Appreciation #8

“Frank Kuenstler” by Richard Kostelanetz

(From the forthcoming third edition of the Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes.)

ALL-TIME AMERICAN WRITERS TOURNAMENT

In 1964, from the imprint of Film Culture, a New York publisher noted for its film magazine of the same title, appeared Lens, a book so extraordinary that it was completely unnoticed at the time. It opens with a single-page “Emblem,” a sort of preface that establishes in six sections that anything might happen in the following pages, including the destruction of both sense and syntax. The last section of “Emblem” reads: “aura.Dictionary, aura.Crossword Puzzle, aura.Skeleton. aura.Poem./Once upon a time.” What follows are eighty long paragraphs so devoid of connection, from line to line, from word to word, that you realize only a human being could have made them; even the most aleatory computer program would have put together, even inadvertently, two words that made sense. The book concludes with the tag “New York, N. Y., 1952–64,” suggesting that Lens took a full dozen years to write; I can believe it, because anyone who thinks such writing easy to do should try it sometime (and send me the results). Kuenstler’s later publications include 13 1/2 Poems (1984), which is a progression of increasingly experimental poems (though none as radical as Lens). Toward the end of his life he sold antiquarian books on the street in New York, usually on Broadway north of 86th Street. To no surprise perhaps, his name rarely, if ever, appears in histories of American literature.

copyright 2018 Richard Kostelanetz
http://richardkostelanetz.com/

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(Photo from a collage by Ira Cohen.)

Appreciation #7

“Gene Wolfe” by Robin Wyatt Dunn

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“Cry Wolfe”

Gene Wolfe, the old fat man, we’ll sing for him—though it be wrong.

How many men will write the etymology of their own name and admit what it makes them? (Wolfe did in his story “Wolfer”).

Gene Wolfe fought in the Korean War, helping the pedophiles who run the United States Government get little children to eat, and all it taught him was “you need to keep shooting.”

Still, he is one of our best writers. Like the Russian writers, who all come out of the Caucasus, feasting on human flesh, and ready to spill blood onto the page.

Though he is a conservative, honored by some of the most conservative bodies here in North America, the golden fascists of the Science Fiction Writers of America—shouldn’t he be honored more greatly, and given the same laurels as Barry Obama?

I love Gene Wolfe; I’ve written about my love for him before, in a piece for Black Heart Magazine, which they later deleted, without comment. I only said I wanted to kiss him on the mouth.

Our Wolfe is howling, and we cannot know why.

Though he began on territory similar to the alt-right “Sad Puppies,” his first novel (he admits himself) prenticework attacking liberals in government, he matured in his work to be one of the few American writers, as David Lynch is one of the few American filmmakers, to use surrealism in his mainstream narrative work, without a second thought, without irony, without compunction, to find the truth.

In his search for the truth, like Kurosawa, he was forced to use dreams. Unlike Kurosawa, there is a bloody spirit in Wolfe, always hunting fresh meat, wherever he may find it.

Today it strikes me that honoring writers is a very tedious business, but this is only because I am a writer longing for honor. Perhaps I should have been killing more children in Asia.

What does it mean that we have Wolfe? Grand Master of Science Fiction: ensconced! Ennobled! Beloved. And we do love him. So much.

Wolfe is not prepared for the end of America; he is sentimental. He shoveled the corpses into its maw, and in his fiction, like all great American writers, he examined the psyche of the psychopath, in Severian from The Urth of the New Sun, in Patera Silk (another child eater) of The Book of the Long Sun, and he also sought and found the little psychopath lurking inside all of us, only awaiting the right circumstances to bring it out.

Like Asimov, Wolfe is a humanist. Unlike Asimov, Wolfe understands how monstrous a thing that is.
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Robin Dunn’s last story for us was “Travelogue.” Find his books here.

Appreciation #6

“Ernest Hemingway” by Samuel Stevens

(Time cover by Waldo Peirce.)

There is probably no writer more controversial than Ernest Hemingway, attacked by academia as a misogynist, while others see him as a talentless hack with an inflated reputation. Yet his work endures despite all of it.

Hemingway was able to show deep emotion with his stripped-down style, changing American literature in the process. His novel The Sun Also Rises captures the relationship between men and women in such a way that few other writers have been able to do. He was also a master of the short story, demonstrated in “Soldiers Home,” “The Killers,” and “A Clean, Well Lighted Place” among many others.

He was not a perfect man, nor even a perfect writer– but who is? His myth has lived on more than who he truly was, laid bare in his novels and short stories. He is also an archetype of American success, spending years in obscurity among the Paris avantgarde before working his way up to literary fame.

Many have tried to imitate him, but there will only ever be one Ernest Hemingway.
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Samuel Stevens’s last story for New Pop Lit was “The Vast Conspiracy.”

Appreciation #4

Hunter S. Thompson by Joseph S. Pete

ALL-TIME AMERICAN WRITERS TOURNAMENT

Every year since 2014, the alt weekly Nuvo has run an Indianapolis 500 guide for the benefit of “naïve first-timers to the Speedway, their minds filled with excitement and sugar plums, totally oblivious to some of the ugly realities awaiting them – the inherent, unavoidable realities of cramming 800,000 people or whatever into a 2.5 mile POWDER KEG OF INTENSITY AND/OR BEER.” Author Roy Hobbson was clearly channeling Hunter S. Thompson and specifically “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” when he penned lines like “that is how it has been done for GENERATIONS, since AJ Foyt and Beowulf built this heavenly Speedway out of bricks & sorcery some 2,500 years ago.”

It’s a testament to Dr. Gonzo that so many writers emulate or channel him, especially when covering major events or politics. Many young journalists go through a Hunter S. Thompson phase, often while cutting their teeth for their college newspaper.

The author of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” and “Fear and Loathing on ESPN’s short-lived bid for respectability Page 2” got great himself through imitation.

Long before his legendary drug binges and manic bursts of gonzo journalism, Thompson honed his craft in his native Louisville by retyping “The Great Gatsby” and “A Farewell to Arms” in full.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the late great Raoul Duke is that anytime politics get weird, someone inevitably will lament he’s no longer around to cover it.
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Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, an Iraq War veteran and a Baconfest Chicago Poet Laureate who’s been widely published in journals like Lumpen, the Blue Collar Review, Stoneboat and Prairie Winds.

 

Appreciation #3

Philip K. Dick by D.C. Miller

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 Philip K. Dick’s claims to greatness don’t rest on the clarity of his style, or the sophistication of his characterizations, but on his depth of immersion in postmodern American culture. It’s no coincidence that his best novels were completed during the last period of his life, when he lived in Orange County near Disneyland – as Baudrilllard reminds us, a world presented as imaginary, in order to make us believe that the rest is “real”, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” Already in 1984, Jeff Kinney, the editor of the magazine Gnosis, was comparing him to L. Ron Hubbard, as well as Swedenborg, and predicting the emergence of a “Dickian religion” with the Exegesis, Dick’s 8,000 plus pages of mystical writings, at the centre. Today, Dick resembles a figure, who instead of describing reality, dreamed the future we’re inhabiting – a future of flattening characterization, incoherent and contradictory transmissions, disintegration. If every revolution in art is a return to realism, no other writer today is as necessary.

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D.C. Miller is at @dctv_od

Appreciation #2

“Nelson Algren” by Joseph S. Pete

ALL-TIME AMERICAN WRITERS TOURNAMENT

Nelson Algren loathed the film adaptation of “The Man with the Golden Arm,” refusing to be photographed by a marquee of a movie he “had nothing to do with” and saying Frank Sinatra’s take on down-on-his-luck vet Frankie Machine made it look like he was trying to recover from a cold instead of quit morphine.

But it landed the Detroit-born Chicagoan a windfall he used to buy a beach cottage in the Miller neighborhood of nearby Gary, Indiana. One winter, he bought a six-pack from a package store and took a popular shortcut across an iced-over lagoon, but the ice cracked and gave way, plunging him into frigid water. Though delirious, he warned rescuers not to venture onto the brittle ice and instead throw a rope to drag him out.

Algren was always like that, empathetic.

His compassion was why he was known as “the bard of the down-and-outer.” Some think he developed a fondness for life’s castaways and woebegone losers after he was jailed for five months in Texas for stealing a typewriter during the Great Depression. They blamed his stubborn attachment to the squalid underbelly of outsiders and sinners for his waning stature, even after he won a National Book Award for Fiction, saying he remained fixated on the downtrodden while society started to view the world in a more optimistic light.

Maybe Algren cared too much. Nobody wrote as well about addicts, the poor, the hustlers, the wretched refuse just trying to get by.
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Joseph S. Pete is an award-winning journalist, an Iraq War veteran and a Baconfest Chicago Poet Laureate who’s been widely published in journals like Lumpen, the Blue Collar Review, Stoneboat and Prairie Winds.

Appreciation #1

“William Burroughs” by D.C. Miller

ALL-TIME AMERICAN WRITERS TOURNAMENT

The most cerebral of post-war American writers, William S. Burroughs belongs to the tradition of literary rebels and exiles, and perhaps was its last representative. Only his earliest books fall under the definition of novels, but he invented a new kind of writing, a form of anti-novel, or theory-fiction, conceived in terms closer to deprogramming then self-expression. With a typewriter, a needle and an independent income, Burroughs stood apart from mainstream society, observing it with an unflinching gaze. From Naked Lunch through the Nova Trilogy his work describes a search for escape. He states his own position in the introduction to Queer. “What are you rewriting? A lifelong preoccupation with Control and Virus. Having gained access the virus uses the host’s energy, blood, flesh and bones to make copies of itself. Model of dogmatic insistence never never from without was screaming in my ear, “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!”

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D.C. Miller’s twitter address is @dctv_od