Alan Kaufman's Blog

• The Electronic Book Burning--Alan Kaufman's essay in the new EVERGREEN REVIEW on hi-tech's destruction of the book

  October 21, 2009

  •  http://evergreenreview.com/120/index.htmlFrom the current issue of  Evergreen Review #120  The Electronic Book Burning by Alan Kaufman ...
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• How I Came To Write The Novel 'MATCHES'

  February 4, 2008

  • Many readers who know me only as a poet and memoirist may be rather surprised to learn that my first full-length fictional effort is about Israeli soldiers serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. How, they may wonder, did I come to write about Israeli soldiers? I am a bi-national, Israeli and American, and an Israeli army veteran. I touched on this briefly in my memoir Jew Boy, but did not ...
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• On Hubert Selby Jr., The Greatest Post-War American Writer

  February 3, 2008

  • "God and the Devil are struggling for the soul of man," Dostoyevsky wrote, "and the battleground is the human heart." That could well summarize the oeuvre of Brooklyn-born Hubert Selby Jr., who died in 1974. His last book "Waiting Period," built on the vision revealed in "Last Exit to Brooklyn," the 1964 novel with which he exploded onto the U.S. scene. That book was immediately hailed as a ...
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• A Brief Note On Beat Gravitas

  February 3, 2008

  • Irreverence, not piety, seems like the perfect sentiment to characterize the Beats. And yet, strangely enough, piety -- dictionary-defined for our purposes as awe, godliness, sanctity, holiness -- is precisely what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the twin pillars of Beat sensibility, were most about. Some younger admirers don't like to admit that sarcasm was mainly not in the Beat repertoire; ...
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• Charles Bukowski Was The Ultimate Outsider Poet

  February 3, 2008

  • When Charles Bukowski died at 73, he left behind more than 45 volumes of poetry and prose, an oeuvre that to this day makes up the most entertaining affront ever delivered to modern letters. The books are not so much a spit in the face of literature as a beer belch. He occupies a place among those outcasts, outlaws, madmen and solitaries whose outspoken visions achieved against all odds a ...
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• Statement on Zionism from 'The Zionist Five'

  February 3, 2008

  • In addition to being a professional author, I am also a professional painter. Until December of 2007, I was represented by a well-known San Francisco gallery which decided to cancel publication of a catalogue of my work due to the use of the term Zionism in the catalogue's title and by several of the authors who contributed essays. The authors included David Rosenberg, David Twersky, Polly ...
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• On The Autobahn

  February 3, 2008

  • *Since the events recounted in this memoiristic piece, anti-Semitism has not only spread throughout Germany but has exploded globally. Thanks to Judith Tannenbaum whose posting here of the names Rodriguez and Smith--both poets were on the tour-- inspired me to blog this article. A.K ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Between 1991 ...
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• On Being A Jewish Writer

  January 26, 2008

  • Isaac Bashevis Singer considered himself a perennial outsider not only in his native Poland but also in the United States (to which he fled in the 1930s to escape Hitler's growing shadow over Europe) for the frail-looking yet indomitable Yiddish writer was, if nothing else, a consummate loner, a fierce political conservative dwelling in a liberal enclave and a stylistic and spiritual devotee of ...
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