Czech of Ohio

American Czechoslovakian Club of Dayton, Ohio

the same obligation to be factual

A New Yorker article on Ernest Hemingway, which included a note about Papa's attack on Alfred Kazin after a bad review of Across the River and into the Trees, reminded me of a long quotation about Kazin from a book I'd recently come across.

"His memoirs tend to be even more memorable than his criticism, partly because when writing about himself he never felt the same obligation to be factual that he felt toward the writers he revered.
He constantly reshapes facts about his family and his marriages: the same wife gets different names in different books, marriages are conflated, he seems lonely, only child because his sister Pearl--she married the sociologist Daniel Bell--never gets mentioned."

~~from the Alfred Kazin section of Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers.

So perhaps Kazin could be perceived as a "Critic Laureate" at the Less United States of Kudera, as he continues to get mention at this blog. I wonder what the author of On Native Grounds would write about the current literary scene, both in and outside the academy.

29 grand

In 2014, the median American worker earned $28,851.21.

a review of frade killed ellen

The Next Best Book Club has posted Lavinia Ludlow's review of Frade Killed Ellen.

Review contributor @LaviniaLudlow whips up a 4 star review for @kudera's FRADE KILLED ELLEN. Check it https://t.co/eQjmjPClos

— TNBBC (@TNBBC) October 20, 2015

Turquoise Truck

Turquoise Truck is now available for sale and can be read online or on many e-readers.

Kenneth Goldsmith in The New Yorker

I'd read so many online responses to Yi Fen Chou (the "pooped" poet), Vanessa Place, and Kenneth Goldsmith that I did something I rarely do these days.  Which was to sit in the library and read the entire Alec Wilkinson piece on KG, a poet I'd never heard of until the last few weeks, despite spending the majority of my life in University City in West Philly. It's almost a surprise I wasn't born in Clark Park, right where John Ebersole has sworn off white poets writing about race and dreamed up Public Pool. Based on Ebersole's online poetry personality, I'd assume he is a migrant to University City, not someone like me who grew up there, but I don't know. Anyway, the un-New Yorker-ish "resentfully" (an "ly" from those guys?) is noted, a jab that doesn't add anything to the profile, but in a life of grading, parenting, commuting, surviving, it was reading to enjoy. It was a break, a chance to read an extended profile of a writer, and I've enjoyed many of these over the years, often when I was previously unfamiliar with the writer's creative work, and mostly from Harper's Magazine or The New Yorker. Wilkinson's profile captured KG's quirks. I saw multiple points of view about his poetry's value, or not, thoughts about his copying, and I appreciated he's read Ulysses several times and much admires Benjamin, Joyce, etc. (these guys aren't my guys, but it's disturbing that they could be dismissed as dead white guys). Goldsmith comes across as a nerd-dandy-intellectual of sorts, somewhat aware that he is playing the poet-fool, out there hustling in funny clothes. So he's a human being—a goof?, a jerk?—but not a murderer. He's a wealthy man, perhaps, but no doubt, this is only relative to the pervasive poverty in the world of poetry (news alert: in fact, he is rich by any definition although the pervasive poverty of poetry remains). His projects sound creative, if not poetic, and he'd tell you, I think, he's a plagiarizer by more than one definition. It would make sense to me if his appropriation did not stand the test of time although with art, and the commerce surrounding it, one never knows. Past poets who mastered PR and marketing in their own lifetime have managed to stay in print long after it. I'm thinking mainly of Allen Ginsberg, whose strategy (sorry, I meant spontaneous impulse to do this or that) included meeting late in life with writers associated with WWII fascism, Celine and Pound, protesting nukes and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and standing in the background of Bob Dylan music videos (for more detail, read American Scream). Even when he rambles on race, I doubt The Donald will reference KG as "one of those New York Jew poets who cracks out of tune," but KG, VP, and PP's detractors have gotten me reading more poems. It reminded me to hunt down some poetry and prose from a writer I associate with Philly, Linh Dinh, as well as some new ones, Franny Choi, Nomi Stone, Jenny Zhang. And by coincidence I heard Candace Wiley and Skip Eisiminger read poetry at an event I organized down here. My version of Philly poetry has nothing to do with KG. It starts with Lamont Steptoe and Don Riggs, and it extends to so many talented others who've mainly lived in South Philly, Center City, particularly back when it was affordable, or even in the suburbs. These poets have studied and taught variously at Penn, Drexel, Temple, CCP, and other schools; some are from the region and others moved to Philly because an artist could afford its cost of living. After Alec on Kenny, I was on a roll, reading about and by all manner of older affluent why-pee-poes. I read most of the Jane Smiley interview in the new print copy of The Paris Review, highly recommended, and then a chunk of the Bernie Sanders profile from Mother Jones. From the New York Review of Books, I read a paragraph or two of George Soros on Ukraine, but that was all I could stand although I often recommend his father Tivadar's book on surviving the Holocaust in Hungary. I thought I'd read in the print version that Goldsmith had relatives on both sides who died in the Shoah, but when I returned more recently to the online version of the article, even after some skimming, I could not find this detail although that's not to say that these facts had been disappeared.

Clemson University literary reading

Award-winning faculty read fiction and poetry in Daniel Studio on Wednesday, September 30 from 3 to 4 p.m. Join Professor Emeritus Skip Eisiminger, 2015 Best of American Poetry winner Candace Wiley, and award-winning novelist Alex Kudera for a fun free literary reading you won't want to miss. Please see the Clemson calendar or Facebook invitation for more information.

we're not all Jenny Zhang's parents, but

"[My father] sure as hell was not jumping with joy and support when I said I wanted to be a writer. My mother cried for weeks and threatened to tell Stanford I was a convicted criminal so they would revoke my admission if I didn’t promise that I would not try to be a writer. I didn’t promise and my mother never made good on hers. They were scared for me. . ."

~~from "They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist" by Jenny Zhang

Fight for Your Long Day: Classroom Edition

Hi Folks,

We're in the early stages of preparing a Classroom Edition of Fight for Your Long Day. It will be published by Hard Ball Press and will include the full text of the novel and additional essays on higher-education and contract-worker issues. It will also include author and other adjunct interviews as well as an extended listing of texts for additional reading. Feel free to share or please comment here, e-mail, tweet, or message me (I do check my "Other" folder at Facebook) if you have writing you'd like to offer or suggest for inclusion. Limited funds are available to pay for reprints or new material. Included articles will address rising student debt, adjunct narratives, labor organizing (pros and cons), impact of pay-per-course contracts on teaching, the denigration of literature or the humanities in general, and more. I'm also interested in adding an essay that considers, as the novel does, the relationship between American contract work and the more global, transnational struggle of workers, with particular interest in educational and literary workers such as teachers, translators, reviewers, etc.

I'll edit this post as necessary.

Best of luck this fall.

coming soon: Turquoise Truck

a car-sales e-single from Mendicant Bookworks