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Here are two youtube.com sites featuring a 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 Dafoe Nelson Algren Live: Margo, read by Barry Gifford
The Nelson Algren Committee hosts
the 21st annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party on Saturday, March
27, 8 p.m. at St Paul’s/Acme Art Center, 2215 W. North Avenue
in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, Algren’s home
turf. The Party pays tribute to the National Book Award-winning
author of The Man with a Golden Arm, Chicago: City on the Make
and other works that combine gritty noir realism with a profound
compassion for the underdog.
The event also honors community artists and activists who work
in the Algren spirit. This year’s recipients of the Nelson
Algren Committee Award include film preservationist and presenter
extraordinaire James Bond and legendary stride piano player and
teacher Erwin Helfer. Past Algren Award winners – including
scholar and Obama biographer John K. Wilson, ace journalist Kari
Lydersen and political maven Don Rose – will attend the event
and say a few words.
Veteran photographer and Algren cohort Art Shay is a regular attendee
at the birthday event, and his slide presentation/Q&A will
give attendees a firsthand look at Algren’s world. This year’s
celebration will also feature Algren scholar Nathaniel Mills,
discussing Algren’s art and politics; notable local poets
Charlie Newman, John Goode and Paul Ryan; and musicians John Garvey
and Larry Jones. On display will be the Nelson Algren Archive,
a collection of materials put together by the Committee to commemorate
Algren’s tenure in Wicker Park, as well as video footage
of Algren in full storytelling action.
This year’s event is dedicated to the memory of Howard Zinn,
whose People’s History of the United States is history as
Algren would have written it, from the standpoint of humanity.
Our sponsor is the Near Northwest Arts Council, whose visionary
director, Laura Weathered, has overseen many a Birthday Party.
Admission is $10 at the door, with seniors and students (bring
that ID!) admitted at the knockdown price of five bucks. Libations
will be available at a cash bar, with the proceeds dedicated to
keeping Algren’s memory alive. Committee members Warren Leming
and Hugh Iglarsh will help MC this years event; Alice Prus will
lead partygoers in a rendition of the traditional Polish birthday
anthem Sto Lat, ably assisted by Nina Gaspich and Kurt Jacobsen.
Door prizes and refreshments will also be featured.
When the Committee started in the 1980s, all of Algren’s
work was out of print. In 2010, all of Algren’s work is available
(thanks in part to Committee support), his house is graced by
a plaque, he has a memorial fountain right on the Blue Line, City
on the Make has been dramatized by the Lookingglass troupe, and
a passel of startlingly famous writers and actors performed a
reading of his work at a centennial celebration last year at a
packed Steppenwolf Theatre. But Algren’s genius has never
been fully recognized in his hometown, and the Committee’s
work continues.
Past Algren Committee award winner Franklin Rosemont passed away April 11th, near his home in Chicago. Franklin was an Algren friend, and had a long career as a writer, poet, artist and publisher. He and his wife Penelope were crucial to saving and promoting Charles Kerr publishers, founded in 1886, and still the oldest radical publishing house in the US. Franklin was an authority on, and had written widely on the Surrealist movement. He and Penelope spent time in France during the 1960's, and met Andre Breton, and a number of the French Surrealist figures. The Rosemonts made their home in Chicago and were an essential part of Chicago's literary and artistic scene. Franklin and his wife had helped found the Surrealist focused, Bugs Bunny Gallery, on Chicago's Northside in the 1960's. Most recently, Franklin had helped edit a collection of radical and IWW song, published by the Charles Kerr Company.
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!
A Video . . . Nelson Algren's Last Night! . . . by Warren Leming & Carmine Cervi
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.
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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."