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The poster announces the upcoming reading by authors Peter Joseph and Rick Wallach. They are reading Ginzberg's "Howl" too, but they might be reading a number of things. An event not without humor, I suspect.
Rick Wallach, author and editor of a large number of books and articles, is a longtime leading Cormac McCarthy scholar and formerly an associate of the famous mythologists Joseph Campbell and Marcia Eliade.
Henry Miller wrote of the working man, as did Nelson Algren. Not many authors do that these days. I believe in the ideas set forth in Dan Bern's song, "Marilyn Monroe Should Have Married Henry Miller."
Making the rounds on the internet this Bloomsday was Eve Arnold's 1954 picture of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses:
This week, when discussing the use of the cat as a symbol of the mankind's animal nature, I recalled the opening of the film version of Nelson Algren's A Walk On The Wild Side. You can see it on youtube at this link.
You can also find the ending segment there, which has Brook Benton singing the jazz lyrics to the Elmer Bernstein's majestic theme. One night of praying, six nights of fun. The odds against going to heaven, six to one.
That doesn't sound like Algren's novel, but it does sound like the movie, which is something else again. The book differs and is much better, but even the novel was altered from Algren's original vision before publication. One deleted segment was later published as a short story in the Nelson Algren edited anthology, Nelson Algren's Lonesome Monsters.
I like the book cover with the two brick walls, the human figure clausterphobic and perhaps fearful, facing his own monster shadow in the alley. The first hardcover edition of Lonesome Monsters had a vortex or spiral as in the logo for the Hitchcock movie, Vertigo.
The cat sequence is the most memorable thing about the movie of A Walk on the Wild Side. Barbara Stynwyck and Anne Baxter seem to suffer through their roles. A fresh-faced Jane Fonda makes her appearence as the new girl at the brothel. When asked what she is doing there, she replies, "I run the candy concession."
Here are some more cat images for A Walk on the Wild Side, including the foreign film poster on which the movie was retitled, The Black Cat.
Tom Robbins is one of my favorite authors, a secular buddhist with a small b, an absurdist who believes that everything in this material vale dissolves in paradox and cosmic laughter.
The new book on him, just out, is a collection of his interviews, Conversations with Tom Robbins (Literary Conversations Series)
, nicely edited by Liam O. Purdon and Beef Torrey. We are also indebted to Torrey for his part in bringing us the magnificent Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1964-2008
.
Tom Robbins has always included secular buddhist Jim Harrison on the shortlist of his favorite authors. In a 1982 interview, Robbins said "When Jim Harrison strayed from the dark side into the light side with his novel, Warlock
, the critics who had been washing his feet (and rightly so) now began to dice them with razor blades. He was punished for going AWOL from Camp Desperation. Yet Warlock is just as tough and true, in its own way, as Harrison's earlier work."
In his latest interview with Torry, first published in this book, Robbins talks about his affinity with Jim Harrison for food writing, citing Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand and his own "Til Lunch Do Us Part" (included in the collection 
Wild Ducks Flying Backward). He seems to always be considering "the jelly doughnut, that plump pastry Pantheon, that unbroken circle, that female breast swollen with sweetness..."
Robbins also often discusses Nelson Algren and Henry Miller. He laments that these authors have either been forgotten or deliberately ignored, especially by the academic community.
Robbins says, "I suppose it's mandatory to refer to Algren as a 'realist,' despite the fact that the gritty pyrotechnics--the mixture of funk and liquid hydrogen--that lit up his paragraphs rocketed him into a zone more real than either realism or surrealism. Yes, and although I would without hesitation place his name in contention for the title of Greatest American Author of the 20th Century, and although I wrote a weekly column entitled "Walks On The Wildside" for my college newspaper, the presence of otherness in my work derives from my Asian and mythological studies, as well as from personal experience (psychedelic and otherwise), not one twig of it directly traceable to Algren's sooty urban elm."
"If anything in Algren influenced me, it would have been neither his characters nor his milieu, but the big jangling poetics , the deceptively sensitive slapstick humor, and the verb-surprises-noun bittersweet junkyard magic show of his style. That's not exactly traceable, either, although one could do worse than apprentice oneself to a supreme stylist. A novel without style is like a swan without feathers: it's just another plucked chicken."
"Anyone looking for early influences on my work, however, will need to shift their gaze beyond these shores. Specifically, they'll have to call out, in their best French accent, the names Francois Rabelais, Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, and most loudly, Alfred Jarry. Jarry's Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll Pataphysician
infected me like a virus, a feverish pathology for which there would be no cure except distance. . ."
Robbins also discusses Thomas Pynchon, Tom McGuane, Hunter Thompson, Haruki Murakami, Ken Kesey, and others. Fun to read, as Robbins himself is fun to read.
Books about books make up a considerable amount of my reading life, and I'll need a designated day every week to write about them. Sunday seems like the right day.
