Bellow short stack

Saul Bellow published 100 years ago this month: http://t.co/D1ufz2rzBh #Birth of the #Writer

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) June 4, 2015

3 favorite Saul Bellow characters or scenes 1) Ravelstein watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls 2) Sammler observing, famously & 1/2

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) June 4, 2015

3) Saul Bellow's depiction in Humboldt's Gift of Delmore Schwartz as "the first poet with power brakes"; fav prose, opening para. of Herzog.

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) June 4, 2015

somber city?

We're in Chicago--with no periods, semicolons, or colons on this netbook--but we're here, at the Association for Business Communications Conference, hobnobbing with the B-School and Communications crowd, perhaps unlike creative writers, they can discern a career path in the near and far terms, so now I feel like a paragraph from Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Camera, stopping with commas, and then moving on, it's life in windy weather, indeed

but i wanted to drift back to the bit of Saul Bellow quoted by Fred Exley, the "somber city" of Augie's first paragraph if I'm not mistaken, and truth be told, I've read four or five Bellow novels but not that one and yet I think of it a lot, think of reading it, own it in fine trade paper, and have already named a central character in a future novel Auggie in recognition of Bellow's fellow and also the Harvey Keitel cigar-store photographer in Paul Auster and Wayne Wang's Smoke

But back to Chicago--is it a somber city? it certainly is a windy one, so much so that our flight was delayed three hours due to strong gusts and then receiving luggage straight from the plane, outside on the runway became an exercise in survival of the most sensibly dressed, and it helped if you hid behind the other passengers and let their bodies break the wind (so to speak)

Chicago hasn't seemed so somber, it's seemed cold, and we haven't really been very far from the hotel, just one trip to Chinatown, which seemed quite empty, and this could be due to the economy or the cold although there were people inside the restaurants, we were told by the concierge to take a taxi because they don't want guests walking by the government housing on the way to Chinatown, a "for your own safety" kind of thing, so we passed the projects in a taxi minivan (seeing more of those for whatever reason), and we saw some people but neither the buildings nor the citizens looked particularly somber although at the restaurant, Old Sze Chuan, it was more or less, "first to knock, first admitted"

OK, maybe we gather more data and report back later, we're hoping to see University of Chicago later and will report back on the ghosts of Bloom and Bellow if such are seen preparing for their Halloween spooking

PS--amazon recently notified me that bellow's letters are available there at discount

dale drews

I won't be able to do this justice but wanted to get some notes down on the passing of a close family friend. Dale Drews shared many, many Thanksgivings with us at my mother's old apartment in University City. I met him in the very early 1980s when he lived around 49th and Osage, and I was lucky enough to see him a couple times recently and he even got to meet Yiyi and Xiaoli.

I learned all kinds of things from Dale over the years; topics of instruction related to sociology, history, hot sauce, pacifism, humanism, the difference between agnosticism and atheism, the University of Chicago, and how a young man from Iowa knocked on the door to gain admittance. I'm not sure I ever would have become a college instructor or tried to write a novel whose main character is an adjunct if I hadn't known Dale during my formative years. And I'm almost certain that knowing Dale and what he was about and believed in was a main reason I was so intent on devouring Marx, Rousseau, and other continental thinkers when I went off to college.

In fact, I recently chose one of Rousseau's quototations as the prefatory quote for the novel, and I know it is one that Dale would enjoy discussing and then perhaps adding a final comment in his very dry wit. It is even the case that his medical emergency in 1994 was what put me in front of a college classroom for the first time; I proctored a final exam for one of his classes at West Chester University, not knowing that within two years I'd be a teaching assistant at Temple with my own papers to grade and soon after deeply rooted to my own adjunct shuffle around town in Philly. So perhaps the way he led his life helped lead me to my own.

Almost every year we came together for Thanksgiving, Dale would say a few words before we ate; a paraphrase would include, "in reaching for these dishes, we are reaching for each other, and in reaching for each other, we are reaching for the highest."

Now Dale, world willing, has attained the highest. Peace.