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Our Founder, established in 1989. |
June 18, 2011 .. For immediate release Attention Algren collectors, fans, and all and sundry:
Bob Katzman, owner of the Magazine Museum in Skokie, has assembled an Algren collection well worth looking at. You're invited to call and/or visit Bob, whose own life and writings have an Algren quality -- check out the Web site below. Do spread the word, and should you talk to Bob, mention the Algren Committee for that frisson we provide any transaction.Information: Bob Katzman's Magazine Museum: 100,000 periodicals back to 1681!!!
4906 Oakton St. (8000 north and 4900 west) Skokie, Ill 60077Telephone: (847) 677-9444
Hours: Mon-Fri: 10 am to 5 pm / Weekends: 10 am to 2 pm
Katzman's Publishing Company site: www.FightingWordsPubco.com
Katzman's online non-fiction stories: www.DifferentSlants.com
22nd Algren Birthday Party Brings Together the Best of Chicago On March 26, 2011, the center of Nelson Algren's not-so-fictional world was the 22nd Algren Birthday party, held once again at the Wicker Park Arts Center, 2215 W. North Avenue in Chicago's Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhood. Here an avid and eclectic group gathered to celebrate the great work and complicated life of Chicago's emblematic author, bon vivant and longtime critic - a man who was born in Detroit, died on Long Island and in between lived in and came to know the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago. He died in 1981 - the same week as Bob Marley, who got a bigger notice in Time. But this year's stellar event shows Algren is still very much remembered and honored in the city he made his trade.
Here are some of the highlights:
The Nelson Algren Committee Awards are given to local folks who operate under the radar and in the Algren tradition of "a conscience in touch with humanity." This year's worthy recipients were artist, organizer and free speech crusader Chris Drew, media reformer Scott Sanders, humane animal husbandry and food safety advocate Richard Wood, and writer/activist and FBI target Maureen Murphy, who is guilty of exercising freedom of speech in regard to the Israel/Palestine situation and U.S. foreign policy.
Algren scholar Mike Jones from the University of Connecticut delivered a terrific, street-smart presentation that was long on insight and light on jargon. Another guest from afar (Dallas, Texas) was Josh Alan Friedman, son of Algren pal Bruce Jay Friedman - who mixed some super guitar licks with tales of Algren's visit to his boyhood home in the 1960s. The party that ensued was of Roman proportions, culminating in numerous divorces and going a bit far even for Nelson.
Noted local poet and Algren Committee member Charlie Newman delivered some great verse, and Algren's own poetry got a mention. (See Chicago: City on the Make for a sample.). The evening was further blessed with fine dramatic readings of Algren scenes by actor/writer Gary Houston, while Algren Party regular Richard Henzel was spellbinding as Mark Twain, performing his eerily powerful and prescient "War Prayer."
A highpoint was hobo scholar and historic re-enactor Paul Durica, whose slide presentation was beautifully researched, witty and very informative. Smart and talented, the U. of C.-based Durica is somebody to watch.
Erwin Helfer, Chicago's poet laurate of the piano, is an encyclopedia of transcendent licks. Endowed with the best left hand in the business, he elicited what can only be described as wondrous music from a well-tuned church piano. He is a fixed feature of the Algren event, and not to be missed. The bands Friends of Chloe and Jungle of Cities provided the party with some much-needed melodic breathing space; thank you, musicians.
Gallo-American novelist Delphine Pontvieux, toujours vivante et charmante, read from the American travel journals of the esteemed feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, including the momentous first encounter with her beloved Nelson. We are beholden to Delphine once again for a great presentation.
Together, we celebrated Algren's induction into the first "class" of the new Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, along with his friend Studs Terkel and Richard Wright. And as ever, we saluted his entry into the world 102 years ago with cake and a rousing rendition of Sto Lat, the Polish birthday song delivered by our own Alice Prus.
This year's event was dedicated to the worldwide struggle for freedom and dignity, from Cairo, Egypt to Madison, Wisconsin to Athens, Greece. If Nelson were still alive, he would see the beauty in today's acts of spirited resistance. And we remembered the passing 10 years ago of poet and Algren friend Stu McCarrell, a founder and mainstay of the Committee.
Our sponsor once again is the Near Northwest Arts Council and NNWAC Director Laura Weathered, who for many years has hosted and supported this event, as well as serving the community in so many ways we've lost count. The Algren sign graces NNWAC's church basement venue on North Avenue thanks to Alice Prus, who installed it in all its neon glory. Nelson's spirit must walk past from time to time looking at his own cat signature, which is incorporated into the sign.
Committee members Warren Leming and Hugh Iglarsh MC'd and held their ground gamely, despite the touch of chaos the event invariably generates. A little chaos is in the spirit of the event … and we are never disappointed on that count. A shout-out to Algren pal and photographer Art Shay, who made a brief but memorable appearance.
Members Nina Gaspich, Alice Prus, Charlie Newman and Kurt Jacobsen did stellar service in a variety of roles. The unique Algren "Mugshot Mug" sold well, and helps finance the Committee's next party. Remember: Accept no substitutes for your morning coffee.
When the Algren Committee started in the late 1980s, just a few years after Algren's death, his work was almost out of print. In 2011, his books are available (even in the Chicago Public Library, which once took Never Come Morning off the shelves), he's commemorated with a plaque and a fountain at Division and Ashland, City on the Make has been dramatized and revived, and a movie about Nelson and Simone starring Johnny Depp is reportedly in the works. But Algren is still under-read, under-appreciated and under the radar - amazingly, none of his books has ever been included in the city's "One Book, One Chicago" program - and the Committee's work goes on.
For updates on Nelson Algren Committee events and other Algren-related doings, visit this Web site or call the Algren Hot Line at (773) 235-4267. A Heroic Line of Losers: From Herman Melville to Nelson Algren by Hugh Iglarsh
The Algren Committee has a limited supply of the NELSON ALGREN MUG SHOT MUG.
Done in black and white and with Algren's mug shot, courtesy of the Chicago Police Dept., on both sides.
Greet the day with an Algren Mug Shot Mug---reminding you never to "play cards with a man named Doc.
And never to eat at a place called Ma's. And never to sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own."For details email us at: mtbanjo@mail.com
A rare, archival DVD, of John Susman's Nelson & Simone.
The play traces the twenty plus year love affair between ...Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir
Directed by Richard Cotovsky, Live Bait Theater's 2000 production stars
Gary Houston, Rebecca Covey and Fred Wellisch.The Algren Committee has copies of the dvd for sale at 25 dollars post paid to you. To order email us at; mtbanjo@mail.com
Be sure and include your address. We'll send you details on the purchase when we get your email.EMAIL ADVISOR: IF YOU CAN'T ACCESS MTBANJO@MAIL.COM FROM THIS SITE... COPY THE ADDRESS AND ACCESS IT FROM YOUR EMAIL PROGRAM. THANKS, THE ALGREN COMMITTEE Max Vanzi is a retired writer/journalist living in Sacramento, California. Max covered the Far East and points between for the wire services as a foreign correspondent. He's an Algren fan, and spent a weekend with the Committee during the 2010 Algren Birthday party. He's done us the honor of a piece on the Committee, Algren's legacy, and his time in Chicago.
Orsolya Bene is a Nelson Algren fan and a writer who is interested in contacting people about her book project: she has a plan to illustrate and update Algren's Chicago: City on the Make... anyone interested can contact her directly at orsolyab05@gmail.com Her birthday party speech was delivered at the 2010 Algren Birthday Party.
My name is Orsolya Bene. I'm a fan of Nelson Algren's writing. I live in South Bend, Indiana now, but I lived in Chicago for twenty-five years. I was born in Hungary and came here with my parents in 1984.
I've been reading Algren for nine or ten years. The first book of his that I read was The Man with the Golden Arm. I became interested in reading Golden Arm because I read a small item in the Chicago Tribune that reprinted the first few lines of the novel. I was intrigued by the first sentences, so I bought the book. I had a hard time getting through the book because it's so densely written. But the language is so beautiful and the descriptions of Chicago are so unique that it made me want to finish the novel. After that I looked into Algren's other books. I read The Neon Wilderness, which is my favorite of his books. I loved the story "Design for Departure" because I was able to identify with the female protagonist and also the story "Kingdom City to Cairo," about a hitchhiking adventure that Algren had. I also read Chicago: City on the Make and I was impressed by it. It described Chicago and chronicled its history in such an original and interesting way that I had never read anything like it before. It changed the way I looked at Chicago.
I also looked into Algren's other novels and his collection of short fiction and nonfiction pieces, The Last Carousel. My favorite pieces in The Last Carousel are "Previous Days," which is a collection of short vignettes that Algren wrote from memories of his life and "Merry Christmas Mr. Mark," which tells about his experiences working as a newsie selling the Saturday Evening Blade.
Chicago: City on the Make is one of my favorites of Algren's works and right now I'm planning to do an illustrated version of the book. I need some assistance with the research for the book so I would like to make an appeal to anyone who would be interested in this project and interested in assisting me. orsolyab05@gmail.com
"Algren's Last Night" is the bittersweet tale of a Chicago writer bidding farewell to the city he had 'made his trade.'
Bulletprooffilm — February 12, 2006 — Based on a script written and narrated by Algren friend Warren Leming,Given the dark tone of Algren's work, Carmine Cervi creates his own film noir world in DV color. "Algren's Last Night" is: 'Video Noir'. Unique and evocative cityscapes reveal a dark, haunted Chicago rarely traveled or seen.
Director/Producer/Editor/Camera: Carmine Cervi
Actor/Writer/Producer: Warren LemingMediaBurnArchive — November 03, 2009 — Studs Terkel chats and jokes with Nelson Algren at a party in Chicago.
Algren had recently moved from Chicago to Paterson, New Jersey, and this move was the subject of most of the conversation,
told mainly through deadpan jokes.
Here are two youtube.com sites featuring a 2009 Nelson Algren program at the Steppenwolf theater in Chicago.
The event celebrated Algren's centennial, and featured readings and commentary by authors and actors.
Nelson Algren Live: The Lightless Room,
read by Willem DafoeNelson Algren Live: Margo,
read by Barry Gifford
Past Nelson Algren Award Recipients
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Don Rose Laura Weathered Jeff Huebner Glenda Daniel Diana Berek John K. Wilson Denis Mueller James Bond Chris Drew Carlos Cortez Roberto Lopez Vesna Rebernak Carl Davidson Lew Rosenbaum Kari Lydersen Ken Dunn Erwin Helfer Maureen Murphy Jon Jost David Williams Penelope & Marguerite Horberg Bob Rudner Alma Washington Erika R. Allen Scott Sanders Kate Hogan Peter Kuttner Franklin Rosemont Richard Wood Jim Redd Judy Hoffman
Understanding Nelson Algren
Univ. of South Carolina Press
Brook Horvath
William Faulkner said that every Southern schoolboy waits eternally for George Pickett to raise his sword and begin the mad charge into Union artillery that will end with the decimation of his division and the death of Confederate hopes at Gettysburg, the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
For Nelson Algren, Chicago waits eternally to expiate the sin of its beginnings in the Haymarket show trial and the judicial murder of the Haymarket victims, hanged to stave off the fight for the Labor Union and the eight-hour day. Algren never forgave Chicago's ruthless merchant class that oversaw the exploitation and political-cum-judicial repression that still stigmatize the good residents of the Second City. And so Algren, like the Truth, had a hardscrabble life in the town he "made his trade."
Lumping Algren with Faulkner may seem perverse, but the two shared a fascination with an America that continues to defy explanation. They are both attuned to a culture of violence and deliberate moral confusion that today finds clear expression in FOX non-News and can be summarized by the sentence: "The more you watch the less you know."
Brooke Horvath's Understanding Nelson Algren, published by the University of South Carolina Press as part of its "Understanding Contemporary American Literature" series, introduces a new generation of readers to Algren. Horvath's book charts Algren's beginnings, wandering the country in the midst of the Depression, getting jailed in Texas and then returning to Chicago broke but convinced, against all the odds, that he could get enough of the city onto paper to make a living as a writer.
Inspired by Dickens, Conrad, Celine, Sartre and his friend Richard Wright, Algren set out to describe what he had found in what Brecht called "the great jungles we know as cities." Algren had already been writing for well over a decade when The Man With the Golden Arm , which won the first National Book Award for fiction, made him famous to littérateurs and infamous to many of Chicago's more respectable citizens. The book is one of the first serious attempts to look at drug addiction in a nation the writer found riddled with "spiritual desolation."
It is difficult now to reconjure the world that produced Algren and Wright, James T. Farrell and Studs Terkel. It was a world which villified a broken and exploitative Capitalist system now shifted to a media-driven triumphalist mode. Capitalism was so universally deplored that Depression-era American literature now reads as though from another planet.
What happened, one asks with Mr. Horvath, to all that now-suspect anti-mercantilist Realist prose and the radical energy that produced it? The answers lie in the carefully buried Past, victim, as Algren predicted, of the media's endless rewrite in a country continually riven by racism, inequality, violence and a rapacity that leaves a Quentin Tarantino salivating and Progressives wishing they'd been born elsewhere.
Horvath is good on the FBI, with its ever more hysterical Cold War hyperbole, as it brands Algren a "potentially active enemy agent." In today's atmosphere, he'd be considered a Terrorist. Horvath saves us a superb and prophetic Algren quote: "We must recognize that, in the eyes of the world, the CIA is now reversing what it once meant to be an American." This uttered a quarter-century and counting before George W. Bush stepped to the podium and forever blackened the legacy of a State that, if not failed,has revealed its successes as steeped in the blood of its own citizens.
It is not farfetched to call Algren a prophet, and Horvath suggests as much. Algren's view of the U.S. as "an Imperialist son of a bitch" has now been echoed by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Bill Blum to Ramsey Clarke.
What did happen to Algren who, along with Robeson and Wright and Farrell and the Hollywood Ten and thousands of others, found themselves enemies of the State? Their passports pulled, their phones bugged and their careers virtually ended by a state-sponsored attack on "subversives" that's been re-worked in our own time. Once again, the Fascist slanders of the Corporate media and the "anti-Terrorist" campaigns funded by taxpayer dollars are squandered on horror shows that produce universal hatred of the U.S. Algren held to these views despite the price exactted. Horvath suggets that the price of Algrens truths was career suicide.
The chasm between an indifferent elite and the masses of people at the bottom of the system is now a fixed fact of American life. Algren's generation is to be the last allowed to take this fact seriously, as something shameful to be acted upon. We live now, as Horvath suggests, at a time when Algren remains a problem for the po/mo academics, the hacks at the heart of the media and the middlebrow millionaire breast-beaters of the Dr. Phil and Oprah variety.
What response other than deep despair could Algren summon to what he saw in his own time? Horvath's book remains good evidence that Algren - for all his troubles, tormented love life, blighted career and eventual literary exile - remained true to something that's disappearing quickly in the self-proclaimed home of "freedom and democracy": human compassion. Brooke Horvath has given us a good look at Algren's legacy: the Corporate/State Lie and Algren's great "No" to America.
Warren Leming
Farleigh Dickinson Press has announced the publication (late Dec. 2007) of .... Nelson Algren: A Collection of Critical Essays
(ISBN 0-8386-4108-3),edited by Robert Ward. (Dr. Ward lectures in American Literature at St. Martins College, Lancaster, England.)
Ward, while still an undergraduate at Leeds University, organized the first Nelson Algren Symposium which invited Algren scholars, and the Algren Committee's Warren Leming to England for a three day event. The book includes the essays on Algren delivered at Leeds.For more information write: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, M-GH2-01, Madison, New Jersey, 07940 or email them at fdupress@fdu.edu
Algren's Eye: Photography and the City by Warren Leming
Most recently, the BBC (Scotland) shot "A Walk on the Wild Side," in Chicago, with the co-operation of the Committee. The video documents Algren's now famous love affair with the French writer and feminist icon Simone De Beauvoir. Copies are available thru the Committee.
The Committee is making available, for the first time, a CD of Algren reading from his work. The CD will contain a long interview with Algren by Studs Terkel. There are also excerpts of Algren reading from his work. If you are interested you can write or call the Committee about obtaining a copy. Produced by Cold Chicago, the CD was originally recorded at FM station WFMT.
In addition, a map of Algren sites, fictional and real, has been created by artist Robert Hartzell and is now available, have a look!
Click the link to download an mpeg of the Frankie Machine Blues bands version of: Algren Street our homage to the work of Nelson Algren. The lyrics to the tune are also available.
Algren Quotes:
"Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity."
"The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer
in all ages of man.""I went out there [Hollywood] for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday.
The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.""The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood,
providing you back it up with a Ph.D."
