8 ratings | 0 reviews | avg rating:5.00

Henry James Korn’s Followers (7)

Henry’s Bookshelves

read (11)
currently-reading (2)
to-read (0)
satire (10)
zionista-research (1)
zionsita-research (0)

Henry’s Friends (33)

Benjamin Cawthra

1,489 books | 60 friends

Chris Aldrich

2,904 books | 406 friends

Marc

613 books | 41 friends

Writer's Relief

549 books | 4,568 friends

Doubleday Books

612 books | 4,957 friends

L.R.W. Lee

747 books | 4,921 friends

Touchstone Books

325 books | 2,764 friends

Steve Downes

530 books | 5,134 friends

More friends…

Henry James Korn

Goodreads Author

Born

The United States

Website

http://www.henryjameskorn.com

Twitter

henryjameskorn

Genre

Fiction, Nonfiction, Art

Influences

John Barth, George Saunders, Carl Hiaasen, Norman Mailer, George Orwel ...more

Member Since

February 2015

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/henryjameskorn

edit data

Henry James Korn's debut novel Amerikan Krazy is coming on February 22, 2016.

Korn has written about art, sports, popular culture, media and history for magazines and newspapers and his stories have been published in fiction anthologies and literary magazines. Korn was awarded a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

From 2008-13, Korn served as Orange County Great Park principal planning and program development specialist for arts, culture and history where he organized festivals and exhibitions and guided planning for the Palm Court Arts Complex and Great Park Gallery. Korn previously served as Director of the Poway Center for the Performing Arts Foundation; Director of Arts and Culture, City of Beverly Hills; Presiden ...more

Learn more
Ask the Author

To ask Henry James Korn questions, please sign up.

Popular Answered Questions

Is it true that you were expelled from Johns Hopkins University by university president Milton S. Eisenhower (President Dwight Eisenhower's brother) for an article you edited/published in the college student newspaper which defamed sitting President Lyndon B. Johnson? Can you tell us more about the incident and how it influenced the plot of your book Amerikan Krazy?

Henry James Korn Yes and yes. Ironically, I landed at Johns Hopkins University as a freshman in the fall of 1963 as a result of a successful encounter with Dr. Milton …moreYes and yes. Ironically, I landed at Johns Hopkins University as a freshman in the fall of 1963 as a result of a successful encounter with Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower at Rockefeller University arranged by my late dad through his bank.

As an impressionable Hopkins student, I continued to admire Ike's younger brother (who was an international relations expert in his own right) from afar. Nevertheless, in 1967, Dr. Eisenhower informed me via a hand-delivered letter on embossed stationary that I had brought great shame upon the University by calling President Lyndon B. Johnson a murderer in public print because of his role in the JFK assassination cover-up and the Vietnam war.

In Amerikan Krazy, a boy named Herbert Horn fears an imminent atomic attack and, as a result, wears patriotism on the sleeve of his cut-down Eisenhower jacket and takes comfort from Ike's peculiar but reassuring resemblance to Proctor and Gamble's "Mr. Clean." As a teenager, Herb Horn similarly perceives young Senator Kennedy as his nation's well-scrubbed savior but Herb's fragile psyche is soon shattered by Kennedy's brutal public execution. In response to Kennedy's death, Herb crafts a satire defaming his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson similar to the Hopkins Newsletter essay that enraged Milton S. Eisenhower. This formative, high-profile experience beneath the iron heel of Presidential authority results in Herb's radicalization manifested in sleepless nights, revenge fantasies, odd longings, substance abuse, patricidal nightmares, war wounds, terror bombings and fantasies about new Presidential assassination plots.

Incidentally, when I was suspended from school and the story was published round the world, Lou Panos, who wrote the Inside Baltimore column of The Evening Sun interviewed Milton Eisenhower and asked him where freedom of the press fit in? Panos reported that the ordinarily unflappable Eisenhower snapped, "Don't ask a stupid question like that because the undergraduate newspaper is subsidized." Panos concluded that Dr. Eisenhower's answer indicated that the President of one of the America's leading universities believed there should be two kinds of press--one paid and the other free.

As another interesting aside, my true-life confrontation with the arbitrary power of the ruling elites at an early age had a bit of a happy ending. Several days after my reinstatement as a Hopkins student, I was surprised to receive a letter from Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 (and a major literary hero of mine then and now) expressing the wish that I was in Washington, D.C. running the country and that the folks in Washington, D.C. were in school learning a few things.

PS: Goodreads friends are encouraged to click on a You Tube link that features Milton S. Eisenhower championing the establishment of concentration camps for 120,000 Japanese-American citizens during World War II. Readers are cordially invited to view this ten-minute War Relocation Agency propaganda film and post opinions on the question of who shamed Hopkins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esVeg...
(less)

flag

1 like · like
Comment

You use several song lyrics throughout your book, some more subtly than others. On page 60 you use the term "Dusky Jewel" and on page 88 "Roman wilderness of pain" my question is: Are you a Doors fan? were you fortunate enough to see them live? and, if so, do you think this experience ( coupled with the 60's "tune in, turn on and drop out" mentality in some camps ) influenced/affected your writing ?

Henry James Korn Thank you for noting that Amerikan Krazy contains references to consciousness-changing music by The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and more. Like man…moreThank you for noting that Amerikan Krazy contains references to consciousness-changing music by The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and more. Like many in my generation, folk and rock music strongly influenced my socialization and political development. As I think back on those years, my prototypical Woodstock-like communal experience occurred at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 where Robert Allen Zimmerman premiered a searing acoustic version of Mr. Tambourine Man. But to respond to your question more directly, I first saw The Doors live in the futuristic International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel in the fateful year of 1967 when I was expelled from my university for publishing an article criticizing President Lyndon B. Johnson in the pages of the campus newspaper. My guest at the Doors bash that night was a poet and Vietnam bound draft resister who was AWOL from the U.S. Army at the time. As college friends, he and I had "chased our pleasures here and dug our treasures there" and witnessed "weird scenes inside the gold mine." And if you must know we experienced our first Doors performance under the influence of Aldous Huxley and were thoroughly familiar with the British author's promise of ecstatic redemption via chemistry espoused in The Doors of Perception--a book title that inspired the naming of the band. Jim Morrison's socially surrealistic and ferocious performance at the Washington Hilton that November night reinforced our intoxication with the revolutionary potential of art. After playing the Doors songs that comprised their debut album, Light My Fire over and over on my dilapidated stereo, my friend and I were more eager than ever to Break on Through. Our heart's desire in those days was to arrive at an ideological tipping point exemplified by Berthold Brecht and Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater that the Doors termed "the other side." But according to Morrison's dark prophecy, William Blake's road of excess apparently did not lead to the Palace of Wisdom but rather to The End-- a haunting neo Freudian epic about incest and patricide that describes a psychotic killer on Jack Kerouac's freeway to purgatory. In the course of what later became the Apocalypse Now theme song, an assassin informs his father that he intends to bash in his skull--a direct political action at the familial level that my friend and I mistakenly believed was a prerequisite to overthrowing state power. Even today, Robby Krieger's wicked take off on My Country 'Tis of Thee (God Save the Queen) that kicks some versions of LA Woman into gear remains a insolent challenge to ruling class values that still sets its listeners on an anarchic trip arguably inspired by Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and City of Night by John Rechy. But in Morrison's version of paradise lost, the Hollywood Hills are filled with fires, flea bag motels and topless bars are burning to the ground, and murder rules the streets--perhaps a reference to the Watts riots in 1965 that dramatically revealed what overthrowing state authority might look like. Many years later, the news that our country's titular sugar daddy, President Ronald Reagan had been shot by a pistol toting young fantasist named John Hinckley Jr. at the Washington Hilton hit me hard--perhaps because I knew in my gut that I could have grown up to become Morrison's road killer or Bob Dylan's orphan with a gun instead of a sweet talking, bow tie and blazer wearing museum executive. But in my new role as a teller of humorous tall tales from a radical perspective, I try to do what Bob Dylan recommended in It's All Over Now Baby Blue and take what I have gathered from coincidence. If only my former Brooklyn Heights neighbor, Norman Mailer, was still alive and helping me puzzle through the ramifications of a national nightmare that came true at the very location where the Doors advocated for madness, murder and revolution fourteen years earlier. Nevertheless, I hope this extended response helps you understand why numerous Amerikan Krazy protagonists, PTSD victims all, are depicted battling both patriarchic rulers and knee-jerk patriotism that are represented in my novel by a dystopian theme park that I intentionally named Founding Father Land.(less)

flag

like
Comment

See 2 answers from Henry James Korn…

Combine Editions
Henry James Korn’s books

Average rating: 4.3 · 20 ratings · 7 reviews · 12 distinct works

	Amerikan Krazy 4.14 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 2016 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Proceedings of the National Academy of the Avant Garde: Administering the Coup de Grace to the American Reality Consensus 3.50 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1975 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Exact Change: Short Fiction it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1974 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Difficult Act to Follow: Stories & Essays 1969-1979 it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1980	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Pontoon Manifesto 4.50 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1970	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Muhammad Ali Retrospective it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1976 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Selections from the Collection: Guild Hall Musuem by Henry James Korn (Goodreads Author) (Foreward), Lisa Panzera (Introduction) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1998 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Difficult Act to Follow:Stories & Essays 1969-1979 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Fifth Assembling. A Collection of Otherwise Unpublishable Manuscripts. by Henry James Korn (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Richard Kostelanetz (Editor), Mike Metz (Editor) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Muhammad Ali Retrospective 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Henry James Korn…

58 posts
Henry James Korn's Blog

Underrated Reads review of Amerikan Krazy

Thanks for reading Amerikan Krazy JD Jung! Glad you enjoyed it!

The full review from Underrated Reads appears below. (Emphasis is mine.) Be sure to check out their site for other great recommendations.

“The next thing Herb knew he was standing naked in the Johns Hopkins University powerhouse with a combination of Kennedy’s brains and his study date’s menstrual blood smeared all over his body…”