But Some Of Us Are Looking At The Stars…
The brilliance in Albert Murray’s writing isn’t exactly where most dark web pundits say it is. Yet dear god, it’s there.
Review: Collected Essays And Memoirs: Albert Murray
Review: Collected Novels And Poems: Albert Murray
In her eulogy for Albert Murray, Renata Adler brought up the last subject the lay reader thinks when they think of him. After kind and genial words about their friendship and shared allergies to extremist cant, the author of Speedboat read from Blues Face To Face: a section from Stomping the Blues that discussed fighting his depression. The essay, as Adler prefaces, is form working against function, Murray describing depression as one of his prototypical Cambellesque hero’s journey but in a style with herky-jerky streams of consciousness that evoke desperation. Reading Murray’s essay at different speeds-accenting commas and pauses one moment, claustrophobically frenetic the next, she gave witness to how the best of his work plays off his polemics and masks no matter how majestic they may be.
It is this writer’s opinion, after re-reading him, that the Murray of Blues face-to-face is where the best of his work lies. It is not an insult to his work to say this because A: there’s a lot he wrote that exists in this place and B: his polemics by themselves were so often majestic, that I…
