Month: November 2008

Division Street America

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jon Fasman, Saul Bellow

My old hometown, Chicago, seems much on everybody’s mind lately. One of its greatest journalists, Studs Terkel, died last weekend, and it’ll host some kind of big political event this evening. I’ve had a hard time not thinking about the place—when the National Book Critics Circle recently asked its members to recommend books that speak to this particular political moment, Mike Royko‘s Boss was the first to spring to mind.

So novelist Jon Fasman‘s portrait of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood is worth a look—partly because it’s a literary story, looking at the neighborhood through Saul Bellow‘s eyes. But also because it captures the kind of tight-knit ethnic enclaves that make it seem less like a Big City and a little more livable:

My early memories are full of characters I would come to recognize (or at least call) Bellovian: Jewish wiseguys, street-smart autodidacts like my grandfather, an orphan raised in military school who became first a professional saxophonist and then a lawyer, who taught me how to play poker when I was 6. My grandfather also read voraciously; when he came across an unfamiliar word he wrote it on the book’s inside flap, then looked it up and used it as soon as he could. My grandmother could curse in Yiddish and quote Browning from memory with equal felicity. Art and commerce coexisted, rather than competing, in these people and in their milieu. Augie, Einhorn and Maurice spoke in their accents: adenoidal Midwestern with an unerasable Yiddish twang.

——

If you live in the D.C. area and you’re glutton for even more Election Day coverage than you’re probably already taking in, please swing by the Web site for my employer, Washington City Paper, which will be covering local and national affairs throughout the day. (In theory I’ll be riffing on the Maryland slots vote, but we’re all playing it by ear, pretty much.) If you have news about the election that you’d like to Twitter us about, tag them as #dcvotes and they’ll show up on our homepage.

A Film Called “Wanda”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo has an essay in the Guardian about Barbara Loden‘s 1970 film Wanda, the only feature she ever made. You could probably guess who wrote the piece from the beginning:

Early in the film a woman in the shape of a white shadow moves in long shot across a bitter grey landscape of slag heaps and mining equipment.

Thought DeLillo largely discusses Wanda as a curiosity piece in American ’70s film—not noirish, not social-realist, not political, “the dark side of the moon of Bonnie and Clyde“—he also describes his experiences as a filmgoer at the time of Wanda‘s release. New York theaters were, for want of a better word, DeLillo-esque places:

I went to the movies on weekday afternoons, a movie on a dead afternoon, the merest scatter of people in attendance, always someone reading the Village Voice in the half murk before the house lights died. In many cases I can recall today where I saw certain movies back then, drifting from the New Yorker Theater one day to the Bleecker Street the next, alert and ever expectant, ready to be taken out of the day, the week, the plodding writer’s one-room life, and into a fold of discontinuous space and time.

I haven’t seen the film, which got a DVD release in 2006. There’s a lengthy excerpt on YouTube, though, that seems to get at how Wanda “worked against the grain of its time”:

Barney Rosset’s Dirty Years

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Barney Rosset

When I first started hoovering paperbacks as a teenager, I wasn’t especially schooled in the distinctions between various publishers, but I smart enough to intuit that Grove Press books dealt in provocative stuff—the house published Hubert Selby‘s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Henry Miller‘s Tropic of Cancer, Kenzaburo Oe‘s A Personal Matter, John Rechy‘s City of Night, and Jack Kerouac‘s The Subterraneans. (That last book was a big inspiration to me at the time, though I’m not sure why now; reading it may simply has been the moment when I realized that books do liven up a long bus commute.)

It would take me a few years to learn about Grove Press’ publisher, Barney Rosset, and his Evergreen Review—or that he helped bring I Am Curious (Yellow) to American filmgoers, 99 percent of whom were dudes hugely disappointed that it wasn’t the porno that its rep suggested. Grove’s offerings don’t have the same power to shock these days—this is the house that put out Cold Mountain, after all, and though the Black Cat imprint seems eager to revive that old spirit, Michael Thomas‘ novel Man Gone Down was a disappointment to me (though not to the New York Times). All of which is to say I’m hoping that a D.C. theater will eventually show Obscene, a documentary about Rosset’s life in publishing. The Brooklyn Rail recently ran an excellent, wide-ranging interview with Rosset timed to the film’s release. A notable exchange:

Rail: A big part of your story is that you were in a time when there was a lot of censorship, a lot of constriction on culture. Did you find these books and these writers and get into the lawsuits in order to open up culture?

Rosset: I didn’t go through lawsuits to open up culture; I wanted to publish Henry Miller. That certainly involved fighting censorship. But the first thing I thought of was Miller. So, in other words, my thinking never went along the lines of, “We are doing all of this for a very set purpose.” I remember I became a member of the Communist party when I was at the University of Chicago. And after learning more I thought it was impossible! It was boring, stupid, and, although I agreed with many things, I quickly saw that I couldn’t continue doing something just because a long track ahead was laid out. So I, in other words, I don’t think I had a set “line” to accomplish one ideology. I thought Beckett was a great writer, I guess, no matter what he wrote. To me, it was good. I certainly was against censorship, in any way I ran into it. But I didn’t go out looking for new places. Growing up, I belonged to nothing because in a city like Chicago there were two groups that I think really had great prejudice against them, and that was the Jews and the Irish—and I was both of them! And they didn’t like each other. I felt that by not identifying with anything I would not censor, but they censored each other too, also [laughs].

In an interview with Chicagoist, co-director Neil Ortenberg explains how Rosset nearly earned himself a directing credit:

The other thing about filming him was that he really wanted to be a kind of co-director. Initially I just thought, oh, that’s Barney being crazy, that’s a nutty kind of thing. It was just a control freak thing. And then I realized that he just loves film, and here I was making a film about him. Barney knows no boundaries. So even though it seemed crazy to me, him being a co-director of his own documentary probably seemed completely reasonable to him. That caused a certain amount of confusion. Anyhow. The people we interviewed, there were no hard feelings. The biggest problem we encountered was–all the reviews so far have characterized the film more or less as a love letter to Barney. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted it to show Barney as this kind of tragic hero but with all of the darkness and the demons that haunt him. I wanted to show that, but I don’t think maybe we showed some of that.

The trailer: