Fans of Seymour Krim show up here and there, and writer and editor Ezra Glinter showed up at Zeek. He interviewed me about my new Krim collection, Missing a Beat, and I talked and talked.
Here it is.
Comments (0)Ah, what a sweetie. We need a million more like her.
“To find a shoe has always been my dream,” is what Armenian doctoral student, Diana Zardaryan, told a New York Times reporter about her discovery of a 5,500-year-old leather shoe during a dig in Armenia.
How many people have their own individual dreams like Zardaryan? Too few. We dream the common dreams, leftover dreams — doggy-bag dreams — of fame and wealth, not ancient shoes or their equivalent.
We need a new movement of shoe dreamers.
Comments (0)That little jingle from the Patty Duke show dates me, but I found it irresistible after reading how researchers determined that Jews around the world are virtually cousins and genetically more like each other than they are like their non-Jewish neighbors. Jews thousands of miles apart share genetic markers commonly seen among distant relatives, such as fourth cousins.
The New York Times did not run the story, which is interesting, but the paper seemed to make oblique reference to the research today in a story about a Jewish men’s club on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that has been holding meetings for 70 years. Frank Levy, Robert Brustein, Bob Schwartz, Marty Brustein, and Dick Zimmern share “a lifelong affection for one another somehow inscribed in their DNA,” wrote reporter N.R. Kleinfeld.
So, Mark, I can hear some people saying, where’s the Saul Bellow angle to this post?
Easy, sweetheart. It’s in Bellow’s short story, “Cousins,” which is about the powerful ties of “Jewish cousinhood” and “Jewish consanguinity—a special phenomenon.”
Comments (1)After I read Chabon’s chosen people article I was still hungry
The major real estate devoted to Michael Chabon’s “chosen people” piece in the New York Times reminded me that, like myself, many Jews stumble into Jews. As historian Michael Meyer said, for today’s Jews being Jewish is only a part of their total identity. But Jews are often more aware of this aspect of themselves than any [...]
continue reading >>Krim gets whacked, not made (He’s gone. Whaddya mean? Well, you know what I mean. He’s gone.)
The premise of my Missing a Beat collection was, first, that the Beats dumped Seymour Krim. It’s like that scene in Goodfellas when DeNiro gets the news that Joe Pesci, instead of being made, got whacked.
“He’s gone.”
“Whaddya mean? asks DeNiro.
“Well, you know what I mean. He’s gone.”
Well, I just got news like that about Krim. [...]
Seymour Krim does the Flat Foot Floogie
About a million years ago SUNY Buffalo flew me up to the campus to entice me into its English PhD program, and they arranged for me to meet Prof. Mark Shechner, then already a noted critic who went on to become a star on the Jewish American lit scene that was also my beat.
I didn’t [...]
My Moses Herzog moment
The uncontrollable urge to express himself on every issue of the day was a clear sign that Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog was losing it. So I have always treated the temptation to comment on blogs or internet magazines as an evil impulse to be resisted.
But today I caved. I really let loose with a doozy [...]
Jewish Book World offers shrewd appreciation of Seymour Krim
The Summer 2010 issue of Jewish Book World includes a succinct and sharp-eyed review of Missing a Beat. This sentence is about a good a summary of the book as any,
“This volume brings together several highly individualistic documents of an era that is all too easily caricatured and dismissed, showing the surprising range of views that were possible (if [...]
Krim getting enough attention to make him uncomfortable
Vol. 1 Brooklyn this morning took notice of the ripples that Krim has lately made and wonders if he might finally be getting his due among a new generation of Jewish writers.
That would be nice. But it wouldn’t please Krim. If he was here the very possibility would fill him with enough conflicted sensations to [...]
