Vitro Nasu

Nelson with Simone de Beauvoir –Paris with Sartre, Chicago with Nelson Algren

Chicago Man Nelson Algren
(click to see large)

Nelson Algren – (Nation)

J. Edgar Hoover sought to destroy Nelson Algren’s career — and was largely successful.

Into this maelstrom comes the first three-pound excavation of Algren, Colin Asher’s Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, which Norton is bringing out, with some fanfare, in April. Besides being larger in size and scope than any previous biography of this last celebrant of what once was called Proletarian Literature, Asher’s book is devotional and beautifully written, seven years in the making, its sentences capturing the very same mix of lyricism and street, hard truths and sentimentality that made Algren himself so special. It delves into Algren’s lifelong struggle to stay true to his credo, his soulful cry that the purpose of any writer is to stand up to power, to take the judge down from the bench, to give voice to the voiceless. And it delivers a wrenching portrait of a man who struggled to maintain his sanity and his spirit in a society that was well prepared to see its writers give up or sell out, but struggled to comprehend writers who persevered and paid the price as Algren did.

Photo via

Studs Terkel salutes a seriously funny man
(Visit youtube on Terkel and Nelson Algren)

Japanese Literature Scholar, Translater Donald Keene died at 96.

Akutagawa Hiroshi, Mishima and Donald Keene
Mishima (his final performance)

His autobiography is an excellent read.. what an amazing life.

Keene Observation (On his 84th birthday)

Donald Keene

Interesting review of his book by Colin Marshall.. Donald Keene on Familiar Terms.

Enigmatic Emperor

Portrait of Francine Du Plessix Gray by Balthus and Man Ray.

(Francine with her parents) became a cover photo of her book “Them”.

Francine Du Plessix Gray passed away

Francine du Plessix Gray (1933–2019)

Francine du Plessix Gray, the French-American reporter, critic, novelist, and feminist known for her elegance and unsparingness in chronicling issues of the self and beyond, died in Manhattan on Sunday from complications of congestive heart failure. She was eighty-eight years old.

Gray’s upbringing was defined by both entitlement and loss. Born to a French father and a Russian mother in Warsaw’s French embassy in 1933, Gray emigrated from France to New York with her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva, after her father’s plane was shot down by fascists near Gibraltar in 1940. In New York, Yakovleva—once a muse for the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—married socialite and future Condé Nast director Alexander Liberman and eventually became a prolific milliner for Saks Fifth Avenue. Gray recounted her complex childhood and family life in 2006’s Them: A Memoir of Parents, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Paris Review – Francine and sorrel soup.

Gore Vidal on “At Home With The Marquis de Sade – (A Life) by Francine Du Plessix Gray

“It was brilliant idea of Francine du Plessix Gray to re-create not so much the “Monster” who was to become, somber fate, an adjective but the actual man who spent so much of his time in prisons… thanks not only to his sexual capers but, also, to a real-life monster, his mother-in-law, who would have walked off with Les Liaisons Dangereuses had the author dared cast her.
“This is an elegant, enlightend Enlightenment study of a powerful sexual imagination trapped in the mere human body, not to mention the Bastille from which it would take a revolution to free him—and us, his unborn readers.”

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop – Tragic Muses

Elizabeth Bishop
February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979

Biography 0f Bishop 2017 (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
by Megan Marshall)

One Art – see her painting + many great links (previous post)

Reaching for the Moon – Brazilian film on Elizabeth Bishop (trailer)

Frieze

How Philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War

Claude Parent and Paul Virilio

via

Paul Virilio (wiki) (French: [viʁiljo]; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018)[3] was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
According to two geographers, Virilio was a “historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations

Bunker Archeology

Magdalene Jetelova
– in which she laser-projected select quotations from, what else, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology onto the half-submerged fortifications found scattered along Normandy’s beaches.

Magdalene Jetalova (Czech artist)

Annette Michelson (photo via)

Art News – Annette Michelsonk Pioneering Film Critic, Co-founder October dies at 96.

Photo by Fung Lin Hall

Tom Clark, 2010. Poet – photo by John Sarsgard

Beyond the Pale an extraordinary blog by Tom Clark.

Tom Clark Renowned Poet and Biographer dies in North Berkeley traffic collision.

Jacket Interview
(Tom Clark thought Ron Padgett was a far superior poet of my generation.. )
Ron Padgett and Paterson – (scroll down)

Samuel Beckett – My Family with extraordinary photos from Jakarta Indonesia here (from Tom Clark’s blog)

Portrait by Paul Emsley at the National Portrait Gallery

The World is What it is – (The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick French, 2008 – reviewed by Agog)

Guardian obit

VS Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning British author, dies aged 85.

Ian Buruma on Naipaul (the Poet of the Displaced)

An Appraisal- NYtimes..

V.S.Naipaul wiki
5 things Probably Didn’t know about V.S.Naipaul

1) He had a nervous breakdown while studying at Oxford, and spent all his money on a trip to Spain
2)He wrote his first story collection in five weeks (read more from the above link)

Pat and V.S Naipaul

V.S.Naipal and Harold Pinter here.

Kureishi Novel echoes Life of V. S.Naipaul

Paris Review

Naipaul’s gentle side ..

MYSTIC MASSEUR, Ayesha Dharker, Om Puri, 2001(c) Think Film. . Merchant Ivory production..
story by V.S. Naipal.
Om Puri in Mystic Masseur

Ken Russell July 3rd, 1927 (The Mad music lover – previous post)

(Robert Crumb – Introducing Kafka)

Kafka Imagining (previous post)

Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard photographed by Arnold Newman
Both Tom Stoppard and Franz Kafka were born in Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic today).

(Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon)

LA Times obit

The joy and tragedy of his life were his years with Kenyon, his second wife. They met in 1969, when she was his student at the University of Michigan. By the mid-’70s, they were married and living together at Eagle Creek, fellow poets enjoying a fantasy of mind and body — of sex, work and homemaking.

“We sleep, we make love, we plant a tree, we walk up and down/eating lunch,” he wrote.

Paris Review

Donald Hall, Who Gave His Life to Work and Eros.
He was also very funny and very particular (“I love chicken salad, egg salad as long as it has onion, turkey and salami. I don’t like tuna”). The horrors of antiquity—a “black fatigue,” congestive heart failure, “a hundred and fifty colonoscopies,” walking more slowly with his “rollator,” falling down, the loss of words—did not exclude joy and love.

New Yorker -Between Solitude and Loneliness (Hall’s short Story)

“Work, love, build a house, and die,” he wrote. “But build a house.” – Donald Hall

Poetry foundation

Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.

Kosinski
Photo via Jerzy Kosinski
Who was Jerzy Kosinski? (Previous post)

Jerzy Kosinski was born on June 14, 1933. He was an award-winning Polish-American novelist, best known for the novels The Painted Bird (1965) and Being There (1971), the latter of which was adapted into a film in 1979.

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Hal Ashby directed Being There.

Philip Roth on Jerzy Kosinski –

In the end, I don’t understand Jerzy Kosinski. At some level, he must have judged his life as successful. Using his talent, wits, boldness and determination, he went far, if you consider the boy growing up under the most menacing of shadows. Was he happy? There is so much darkness in his novels, I wonder how much brightness there was in his life (inside him, in the place he kept hidden). I am left with a sense of pity, which I’m sure he would not want me to feel. He would prefer respect. And I can grant him that.

Jerzey

David Foster Wallace described Steps as a “collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever”. Wallace continued in praise: “Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosiński goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.

Polish Children

The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson

Not until the end of her life did she write the work for which she is now known. Before then, she had always thought of herself as a poet of the sea.
By Jill Lepore

Rachel Carson (wiki)

Rachel Carson org.