Nelson Algren: The answer, plus what the ancients can teach us

Yesterday's post here at Detectives Beyond Borders asked What ever happened to Nelson Algren, and why? The good people who run the Nelson Algren Twitter account suggested I might find some answers here. The article's headline:

"Despite his literary brilliance and humanist resolve, Nelson Algren was the type of loser this country just can't stomach."

***

 I miss the medal stand in the How Many Books Do You Own? Olympics (fourth place, behind Ali Karim, Jon and Ruth Jordan, and the Library of Congress), but I still can't take three steps anywhere in my house without tripping over a pile of mid-listers. So I took two bags of books to a used bookstore today and traded them for credit and three books.

Two of the three have some connection to crime: James Ellroy's Crime Wave, and Sophocles' Oedipus plays. Everyone knows about Oedipus Rex's sublime plotting, but what grabbed me was Oedipus' declaration in the prologue that

"Children!
"I would not have you speak through messengers
"And therefore I have come myself to hear you."

That has to be as good a job as any writer has ever done getting right to the heart of the action without, however, resorting to desperate action for the sake of action. It's a perfect balance among action, atmosphere, and suspense.  The ancients have much to teach us.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

What ever happened to Nelson Algren, and why?

Nelson Algren was not a crime writer, but he wrote about hustlers and gamblers and addicts and hoods and corrupt politicians. While such non-crime writers as Charles Bukowski and John Fante and Jim Tully occasionally find their way into discussions of crime fiction, however, I have never heard Algren's name at a crime convention or read it on a crime blog. Why is this?

(Nelson Algren Fountain base with part of 
inscription from Chicago: City on the Make)

I have not read Algren, but last month I stayed in the heart of Algren country in Chicago's West Town, a block from the small, boarded-up fountain in the "Polish Triangle" that I think is the neighborhood's only memorial to Algren. The inscription at the fountain's base reads: "For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart" — a sentiment perhaps out of step with contemporary America.

(The Nelson Algren Fountain)

(The Man With the Golden Arm was the first winner of the National Book Award for fiction and was made into a celebrated film starring Frank Sinatra as the splendidly named Frankie Machine. Algren was Simone de Beauvoir's lover for years, when she could get that pesky Jean-Paul Sartre out of the way, and I'm guessing Lou Reed read Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side. The inscription on the fountain's base comes from Algren's essay Chicago: City on the Make, a copy of which I could not find in Chicago.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

A fond farewell to L.A.

Los Angeles is an easy target, and the jokes are as cheap as they are deserved. The smog. The corruption. The shallow garishness of the parvenu. In fact, there is much of beauty to see here (OK, there; I'm back home now), some of it due uniquely to the city's social and historical circumstances. While I catch up on work and recover from jet lag, I'll show you a bit of it before returning to my normal programming later this week. All photos by your humble blogkeeper.

Los Angeles has some fine older buildings, though it has leveled many and done less than it might have to preserve the rest.

Its industrialists and other moneymakers caught the art bug later than did their East Coast counterparts, which means they were left to acquire unusual and eccentric pieces by European artists after the artists' major works had been scooped up by rich, socially ambitious collectors in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.

The Norton Simon Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have excellent collections of Asian art, and the Getty has all kinds of good things, both at its main museum and also at the Getty Villa. And you may have heard about the city's sunsets and magnificent trees. Have a good night. I'll be back.

(A weather-related note: I began this journey in Chicago, where the locals went out in T-shirts when temperatures hit the low 50s. I ended it in Los Angeles, where Angelenos shivered in coats, hats, scarves, and gloves in 60-degree weather my first two days in town. The United States is one big country.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Tales From a Train: The Judy Bobalik Dia Sin Pantalones

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper_

My second day on the Southwest Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles began with words no leisure traveller wants to hear: "LAST CALL FOR BREAKFAST!" So I high-tailed it to the dining car wearing nothing but a pair of lounge pants (just a fancy word for pajamas or long underwear), a T-shirt, my gray sweater, and my brown Rockports, and I stayed that way the entire day, except for a brief stop in Raton, New Mexico, when I put on pants to brave the high-desert snow. Just try that on a plane.

*

The multi-headed sculpture above lives at the Art Institute of Chicago and depicts Karttikeya, the principal Hindu god of war.  Its 12th-century sculptor, and the tradition in which he or she worked, must have had some clear-headed ideas about the effects of war if they depicted its god as able to see in all directions.

These dancing beauties from the Khmer period in Cambodia (c. 10th century), on the other hand, are apt to encourage more cheerful thoughts.

And finally, just because this would not be a Detectives Beyond Borders travel post without a photo of buildings or trees, here's a photo, also from Chicago, of buildings and trees.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Chicago, city of poles

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Totem on left: (teeth chattering): "Oh, dear! The museum closes at 3 today for a women's board meeting. Should we tell him?"

Totem on right (smiling sardonically): "The early closing is right there on the Web site. Let the idiot read more carefully next time. And the schmuck calls himself an editor."

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OK, so all I got to see of the Field Museum this afternoon was the Stanley Field Hall, thanks to that early closing. But what I saw was impressive, including not just my two polish friends, but also Sue (John McFetridge will like this one.)

And Chicago's architecture is so rich that any excursion downtown is like a walk through a museum, so this was still a hell of a day.

This is what Rome must have been like when Raphael was sneaking into the Sistine Chapel to look at Michelangelo's still-in-progress ceiling frescoes and crib ideas for his own work in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura.

What other city has ever produced such a feast for the eyes? What combination of genius, imagination, and money made it happen? And why in Chicago?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The greatest intersection in the world: 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago

The excellent 57th Street Books.
on, er, 57th Street

The University of Chicago gave the world the atomic bomb and Milton Friedman. Its peacefully isolated campus in Hyde Park also contains what must be one of the world's most aesthetically elevating intersections, that of 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, whose northeast corner is home to Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, and whose southwest corner houses the Museum of the Oriental Institute.

Robie House, 1908-1910, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright was one of the twentieth century's great architects, maybe the greatest, and the Oriental Institute houses one of the world's best collections of Near and Middle Eastern antiquities. And it doesn't just show the treasures, it excavated many of them.  On top of all this dizzying cultural wealth at 58th and Woodlawn, you can get a terrific pizza just two blocks away. What intersection in what city can match all this?

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper, who will now get some sleep because he has museums to visit tomorrow.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Detail from the decoration at the palace
 of Sargon II of Assyria

Hand-wringing Mesopotamian priest.

Crime fiction at the Art Institute of Chicago, plus a question for readers

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942.
Oil on canvas, 84.1 x 152.4 cm, 33.125 x 60 in Art Institute of Chicago

"Just then we had another customer. A car squeaked to a stop outside and the swinging door came open. A fellow came in who looked a little in a hurry. He held the door and ranged the place quickly with flat, shiny, dark eyes. He was well set up, dark, good-looking in a narrow-faced, tight-lipped way. His clothes were dark and a white handkerchief peeped coyly from his pocket and he looked cool as well as under a tension of some sort. I guessed it was the hot wind. I felt a bit the same myself only not cool.

"He looked at the drunk's back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in-down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself-and spoke to the bar kid.

"`Seen a lady in here, buddy? ...'"

— Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind"

Statue of the God Horus as a Falcon,
Egypt, Ptolemaic period (335-30 BC),
Art Institute of Chicago

"`Well, what did he say?' she asked with half-playful petulance.

"`He offered me five thousand dollars for the black bird.'"

— Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

*** 

I saw the art; I thought of the writing. But the purest piece of crime fiction here at the Art Institute of Chicago tells a story by itself, no outside writing needed.

The artist: Goya. The paintings: Friar Pedro and El Maragato. The series of six small pictures gives us Friar Pedro (a Gerry Kells or Tough Dick Donahue for his time) foiling, disarming, and shooting the bandit El Margato. The bandit threatens the friar, the friar wrestles the bandit, clubs him with a gun, shoots him, and ties him up.

Friar Pedro Offers Shoes to El Maragato and Prepares
to Push Aside His Gun, Francisco José de Goya
y Lucientes. 1806, Oil on panel, 11.5 x 15.75 in.
(29.2 x 38.5 cm) Art Institute of Chicago

And you know the stock hard-boiled scene where the hero contemplates and analyzes his chances of distracting then jumping the bad guy so he can take away his gun? A thousand crime writers have written the scene in this century and the last one. Goya painted it in 1806.

What works of art have made you think: Wow, that's a crime story!

© Peter Rozovsky 2013 

A tale of three cities, or: No crime fiction, please; this is Philadelphia

Since I'll soon be in Chicago for a few days and then Los Angeles, this is a good time to bring back an old post about Chicago's decision a few years ago to honor Raymond Chandler, who was born there, though he will be forever associated with Los Angeles. That post, in turn, reminds of another I made about the high-mindedness of my own city's One Book ... program. No Chandler or Hammett or David Goodis here; this is Philadelphia.

 ============

 Julia Buckley is one of several bloggers to note Chicago's decision to feature Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye in its One Book, One Chicago program, complete with discussions, readings, seminars, screenings and other events of various kinds.

A number of American cities run similar programs under such names as "One City, One Book", and I've never felt entirely comfortable with the concept. Why? Because I'm not sure uniformity of reading choices or of anything else is a good thing. Even the slogan "One City, One Book" has disquieting historical overtones, unintended though they may be. Still, Chandler is a refreshingly unhigh-minded choice, for which Chicago deserves a hearty clap between its broad shoulders.

All right, readers, you've just been elected mayor of the municipal jurisdiction where you live. What's your choice for One City, One (Suggested) Crime Book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008/2013