a footnote from the Atlas

* More than forty years on, I could tell you the brand of cigarette that my intellectual heroes smoked: Clement Greenberg, unfiltered Camels; Harold Rosenberg, Pall Malls, Lowell, the short-lived Trues. It's hard to recall now, as cigarettes are being phased out of American life--some brands no longer exist--and smoking is often seen as a marker of mental illness, that in those days almost everyone smoked.

This tangent reminds me of my family lore, that my mother's father died from "smoking unfiltered Camels and eating red meat late at night." Certainly it's true, I've taught entire sections of college English in which there is hardly a smoker in the room, yet the habit may remain more pervasive than we realize. Although the N + 1 and Jacobin intellectuals may have traded in their daily pack for exercise machines, there are still plenty of smokers around. We find them outside of campus buildings and bars, or in designated smoking areas. Go abroad, and you can see the habit remains much more pervasive, or at least, there are fewer restrictions as to where one might partake. At current prices in the U.S., it's amazing to think how much smokers could save if they could quit. Anyway, if you're interested in 20th-century literature and the biographies of writers, I highly recommend James Atlas's book.

James Atlas On Biography

I'm a hundred pages into James Atlas's The Shadow in the Garden, his memoir about his life writing biography, and I'm greatly enjoying it. Although his principle subjects, Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, figure prominently, there is so much more on various writers, biographers, and writer-biographers. Some of the footnotes are extremely detailed or hilarious as well. Thomas Carlyle, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Kazin, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Stafford are only a handful of  writers who are included in the narrative. The recurring theme of writers dying isolated in cramped apartments would make Cyrus Duffleman proud.

Ken Ingunas

I recommend Ken Ilgunas's two travel narratives Walden on Wheels and Trespassing Across America. Both have strong elements of memoir, often self-reflective comedy, and heartfelt views of what we are doing to the planet as well as each other and why we might want to change our ways. Partly because they are interesting books and partly because I so rarely read three books by the same author within a couple months, I may try to interview Ilgunas about these two along with his more polemical This Land is Our Land although I'm momentarily so deep in the weeds with my own problems and concerns that for now this blog is the best I can do on Ken's behalf. Please see Goodreads for my other recent reads.

László Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240

"Because they couldn't publish their own work under the Communist regime, the greatest writers and poets became translators. That's why we had wonderful translations of Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, and of every great American writer from Faulkner onward. The first translation of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was really marvelous."

~~ The Paris Review, Summer 2018

Independence Day, 2018

On my way to tweeting "The Bicentennial with Grandpa Andy," I came across an excerpt from Auggie's Revenge. 

For old times' sake, "The Bicentennial with Grandpa Andy," a July 4th memoir excerpt: https://t.co/Pyg6LE3zEh

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) July 4, 2018

For July 4th, I shared "The Bicentennial with Grandpa Andy," and that led me to this #excerpt from Auggie's Revenge:  #gig #economy #comic #crime #novel  https://t.co/9tweV2SgCp https://t.co/IR7iEtF8Hg

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) July 4, 2018

Stay safe and sober, America.

Roses Are Red and We Run Bad

New indie fiction titles We Run Bad and Roses are Red, Violets are stealing loose change from my pockets while I sleep are out and about.