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.
Unedited thoughts on Seymour Krim
“To find a shoe has always been my dream.”
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Canonize this Jew: A bid to get Krim past the literary gate-keepers
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published my argument that Seymour Krim be added to reading lists, anthologies, and departments of Jewish literature and cultural studies.
What got me going on the Seymour Krim kick that led to Missing a Beat was his omission from every Beat anthology since the 1992 Portable Beat Reader. That led me [...]
Seymour Krim review in Los Angeles Times
Akiva Gottlieb nailed the Krimian essence in the LA Times book review of Missing a Beat,
“Krim’s verbose, misogynistic, endlessly vulgar vernacular caught some of the bop inflections of the Beat era, but the Beats never welcomed him. Certainly he cared more about the concrete than the numinous: You wouldn’t find a naked Krim penning odes to [...]
New review of Seymour Krim book praises his Harlem pieces
It’s been interesting to see that Seymour Krim’s entertaining, honest, and outrageous articles on Harlem and New York black life have been embraced by reviewers who disagree otherwise. There’s something there that can’t be denied.
From NewWorld Review,
“If Krim does occasionally lapse into self-indulgence, he also exhibits one of the most acute and, ironically, objective social [...]
Yes, the blacks and the Jews, but cool this time
Head Butler is a great source for learning about great stuff and when I checked it today these lines about blues musician Junior Wells and his record, Hoodoo Man Blues, jumped off the screen and into my brain’s Seymour Krim arena,
If they sound as if they’re in a club, that’s deliberate; this is pure Chicago [...]
