“If you start taking what’s pure in a man, and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can’t help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don’t have anything left to give.” — Sidney Bechet Shortly before I began teaching at El Paso Community College, […]
I think I was 13, poking my eyes along the titles of books lined up on a long folding table at some church basement rummage sale, when a title called out to me – Life in a Putty Knife Factory, by someone named H. Allen Smith. In those days, I often selected books simply because
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It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. – Blackstone’s Ratio Dark night in a city slum. Three black street gang members, two men and a woman, pull into the parking lot of a housing complex. They exchange words with three members of another gang, all men. The words lead
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During my 7th summer, my grandmother Augusta died. This brought the reality of death to me for the first time. That was also the summer rats got in under our back porch, an infestation that drove Mom about crazy with fear and loathing. All that somehow came together to inspire me to imagine my own
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Praised by such different souls as Ernest Hemingway, Donald Barthelme, Simone de Beauvoir and Kurt Vonnegut, Nelson Algren remains at best a rumor in his own time. They misspelled his name on his tombstone, and when the City of Chicago renamed a street in his honor, the residents complained so bitterly about the change that
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The murder of meaning is a crime Nelson Algren spent his life trying to get people interested in, and it scarcely ended with his death in 1982. Shortly after that year, in fact, one of the greatest admissions of that crime began appearing on t-shirts nationwide. They said, “The one who dies with the most
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