Bernard Wolfe (1915–1985)
Autor de Limbo
Sobre El Autor
Obras de Bernard Wolfe
Self Portrait 3 copias
The Bisquit Position 2 copias
The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements 2 copias
Garden Butterflies 1 copia
Obras relacionadas
The Human Commitment - An Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction — Contribuidor — 1 copia
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1915-08-28
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 1985-10-27
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- New Haven, Connecticut, USA
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Calabasas, California, USA
- Ocupaciones
- Yale University (1935)
Miembros
Reseñas
An odd story of a pacifistic world where the prestigeous have had their arms literally removed. However, the difficulties of life have led to the develpement of high quality prosthetics which have done little to curb the aggression in mankind.
I don't believe this will be a quick review. "The Great Prince Died" warrants comment and cautions. First, if you are not familiar with Trotsky and pre-Russian Revolution socialist politics, this book will be a challenge. I think it's fair to say the author assumes the reader has a more than passing familiarity with these topics. The story is interesting but without the background, the reader would struggle.
The author's style can also be a tad off-putting. Much of the novel's start (and the story itself in fact) is presented as dialog between characters with whom the reader has been provided no introduction. This style can be very powerful and effective but in historical fiction (at least in this work) the reader can be left asking "who the hell are these characters"?
The author also often uses sparse punctuation and short staccato sentences. The feeling I got was the author was over-using a style with which he was familiar but not proficient. Often the story could have benefited from some direct narrative.
So, did I not like the work? In fact I did like the novel. It added personal dimensions to the harsh historical facts. The complexity of the characters struggles add depth to their typically brief stereotypes. This extent of this complexity is effectively portrayed as the characters grapple with the political events and theories of the time. And, the political and personal struggles extend beyond the historical context addressing perennial themes such as personal accountability and societal change.
The novel's credibility is underlined by the author's having spent eight months living in Trotsky's compound in Mexico. If you have an interest in the historical characters, socialist politics and/or pre-World War II history, this is a worthwhile read.
[The Appendix by the author and the Afterword by William T. Vollmann are invaluable for a deeper understanding of the historical context.]… (más)
The author's style can also be a tad off-putting. Much of the novel's start (and the story itself in fact) is presented as dialog between characters with whom the reader has been provided no introduction. This style can be very powerful and effective but in historical fiction (at least in this work) the reader can be left asking "who the hell are these characters"?
The author also often uses sparse punctuation and short staccato sentences. The feeling I got was the author was over-using a style with which he was familiar but not proficient. Often the story could have benefited from some direct narrative.
So, did I not like the work? In fact I did like the novel. It added personal dimensions to the harsh historical facts. The complexity of the characters struggles add depth to their typically brief stereotypes. This extent of this complexity is effectively portrayed as the characters grapple with the political events and theories of the time. And, the political and personal struggles extend beyond the historical context addressing perennial themes such as personal accountability and societal change.
The novel's credibility is underlined by the author's having spent eight months living in Trotsky's compound in Mexico. If you have an interest in the historical characters, socialist politics and/or pre-World War II history, this is a worthwhile read.
[The Appendix by the author and the Afterword by William T. Vollmann are invaluable for a deeper understanding of the historical context.]… (más)
A one of a kind document, which is the best thing you can say about a book.
Milton Mezzrow (née Mesirow) grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Chicago, learned to play saxophone in juvenile lock-up, developed a deep affection for black culture, and lived a life of extraordinary acquaintances and experience. His memoir Really the Blues (1946) is a valuable piece of social history and a fascinating artifact in the American vernacular.
Mezzrow tells a story of the early days of jazz and a vibrant urban folk culture that was the consequence of the Great Migration and Prohibition and the role of Chicago as a terminus and hub. Jazz flowed out from Basin Street and Storyville as enterprising sorts escaping Jim Crow or looking to profit from the ban on booze brought new life and energy to cities from Memphis to Detroit. Gangsters, prostitutes and musicians worked the syndicate houses and speakeasies.
All the café owners we ever knew were more familiar with machine guns than they were with music.
As Mezzrow tells it, jazz appealed to the ‘unwashed and untidy,’ the rebellious; the music was synonymous with freedom, improvisation a kind of anarchism, disregarding rules and constraints. By the late-1920s, though, the ‘uncorrupted purists’ in Chicago, who looked to the south for inspiration, were losing out to big bands and written music and Tin Pan Alley. Mezzrow the traditionalist laments the evolution of the music (how easily does the anarchist turn reactionary, in the name of preserving purity), but he does acknowledge that the music of the Chicago School was derivative, ‘an imperfect reflection,’ since ‘jazz was the colored man’s music.’ He knew that the Chicago sound represented a ‘half-way house’ between the original New Orleans combos and whatever was to come.
The jazz-jive lingo by which Mezzrow relates his own enthusiastic fascination with the world around jazz music is by turns amusing and tiresome. He conjures some fabulously poetic similes. First hearing the blues hit him ‘like a millennium would hit a philosopher.’ The shoes of a criminal hanged from the gallows ‘swing easy in space, like a couple of tired crows.’ A late-1920s exodus of musicians to NY left the Chicago gang ‘sad as a map and twice as flat.’ Some bits sound like a film noir voice-over:
On my next job I found myself running with a literary ex-pug, a pistol-packing rabbi, and a pee-wee jockey whose only riding crop was a stick of marihuana.
There are passages on Mezzrow’s first experiment with opium in Detroit and on the Jimmy Noone Band’s ‘preachin’ blues’ rendered as wonderfully affective set pieces. Other stories are great good fun but sound suspiciously apocryphal—Louis Armstrong’s invention of scat singing, Bix Beiderbecke burying jugs of sour mash in the weeds around Hudson Lake summer resort, Mezzrow and his friends inventing the ‘jam session.’ There is an Appendix that provides a translation of a reefer-jive conversation between Mezzrow and a prospective client on a Harlem street corner, and a full Glossary of early-20th c. hipster terminology. Occasionally the argot got a bit purplish and I would put the book down for a few days, but it always recovered. You have to take it for what it is. Makes one wonder how the book was received when it came out in 1946.
What makes Really the Blues so valuable is Mezzrow’s distinctive take on some potent themes that recur regularly in the jazz bibliography: the notion of authenticity, popular entertainment v. art, regional styles or ‘schools,’ the evolution of jazz forms through distinct phases in a kind of punctuated equilibrium, and the thorny matter of race. By the time Mezzrow wrote the book in the mid-1940s, he had become convinced of his own negritude. As his collaborator Bernard Wolfe wrote subsequently, Mezzrow’s adoption of the black man’s music, slang, bearing and social modes was not just a case of transculturation—it was one man’s reincarnation myth.
Wolfe was a Korzybski enthusiast who served a stint as secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico and later as the private pornographer of an Oklahoma oil millionaire. His article “Ecstatic in Blackface: The Negro as a Song-and-Dance Man” (written in 1947 for the French journal Les Temps Modernes) appears as an appendix to the NYRB edition of Really the Blues. According to Wolfe, Mezzrow had fetishized the ‘simple and natural’ ways of the black man, his effortless ecstasy, his ‘genius for relaxed, high-spirited, unburdened living,’ and Wolfe wanted to shine a light on Mezzrow’s negrophilia. Where Mezzrow saw spontaneous emanation, Wolfe saw calculated performance. There is, observed Wolfe, ‘a nimble interplay of image, reflex, and false face across the caste lines which is death to all real spontaneity.’ The more a white audience relishes the Negro on stage as ‘authentic,’ the more must the Negro performer cling to the masks which they (whites) take for real faces. The truth about the Negro performer is that he is required to be a Negro impersonator. (John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me provides discomfiting confirmation of the point.) Mezzrow seemed to have fooled himself, as the black man must fool the white man.
The ‘creative’ Negro, far from being his own spontaneous self, may actually be dramatizing the white man’s image of the ‘spontaneous’ Negro.
Wolfe sensed that a shift was underway in the 1940s—
…the extent to which (the Negro) really feels himself to be what the white man thinks he is is dwindling, and the extent to which he pretends to be this or that, to achieve certain effects among certain groups of whites, is on the rise. And in that murky space where the mechanical fades into the willful lies the source of most Negro art forms. If the shift is ever completed the mask will be thrown off entirely and a startling new crop of art forms will mushroom.
Bebop was coming to the fore just as Wolfe was writing, and so his observations carried a remarkable prescience.… (más)
Milton Mezzrow (née Mesirow) grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Chicago, learned to play saxophone in juvenile lock-up, developed a deep affection for black culture, and lived a life of extraordinary acquaintances and experience. His memoir Really the Blues (1946) is a valuable piece of social history and a fascinating artifact in the American vernacular.
Mezzrow tells a story of the early days of jazz and a vibrant urban folk culture that was the consequence of the Great Migration and Prohibition and the role of Chicago as a terminus and hub. Jazz flowed out from Basin Street and Storyville as enterprising sorts escaping Jim Crow or looking to profit from the ban on booze brought new life and energy to cities from Memphis to Detroit. Gangsters, prostitutes and musicians worked the syndicate houses and speakeasies.
All the café owners we ever knew were more familiar with machine guns than they were with music.
As Mezzrow tells it, jazz appealed to the ‘unwashed and untidy,’ the rebellious; the music was synonymous with freedom, improvisation a kind of anarchism, disregarding rules and constraints. By the late-1920s, though, the ‘uncorrupted purists’ in Chicago, who looked to the south for inspiration, were losing out to big bands and written music and Tin Pan Alley. Mezzrow the traditionalist laments the evolution of the music (how easily does the anarchist turn reactionary, in the name of preserving purity), but he does acknowledge that the music of the Chicago School was derivative, ‘an imperfect reflection,’ since ‘jazz was the colored man’s music.’ He knew that the Chicago sound represented a ‘half-way house’ between the original New Orleans combos and whatever was to come.
The jazz-jive lingo by which Mezzrow relates his own enthusiastic fascination with the world around jazz music is by turns amusing and tiresome. He conjures some fabulously poetic similes. First hearing the blues hit him ‘like a millennium would hit a philosopher.’ The shoes of a criminal hanged from the gallows ‘swing easy in space, like a couple of tired crows.’ A late-1920s exodus of musicians to NY left the Chicago gang ‘sad as a map and twice as flat.’ Some bits sound like a film noir voice-over:
On my next job I found myself running with a literary ex-pug, a pistol-packing rabbi, and a pee-wee jockey whose only riding crop was a stick of marihuana.
There are passages on Mezzrow’s first experiment with opium in Detroit and on the Jimmy Noone Band’s ‘preachin’ blues’ rendered as wonderfully affective set pieces. Other stories are great good fun but sound suspiciously apocryphal—Louis Armstrong’s invention of scat singing, Bix Beiderbecke burying jugs of sour mash in the weeds around Hudson Lake summer resort, Mezzrow and his friends inventing the ‘jam session.’ There is an Appendix that provides a translation of a reefer-jive conversation between Mezzrow and a prospective client on a Harlem street corner, and a full Glossary of early-20th c. hipster terminology. Occasionally the argot got a bit purplish and I would put the book down for a few days, but it always recovered. You have to take it for what it is. Makes one wonder how the book was received when it came out in 1946.
What makes Really the Blues so valuable is Mezzrow’s distinctive take on some potent themes that recur regularly in the jazz bibliography: the notion of authenticity, popular entertainment v. art, regional styles or ‘schools,’ the evolution of jazz forms through distinct phases in a kind of punctuated equilibrium, and the thorny matter of race. By the time Mezzrow wrote the book in the mid-1940s, he had become convinced of his own negritude. As his collaborator Bernard Wolfe wrote subsequently, Mezzrow’s adoption of the black man’s music, slang, bearing and social modes was not just a case of transculturation—it was one man’s reincarnation myth.
Wolfe was a Korzybski enthusiast who served a stint as secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico and later as the private pornographer of an Oklahoma oil millionaire. His article “Ecstatic in Blackface: The Negro as a Song-and-Dance Man” (written in 1947 for the French journal Les Temps Modernes) appears as an appendix to the NYRB edition of Really the Blues. According to Wolfe, Mezzrow had fetishized the ‘simple and natural’ ways of the black man, his effortless ecstasy, his ‘genius for relaxed, high-spirited, unburdened living,’ and Wolfe wanted to shine a light on Mezzrow’s negrophilia. Where Mezzrow saw spontaneous emanation, Wolfe saw calculated performance. There is, observed Wolfe, ‘a nimble interplay of image, reflex, and false face across the caste lines which is death to all real spontaneity.’ The more a white audience relishes the Negro on stage as ‘authentic,’ the more must the Negro performer cling to the masks which they (whites) take for real faces. The truth about the Negro performer is that he is required to be a Negro impersonator. (John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me provides discomfiting confirmation of the point.) Mezzrow seemed to have fooled himself, as the black man must fool the white man.
The ‘creative’ Negro, far from being his own spontaneous self, may actually be dramatizing the white man’s image of the ‘spontaneous’ Negro.
Wolfe sensed that a shift was underway in the 1940s—
…the extent to which (the Negro) really feels himself to be what the white man thinks he is is dwindling, and the extent to which he pretends to be this or that, to achieve certain effects among certain groups of whites, is on the rise. And in that murky space where the mechanical fades into the willful lies the source of most Negro art forms. If the shift is ever completed the mask will be thrown off entirely and a startling new crop of art forms will mushroom.
Bebop was coming to the fore just as Wolfe was writing, and so his observations carried a remarkable prescience.… (más)
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In that light I was able to finish of the 'ol Mezz. Will have to look up the numerous songs and compositions bragged on in the text.