Essayist Richard Rodriguez talked movingly about the notion of success and failure last night in his discussion with Stanford’s Steven Zipperstein about the latter’s Isaac Rosenfeld biography, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing.
In the conversational presentation between the two writers and friends at the San Francisco JCC, Rodriguez questioned Rosenfeld’s reputation as [...]
Isaac Rosenfeld talk unexpectedly moving (especially if you’re a Seymour Krim fan)
Seymour Krim on Jews and Blacks
As part of a three-part series on Seymour Krim that Jewcy is featuring, I wrote this overview of Krim’s writings on blacks and Jews.
That is part 2.
Part 3 will feature Krim’s take on Jewish intellectuals. Let’s just say that he wasn’t a big fan.
Kvetching, upon a peak in Darien
A minute ago I discovered bookforum.com’s omnivore page.
If you’re like the original inhabitants of Panama then you knew about the omnivore page already. So what? That doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that instead of being filled with a “wild surmise” like Cortez and his men seeing the Pacific for the first time in that poem, [...]
Joshua Cohen & Seymour Krim 4ever
The Forward has its review of Missing a Beat. The reviewer, novelist Joshua Cohen (no relation), seems to be part of a Seymour Krim sleeper cell.
Cohen wrote,
“The mere presence of this book makes me happy, let alone Mark Cohen’s sympathetic editing and introductions. Krim has been out of print for too long.”
Also,
“I should say, then, [...]
Guerrilla scholarship on enemy territory
When I speak about Seymour Krim at the American Literature Association’s annual conference in San Francisco this May, I’ll be ignoring one of the precepts of guerrilla scholarship.
Instead of leaving myself an escape route, I’ll be exposed to direct attack by veteran PhDs who have seen my kind before.
Do loaded questions that expose the gaps in [...]
Fiction weariness and Seymour Krim
A tip of the hat to Levi Asher’s Literary Kicks for calling attention to Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, reviewed in the NYT Book Review yesterday. I missed it. Asher notes that David Shields’ book “urges us to reject the notion that fiction is artistically or philosophically superior to nonfiction.”
Amen to that. And I want to [...]
Battle of Clay Shirky’s self-aggrandizing jerks: Seymour Krim vs. Norman Mailer
The Internet is big and until this minute I missed the hullabaloo over Clay Shirky’s A Rant About Women that calls on females to behave like “arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks” — aka, men — to get ahead.
God, I love having read Seymour Krim. He was a damned American Geiger counter who 40 years ago detected the [...]
Seymour Krim in Beat Scene
Sometimes miracles happen and Seymour Krim gets a little ink, as he does now in the British publication, Beat Scene, which features a profile on Seymour Krim in its new Winter 2010 issue.
The article is a workmanlike overview of Krim’s career, but its allegiance to the Beat interpretation of his life leads the writer to [...]
Hi Touré, it’s me, with the usual suspects (Krim, Bellow, etc)
Skilled hosts steer the conversation toward topics that will draw out their guests. So when I read Touré’s Do Not Pass essay in yesterday’s NY Times Book Review I knew he was only nominally addressing a general audience.
Really, he was talking to me.
Okay, Touré, okay. I got the hint. I’ve got the Jewish angle on the topic [...]
Krim left off list of writers consigned to oblivion
Mad magazine used to run a feature called “Scenes We’d Like To See,” and the headline above is a scene I’d like to see, inspired by something pretty close.
There’s a talk coming up at the San Francisco JCC on March 11 called Fame, Oblivion, and the Writing Life.
The writer in question is the getting-less-obscure-all-the-time Isaac Rosenfeld [...]
