When novelist Harry Crews passed away, he left behind novels, magazine articles and a musical legacy. Classics Rock! compiled a list of all the musicians who were inspired by the late writer. Check it out:
In 1989, Kim Gordon (of Sonic Youth), Lydia Lunch, and Sadie Mae formed a band called Harry Crews and released one album, a collection of live performances, called Naked in Garden Hills
after Crews’s novel. As Spin Magazine points out in a review, “lyrics to some of the songs—notably ‘The Knockout Artist,’ ‘The Gospel Singer,’ and ‘Car’—are inspired by Crews’s stories, though the connection is loose, a sort of Cliff’s Notes/free-association combo. Once in a while the lumbering brake-shop squall of the music suggests something of Crews’s stories….”
The Harry Crews Online Bibliography created a giant list of obituaries and essays written about Crews. Below, we’ve linked to some older articles highlighted by the website.
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Appraising the career of the Southern novelist, who died Wednesday at 76.
Novelist Harry Crews has passed away. Above, we’ve embedded a YouTube video of the author talking to Dennis Miller about his time in the military, his E.E. Cummings-inspired tattoo and his Scar Lover novel.
He wrote many novels, including The Gospel Singer and A Feast of Snakes, but he also produced an extensive body of nonfiction work. You can explore the novelist’s prolific career at the Henry Crews Bibliography. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Vice Magazine about his work as a writing teacher:
“Well, thank God the University of Florida gave me this deal that every writer needs. I worked with 10 or 12 graduate students a year. They were just young people who thought they wanted to be fiction writers. By and large, they fell in love with the idea of being a fiction writer and then they were introduced to the slave labor of it and they pretty soon decided, “No, I don’t want to do this.” … If you’re going to write a book, you don’t know what you’re looking at. You have to disabuse them of all these ideas they have that they are sure are right but which are almost exclusively, always, all of them, wrong.
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In the food issue of the New York Times Magazine, out this weekend, writers answer various questions. Mine was “How does rattlesnake taste?” Obviously I roped Dana, Max, and Nick in, and obviously we intended to follow (to the extent possible) Harry Crews’ instructions.
Tracking down a diamondback in New York City proved impossible, even after I took to Ask Metafilter. Unlike Crews’, our snake arrived in the mail, skinned and gutted, stripped of head and tail. Coiled on the cutting-board, it looked like a garden hose made of filleted haddock.
And as we took a cleaver to it, laboriously hacking it into one-inch slices, the spine was so thick and resistant to cutting, I found myself wondering if hedge clippers would be more effective, or at least less likely to result in someone losing a finger.
Although Crews warned against overcooking, he didn’t provide concrete guidance on timing. (He always said writers should be prepared to take work as short-order cooks, so perhaps it was presumed we’d know intuitively.) Within three minutes the first batch was dry and crunchy and inedible, the breading shriveled against the bone, the lean meat evidently having been boiled completely away.
On second try, the fritters (“steaks,” Crews calls them, but this native Texan just can’t use that term to encompass such stingy game) were juicier. The flesh was still hard to locate, though, trapped as it was in thick, slanted Vs to each side of the spiny vertebrae up top. (Maybe I overcooked it all and have unfairly maligned the dish.)
As Dana says, “God bless Harry Crews (one of my favorite authors, and one of the many subjects Maud and I first bonded over when we met nearly nine years ago) but I’m not sure I’ll be taking any food or beverage recommendations from him in the future.” We ate the snake with cornbread and fried okra, and a salad for the veneer of health, and we followed it up with her amazing berry pie.
You can read about the actual taste of the snake — and other ways to prepare it — over at the Times Ma
Twilight tattoos are not the only contenders on the literary tattoo playing field. Novelist Justin Taylor and literary agent Eva Talmadge collaborated on a nonfiction compilation of literary tattoos based on their blog, tattoolit.com.
The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide came out this week from Harper Perennial and the trailer is embedded above. We caught up with the authors to talk about how the book came to be.
E = Eva Talmadge
J = Justin Taylor
Q: From your experience, which book/author receives the most tattoo requests?
E: Kurt Vonnegut and e.e. cummings are probably the most popular authors when it comes to literary tattoos.
J: And of course, if we had wanted to we could have done an entire book of just Shakespeare.
Q: Which children’s book illustrations are most popular?
E: Shel Silverstein, by far.
Q: What was the most interesting “story” behind a tattoo?
E: Best story by far is how Jamie Garvey of Gainesville, Florida, came to copy his e.e. cummings tattoo (“how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, mr. death?”) off the one and only Harry Crews.
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