Overview

""The jewel is in the lotus, but you can't get there from here."" Alan ""Long Eyes"" Russo was the genuine article. He was one of the most gifted members among a group of artists from the Midwest known as the ""Wichita Vortex."" His legacy fell into obscurity when he passed in 2003 until a dusty bag of slips, shards, and notes surfaced from the late David Omer Bearden's basement, titled State Line. In Russo-esque fashion, the uncouth bag fell into the hands of surviving friend, Dion Wright, to string together this cogent collection of disconnected pearls. Unwound in a tornado of real-life stories, poems, and vignettes-Rosace Publications brings Russo's ""absences"" and ""negatives in reverse"" to life. State Line addresses irresolution between fixed realities: the physical and the imaginative states of being. With accounts by Gerard Malanga, Bruce Conner, Charlie Plymell, Bob Branaman, and many more, this unique literary compendium uncovers notes from the man who trailblazed a distinct path between the Beats and the Hippies.

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9780999777725

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Reviews

Found! An unexpected manuscript from one of the central writers of the legendary Wichita Vortex. In this almost disappeared find, State Line, Russo's uncompromising search for the world of his visions flows on and into the very core of being alive in any generation. Within these pages, a soul unbound hails us! - Maureen Owen, Poet & Editor A STORYBOOK LIKE NO OTHER. An engaging (shocking) great read. - Charlie Plymell, Poet, Novelist, and Publisher I think it's really sweet how so many are caring about Alan Russo's writings now. His writing has gone from Ozymandias to Wilde in one posthumous lifetime: Mad, bad, and dangerous to know-again. Yes to Alan Russo. - James Grauerholz, Bibliographer and Literary Executor of the William S. Burroughs Estate An important work. Especially now, when authentic is so needed. Russo recognizes his friends being his heroes-they get him through-and it's clear he does the same for them. His prose and poems play out curious, passionate, sensitive and hot for whackshit-crazy. His honesty makes clever and intellectual writing more false than ever. - Benito Vila, Contributor to PleaseKillMe.com and Editor of Of Myth & Men, by Charles Plymell This nearly three hundred pages of Alan Russo's State Line give eloquent proof to his wide-ranging abilities expressing his genuine vital perceptions in both poetry and prose. - Gerd Stern, Poet and Multimedia Artist I met Alan Russo in San Francisco 1960. We bonded fast and remained close. Alan's humor and his sense of the absurd permeate his writing. I'm hopeful that State Line gets his readily accessible and fascinating narratives out to the wider readership they deserve. - Michael Lewis, Friend, Writer, and Survivor Alan Russo helped me in my move from Wichita Kansas to San Francisco late summer 1959. Knowing Alan from there, I found the book, State Line, very well organized. The result, put together from Alan's poems and journal writings, is amazingly coherent. It was that period between the beatniks and the hippies, full of illusions and delusions, and Alan was the tour guide. A lot of this and more is captured in his State Line. - Beth Pewther, Active San Francisco Artist

Author Information

Alan Bätjer Russo was born May 25, 1938 in Auburn, New York. His parents were Salvatore and Erna Bätjer Russo, and he had an older sister named Terry. In 1942 the family relocated to Hamilton Square, New Jersey and in 1948 moved to Wichita, Kansas. Something of a prodigy, Alan graduated from high school early and enrolled at Wichita University, where he took classes taught by Professor William Nelson, who encouraged his interest in the literary arts. He published several of his poems and a notable translation from Latin of Pervigilium Veneris (The Vigil of Venus) in campus literary magazines. While at WU, he befriended members of the local literary and artistic scene-including fellow students Glenn Todd, Justin Hein, Charles Plymell, Roxie Powell, and Robert Branaman. In 1959 he edited an anthology published by Plymell called Poet's Corner #2. In 1960, Plymell published a sheaf of Alan's poems with the title The Locked Man. That same year Alan moved to San Francisco to be followed by several of his Wichita cohorts. He subsequently published poems in a number of literary magazines and chapbooks created by Plymell, Bob Branaman, and David Omer Bearden. Alan spent the next two decades primarily in California but with stints in the mid-west and New York. He had a variety of jobs including staff-member at the San Francisco Oracle in 1967-1968. He also began working sub-rosa on a sequence of prose writings that would comprise an ""autobiographical novel"" he called State Line. By the 1980's he was living full-time in Tulsa, Oklahoma where Salvatore and Erna Russo had moved to in 1964. He supported himself by driving a cab, then eventually became his parents' full-time caregiver. His friend Justin Hein visited him in Tulsa on three separate occasions, and in 1991 Alan traveled to Wichita to be reunited with Charles Plymell and Bob Branaman for an event at the Wichita Art Museum. After his parents passed away in 1998 and 1999, he fell ill himself in 2002 and spent his final six months in a Tulsa nursing home. He passed on May 24, 2003. On his death certificate, his occupation read ""Poet and Cab Driver.""

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