody to get weird and enlightened and learn and fall in love and have superpowers. We want to surprise and delight and horrify and provoke. Storm Cellar is not a distraction but a cure for boredom.

Two to three issues per year in print and ebook editions. Free samples up weekly-ish

sch 11/13/22 

I forgot The Good Life Review out of Omaha, Nebraska:

... The Good Life Review is committed to exploring the overlooked. Our mission is to lift the strange, the daring, the underrepresented; and reveal complexities hidden in the Heartland and beyond. We seek to elevate writing that takes risks and challenges perceptions, writing that haunts long after the last line.

sch 11/15/22 

Serendipity rules! More Midwestern sites:

Old Iron Press:

We are a female-led, independent publisher dedicated to retooled classics. Proudly based in Indianapolis, Indiana, we champion irreverent underdogs, the handbuilt, and the hybrid. At OIP, we love disobedient forms and books that risk something, are stylistically surprising, and embrace a philosophy of in-between.

Existing apart from traditional publishing with an entirely different set of values, we are focused on originality over sales. Every book we publish will be treated as a future classic and designed to be a cherished object.

Lakeshore Literary out of Michigan.

sch 11/16/22

One I forgot, even I submitted a piece, The Journal from The Ohio State University:

The Journal, originally titled The Ohio Journal, was founded in 1973 by William Allen of the English Department at The Ohio State University, and has been published continuously ever since. David Citino served as Editor from 1985 to 1990 and was a contributing editor until his death in 2005. Michelle Herman and Kathy Fagan became Fiction Editor and Poetry Editor, respectively, in 1990 and currently serve as Advisory Editors. The graduate staff has maintained The Journal’s commitment to publishing the best work by new and emerging writers around Ohio and the nation, including writing not easily classified by genre, excerpts from novels, longer stories, and other daring or wholly original pieces.

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Criticizing David Foster Wallace

I have already mentioned how David Foster Wallace bothers me. This has.left me questioning my judgment. Then I found The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace from Literary Hub. Mary K. Holland sets out the case for Wallace in her opening:

David Foster Wallace’s work has long been celebrated for audaciously reorienting fiction toward empathy, sincerity, and human connection after decades of (supposedly) bleak postmodern assertions that all had become nearly impossible. Linguistically rich and structurally innovative, his work is also thematically compelling, mounting brilliant critiques of liberal humanism’s masked oppressions, the soul-killing dangers of technology and American narcissism, and the increasing impotence of our culture of irony.

I did not get this from reading Infinite Jest. I got, maybe, the exact opposite - exploitation of the drug addicts and lower classes by an MFA writer. Could be my biases come shining through. Could be reading him in prison was the wrong place and time. So be it. Could be I just prefer Nelson Algren.

 Back to Ms. Holland's essay, she lays out the criticism and biographical details, which are too detailed for anything but you reading them yourself, before coming to this conclusion:

What does it mean that this artist could not produce in his life the mutually respecting empathy he all but preached in his work (or, most clearly, in his statements about it)? What does it mean that a man and a body of work that claimed feminism in theory primarily produced a stream of abusive relationships between men and women in life and art? What can we learn about the blindness of both men and women to their participation in misogyny and rape culture, despite their professions of awareness of both? How might reading Wallace’s fiction in the contexts of biographical information about him and women’s narratives about their experiences of sexual violence enable us to better understand—and interrupt—the powerful hold misogyny and rape culture have on our society, our art, and our critical practices?

 I knew about his being a possible stalker. Still, this gives me a sense that my vague discomfort with his novel had.some rational justification.

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