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Summary Report: The 21st Annual Nelson Algren Birthday Party, March 27, 2010
The Nelson Algren Committee, now in its 21st year, held what may have been its best birthday party ever under the auspices of Laura Weathered’s St. Paul’s Cultural Center, at 2215 W. North Avenue. It featured a rich and lively mixture of performance, literary discussion, anecdote, imagery, music and memory, brought together in an atmosphere of openness and spontaneity.
The evening was dedicated to the late Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, who was honored by a poem and short presentation by Committee members Warren Leming and Hugh Iglarsh, respectively. Zinn not only wrote history, he also made it as a committed civil rights leader and anti-war activist. His work makes an interesting companion piece to Algren’s own Chicago: City on the Make, which is very much a people’s history of our own city.
The centerpiece of every party is the giving of the Nelson Algren Committee Awards to local artists and activists who have demonstrated “ a conscience in touch with humanity.” Award winners this year were green advocate Erika Allen, veteran film presenter and preservationist James Bond and stride piano legend Erwin Helfer. Each gave short, pointed talks on their work and its relationship to the Algren legacy. Helfer showed his gratitude by playing several crowd-pleasing piano compositions.
The academic community was represented at this year’s event by scholar and University of Michigan doctoral candidate Nathaniel Mills, who gave an informative talk on some of the more subtle political dimensions of Algren’s fiction. He was joined by prize-winning author and DePaul University creative writing instructor Bayo Ojikutu, who read from his hard-hitting, Chicago-based novel, Free Burning.
Poets Charlie Newman (also a Committee member), Paul Ryan and John Goode favored the audience with a rousing recitation of poetry in the Algren vein. They were joined by Walter Plumer, who read from his own work and spoke of his connection to J.J. Jameson/Norman Porter, the poet and Algren enthusiast who now languishes in a Massachusetts prison.
In what proved to be one of the most moving moments of the evening, Algren fan Orsolya Bene gave a short talk on what Algren’s work has meant to her, and issued an appeal for help with her research. Former UPI reporter Max Vanzi spoke of his debt to Algren and his long-term, long-distance relationship with the Committee. On his own dime, he came all the way from Sacramento, California to take part in the festivities. And past Algren Committee Award winner David Williams visited us from Madison, Wisconsin to discuss the importance of Algren in understanding the current situation.
French-born novelist Delphine Pontvieux gave a moving reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to her lover Algren, and spoke about the relationship, one of the great romances of the 20th century – and soon to be the subject of a movie starring Johnny Depp as Algren.
Photographer and long-time Algren companion Art Shay, along with documentarian and Columbia College Professor Michael Caplan, spoke gently and graciously about Algren’s life and work, accompanied by photos and a trailer of Caplan’s upcoming film about Algren.
Actors Richard Henzel and Charles Richards did stellar turns as beatnik bard Lord Buckley and Algren respectively. They were joined by pianist Jonathan Menchin and author Kurt Jacobsen. The Algren dialogue, based on the book Conversations with Nelson Algren, was edited by Committee member Hugh Iglarsh, who also co-wrote the extensive program notes with fellow member Warren Leming.
Alice Prus and Nina Gaspich of the Committee provided birthday cake, song, goodwill and stellar performances at the sales table where tickets were taken and Algren wares and lore dispensed as the occasion arose. A non-documented but very real aspect of every Algren fest is the intense conversation that ensues, as performers and audience members join in discussions of the themes uncovered by the event.
John Garvey and Larry Jones provided offstage musical help and cheered the evening on. Webmaster Bill Bentley was able to get all the requisite information ready well before the event occurred. He – along with Ms. Weathered and the Committee – got the word out via conversation, advertisements, listings, radio, a poster or two, electronic signage and the Internet. The result was a gathering of over 100 Algren party veterans and novices – a mixed multitude from near and far, joined by their admiration for the author who understood Chicago like nobody else.
Newly available was the Nelson Algren “mugshot mug,” an unholy grail bearing the iconic jailhouse picture of Algren, along with the Committee’s URL. It proved to be a popular souvenir of the event. The mug project – along with the party itself – was in part made possible by the Wicker Park-Bucktown SSA #33, which has once again extended its generous support to our community venture.
As the guests departed into the Chicago night, most seemed exhilarated by their contact with Algren’s art and impressed by his continuing relevance. Like Algren’s best work, the party isn’t always slick but is every moment real. As one older partygoer noted enthusiastically, “I didn’t think things like this existed anymore” – a sentiment shared by many of those who attended.
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
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 Don Rose Laura Weathered Jeff Huebner Glenda Daniel Diana Berek John K. Wilson Denis Mueller James Bond Carlos Cortez Roberto Lopez Vesna Rebernak Carl Davidson Lew Rosenbaum Kari Lydersen Ken Dunn Erwin Helfer Jon Jost David Williams Penelope & Franklin Rosemont Marguerite Horberg Bob Rudner Alma Washington Erika R. Allen Kate Hogan Peter Kuttner 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."
