"As New" Chump Change

Make an offer on the original English-language trade paperback of Dan Fante's debut novel. It's an extremely rare "as new" edition of Chump Change from Sun Dog Press.

John Martin, rest in peace

John Martin of Black Sparrow Press passed on. This morning, I read a memory of a rare book dealer purchasing and reading Bukowski's poetry after seeing the film Barfly in the 1980s, and then I discovered The New York Times obituary released from its paywall. The Charles Bukowski introduction to John Fante's Ask the Dust is a favorite piece of writing published by Black Sparrow. Bukowski also wrote a famous letter of gratitude to his publisher. Rest in peace, John Martin.

a happier life

"I didn't want Rocco to finish his life on the back seat of my car surrounded by hack fiction, cigarette butts and empty potato chip bags. I wanted him to die at Jonathan Dante's home in Malibu. He'd lived his life near the smell of his master and the things that were familiar—on the carpet in the old man's den where he would snooze while my father banged away on his typewriter hour after hour, where the sweetness of the ocean's sound and the taste of the salted air would remind him of a happier life."

~~ from Chump Change by Dan Fante

John sent me. . .

"John sent me," Akira said, "Told me to Ask the Dust."

~~ from Chinese Gucci by Hosho McCreesh

Dan Fante, writer

The writer Dan Fante joined his father John Fante this week. Both were novelists of Los Angeles championed in France for their "down and out in America" themes. Dan was published in French before he was published in English, and his best works were Chump Change and the family memoir, Fante. Mostly off the beaten path as an adult, Dan was teaching at the UCLA extension school for writers in some of his last years. Possibly his father would be seen as the more "important" literary figure (Ask the Dust, Brotherhood of the Grape, Dreams of Bunker Hill, screenplay credits including one for Algren's Walk on the Wild Side), and Dan was quite proud of his father's accomplishment and his Italian heritage. Late in life, Dan was partnering with his native province in Italy and getting his works translated into Italian. I discovered Chump Change in a Barnes and Noble across the country, back when small-press titles had a shot of sneaking into the chain stores, even if the authors weren't "local." Fifteen years later it would be far more difficult to learn of writers like the Fantes although since I found Chump Change in Philly, I've seen that Dan has had most of his books reprinted by a New York big, and almost all of John's titles have stayed in print and seem to be selling as well as ever. Famously, it was Charles Bukowski who discovered John Fante in the Los Angeles library, and would help revive interest in the author years later. They're all gone now, but not forgotten.

Guardian obituary: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/25/dan-fante-underground-writer-legacy-chump-change-mooch

My interview with Dan in 2009: http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2009/05/21/an-interview-with-author-dan-fante/

Dan Fante articles in the L.A. Times: http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/dan-fante

Other obituaries: 

Examiner: http://www.examiner.com/article/daniel-smart-dan-fante-february-19-1944-november-23-2015

Italoamericano: http://www.italoamericano.org/story/2015-12-11/dan-fante

L. A. Books

I've recently been enjoying novels set mainly in Southern California such as The White Boy Shuffle and How To Get Into The Twin Palms. I've also been following So Cal fires and oil spills, and I'm even getting e-mail  on L.A. social-justice "gap year" programs.

So, naturally, I took it all as a sign that I was due to link and list:

Novels:

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Chump Change by Dan Fante

Ask the Dust by John Fante

Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante

The Road To Los Angeles by John Fante

Which Side Are You On? by Ryan Lee Wong

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The Player by Michael Tolkien

How To Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak

Memoir:

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski

Fante by Dan Fante

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

I'll add links and other books soon, but please feel free to note your own in a comment.

a bit more Buk

For hump day, here's just a bit more from John Fante's star student, two-bit Chuck.

And here's another because Bukowski was hardly an average fellow.

Fante Published Today

Dan Fante's Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking, and Surviving is officially out and about today. I was lucky enough to read it earlier this summer, and my immediate sense was that Dan had written his best book yet.

It also got me back to exploring his father's novels, and I particularly enjoyed Dreams from Bunker Hill and The Brotherhood of the Grape.

The Less United States of Kudera is wishing Dan well at his hometown reading this Friday night at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Here's my interview with Dan on his Bruno Dante novels, his father, alcoholics anonymous, and more.

The Adventures of Augie March

Before I drove up to Philly, in bed but awake at 7 a.m., I shoved down the last ten pages of The Adventures of Augie March, and I can tell you the last word was America even if it would be ridiculous to suggest this novel could be the last word on America.

In fact, it's not, and although I know that from reading James Atlas's biography and other sources, Bellow ended his life in favor of Augie's active spirit as opposed to the hopelessness and fatalism of the much shorter Seize the Day, it still seems that you don't have to live through the Great Depression or the current situation to recognize that by the numbers, the protagonist's life in Seize the Day much more accurately depicts life for many more Americans than the adventures of Augie. (Still, we could consider that's not the point at all, and that while both inform, it is Augie March that better entertains.)

And for the slim majority of Americans that do live their whole lives floating well above surface, housing and health benefits intact, etc--well, their adventures are not often with gigantic eagles, gamblers, thinkers, and Russian revolutionaries on the run, but rather, exist on planned vacations and shopping and HDTV where some other fellow is ramming his head into an incredible hulk of a defensive line.

As for the book itself, similar to Ravelstein, my interest waned when Bellow took his protagonist South of the border. Save for the Trotsky section in Mexico, I found most of the writing much more exciting when Augie was in America, Chicago for the most part, but not exclusively. I can't say why that it is, and it could surely be coincidence.

I can see why Bellow's friends and admirers were downright angry at the Atlas biography, and yet, frankly, it was good, easy reading, and in some ways, to me, the man's life was more interesting than his prose.

Another favorite nonfiction concerning Bellow is the chapter included in Brent Staples's Parallel Time, which although seemingly based upon a misreading or incomplete reading of Mr Sammler's Planet offers a great chase scene and is still fascinating in the way it brings perspective to the circumstances in which the canonical writer was living at University of Chicago in the late sixties and early seventies. I highly encourage a read of Staples's book concurrent with Sammler.

Bellow did come through with many great quotable sections of Augie, and I'll leave you with this one (for clarity, in short-quote format--with quotation marks, period in the wrong place, but alas, no identifying tag because I have no colon on this netbook and I just drove myself mad pasting in all the periods!--not because I'd want any of you to ignore MLA format for long quotations).

"Take the fact that people generally were full of loathing and it cost them an effort to look at one another. Mostly they wanted to be left alone. And they dug for unreality more than for treasure, unreality being their last great hope because then they could doubt that what they knew about themselves was true" (482).

And as we do, we move on, and now I'm reading number 197 of The Paris Review (great interviews with Samuel Delany and William Gibson, photography, and the next section of an early "lost" Bolano novel) and John Fante's Dreams from Bunker Hill.

Fante criticism but no fiction

Well, I've been blogging on Saving Bookstores (and buying more than I should, too), but I wanted to come clean and be sure that everyone knows that I purchased the John Fante straight from the Evil Bezos himself on Friday. This was after I discovered that my otherwise wonderful university library had books of John Fante criticism but none of his novels.

Please thank Allen Ginsberg if this first thought is in fact the best one:

The parasites suck the host dry and then live to gloat about it in the stacks!

(I should come clean and admit that I checked out both books of criticism and have enjoyed some of the essays so far. In fact, if you count comp and business writing as separate strands of college English, then for some time now, I've been swinging from far more than two sides of the departmental plate.)

Well, I've read The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust, so I ordered Dreams from Bunker Hill and The Brotherhood of the Grape.

If you want to learn more about John Fante, or the writing of his son Dan, then John's Ask the Dust and Dan's Chump Change are good places to start, but Dan Fante's memoir Fante: A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking, and Surviving coming later this summer, will work just as well. Maybe better.