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Clifford Browder's Blog, page 13
November 24, 2019
437. Bread
BROWDERBOOKS
Not much to report on my new book. I have a copy, for one final glance before okaying it for publication. Next comes formatting the e-book. After that, print copies will be available, but the release date will not be immediately.
BREAD
Somewhere in this blog, not too long ago, I listed five essentials that I could not do without:
1. Bread2. Trees3. Books4. Sleep5. Hope
To these I could add a sixth: Music. Lately I have been listening to WQXR from breakfast on, whenever I’m in the kitchen, which means during meals. I would rather hear Bach and Vivaldi, whom I cannot turn off, or Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn, than the news, which proclaims our president’s latest folly, or a report of who’s killing whom.
Upon refection, however, I notice certain omissions that might puzzle or shock some people:
· God· Joy· Love· Friends· Wonder
Joy is on my list, in that bread, trees, and books bring me joy. Love and Friends are there, in that I love those three things and consider them my friends. But God is not there, nor is, explicitly, Wonder. God, in one form or another, is the subject of some awful poetry that is making me write it, but which, with luck, will never see the day, meaning, find its way into print. So let’s say that He – or She or It – is pending as an essential, with the outcome uncertain.
And that leaves Wonder. A serious omission, I grant. Without Wonder, life is drab, dull, dead. As children we have it, looking at the world wide-eyed. But as adults we lose it, get bogged down in our cluttered, busy lives, and see the world around us as mere routine, overly familiar, or even as an obstacle, a threat, something to be ignored or overcome. So I’m pondering where to place Wonder in my list of essentials.
Meanwhile, I’ll do an occasional post on the five that I’ve listed to date. Starting with Bread. I love it, used to bake it, have it for breakfast (organic olive bread preferred) and sometimes, in lesser amounts, at dinner. During my Midwestern childhood in the 1930s I ate Silvercup Bread daily and heard it advertised on the radio by the Lone Ranger program. The moment that program came on, at 5 p.m. weekdays, my brother and I mounted the side arms of our living-room davenport, and to the rousing strains of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, rode our horses furiously, firing our imagined revolvers six times (they were six-shooters) in imitation of the heroic Masked Man of the Plains, who rode his horse Silver (get the connection?) in the company of his pal of few words, Tonto. When the Masked Man completed his task at some troubled Western town, with the villains disarmed and peace and order restored, and the grateful townsfolk wondered who and where their rescuer was, they would hear his distant voice shouting “Hi yo, Silver, away!” as he and Tonto galloped off into the hazy distance, his identity still a mystery. So there I was with bread enhanced by the Masked Man of the Plains and the frenzied strains of Rossini.
Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger,
with Silver, in a film version, 1965.
(A brief Internet-inspired note: Tonto always called his companion “Kemosabe,” which the radio audience took as a Native American honorific, but in fact means “soggy shrub” in Navajo. Which is only fair, since tonto means “stupid” in Spanish.)
Years later, to be sure, I realized that Silvercup was a bread made of refined white flour, with most of its nutrients removed, and therefore nutritionally deficient. Today I wouldn’t have it in my kitchen. Hardly an issue, since Silvercup’s maker, the Gordon Baking Company of Long island City (so far from the Old West of legend) shut down in 1974, the victim of a Teamsters strike. But legends die hard. The Lone Ranger made it to TV and the movies, and recently a high-school choir sang the entire William Tell Overture while galloping on real horses, a performance that must have been memorable, even if Rossini was turning ten times over in his grave.
Bread was less important to me during my high school and college years, so we’ll fast forward to my two years in France in the early 1950s. I was a student there learning French and French culture, but spent my vacations traveling by rail or bus or foot (hitch-hiking), and in the course of my travels saw a good deal of provincial France. In big cities and small towns alike, a common sight was a little kid carrying a flûte, a long, thin loaf of bread, often longer than they were tall. Fresh-baked, the bread was a rich golden brown, and was destined for the family dinner table, since no dinner was complete without it. I learned about real dining, not in the government-financed student restaurants, to be sure, where one never dared ask what the meat served was (horse meat was a distinct possibility), but in small restaurants suited to my limited budget. There each meal was a ritual, served in courses. One began with soup, and only after that did one break bread and sip a glass of wine, while waiting for the next course to be served. And the bread was good, always freshly baked that day.
French baguettes, shorter and thicker than flûtes.
Both are a rare sight in villages today.
jeffreyw
So good was French bread that when I hiked in the Pyrenees, where hitch-hiking sometimes failed me, I would walk jauntily along some quiet rural road, with the sound of water from unseen streams in the woods rising all around me, and a flûte or baguette protruding from my backpack. Then, finding a stream beside the road, I would look for a smooth streamside rock, sit, and have my lunch, serenaded by the sound of water. And what was that lunch? French bread with jam, and whatever fruit was in season, often grapes.
During those provincial wanderings, on some early mornings I found myself the first diner in a café, and had to wait while the owner sent someone to fetch bread from a nearby bakery. To serve any bread not fresh was unthinkable. Imagine my surprise then, years later, when my partner Bob came back from his first trip to Paris, and told of seeing the woman running his hotel setting up the tables for the next day’s breakfast with some bread at each place on the table. Today’s bread for tomorrow’s breakfast! To my mind, in France, unthinkable. But who were the guests in her hotel? Americans and Scandinavians. The French would never have put up with it.
When they traveled abroad, the French took their need for bread with them. In a restaurant in Mexico I’ll never forget seeing a demanding band of French tourists dining with their young Mexican guise. “Du pain! Du pain!” said a woman with great power of tongue. The Mexican guide’s eye momentarily caught mine, and we both smiled furtively. Annoyed by having seen so many Ugly Americans abroad on my travels, it was vastly reassuring to see the Gallic equivalent in Mexico. Travel seems to bring out the worst in all of us, especially when exchange rates are favorable.
Italian bread too can be marvelous. On my trip with Bob and our friend Barbara to Italy in 1999, on three occasions we tasted bread so delicious that we could have made a meal of it alone. The bread was always good, but on these three occasions exceptional. But always, in every restaurant, when we sat at a table for dinner, they brought us bread and olive oil, and we dipped the bread in the oil and reveled in the taste. Never, in this country, have I tasted such bread in an Italian restaurant. Local traditions and local ingredients probably explain it.
A French baker baking baguettes.
RudolfSimon
Recently I have learned that in many French villages today there is not one local bakery. No local bakery? No fresh bread every morning, its aroma transporting you heavenward? Unthinkable! But so it is in the provinces, though not in the big cities. Young people are no longer tempted by the trade of baker, with its long hours of work, and shopping malls with supermarkets and chain stores are popping up nearby, often the only outlets for bread in the area. And the young are eating less bread. And to dramatize the death of the traditional boulangerie, with the village baker living above his shop, vending machines that look like phone booths are appearing on village streets. Village life in France will never be the same.
[image error] A bakery in Paris. Becoming a rare sight in the provinces.
Poulpy
Here in the huge metropolis of New York, I have never been so glad to be able to go year round to a nearby greenmarket and buy, from Tibetan vendors who know me and my needs, a loaf of fresh-baked organic olive bread, plus cookies and blueberry muffins and a package of granola. Yes, bread is life. We need it, and want it fresh.
Robots moving bread in Germany, 2005.
A final thought, inspired by the photo above: Are robots the way of the future? If so, a chilling thought.
Coming soon: No idea.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
Not much to report on my new book. I have a copy, for one final glance before okaying it for publication. Next comes formatting the e-book. After that, print copies will be available, but the release date will not be immediately.
BREAD
Somewhere in this blog, not too long ago, I listed five essentials that I could not do without:
1. Bread2. Trees3. Books4. Sleep5. Hope
To these I could add a sixth: Music. Lately I have been listening to WQXR from breakfast on, whenever I’m in the kitchen, which means during meals. I would rather hear Bach and Vivaldi, whom I cannot turn off, or Beethoven or Mozart or Haydn, than the news, which proclaims our president’s latest folly, or a report of who’s killing whom.
Upon refection, however, I notice certain omissions that might puzzle or shock some people:
· God· Joy· Love· Friends· Wonder
Joy is on my list, in that bread, trees, and books bring me joy. Love and Friends are there, in that I love those three things and consider them my friends. But God is not there, nor is, explicitly, Wonder. God, in one form or another, is the subject of some awful poetry that is making me write it, but which, with luck, will never see the day, meaning, find its way into print. So let’s say that He – or She or It – is pending as an essential, with the outcome uncertain.
And that leaves Wonder. A serious omission, I grant. Without Wonder, life is drab, dull, dead. As children we have it, looking at the world wide-eyed. But as adults we lose it, get bogged down in our cluttered, busy lives, and see the world around us as mere routine, overly familiar, or even as an obstacle, a threat, something to be ignored or overcome. So I’m pondering where to place Wonder in my list of essentials.
Meanwhile, I’ll do an occasional post on the five that I’ve listed to date. Starting with Bread. I love it, used to bake it, have it for breakfast (organic olive bread preferred) and sometimes, in lesser amounts, at dinner. During my Midwestern childhood in the 1930s I ate Silvercup Bread daily and heard it advertised on the radio by the Lone Ranger program. The moment that program came on, at 5 p.m. weekdays, my brother and I mounted the side arms of our living-room davenport, and to the rousing strains of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, rode our horses furiously, firing our imagined revolvers six times (they were six-shooters) in imitation of the heroic Masked Man of the Plains, who rode his horse Silver (get the connection?) in the company of his pal of few words, Tonto. When the Masked Man completed his task at some troubled Western town, with the villains disarmed and peace and order restored, and the grateful townsfolk wondered who and where their rescuer was, they would hear his distant voice shouting “Hi yo, Silver, away!” as he and Tonto galloped off into the hazy distance, his identity still a mystery. So there I was with bread enhanced by the Masked Man of the Plains and the frenzied strains of Rossini.
Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger, with Silver, in a film version, 1965.
(A brief Internet-inspired note: Tonto always called his companion “Kemosabe,” which the radio audience took as a Native American honorific, but in fact means “soggy shrub” in Navajo. Which is only fair, since tonto means “stupid” in Spanish.)
Years later, to be sure, I realized that Silvercup was a bread made of refined white flour, with most of its nutrients removed, and therefore nutritionally deficient. Today I wouldn’t have it in my kitchen. Hardly an issue, since Silvercup’s maker, the Gordon Baking Company of Long island City (so far from the Old West of legend) shut down in 1974, the victim of a Teamsters strike. But legends die hard. The Lone Ranger made it to TV and the movies, and recently a high-school choir sang the entire William Tell Overture while galloping on real horses, a performance that must have been memorable, even if Rossini was turning ten times over in his grave.
Bread was less important to me during my high school and college years, so we’ll fast forward to my two years in France in the early 1950s. I was a student there learning French and French culture, but spent my vacations traveling by rail or bus or foot (hitch-hiking), and in the course of my travels saw a good deal of provincial France. In big cities and small towns alike, a common sight was a little kid carrying a flûte, a long, thin loaf of bread, often longer than they were tall. Fresh-baked, the bread was a rich golden brown, and was destined for the family dinner table, since no dinner was complete without it. I learned about real dining, not in the government-financed student restaurants, to be sure, where one never dared ask what the meat served was (horse meat was a distinct possibility), but in small restaurants suited to my limited budget. There each meal was a ritual, served in courses. One began with soup, and only after that did one break bread and sip a glass of wine, while waiting for the next course to be served. And the bread was good, always freshly baked that day.
French baguettes, shorter and thicker than flûtes. Both are a rare sight in villages today.
jeffreyw
So good was French bread that when I hiked in the Pyrenees, where hitch-hiking sometimes failed me, I would walk jauntily along some quiet rural road, with the sound of water from unseen streams in the woods rising all around me, and a flûte or baguette protruding from my backpack. Then, finding a stream beside the road, I would look for a smooth streamside rock, sit, and have my lunch, serenaded by the sound of water. And what was that lunch? French bread with jam, and whatever fruit was in season, often grapes.
During those provincial wanderings, on some early mornings I found myself the first diner in a café, and had to wait while the owner sent someone to fetch bread from a nearby bakery. To serve any bread not fresh was unthinkable. Imagine my surprise then, years later, when my partner Bob came back from his first trip to Paris, and told of seeing the woman running his hotel setting up the tables for the next day’s breakfast with some bread at each place on the table. Today’s bread for tomorrow’s breakfast! To my mind, in France, unthinkable. But who were the guests in her hotel? Americans and Scandinavians. The French would never have put up with it.
When they traveled abroad, the French took their need for bread with them. In a restaurant in Mexico I’ll never forget seeing a demanding band of French tourists dining with their young Mexican guise. “Du pain! Du pain!” said a woman with great power of tongue. The Mexican guide’s eye momentarily caught mine, and we both smiled furtively. Annoyed by having seen so many Ugly Americans abroad on my travels, it was vastly reassuring to see the Gallic equivalent in Mexico. Travel seems to bring out the worst in all of us, especially when exchange rates are favorable.
Italian bread too can be marvelous. On my trip with Bob and our friend Barbara to Italy in 1999, on three occasions we tasted bread so delicious that we could have made a meal of it alone. The bread was always good, but on these three occasions exceptional. But always, in every restaurant, when we sat at a table for dinner, they brought us bread and olive oil, and we dipped the bread in the oil and reveled in the taste. Never, in this country, have I tasted such bread in an Italian restaurant. Local traditions and local ingredients probably explain it.
A French baker baking baguettes.RudolfSimon
Recently I have learned that in many French villages today there is not one local bakery. No local bakery? No fresh bread every morning, its aroma transporting you heavenward? Unthinkable! But so it is in the provinces, though not in the big cities. Young people are no longer tempted by the trade of baker, with its long hours of work, and shopping malls with supermarkets and chain stores are popping up nearby, often the only outlets for bread in the area. And the young are eating less bread. And to dramatize the death of the traditional boulangerie, with the village baker living above his shop, vending machines that look like phone booths are appearing on village streets. Village life in France will never be the same.
[image error] A bakery in Paris. Becoming a rare sight in the provinces.
Poulpy
Here in the huge metropolis of New York, I have never been so glad to be able to go year round to a nearby greenmarket and buy, from Tibetan vendors who know me and my needs, a loaf of fresh-baked organic olive bread, plus cookies and blueberry muffins and a package of granola. Yes, bread is life. We need it, and want it fresh.
Robots moving bread in Germany, 2005.A final thought, inspired by the photo above: Are robots the way of the future? If so, a chilling thought.
Coming soon: No idea.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
November 17, 2019
436. Horrors of Voting
BROWDERBOOKS
BIG NEWS: The sample print copy of my new book has arrived and it looks great. Now, after one possible change, my designer team can go ahead and do the e-book formatting. The title, as I've mentioned before, is New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You. Once the e-book formatting is done, I can show the front cover, which is exciting and unique, and the back cover with my blurb. And I can order ARCs (advance review copies) in hopes of getting early, pre-pub reviews.
Horrors of Voting
I’m a good citizen, I vote. Usually. Once I was rained out. And occasionally there is an off-year election where nothing but judges are on the ballot. I don’t vote for judges, since I know nothing about them. Also, a lawyer friend tells me that, regarding judges, the real selection of candidates is done beforehand by insiders, who then present the results on the ballot.
Though I don’t mean to turn this blog into a political platform, I have to confess that this year I’m more involved than usually in elections Here in New York, a very Democratic city, the names of Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg are flying around like crazy, with the latest results of polls in Iowa being constantly announced. These four top the polls, with frequent shifts among them, and other candidates trailing far behind this stellar quartet. Undecided, I ignore the news, but am determined to vote. The free, supposedly nonpartisan Voter Guide that comes to me in the mail doesn’t mention the Democrats’ stellar quartet (an indicator that I should have heeded), but it does mention candidates for public advocate, an office that I should pay attention to, but haven’t. Also mentioned, and in detail, are five local proposals regarding such issues as authorizing “ranked choice voting” in elections, expanding the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and creating a “rainy day” fund for unforeseen future emergencies.
Announced with great fanfare this year is early voting in New York State. You don’t have to vote on Election Day, Tuesday, November 5. If that is inconvenient – maybe an anticipated hurricane, or Aunt Minnie from Milwaukee is visiting – you can vote, from October 25 on, at alternative sites in your district. This sounded good to me, so I went to the Internet to learn my district’s alternative site. It turned out to be a school at a distant location from my building, much farther away than my regular voting site on Hudson Street. So struck the first sour note: for me, early voting was flat-out a fiasco!
When Tuesday, November 5, arrived, I had my day carefully planned, with errands on Hudson Street both prior to voting at P.S. 3 and afterward. At 10 a.m. off I went, jaunty as can be, clutching a small card giving my assembly and election district numbers, so I could avoid a long line at the info table and go directly to my districts’ table and pick up a ballot and instructions for using the voting machines. Outside P.S. 3 I found no lines, no commotion, nothing. Inside two heavy doors I did indeed bypass the info table and, entering the school gym, found my table quickly – the only one with a line. And a line that moved very slowly.
Only when my turn came did I discover why. As always, you were required to write your signature on a form they give you, but this time it was different, for the system has gone high tech. Instead of putting pen to paper, you have to put plastic stick to screen. Yes, just like in some doctors’ offices, you had to navigate this stick on the screen, something I have always had trouble with. I managed to get a “C” down, but adding my last name was impossible; no matter how I moved the stick, pressing firmly or pressing lightly, it made no mark whatsoever. “Try the other end,” the volunteer poll worker said. I did: same result. “Try your finger,” she said. I did, and at first got nothing. Then, finally, I made a wiggly mark on the screen. So with great effort, and many failings, I finally managed to slowly write my complete last name. But what I saw on the screen was a series of wiggly lines, the poorest conceivable excuse for a signature.
After that it went fairly smoothly. I took my ballot to a so-called “privacy booth,” a small platform with a wall on three sides where, standing, you can scan the ballot and instructions and vote, with no one able to see what you’re doing. Not quite a booth, perhaps, but far superior to the old booth where you closed a curtain and had only so much time for voting. Here, you can take all the time you need, with no one in line behind you, waiting for you to push the curtain back and emerge.
So at last I voted. Or at least, marked my ballot, filling in the little oval on the lines where the name of each of my selections appeared. But I found only the candidates for public advocate and the five ballot proposals. Assured that I had the complete one-page ballot, I realized at last that the candidates for higher office wouldn’t appear on a ballot before the primaries next spring. Idiot! I told myself, this is still 2019. They aren’t up for office until 2020. Only dedicated citizens concerned about such trivia as the public advocate and the five ballot proposals would turn out. And sure enough, the gym turned voting site was sparsely populated, with the volunteer poll workers outnumbering the voters.
So I marked the ballot. For public advocate, there were three choices, each accompanied by a photo: the Democratic incumbent, an African American male with a hearty grin; the Republican, a bearded white man, quite dignified; and way over to one side, the lonely Libertarian, a clean-shaven white man with a slightly forced smile. With the possible exception of the Democrat, I had never heard of any of them. Though without a firm conviction, I tilted toward the Democrat, who looked quite jolly. The Republican listed as his three top issues
Stopping the de Blasio agenda Stopping the de Blasio agenda Stopping the de Blasio agenda
Which was clear enough. But I’m not too hostile to our current mayor, under whose leadership a number of good measures have been passed. So this candidate didn’t tempt me. As for the Libertarian, his announced issues sounded valid enough, but I have mixed feelings about Libertarians, and their total rejection of government regulation. I agree with them in not wanting the government to tell me what foods and what supplements I can consume, or whom I can sleep with or marry. But I also want my Social Security and Medicare, and have seen what havoc a lack of regulation can wreak on Wall Street, not to mention the misdeeds of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. So I went with the Democratic incumbent.
My ballot marked, I went to a scanner, a mysterious machine into whose narrow slit of a mouth you feed your ballot. If you do it right, a message appears on a screen, indicating that your vote has been cast. Then, as I was leaving, another poll worker gave me a stick-um badge to put on my jacket, announcing I VOTED. I stuck it on, feeling proud and patriotic. Only later, given the minor and very local issues at stake, as witnessed by the light turnout, did I realize that, for some, it probably labeled me a nerd and a fanatic. So ended my voting adventure, harassed by shameful ignorance and tech.
Coming soon: Maybe "The Jungle and Me" -- my adventures and misadventures in Central America. And maybe something else, like a repeat with variations of "Five Things I Cannot Do Without."
© 2019 Clifford Browder
BIG NEWS: The sample print copy of my new book has arrived and it looks great. Now, after one possible change, my designer team can go ahead and do the e-book formatting. The title, as I've mentioned before, is New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You. Once the e-book formatting is done, I can show the front cover, which is exciting and unique, and the back cover with my blurb. And I can order ARCs (advance review copies) in hopes of getting early, pre-pub reviews.
Horrors of Voting
I’m a good citizen, I vote. Usually. Once I was rained out. And occasionally there is an off-year election where nothing but judges are on the ballot. I don’t vote for judges, since I know nothing about them. Also, a lawyer friend tells me that, regarding judges, the real selection of candidates is done beforehand by insiders, who then present the results on the ballot.
Though I don’t mean to turn this blog into a political platform, I have to confess that this year I’m more involved than usually in elections Here in New York, a very Democratic city, the names of Biden, Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg are flying around like crazy, with the latest results of polls in Iowa being constantly announced. These four top the polls, with frequent shifts among them, and other candidates trailing far behind this stellar quartet. Undecided, I ignore the news, but am determined to vote. The free, supposedly nonpartisan Voter Guide that comes to me in the mail doesn’t mention the Democrats’ stellar quartet (an indicator that I should have heeded), but it does mention candidates for public advocate, an office that I should pay attention to, but haven’t. Also mentioned, and in detail, are five local proposals regarding such issues as authorizing “ranked choice voting” in elections, expanding the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and creating a “rainy day” fund for unforeseen future emergencies.
Announced with great fanfare this year is early voting in New York State. You don’t have to vote on Election Day, Tuesday, November 5. If that is inconvenient – maybe an anticipated hurricane, or Aunt Minnie from Milwaukee is visiting – you can vote, from October 25 on, at alternative sites in your district. This sounded good to me, so I went to the Internet to learn my district’s alternative site. It turned out to be a school at a distant location from my building, much farther away than my regular voting site on Hudson Street. So struck the first sour note: for me, early voting was flat-out a fiasco!
When Tuesday, November 5, arrived, I had my day carefully planned, with errands on Hudson Street both prior to voting at P.S. 3 and afterward. At 10 a.m. off I went, jaunty as can be, clutching a small card giving my assembly and election district numbers, so I could avoid a long line at the info table and go directly to my districts’ table and pick up a ballot and instructions for using the voting machines. Outside P.S. 3 I found no lines, no commotion, nothing. Inside two heavy doors I did indeed bypass the info table and, entering the school gym, found my table quickly – the only one with a line. And a line that moved very slowly.
Only when my turn came did I discover why. As always, you were required to write your signature on a form they give you, but this time it was different, for the system has gone high tech. Instead of putting pen to paper, you have to put plastic stick to screen. Yes, just like in some doctors’ offices, you had to navigate this stick on the screen, something I have always had trouble with. I managed to get a “C” down, but adding my last name was impossible; no matter how I moved the stick, pressing firmly or pressing lightly, it made no mark whatsoever. “Try the other end,” the volunteer poll worker said. I did: same result. “Try your finger,” she said. I did, and at first got nothing. Then, finally, I made a wiggly mark on the screen. So with great effort, and many failings, I finally managed to slowly write my complete last name. But what I saw on the screen was a series of wiggly lines, the poorest conceivable excuse for a signature.
After that it went fairly smoothly. I took my ballot to a so-called “privacy booth,” a small platform with a wall on three sides where, standing, you can scan the ballot and instructions and vote, with no one able to see what you’re doing. Not quite a booth, perhaps, but far superior to the old booth where you closed a curtain and had only so much time for voting. Here, you can take all the time you need, with no one in line behind you, waiting for you to push the curtain back and emerge.
So at last I voted. Or at least, marked my ballot, filling in the little oval on the lines where the name of each of my selections appeared. But I found only the candidates for public advocate and the five ballot proposals. Assured that I had the complete one-page ballot, I realized at last that the candidates for higher office wouldn’t appear on a ballot before the primaries next spring. Idiot! I told myself, this is still 2019. They aren’t up for office until 2020. Only dedicated citizens concerned about such trivia as the public advocate and the five ballot proposals would turn out. And sure enough, the gym turned voting site was sparsely populated, with the volunteer poll workers outnumbering the voters.
So I marked the ballot. For public advocate, there were three choices, each accompanied by a photo: the Democratic incumbent, an African American male with a hearty grin; the Republican, a bearded white man, quite dignified; and way over to one side, the lonely Libertarian, a clean-shaven white man with a slightly forced smile. With the possible exception of the Democrat, I had never heard of any of them. Though without a firm conviction, I tilted toward the Democrat, who looked quite jolly. The Republican listed as his three top issues
Stopping the de Blasio agenda Stopping the de Blasio agenda Stopping the de Blasio agenda
Which was clear enough. But I’m not too hostile to our current mayor, under whose leadership a number of good measures have been passed. So this candidate didn’t tempt me. As for the Libertarian, his announced issues sounded valid enough, but I have mixed feelings about Libertarians, and their total rejection of government regulation. I agree with them in not wanting the government to tell me what foods and what supplements I can consume, or whom I can sleep with or marry. But I also want my Social Security and Medicare, and have seen what havoc a lack of regulation can wreak on Wall Street, not to mention the misdeeds of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. So I went with the Democratic incumbent.
My ballot marked, I went to a scanner, a mysterious machine into whose narrow slit of a mouth you feed your ballot. If you do it right, a message appears on a screen, indicating that your vote has been cast. Then, as I was leaving, another poll worker gave me a stick-um badge to put on my jacket, announcing I VOTED. I stuck it on, feeling proud and patriotic. Only later, given the minor and very local issues at stake, as witnessed by the light turnout, did I realize that, for some, it probably labeled me a nerd and a fanatic. So ended my voting adventure, harassed by shameful ignorance and tech.
Coming soon: Maybe "The Jungle and Me" -- my adventures and misadventures in Central America. And maybe something else, like a repeat with variations of "Five Things I Cannot Do Without."
© 2019 Clifford Browder
November 10, 2019
435. My Crazy Wednesday
Browderbooks
Out of nowhere, I got a phone call. A woman's high-pitched voice asked if I was the author of No Place for Normal: New York. I confessed that I was. She then launched into a rapid-fire spiel about something, I wasn't sure what. She mentioned Something Press. I couldn't catch the name, asked her to spell it, still didn't fully understand. Finally I asked her to send me an e-mail, which she did. It soon arrived. It was from the head acquisition specialist at Stratton Press Publishing, informing me that (for a price, of course) they could vastly improve my book's success by publishing a new edition. The problems with the present edition:
It was priced too high ($14.95, per the back cover).The cover could be enhanced to make it look more appealing.The book obviously needs editorial assessment and developmental editing.They were confident they could position my book better and give it the maximum exposure it deserved.
My poor book! It obviously needed professional help -- theirs, to be exact. After a little online research, I answered them point by point:
1. My book's marked price, $14.95, is not too expensive. I sell it at book fairs for $20.
2. Its cover is fine. The bright colors, and NEW YORK in bold letters against a bright background, draw readers to my stand at book fairs.
3. My book does not need editorial assessment or developmental editing. It was edited professionally.
I added that it upstages and outsells all my other books at book fairs. Conclusion: I don't need the help of Stratton Press, whose troubled history would put me off anyway. (It decamped from Wyoming because of tax delinquency.) So please don't approach me again.
Stratton is one of numerous outfits eager to get hold of newbie authors whose self-published books they claim they can improve by republishing, bringing the authors greater sales. They usually begin with a phone call out of the blue, as in my case, which could well flatter and impress a first-time author. But I was on to their game and didn't take the bait. Stratton may well serve some beleaguered authors and publish or republish legitimately, but in my case their appeal was suspect. I doubt if I will ever hear from them again.
For this and my other books, click here.
My Crazy Wednesday
Recently I had a crazy Wednesday, crazy in part because it involved too much in one day, and in part because of what happened. Having a midday commitment in midtown, I went very early to the Union Square Greenmarket.
Jazz GuysThere, in the course of buying organic salad greens and kale at Keith’s stand, one of my longtime favorites, I saw a buyer take a huge basket of turnips over to the vendor’s counter, where it was weighed, following which he dumped the entire load into a big bag of his own. Then, in the most matter-of-fact way, he paid with a hundred-dollar bill and departed, lugging his load. This amazed me for two reasons:I had never seen anyone buy a whole huge basket of turnips, every last turnip of that variety on hand.I had never seen a hundred-dollar bill in the Greenmarket.
Boy, that must be some family, I thought. But the vendor smiled and said, “He’s a chef.” Suddenly, all was clear. The buyer was following the age-old tradition of the best restaurants, big or small, in France. Early in the morning the owner or head chef goes to the local market, sees what is fresh, and makes purchases that determine the whole day’s menu for his restaurant. So diners in this buyer's restaurant that day must have tasted cooked turnips in whatever dish he chose to prepare.
(A side note: Turnips are a good nutritional food, but by themselves a bit boring. My only recipe for them: roast root vegetables. Mixed in with carrots and potatoes, dripping with olive oil, and sprinkled with that legendary triad of herbs, thyme, rosemary, and sage, they are a great winter food. I would gladly do it as the cold weather comes on, but the gas is still out in my building, meaning no oven, and you can’t do a roast on the stovetop. Yes, I know, get a microwave, but my kitchen has only so much space.)
After that I hurried home, changed, and prepared for the annual Lambda Legal luncheon at Etcetera Etcetera, a restaurant on West 44thStreet. Two outings in one day, and close together, were a bit of a challenge, but I went. “We are your lawyers!” Lambda announces in its e-mails soliciting donations, and it’s true, for every day they are involved in some legal action somewhere in the country, advancing the rights of the LGBTQ community. It would be a Golden Oldies affair, mostly male, thanking moneyed gays (I just can’t say “queers”) for their past generosity, though hosted by a younger set. (I sneak in by virtue of a modest gift of stock.) Getting there a bit out of breath (I hate to be late), I entered and told the first person I saw, an older man with drink in hand, “I’m here for the Lambda luncheon.” “No,” he said with a mischievous smile, “this is a Trump rally.” “Well,” I said, “I’m flexible. I can do both.”
A veteran of these affairs, I knew to go right to the bar and get a drink – free, of course, for Lambda, replete with gratitude, was paying. That done, I eased my way into a host of mostly unfamiliar, though not unfriendly, faces, while sipping pinot noir.
It makes you sociable and witty.Missvain
Soon enough I was seated at a round table with a bunch of strangers, a place setting before me with real red cloth napkins. (No pinching pennies here!) Surprisingly, it turned out that most of my table mates were, or had been, residents of the West Village. Inevitably, the talk went to the weightiest of issues: recommendations of good local restaurants; the legendary chocolate store Li-lac moving to a new location to obtain more space; and the success or failure of the new plan to ease the traffic on 14th Street by banning most private vehicles. As for the food, you started with a salad with thin slices of cheese, then went to a choice of (1) salmon, (2) beef, or (3) risotto. True to my (at times shaky) vegan principles, I went with #3 and did not regret it.
[image error] Risotto
Dessert was an apple tart, delicious. And a second glass of pinot noir didn’t hurt. Nor did the presence of Barbara, a gracious woman, whose presence was significant, the “second sex” being rare in these quarters, though not intentionally so. She announced herself as Philadelphia-born, a lawyer, and a Lambda volunteer.
Being guests of Lambda, we could hardly complain when our fine dining and sophisticated chitchat was interrupted by a series of Lambda biggies at a microphone planted right smack next to our table. Barbara spoke first, then the temporary recent CEO, and finally the new CEO himself, who updated us on Lambda doings. I learned that
Half of U.S. high schools now have centers for gay students. Lambda has 75 lawsuits under way throughout the nation. Halloween is the gay Christmas. A teacher, in 1988 he came out to the student body, a rather gutsy thing to do. Lambda feels under siege by you-know-who and his cronies. There is no final victory or defeat; always, the struggle goes on.
Rounds of applause followed each of his comments, and more praise and gratitude were heaped upon us, plus a discreet request for donations.
The talks over, gobbling and blabbing resumed. (Genteel gobbling and sophisticated blabbing, it goes without saying.) At our table Barbara received a series of greetings, hugs, and kisses from older males who came to our table. This inspired me to observe that people who think gay guys hate women know nothing about gay guys, who, with sex and romance excluded, often have lifelong friendships with women. She endorsed this heartily, stressing that she, a straight woman, was blessed with the friendship of many gay men. This said, an oozy warmth permeated us all. Then Jonathan, a young Lambda staff member and a friend of mine, came to our table, crouched down so as to be on a level with us, and chatted knowingly and amiably. When he left to visit the other tables, one of my neighbors said, “He’s cute!” He is.
So what’s so crazy about all this? you may wonder. Hang on, craziness is coming. Finally it came time to part. Going down West 44th Street to the Times Square subway station, I noticed an elevator at the 44th Street entrance and took it down. Alas, it took me only half way down, but there I spied another elevator, so I got in. I pushed one button, nothing happened. I pushed a second button, and the door closed. I pushed the first button, the door opened. I pushed the second button again, the door closed. But what else was there to push? A red button, so I pushed it. Immediately the button lighted up, and an alarm began ringing. I pushed every button in turn, but nothing happened. I was trapped. Ridiculous, I thought. A woman with an infant in a stroller appeared, wanted to enter the elevator. Through the big elevator window I shrugged in despair, unable to help. Trapped. I pushed a HELP lever, waited. Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. Fantasies of permanent entrapment kindled in my brain. Was claustrophobia next?
Finally two men appeared. “The red button!” they said. I pushed it, nothing happened. Ridiculous. “Pull it out!” they said. I pulled it out, the light went off, and the alarm stopped. Now, when I pushed the right button, the door opened. Free at last! I got out, waved the woman with the stroller in. “There’s room for you, too,” said one of the men. Though wary, with them on hand, I got in, and the elevator took us down. She got out, I got out. “It’s been an adventure,” I said. She smiled, nodded, and we went our separate ways.
Not the one that trapped me, but its cousin.MTA
I got home without difficulty; my crazy day -- at least the craziness – was over. That night I collapsed in bed, didn’t sleep well, and the next day felt all played out. Only by Friday was I rested, able to cope. Crazy days like this I don’t need; give me sane. Dull, boring, monotonous, but sane.
(I was going to ask readers to forgive the uninspired content of this post, but now I've decided that the BROWDERBOOKS account of my experience with Stratton Press redeems it.)
Coming soon: Horrors of Voting.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
November 3, 2019
434. Of Spooks and Ghouls
BROWDERBOOKS
Against my better judgment, poetry is coming out of my ears. Long ago I told my friend Vernon, also a poet, that I wanted to squelch my muse, so I could focus on other things. He said, "If you try, it'll come out your ears." And so it is. I've even gotten up in the middle of the night to jot down a few words, a few phrases, which is the height and depth of absurdity. And how do these golden inspirations look in the cold light of morning? Not impossible, not base lead, and sometimes rather good. That is the trouble. If they looked mediocre and forgettable, I could forget them and be done with it. But these, in their way, haunt me. They say, "C'mon, write me down. Link me up with other words, make me into a poem." But I don't want these nocturnal ·or even diurnal) invasions. I need my sleep. And what I'm writing -- perhaps blatherings for a chapbook -- have something to offend everyone. A kicky thought, admittedly, but I doubt if, given the chance, Everyone will read them.
Hogarth, "The Distress'd Poet," 1737.And look at what a mess his place is.
Today, poetry is a poor, sad thing. Only a few hopeless addicts -- usually poets themselves -- read it. The rest of the world have jobs to do, video games to play, love affairs to get into or out of. So who has time for poetry today? A paltry few. Not like in the nineteenth century. Back then, when Byron or Longfellow announced a new volume, people flocked to the bookstore, even lined up outside, sizzling with expectation. Yes, really. But that was before movies, television, and the Internet.
"
Domenico Fetti, "A Poet from Antiquity," a painting of 1620-1621,painted for the ducal court of Mantua. Not meant as satire, but look at that outlandish headgear -- supposedly, a crown of laurels. He's supposed to be inspired, yet human, and unheroic. Agreed, heroic he ain't.
My prose, fiction and nonfiction, is another matter. People -- some people -- actually read it. And it's all gluten-free and made in America, and it doesn't rob me of sleep. To see it, go to my post BROWDERBOOKS. And now, on to spooks and ghouls.
Of Spooks and GhoulsThis post is a repeat of post #31, dated October 28, 2012, which I am resurrecting in honor of Halloween 2019. If it sounds familiar, it also appeared as chapter 38 in No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World. Apologies to those already familiar with it.
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SilarIt’s spook time, and I don't mean the election. A candy store near my building features witches in orange and black in its window, and a pharmacy offers a host of eerie items: skulls, bones, skeletons, a severed arm (fake, of course; there are limits), a bat, huge spiders and their webs, a black cat, and a vulture that looks hungry. (Not the best display for an outfit dispensing medicines meant to help and heal, but they like to be seasonal.) So Halloween must be in the offing.
But I won't confine myself to the holiday. This post's subject and the next will be our ambiguous attitude toward death and the dead, a vast subject that, given the many associations and scraps of history dancing in my head, will probably spill out in all directions. But we'll start with Halloween.
For most of us, Halloween means ghosts and witches and skeletons, trick-or-treating, costumes, jack-o’-lanterns, and innocent or not-so-innocent pranks – a completely secular event. But the name “Halloween” is a contraction of All Hallows’ Eve, referring to the Christian feast of All Hallows on November 1, and Halloween, celebrated on October 31, has both pagan and Christian antecedents. It has been traced all the way back to the late-autumn Celtic festival of Samhain, when the physical and supernatural worlds were closest; the souls of the dead were thought to revisit their homes, and bonfires were built to ward their spirits off.
The Christian holy day of All Saints’ Day, November 1, was a time for honoring the saints and praying for the dead, who until this day were thought to still wander the earth prior to reaching heaven or the alternative. But this was also the last chance for the dead to wreak vengeance on their enemies before entering the next world, so to avoid being recognized by them (hmm… they must have felt guilty about something), people disguised themselves by wearing masks and costumes: the beginning of Halloween costumes. So are the dead to be welcomed and prayed for, or dreaded and avoided? Both, it seems. Which shows, I think, a profound ambivalence.
LaszloenAs for jack-o’lanterns, they developed out of the custom in Scotland and Ireland of carving turnips into lanterns to ward off evil spirits. Coming to this country, immigrants from those countries used the native pumpkin instead, whose size and softness made it much easier to carve. The name itself probably comes from an Irish folktale about a man named Stingy Jack who outwitted the Devil but after his death, being barred from both heaven and hell, was doomed to wandering the earth with an ember to light his way.
Children’s trick-or-treating came later, being first recorded in North America in a Canadian newspaper of 1911. Wikipedia dates the first use of the term in the U.S. from 1934, but I can testify that by then all the kids in my middle-class Chicago suburb were ringing neighbors’ doorbells in hopes of goodies, though usually not in costume, without any thought of pioneering a new Halloween custom; as far as we were concerned, this is how it had always been, though we were much more into treats than tricks. (Still, my father, fearing vandalism, always wired the gates to our backyard shut, to keep out devilish intruders of whatever species or persuasion.) By then, too, the costumes that some people donned were not confined to the eerie stuff (ghosts, skeletons, witches, and such), but included just about anyone or anything you could think of. All of which shows how a holiday once concerned with praying for departed souls and warding off evil spirits has become, in the U.S. today, a children’s fun fest spiced with just a touch of the eerie.
South of the border things are just a bit different. Related to Halloween in Mexico is the Day of the Dead (el Dia de los Muertos), celebrated on November 1, a national holiday when people gather to remember and pray for deceased friends and family. Altars are built in homes and cemeteries, and offerings are made of sugar and chocolate skulls, and bread often in the shape of a skull and decorated with white frosting to resemble twisted bones. Photos and memorabilia are also placed there, in hopes of encouraging visits by the dead, so they can hear the prayers and comments of the living.
Tomascastelago Associated with the Day of the Dead is the la Catrina, the Grande Dame of Death, a skeleton presented as an elegant woman with a fancy hat. This beloved figure of Mexican folk art first appeared in 1910 as an etching by the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, but can be linked to Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of the dead. She satirizes high society, but also shows how Mexicans bring death close to them and celebrate the joy of life in the very face of its opposite. During my two trips to Mexico long ago I never encountered her (wrong season), but photos of her are unforgettable, reminding us how tame our Halloween images are in comparison. And in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City I saw many Aztec sculptures of gods adorned with human bones and skulls. (They were a cheery bunch, those human-sacrificing Aztecs.) Obviously, we mortals have many ways of facing – and facing down – death.All right, Mexico and la Catrina are pretty far removed from New York, the alleged subject of my blog, but I warned you that I might stray far and wide. So to get back to the Apple, how about the doctors’ riot of 1788? No, the doctors didn’t riot; in fact, they came close to being lynched.
Since the Renaissance medical science had been dissecting bodies so as to better understand anatomy, as evidenced by a Rembrandt painting of 1632. But in England, Scotland, and the thirteen colonies that became the United States, there was strong popular feeling against the practice. Fueling this feeling was the medical schools’ constant need for fresh bodies, which led them to snatch freshly buried
bodies from graveyards. During the Revolution, battlefields provided a good supply of unclaimed bodies, but with the coming of peace the need for more bodies intensified. In New York the students at the city’s only medical school, Columbia College, raided the Negroes Burial Ground, where both slaves and freedmen were buried, but also the graves of paupers in Potters’ Field, while usually – but not always – respecting the graves of those “most entitled to respect.” So great was the demand for bodies that a new occupation appeared, the professional body snatcher, or resurrectionist, whom the medical schools could hire. Aware of the risks, grieving families often hired guards to watch over the grave of a loved one at night for two weeks following burial, since after that the bodies would be too decomposed for purposes of dissection. The authorities were certainly aware of the activities of body snatchers, whether professional or amateur, but probably chose to look the other way, as long as it was all done discreetly and confined to the graves of the lowly, but by the late 1780s trouble was brewing.
Then, in April 1788, the storm broke. Accounts differ, but it seems that a group of boys playing outside the dissection room of City Hospital saw a severed human arm hung up to dry in a window, and rushed off to tell their elders. An angry mob quickly gathered and surrounded the hospital, then broke in and, finding three fresh bodies there, one boiling in a kettle, destroyed everything in sight, including valuable specimens collected over many years, as well as surgical instruments. Most of the doctors and students had escaped, but one doctor remained with three medical students, and only the sheriff’s removing them to the city jail for their own protection saved them from being lynched.
The mob's anger did not subside overnight, and many doctors found it convenient to take a sudden vacation out of town. The governor called out the militia, but the mob disarmed some of them and attacked Columbia College, destroying more medical specimens and instruments. Alexander Hamilton tried in vain to calm them, and John Jay (a future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) was hit by a rock and knocked unconscious. That evening the mob threatened the jail, where the doctor and students were still lodged. When the rioters hurled bricks and rocks at the militia, the soldiers finally opened fire, killing eight and wounding many more. Those doctors still in town treated the wounded, and the rioters dispersed the next morning, thus ending the new nation’s first recorded riot.
Some weeks later the New York legislature passed a law permitting the dissection of hanged criminals. Unfortunately, there were never enough of them, so resurrectionists and their opponents would persist well into the next century, often provoking (your choice) picturesque or grisly incidents, as my next post will show.
Of course body snatching is now a thing of the past, is it not? Wrong! In 2005 an ex-dentist in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was arrested for obtaining bodies from funeral homes in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania with forged consent documents, and then selling bones, organs, skin, and other body parts to legitimate medical companies and tissue banks for resale to hospitals, which needed them for transplants. They did six or seven extractions a day, a male nurse involved in the operation later confessed; it took 45 minutes for the bones, and another 15 for skin, arms, thighs, and belly. But why get involved in such a gruesome business? Because, the nurse explained, he went from earning $50,000 a year as a nurse to $185,000 as a "cutter." Yes, this illegal business is flourishing throughout our fair land, as a quick search for "body snatching" on the Internet will quickly demonstrate. I myself plan to be cremated, but this doesn't guarantee a thing; so did the people whose bodies were stolen by the dentist and his fellow ghouls.
Happy Halloween!
Coming soon: My Crazy Wednesday: A Hundred Dollars' Worth of Turnips, My Lambda Lawyers, Trapped
© 2019 Clifford Browder
October 27, 2019
433. How to Marry an Island
BROWDERBOOKS
I am fresh out of author's copies of my latest nonfiction title, Fascinating New Yorkers, having sold three at the Rainbow Book Fair, leaving only one, which I have since mailed to a friend who couldn't make it to the fair. As for my other nonfiction title, No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, I have only two left, and don't plan to replace them once they are gone. Why? Because they'll compete with my next book, another nonfiction title about New Yorkers and New York, which is in the works and will soon be announced. I'm tired of that book, with its bright cover and the words NEW YORK in bold against a light background, upstaging and outselling all my other books at book fairs. Not that the cover of my forthcoming nonfiction title is disappointing. On the contrary, it's exciting and unique, like no book cover, mine or anyone's, that I've encountered. I'll be displaying it soon.
See what I mean? Bright colors andbold letters -- they catch everyone's eye.
For this and my other books, see my post BROWDERBOOKS.
HOW TO MARRY AN ISLAND
Not being a celebrity fan, I’m not a reader of obituaries. But one obituary in the Sunday New York Times of October 13 caught my eye. It was for Robert Goelet, whom the caption identified as a naturalist, philanthropist, and grandee. I had never heard of him, but the name “Goelet” struck a chord in me. Long ago, when I was researching my biography of the nineteenth-century Wall Street speculator Daniel Drew, who lived in a brownstone mansion on Union Square, I read that one of his neighbors, a Goelet, charmed and amazed passersby by having peacocks strutting in his yard. This struck me not as the brazen attention-getting gesture of a nouveau riche, but as an indication of endearing patrician eccentricity. Though I couldn’t even pronounce it, the name “Goelet” suggested Old Money.
Old New York money in those days meant the Knickerbockers, the long-established Dutch and English families who kept grubby newcomers at a distance. “We keep ourselves to ourselves” was their motto. Marrying only other Knickerbockers, they lived quietly and tastefully, the walls of their parlors adorned with gilt-framed portraits of this mayor and that governor of the distant past, their forebears, who viewed serving the public as a duty incumbent upon respectable, well-moneyed citizens. Their fortune had usually been acquired through commerce long ago, permitting them to likewise keep the grubby ways of business at a distance. But by the 1860s politics repelled them, for Tammany, the notoriously corrupt Democratic machine, now ruled the city, courting the votes of the rabble.
Such were my thoughts inspired by the name “Goelet,” which the Times obit said is pronounced “guh-LET.” Robert Goelet, its subject, was certainly a modern-day example of a Knickerbocker, being independently wealthy and devoting much of his time to civic causes. But were his forebears really the elite Knickerbockers that I had imagined? To find out, I consulted the sources close at hand in my apartment. Back in the 1840s, in the wake of the Panic of 1837, which had brought down many a supposed millionaire, Moses Beach, the publisher of the New York Sun, saw the need of a published list of the city’s wealthy, showing the size and nature of their fortunes. The result was Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City, Comprising an Alphabetical Arrangement of Persons Estimated to be Worth $100,000, and Upwards. When it was published, I suspect that it flew off the shelves. Thanks to tireless Xeroxing by my deceased partner, Bob, I have a copy of the sixth edition, published in 1845.
Cornelius Vanderbilt and assorted Astors dominate its pages, Cornelius with a mere one-inch column and a fortune of $1,200,000, and old John Jacob Astor, the fur trade magnate, with a whole page to himself and a fortune of $25 million, the largest in the list and the country. Moses himself sneaks in with a two-inch column and $250,000, and Phineas Barnum, the future circus man, with slightly less space and $150,000. So how do the Goelets fare? Rather well, in appropriately discreet entries:
· Almie Goelet (widow of Peter P.), $250,000.· George Goelet, the name only, $100,000.· Margaret Goelet (widow of Robert R.), $100,000.· Peter Goelet, son of Peter P., $400,000.
A substantial note under Margaret Goelet states that Robert R., her deceased husband, and his brother Peter P. were of English birth, and that Robert R. made his fortune in the hardware business. Both brothers married daughters of Thomas Buchanan, a Scotch merchant of this city, prior to the American Revolution. So the Goelets of that time were doing well, their known fortunes totaling $850,000. Also, one suspects, they were marrying well. The taint of commerce was still upon them, to some extent, but they were thriving.
Another trusted source, Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 – a hulking volume that, because of its size, I rarely use – adds a few more details. Money for buildings to house the city’s surging population came from old landed families like the Stuyvesants, Roosevelts, Lenoxes, and – you guessed it – Goelets. Clearly, they were in good company as well as in the chips. Goelets were also among the real estate princes who for years blocked the granting of franchises to let horsecars operate on Broadway, until, in the 1880s, their opponents outbribed the state legislature and obtained a franchise for the newfangled cable cars to operate there.
Not that the Goelets were always the enemies of progress. When William H. Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s son, found himself and other New Money folks excluded from the Academy of Music by Old Money’s monopoly of the boxes there, he martialed an army of New Money people to build the first Metropolitan Opera House way uptown at Broadway and 39th Street. And among his backers were a few “older patricians,” including one Ogden Goeket. One wonders how enamored of opera Mr. Vanderbilt’s confederates were; certainly they and their wives were enamored of having an opera box where they could be seen by other moneyed arrivistes.
Goelets were also among the elite clients of McKim, Mead, & White, the stellar architectural firm of the 1880s and 1890s that created such masterpieces as the Washington Square Arch, the pillared magnificence of Low Library at Columbia University, and the Madison Square Garden rooftop theater where the firm’s leading light, Stanford White, would be shot to death in 1906 by a jealous rival in an affair of the heart. And when millionaires flocked to build palatial residences for themselves on the upper Fifth Avenue, another Robert Goelet was among them. In decade after decade, the Goelets seem to have been discreetly involved in the city’s eventful history.
The Ogden Goelet mansion on Fifth Avenue, completed in 1884,proof that the Goelets were living well. The interior was
decorated by a design team from Tiffany's.
And the recently deceased Robert of today? A photo shows a slender, elderly man, clean-shaven and smiling, formally attired with a black bow tie. The Times obit states that Robert Guestier Goelet was born in 1923 in a chateau in Amblainville, France, on a 10,000-acre estate owned by his mother’s family, the Guestiers. His mother’s family were French wine merchants, and his father, Robert Walton Goelet, managed his inherited real estate, railways, hotels, and “other holdings” from homes in New York, Newport, R.I., and France. Dad must have been a busy guy, to keep track of all that property and all those homes. Clearly, his son was born with a silver spoon – maybe several – in his mouth.
That wasn’t the case at the start. The obit says that the Goelets were French Huguenots, whom the Sun King, Louis XIV, had made personae non gratae in France with the repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Always ahead in the game, the first Goelets to arrive on these blessed shores were ten-year-old Jacobus and his widowed father (whose name the obit doesn’t give), who came from Amsterdam in 1676. Jacobus’s grandson, Peter, was an ironmonger during the Revolution, but then invested in real estate. However prosperous ironmongering might have been, it couldn’t match real estate on Manhattan. By the end of the nineteenth century, the family owned some 55 acres on Manhattan. Now 55 acres may not sound like much, compared to 10,000 acres in France, but those acres were on the East Side of Manhattan, from Union Square to 48th Street, and therefore worth a fortune.
As for the subject of the obit, he too was a pretty busy guy. Among his accomplishments (not all of them simultaneous):
· President of the American Museum of Natural History· President of the New York Historical Society· President of the New York Zoological Society· President of the French Institute / Alliance Française· Board member of the National Audubon Society· Board member of the Carnegie Institution for Science· Board member of the Chemical Bank (now my bank, J.P. Morgan Chase), founded in 1824 by his ancestor, Peter Goelet· Husband of Alexandra Gardiner Creel.
That last entry might seem puzzling, but when he married her, at age 52, in 1976, she was co-owner, with her eccentric uncle Robert Gardiner, of Gardiners Island, under a trust from her aunt. Gardiners Island! I had long heard of it as a privately owned 3,300-acre island off the eastern tip of Long Island, rich in history, but also an idyllic wildlife site not open to the public. A Gardiner had bought the island from the Mantaucket Indians in 1639. With the Gardiner family's permission, Captain Kidd had buried some treasure there in 1699, before facing charges of piracy in Boston, where the governor ordered the Gardiners to fork over the treasure as evidence. (The reigning Gardiner kept one diamond and gave it to his daughter.) During both the Revolution and the War of 1812 a British fleet anchored there, and its crew came ashore to either buy supplies or steal them. In 1812, when the Americans captured some of the British crew, the British came to arrest the current Lord of the Manor. He received them lying in bed, feigning debility, and with a supply of medicines in evidence. Not wanting a sick man on board, the British left him alone. And in 1820 the island saw the birth of Julia Gardiner, who would become the second wife of President John Tyler and preside over the White House as First Lady.
So now this storied island, with its white pine and oak forests, colonial buildings, 200-year-old windmill, family cemetery, and more ospreys than people, was linked to the Goelet clan. The reigning Gardiner uncle styled himself the “Sixteenth Lord of the Manor” and viewed everyone in the Hamptons as nouveau riche. He had no heirs, and engaged in a three-decade legal imbroglio with his niece over maintenance costs and visitation rights on the island. He also accused her husband of trying to run over him with a truck, prompting New York Magazine to describe the island in 1989 as a wasps’ nest. When the old man died in 2004, Robert and his wife took full possession, restored its colonial buildings and natural habitat, and maintained it as a wildlife sanctuary. It’s fine to be president of this or that, but to marry Gardiners Island was no small feat.
Aerial view of Gardiners Island, 2007.dsearls
The Gardiners, by the way, were just as savvy as the Goelets in amassing a fortune and hanging on to it. “We have always married into wealth,” Robert Gardiner told a British newspaper in 2003. “We covered all our bets.” Indeed they did, being on both sides in the Revolution and the Civil War. Whatever their loyalties as Americans, they were at the mercy of the British navy and had to deal with them as best they could.
The Gardiners Island windmill, built in 1795.Robert Goelet grew up in France and came to New York at age 12. As a result, he had never seen a baseball game, nor did he ever want to. He got a B.A. in history from -- where else? – Harvard. In the course of his career in philanthropy and civic matters, he acquired a reputation for joining a board when there was an emergency, and somehow resolving it. Not that he always got his way. When he wanted to sell Lever House, the glass-box skyscraper on Park Avenue, to a developer, the Landmarks Preservation Commission saved it from demolition. And when he wanted to rescue the New York Historical Society from bankruptcy by building an apartment tower over it, that same commission stopped him again. But the presidency that thrilled him the most was that of the Museum of Natural History. He confessed to a personal weakness for fish and birds. “I’m nuts for fossils, and I have a healthy respect for poisonous snakes.” Which went back to his school days when, blocked from sports by rheumatism, he took to climbing trees to inspect birds’ nests.
So I say, let’s forgive him his antipathy to baseball (which I share), and his outrageous wealth and privilege, and applaud his love of wildlife (which I also share). He didn’t learn that on a 10,000-acre estate in France; he learned it over here. So may he rest in peace.
Source note: This post was inspired by the obituary of Robert Goelet by Sam Roberts in the New York Times of Sunday, October 13, 2019, and owes many of its details to that source.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
October 20, 2019
432. Rainbow Book Fair:
BROWDERBOOKS
The Eye That Never Sleeps, my most recent historical novel, has received two more good reviews. A Bestsellersworld reviewer concluded:
Altogether, I really enjoyed The Eye That Never Sleeps. I relished in being immersed in a story that captured the reality of that era in early New York history, especially being a New Yorker myself. I do highly recommend this book. It was a worthy read that was simultaneously informative, compelling and entertaining.
You can see the full review here. An IndieReader reviewer said:
The book is obviously well researched and lovingly written, and anyone with an interest in the city and the era will be rewarded by the pleasant prose and delightful details, right down to the sideburns on the main character’s face.
For that complete review, go here.
For this novel and my other books, see my post BROWDERBOOKS.
RAINBOW BOOK FAIRA MYSTERY PROJECT, CONEY ISLAND MEMORIES,A PROPOSITION, AND COCAINE
Yes, the Rainbow Book Fair of 2019 was an adventure, unique. Rather than taking Lyft, as we usually do for fairs, we walked to the Gay Center on West 13thStreet, and all went well. At the Center we found that we were indeed at table #28 in room 101, quite near the entrance, and right across the aisle from the coffee urns and free bagels and doughnuts.
Our table, like all the others, was covered with a fake blue cloth, “fake” in that it wasn’t real cloth, only a flimsy plastic imitation. We set the table up with my two books, The Pleasuring of Men and Fascinating New Yorkers, at one end, and my partner Bob’s two works of fiction, The Coney Island Memoir of Sebastian Strong and The Professor and Other Tales of Coney Island,at the other. I was sure that my novel Pleasuring, with a sexy cover showing a good-looking young man naked from the chest up, would sell, so I had 12 copies on hand, many on our big bookrack.
At a gay book fair, how could this miss?A
My nonfiction title Fascinating New Yorkers (FNY), of which I had only four copies, was also there, for I figured it a close second in sales. I wasn’t sure if Bob’s two books, being slow-paced literary works with great attention to mood and style, would sell at all, so I had only four copies of each on the table. Conspicuous by its absence was my first self-published work, No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World. It is not gay-themed, and even more to the point, with its bright rainbow colors on the cover, it catches people’s attention at once. I was determined that this time it would not upstage and outsell my other books, as it is wont to do. So not one copy went on the table, nor did I have one in reserve.
Besides the big sign NEW YORK STORIES hanging in front of our table, we had some smaller fun signs on the table top, to be displayed one at a time:
YOU
READ? I
LOVE YOU
BOOKS ARE SEXY
NORMAL?NOT MEI’M ANEW YORKER
Me and my paraphernalia.
All four walls of room 101 were lined with exhibitors’ tables, and in the center of the spacious room there was a big circle of additional tables, ours included, facing the other tables to create a circular aisle. If visitors entering the room chose to go clockwise, they would go straight ahead and come to our table first. If they chose to go counterclockwise, they would turn to the right and come first to the table of Poets Wear Prada, where a group of older women, one of them in a wheelchair, were displaying a disconcerting array of poetry chapbooks. The women sat with their backs to us, but to access their chairs they had to enter by a narrow aisle next to one end of our table. I predicted that, doing this, someone from their table would step on our trailing table cloth and bring our big book-laden bookrack crashing to the floor. A worst-case scenario, to be sure, so we chose to be optimists.
At the magic opening hour of 12 noon, by which time we had both gobbled a quick lunch, there was no incoming rush of attendees, for it was lunchtime on Saturday for everyone, and only an hour later did visitors begin dribbling in. Next to us was the table of Harrington Park Press, loaded with books, but with no one there to sell them, which puzzled us mightily. Across the aisle from us, next to the free food, was a stand with a sign overhead:
IVERDALEVEOOKS
This we finally interpreted as
RIVERDALEAVEBOOKS
with the first letter of each line in a color that was barely visible. And elsewhere in the room were dozens of other small gay presses that appear out of the publishing woodwork only on occasions like this.
Slowly the aisles filled up with attendees, who as a group seemed unique to this and similar rare occasions:
· A tall, phenomenally thin boy with a Mohawk.· Young men with flashy print jackets, very expensive, that Silas told me were very “in” this year with the moneyed young male gay set.· A hefty older woman with flaring long, platinum-blond hair and a glittering necklace.· A blond young youth with cherubic features, wearing a long capelike outfit that was oddly elegant.· A merry foursome of young women who were outrageously obese and stood bunched together in the aisle, blocking it, babbling with whoops and squeals of laughter, and showing no interest at all in the books.
This last quartet, as well as many other attendees, seemed to be there simply for the fun of it, with no intention of buying. Since attendees were clipped at the entrance for a suggested five-dollar donation (“more if you can, less if you can’t”), we could only hope that these non-buyers were helping to support the Center. Other non-buyers included, at one point, mothers with infants in strollers and scampering toddlers, and one puppy on a leash.
Also present, midway through the fair, was a blond boy of about fourteen, with an endearing look of innocence, accompanied by an older woman who I assume was his mother. He had probably come out to her early, as kids do nowadays, and expressed a wish to attend the fair. Wisely, Mom decided to go with him. Whether she knew it or not, she was protecting him from the chicken hawks, men who are attracted to innocent-looking young boys ("chicken"). All this is speculation, even fantasy, on my part, but I think there's a bit of truth in it. I hope he found something of interest to read, or was otherwise entertained.
Of course there were buyers, but as always, we waited and waited for the first one to appear. Our buyers were always congenial and friendly, often with a lively story of their own to tell. They tended to be older men, but two women appeared separately and asked me to sign their book, one for “Kathy with a K,” and one for “Nora.” We were also photographed twice, and once or twice more without our permission.
We soon learned to spot the non-buyers, and for them we didn’t trouble to stand up from our chairs:
· Young men, of whom there weren’t many.· People who looked right at our funny signs but didn’t show a hint of a smile.· Older men with a beverage in hand.· People who started looking at a book, then turned to engage in a long conversation with a friend.· Unsmiling people who looked sourly at our books, lips pursed.
Silas was vastly amused once when I started to stand, then sat down again, having decided – correctly – that the buyer wouldn’t buy. It was a long six-hour session, and we were saving our energy.
There were, of course, visitors who looked and looked at the books, complimented us on the covers (especially Pleasuring), helped themselves to free postcards and bookmarks, said how interesting the titles were, and then, with Silas and me both on our feet and hoping, put the books down and walked away. As veterans of book fairs, we weren’t surprised at this, shrugged it off. But one man, having lingered unconscionably long at our table, left with these parting words: “Thank you for writing all those books.” I was tempted to reply, “And thank you, jerk, for not buying any of them,” but wisely, I forbore. Though only half the books were mine, he meant well, and it was all a part of the game.
At quiet intervals I went about the room eyeing the books and other items for sale, and collecting mementos. Among the loot I gathered:
· A 3-by-4-inch card for a thriller entitled Summerville by H.L. Sudler, showing a muscular male in a bikini and promising SECRETS! SCANDAL! MURDER! -- enticements that I resisted.· A smaller card from Poets Wear Prada announcing The Little Entomologist by Roxanne Hoffman, with a charming illustration of a plant.· Another card wishing “Happy Reading from Archer Publishing.”· A glossy sheet for Harrington Park Press, whose unattended publications turned out to be free, announcing forthcoming titles like A Mental Health and Counseling Handbook, Queer Studies Beyond Binaries, and LGBTQ Runaway & Homeless Youth.
Also, a bookmark for Flight Attendant Joe by author Joe Thomas, asking, “ever wonder what happens behind the scenes at 38,000 feet?” and boasting that “This book has enough ego to fill an entire Airbus A380,” and warning, “Fasten your seat belts and eat your fxcking nuts.” Self-promotion to the limits, all of it, and beyond. But why not? That’s what book fairs are all about.
Halfway through the fair, it happened. Going past one end of our table to get behind the Poets Wear Prada exhibit, someone stepped on our trailing green curtain, and down came the bookrack and books with a crash. Were we angry, shocked, perturbed? No way. “It’s okay!” we exclaimed. “Books and bookracks don’t break.” So we scooped up the books, repositioned the rack, and resumed sitting or standing, hoping or not hoping, eyeing our watches, and counting the number of books already sold.
Unlike at the Brooklyn Book Festival, we lost no sales because we couldn’t take credit cards. On two occasions when a buyer asked about this, Silas assured them that, through the wonders of the Internet, he could take payments with either Venmo or Cash App. Since both buyers had one or the other of these mysterious entities, payment was promptly made.
At BookCon 2018 it was our big sign NEW YORK STORIES that drew people to our table. But now at Rainbow, where the aisles were narrower, attendees passed close to our table and were attracted by the sexy cover of Pleasuring. So did Pleasuring fly off the rack? Not at all. Their eye went next to Fascinating New Yorkers, and then to Bob’s two books, and those were the ones that sold. Pleasuring usually interested older gay men, but the other three could appeal to everyone and therefore found a wider audience. To my surprise, Bob’s books, having “Coney Island” in the title, got a lot of attention, for buyers and non-buyers alike seemed to have a Coney Island story. One man told how, sunbathing on the beach, he had got a blistering sunburn on his shoulders and arms. A young woman told us how she had grown up near Coney and knew it from her childhood on. And another man told how, at fifteen, he discovered Coney Island and sex. At first he wondered why so many men on the Boardwalk were staring at the beach, but then he realized that they were eyeing the young lifeguards. Soon, without his parents noticing, he was sneaking off to Coney to indulge in quick, hot sex. (Interesting story, told with gusto, but no sale.)
We heard non-Coney stories as well. One man declared that, because New York had no norms that you had to conform to, people came here to become themselves – a statement that I heartily agreed with. Another man glanced at Fascinating New Yorkers and saw that the subjects of the first two chapters were Francis Spellman, cardinal archbishop of New York, and Roy Cohn. Flashing a knowing smile, he referred to His Eminence as “Franny” (as he was known in certain circles), and mentioned a new study of AIDS-denier Cohn. Obviously, he was well up in such matters. (But no sale.) And another male visitor said he liked the font of Fascinating New Yorkers, explaining that he never bought a book unless the font appealed to him. "But," he added, "I want illustrations, too." But my books are not for the coffee table; what counts is words in print. Alas, another no sale.
Sold three, only one left, and it is spoken for.
Not meant for coffee tables.
Still another male visitor told how he shunned television and preferred to read. Knowing this, his TV-watching friends called him an elitist who looked down on them with scorn, an impression heightened by his being vegetarian. When I told him that I had never owned a TV and that I ate mostly vegan, he grinned and presented his outstretched palm to me, so I could smack it with one of my palms in a joyous celebration of quirky nonconformity. (But, alas, no sale.)
The last visitor of the day was an older Irish American who told us, in a lilting brogue, of growing up gay in the Catholic Ireland of another time, a challenge that he seemed to have survived unscathed. Topped by a jaunty thin-brimmed hat, his appearance came off every bit as Irish as his brogue.
Two encounters were flat-out weird. Soon after the fair opened, an elderly man appeared with a walker. Seeing him, I applauded his coming, given his obvious physical handicap. He came straight to our table and in a soft voice began telling us of a Project that he had undertaken with others. Just what this Project was he didn’t explain, but it was huge in scope and would involve only New Yorkers. Seeing my focus as an author on New York stories, he wondered if he hadn’t right off found the helper he was looking for. “Oh, be sure to look around,” I said, gesturing toward the other tables, “I’m sure you’ll find something,” though just what that might be totally escaped me. His whispery voice talked on and on without clarifying his obsessive Project, but he seemed determined to involve me in it. “I need more information,” I said, offering my business card. Spotting my e-mail address on the card, he waved it away, declaring, “We don’t do e-mails, we absolutely don’t!” By now, Silas and I were eager to get rid of him, since he wasn’t about to buy any books, and was blocking the view of our table for others who might be of a mind to. “You can mail me information,” I suggested, and now he deigned to take my card. “One of my colleagues will contact you,” he said, and having given me his name, Bruce, he finally wandered off. Silas and I exchanged a baffled look, still in the dark about his Project. To date, no one has contacted me, and I rather hope that they won’t.
Later in the day an older man, clean shaven and thin and not bad looking, came to us, his scant locks plastered smooth against his noggin, and talked and talked and talked. He made sense in a way, but seemed all wound up, talked endlessly, scarcely catching his breath. When Silas told him that we were just friends, nothing more, he asked Silas for a date. Silas graciously declined, explaining that he was otherwise involved, but still the man talked on. Him too, another non-buyer, we wanted rid of. The noise level in the room had now risen to the point where I could make out little of what he was saying, so I nodded at what seemed appropriate moments, and smiled whenever he did. Finally, still babbling, he walked off. “Cocaine,” said Silas, “cocaine or methamphetamine. They’re common in the gay community.” News to me, but Silas was surely right.
By five o’clock, with only an hour to go, I had entered what I termed the “yawn phase” and was running down. We had sold only six books, no better than at the Brooklyn Book Festival, which threatened to depress me mightily. With the attendees thinning out, there seemed little chance of any more sales. I had told Silas earlier, “If we sell eight books, I’ll be satisfied.” That would outdo Brooklyn, and be double what I had sold when I first exhibited at the fair in 2012, displaying only the bright rainbow colors of No Place for Normal: New York. But out of nowhere came a buyer, and then another buyer, so we achieved the magic number of eight. I was vastly, joyously relieved. Such is the absurdity of small-press publishing and the antics of the human psyche, when the sale of a mere two books can assume such grandiose importance.
By a quarter of six our neighbors were packing their books away and stripping their tables bare, so we began packing up, too. What to do with our fake blue table cloth became clear, when the blond cherub whom I had noticed earlier popped up again, scooped the table cloth up, and tossed it in a nearby trash can; he was evidently allied with management. Soon Silas and I were out on the street, where the autumn air was delightfully mild, and walking back to my place. Arriving at 286 West 11th, Silas promptly toted the big bookrack, the rolled-up sign, and his book-crammed suitcase – in other words, everything but me and my shoulder bag -- up the four steep flights of stairs, leaving me to trudge up in his wake. Directed by me, he dumped all the stuff in the living room, and there I dumped my shoulder bag, too. “Hey, we did it again,” I exclaimed, then a quick hug and he was gone. After a light supper, I wearily collapsed in bed.
Inventory: we had sold eight books in all, four of mine and four of Bob’s: 1 Pleasuring (a measly 1!), 3 Fascinating New Yorkers, 3 Professors, and 1 Sebastian Strong. Out of 24 taken to the fair, only eight, which at first glance seemed paltry indeed. But then I did a sober calculation. For eight books at $20 each, I had pocketed $160. My table had cost $117, but the books had cost me something, too. Not Bob’s books, which I had inherited, but my own. From $160 I subtracted the cost of the table ($117) and the cost of my books ($69.27), which gave me an outlay of $26.27. O blessed Rainbow, I had almost – almost -- broken even! Just this once, in my history of book fairs, the cost is bearable, reassuring, a delight. So will I do it again? You bet!
By the standards of the big presses, with their book sales in the hundreds and thousands of copies, to be talking about 6 books or 8 or even 24 is, to put it mildly, ludicrous. But such is the world of small presses and indie authors, where two or three books sold, or not sold, can determine a day’s success or failure. Ludicrous, but quaintly small-time and charming, and anyway, that’s how it is.
What, then, is my outlook for book events in the future?
· Brooklyn Book Festival 2020: No way! A mere 6 sales, outdoors, and with the weather unpredictable. Brooklyn, ta ta.· Rainbow Book Fair 2020: Absolutely, if Silas is available. By myself, a challenge, though maybe feasible.· BookCon 2020: A toss-up, with the negatives and positives equally matched. Expensive, and overrun with hysterical young females who don’t buy my books. (So hysterical that, at BookCon 2019, some panelists were so unnerved that they called in security to calm the crowd and guarantee the panelists’ safety.) But three times in four at BookCon, my daily sales averaged 13 or 14: acceptable. Easy to get to, interesting older buyers, indoors. But I would need Silas, and with a demanding new job, he has trouble predicting his schedule.
· A book release party, spring 2020: Most likely. I’ll have at least one new book by then, self-published and in need of promotion. (That word again: promotion.) The first party was fun, so why not a second? And so easy: the books will be all here snug in my apartment, and instead of me going to people, people will come to me. All this, for a cost of some wine and some little plastic cups. Whether they read or not, my guests are great guzzlers, though never drunk. So let them come and chat and guzzle. If, that is, I do it. Book fairs, whether costly or not, come only once a year. An author needs to be selling all the time, and the big sales are on the Internet. So how does an unknown get himself known? Through SEO: Search Engine Optimization. The words themselves shake me to the bone. And think of all those little unknowns scrambling to unlock the secret and get themselves more known: intense, competitive. Will I be able to learn this daunting process? I have my doubts; stay tuned. Meanwhile, I take comfort in Rainbow 2019. For a mere $26.27, what an adventure!
Coming soon: ???
© 2019 Clifford Browder
The Eye That Never Sleeps, my most recent historical novel, has received two more good reviews. A Bestsellersworld reviewer concluded:
Altogether, I really enjoyed The Eye That Never Sleeps. I relished in being immersed in a story that captured the reality of that era in early New York history, especially being a New Yorker myself. I do highly recommend this book. It was a worthy read that was simultaneously informative, compelling and entertaining.
You can see the full review here. An IndieReader reviewer said:
The book is obviously well researched and lovingly written, and anyone with an interest in the city and the era will be rewarded by the pleasant prose and delightful details, right down to the sideburns on the main character’s face.
For that complete review, go here.
For this novel and my other books, see my post BROWDERBOOKS.
RAINBOW BOOK FAIRA MYSTERY PROJECT, CONEY ISLAND MEMORIES,A PROPOSITION, AND COCAINE
Yes, the Rainbow Book Fair of 2019 was an adventure, unique. Rather than taking Lyft, as we usually do for fairs, we walked to the Gay Center on West 13thStreet, and all went well. At the Center we found that we were indeed at table #28 in room 101, quite near the entrance, and right across the aisle from the coffee urns and free bagels and doughnuts.
Our table, like all the others, was covered with a fake blue cloth, “fake” in that it wasn’t real cloth, only a flimsy plastic imitation. We set the table up with my two books, The Pleasuring of Men and Fascinating New Yorkers, at one end, and my partner Bob’s two works of fiction, The Coney Island Memoir of Sebastian Strong and The Professor and Other Tales of Coney Island,at the other. I was sure that my novel Pleasuring, with a sexy cover showing a good-looking young man naked from the chest up, would sell, so I had 12 copies on hand, many on our big bookrack.
At a gay book fair, how could this miss?AMy nonfiction title Fascinating New Yorkers (FNY), of which I had only four copies, was also there, for I figured it a close second in sales. I wasn’t sure if Bob’s two books, being slow-paced literary works with great attention to mood and style, would sell at all, so I had only four copies of each on the table. Conspicuous by its absence was my first self-published work, No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World. It is not gay-themed, and even more to the point, with its bright rainbow colors on the cover, it catches people’s attention at once. I was determined that this time it would not upstage and outsell my other books, as it is wont to do. So not one copy went on the table, nor did I have one in reserve.
Besides the big sign NEW YORK STORIES hanging in front of our table, we had some smaller fun signs on the table top, to be displayed one at a time:
YOU
READ? I
LOVE YOU
BOOKS ARE SEXY
NORMAL?NOT MEI’M ANEW YORKER
Me and my paraphernalia.All four walls of room 101 were lined with exhibitors’ tables, and in the center of the spacious room there was a big circle of additional tables, ours included, facing the other tables to create a circular aisle. If visitors entering the room chose to go clockwise, they would go straight ahead and come to our table first. If they chose to go counterclockwise, they would turn to the right and come first to the table of Poets Wear Prada, where a group of older women, one of them in a wheelchair, were displaying a disconcerting array of poetry chapbooks. The women sat with their backs to us, but to access their chairs they had to enter by a narrow aisle next to one end of our table. I predicted that, doing this, someone from their table would step on our trailing table cloth and bring our big book-laden bookrack crashing to the floor. A worst-case scenario, to be sure, so we chose to be optimists.
At the magic opening hour of 12 noon, by which time we had both gobbled a quick lunch, there was no incoming rush of attendees, for it was lunchtime on Saturday for everyone, and only an hour later did visitors begin dribbling in. Next to us was the table of Harrington Park Press, loaded with books, but with no one there to sell them, which puzzled us mightily. Across the aisle from us, next to the free food, was a stand with a sign overhead:
IVERDALEVEOOKS
This we finally interpreted as
RIVERDALEAVEBOOKS
with the first letter of each line in a color that was barely visible. And elsewhere in the room were dozens of other small gay presses that appear out of the publishing woodwork only on occasions like this.
Slowly the aisles filled up with attendees, who as a group seemed unique to this and similar rare occasions:
· A tall, phenomenally thin boy with a Mohawk.· Young men with flashy print jackets, very expensive, that Silas told me were very “in” this year with the moneyed young male gay set.· A hefty older woman with flaring long, platinum-blond hair and a glittering necklace.· A blond young youth with cherubic features, wearing a long capelike outfit that was oddly elegant.· A merry foursome of young women who were outrageously obese and stood bunched together in the aisle, blocking it, babbling with whoops and squeals of laughter, and showing no interest at all in the books.
This last quartet, as well as many other attendees, seemed to be there simply for the fun of it, with no intention of buying. Since attendees were clipped at the entrance for a suggested five-dollar donation (“more if you can, less if you can’t”), we could only hope that these non-buyers were helping to support the Center. Other non-buyers included, at one point, mothers with infants in strollers and scampering toddlers, and one puppy on a leash.
Also present, midway through the fair, was a blond boy of about fourteen, with an endearing look of innocence, accompanied by an older woman who I assume was his mother. He had probably come out to her early, as kids do nowadays, and expressed a wish to attend the fair. Wisely, Mom decided to go with him. Whether she knew it or not, she was protecting him from the chicken hawks, men who are attracted to innocent-looking young boys ("chicken"). All this is speculation, even fantasy, on my part, but I think there's a bit of truth in it. I hope he found something of interest to read, or was otherwise entertained.
Of course there were buyers, but as always, we waited and waited for the first one to appear. Our buyers were always congenial and friendly, often with a lively story of their own to tell. They tended to be older men, but two women appeared separately and asked me to sign their book, one for “Kathy with a K,” and one for “Nora.” We were also photographed twice, and once or twice more without our permission.
We soon learned to spot the non-buyers, and for them we didn’t trouble to stand up from our chairs:
· Young men, of whom there weren’t many.· People who looked right at our funny signs but didn’t show a hint of a smile.· Older men with a beverage in hand.· People who started looking at a book, then turned to engage in a long conversation with a friend.· Unsmiling people who looked sourly at our books, lips pursed.
Silas was vastly amused once when I started to stand, then sat down again, having decided – correctly – that the buyer wouldn’t buy. It was a long six-hour session, and we were saving our energy.
There were, of course, visitors who looked and looked at the books, complimented us on the covers (especially Pleasuring), helped themselves to free postcards and bookmarks, said how interesting the titles were, and then, with Silas and me both on our feet and hoping, put the books down and walked away. As veterans of book fairs, we weren’t surprised at this, shrugged it off. But one man, having lingered unconscionably long at our table, left with these parting words: “Thank you for writing all those books.” I was tempted to reply, “And thank you, jerk, for not buying any of them,” but wisely, I forbore. Though only half the books were mine, he meant well, and it was all a part of the game.
At quiet intervals I went about the room eyeing the books and other items for sale, and collecting mementos. Among the loot I gathered:
· A 3-by-4-inch card for a thriller entitled Summerville by H.L. Sudler, showing a muscular male in a bikini and promising SECRETS! SCANDAL! MURDER! -- enticements that I resisted.· A smaller card from Poets Wear Prada announcing The Little Entomologist by Roxanne Hoffman, with a charming illustration of a plant.· Another card wishing “Happy Reading from Archer Publishing.”· A glossy sheet for Harrington Park Press, whose unattended publications turned out to be free, announcing forthcoming titles like A Mental Health and Counseling Handbook, Queer Studies Beyond Binaries, and LGBTQ Runaway & Homeless Youth.
Also, a bookmark for Flight Attendant Joe by author Joe Thomas, asking, “ever wonder what happens behind the scenes at 38,000 feet?” and boasting that “This book has enough ego to fill an entire Airbus A380,” and warning, “Fasten your seat belts and eat your fxcking nuts.” Self-promotion to the limits, all of it, and beyond. But why not? That’s what book fairs are all about.
Halfway through the fair, it happened. Going past one end of our table to get behind the Poets Wear Prada exhibit, someone stepped on our trailing green curtain, and down came the bookrack and books with a crash. Were we angry, shocked, perturbed? No way. “It’s okay!” we exclaimed. “Books and bookracks don’t break.” So we scooped up the books, repositioned the rack, and resumed sitting or standing, hoping or not hoping, eyeing our watches, and counting the number of books already sold.
Unlike at the Brooklyn Book Festival, we lost no sales because we couldn’t take credit cards. On two occasions when a buyer asked about this, Silas assured them that, through the wonders of the Internet, he could take payments with either Venmo or Cash App. Since both buyers had one or the other of these mysterious entities, payment was promptly made.
At BookCon 2018 it was our big sign NEW YORK STORIES that drew people to our table. But now at Rainbow, where the aisles were narrower, attendees passed close to our table and were attracted by the sexy cover of Pleasuring. So did Pleasuring fly off the rack? Not at all. Their eye went next to Fascinating New Yorkers, and then to Bob’s two books, and those were the ones that sold. Pleasuring usually interested older gay men, but the other three could appeal to everyone and therefore found a wider audience. To my surprise, Bob’s books, having “Coney Island” in the title, got a lot of attention, for buyers and non-buyers alike seemed to have a Coney Island story. One man told how, sunbathing on the beach, he had got a blistering sunburn on his shoulders and arms. A young woman told us how she had grown up near Coney and knew it from her childhood on. And another man told how, at fifteen, he discovered Coney Island and sex. At first he wondered why so many men on the Boardwalk were staring at the beach, but then he realized that they were eyeing the young lifeguards. Soon, without his parents noticing, he was sneaking off to Coney to indulge in quick, hot sex. (Interesting story, told with gusto, but no sale.)
We heard non-Coney stories as well. One man declared that, because New York had no norms that you had to conform to, people came here to become themselves – a statement that I heartily agreed with. Another man glanced at Fascinating New Yorkers and saw that the subjects of the first two chapters were Francis Spellman, cardinal archbishop of New York, and Roy Cohn. Flashing a knowing smile, he referred to His Eminence as “Franny” (as he was known in certain circles), and mentioned a new study of AIDS-denier Cohn. Obviously, he was well up in such matters. (But no sale.) And another male visitor said he liked the font of Fascinating New Yorkers, explaining that he never bought a book unless the font appealed to him. "But," he added, "I want illustrations, too." But my books are not for the coffee table; what counts is words in print. Alas, another no sale.
Sold three, only one left, and it is spoken for.Not meant for coffee tables.
Still another male visitor told how he shunned television and preferred to read. Knowing this, his TV-watching friends called him an elitist who looked down on them with scorn, an impression heightened by his being vegetarian. When I told him that I had never owned a TV and that I ate mostly vegan, he grinned and presented his outstretched palm to me, so I could smack it with one of my palms in a joyous celebration of quirky nonconformity. (But, alas, no sale.)
The last visitor of the day was an older Irish American who told us, in a lilting brogue, of growing up gay in the Catholic Ireland of another time, a challenge that he seemed to have survived unscathed. Topped by a jaunty thin-brimmed hat, his appearance came off every bit as Irish as his brogue.
Two encounters were flat-out weird. Soon after the fair opened, an elderly man appeared with a walker. Seeing him, I applauded his coming, given his obvious physical handicap. He came straight to our table and in a soft voice began telling us of a Project that he had undertaken with others. Just what this Project was he didn’t explain, but it was huge in scope and would involve only New Yorkers. Seeing my focus as an author on New York stories, he wondered if he hadn’t right off found the helper he was looking for. “Oh, be sure to look around,” I said, gesturing toward the other tables, “I’m sure you’ll find something,” though just what that might be totally escaped me. His whispery voice talked on and on without clarifying his obsessive Project, but he seemed determined to involve me in it. “I need more information,” I said, offering my business card. Spotting my e-mail address on the card, he waved it away, declaring, “We don’t do e-mails, we absolutely don’t!” By now, Silas and I were eager to get rid of him, since he wasn’t about to buy any books, and was blocking the view of our table for others who might be of a mind to. “You can mail me information,” I suggested, and now he deigned to take my card. “One of my colleagues will contact you,” he said, and having given me his name, Bruce, he finally wandered off. Silas and I exchanged a baffled look, still in the dark about his Project. To date, no one has contacted me, and I rather hope that they won’t.
Later in the day an older man, clean shaven and thin and not bad looking, came to us, his scant locks plastered smooth against his noggin, and talked and talked and talked. He made sense in a way, but seemed all wound up, talked endlessly, scarcely catching his breath. When Silas told him that we were just friends, nothing more, he asked Silas for a date. Silas graciously declined, explaining that he was otherwise involved, but still the man talked on. Him too, another non-buyer, we wanted rid of. The noise level in the room had now risen to the point where I could make out little of what he was saying, so I nodded at what seemed appropriate moments, and smiled whenever he did. Finally, still babbling, he walked off. “Cocaine,” said Silas, “cocaine or methamphetamine. They’re common in the gay community.” News to me, but Silas was surely right.
By five o’clock, with only an hour to go, I had entered what I termed the “yawn phase” and was running down. We had sold only six books, no better than at the Brooklyn Book Festival, which threatened to depress me mightily. With the attendees thinning out, there seemed little chance of any more sales. I had told Silas earlier, “If we sell eight books, I’ll be satisfied.” That would outdo Brooklyn, and be double what I had sold when I first exhibited at the fair in 2012, displaying only the bright rainbow colors of No Place for Normal: New York. But out of nowhere came a buyer, and then another buyer, so we achieved the magic number of eight. I was vastly, joyously relieved. Such is the absurdity of small-press publishing and the antics of the human psyche, when the sale of a mere two books can assume such grandiose importance.
By a quarter of six our neighbors were packing their books away and stripping their tables bare, so we began packing up, too. What to do with our fake blue table cloth became clear, when the blond cherub whom I had noticed earlier popped up again, scooped the table cloth up, and tossed it in a nearby trash can; he was evidently allied with management. Soon Silas and I were out on the street, where the autumn air was delightfully mild, and walking back to my place. Arriving at 286 West 11th, Silas promptly toted the big bookrack, the rolled-up sign, and his book-crammed suitcase – in other words, everything but me and my shoulder bag -- up the four steep flights of stairs, leaving me to trudge up in his wake. Directed by me, he dumped all the stuff in the living room, and there I dumped my shoulder bag, too. “Hey, we did it again,” I exclaimed, then a quick hug and he was gone. After a light supper, I wearily collapsed in bed.
Inventory: we had sold eight books in all, four of mine and four of Bob’s: 1 Pleasuring (a measly 1!), 3 Fascinating New Yorkers, 3 Professors, and 1 Sebastian Strong. Out of 24 taken to the fair, only eight, which at first glance seemed paltry indeed. But then I did a sober calculation. For eight books at $20 each, I had pocketed $160. My table had cost $117, but the books had cost me something, too. Not Bob’s books, which I had inherited, but my own. From $160 I subtracted the cost of the table ($117) and the cost of my books ($69.27), which gave me an outlay of $26.27. O blessed Rainbow, I had almost – almost -- broken even! Just this once, in my history of book fairs, the cost is bearable, reassuring, a delight. So will I do it again? You bet!
By the standards of the big presses, with their book sales in the hundreds and thousands of copies, to be talking about 6 books or 8 or even 24 is, to put it mildly, ludicrous. But such is the world of small presses and indie authors, where two or three books sold, or not sold, can determine a day’s success or failure. Ludicrous, but quaintly small-time and charming, and anyway, that’s how it is.
What, then, is my outlook for book events in the future?
· Brooklyn Book Festival 2020: No way! A mere 6 sales, outdoors, and with the weather unpredictable. Brooklyn, ta ta.· Rainbow Book Fair 2020: Absolutely, if Silas is available. By myself, a challenge, though maybe feasible.· BookCon 2020: A toss-up, with the negatives and positives equally matched. Expensive, and overrun with hysterical young females who don’t buy my books. (So hysterical that, at BookCon 2019, some panelists were so unnerved that they called in security to calm the crowd and guarantee the panelists’ safety.) But three times in four at BookCon, my daily sales averaged 13 or 14: acceptable. Easy to get to, interesting older buyers, indoors. But I would need Silas, and with a demanding new job, he has trouble predicting his schedule.
· A book release party, spring 2020: Most likely. I’ll have at least one new book by then, self-published and in need of promotion. (That word again: promotion.) The first party was fun, so why not a second? And so easy: the books will be all here snug in my apartment, and instead of me going to people, people will come to me. All this, for a cost of some wine and some little plastic cups. Whether they read or not, my guests are great guzzlers, though never drunk. So let them come and chat and guzzle. If, that is, I do it. Book fairs, whether costly or not, come only once a year. An author needs to be selling all the time, and the big sales are on the Internet. So how does an unknown get himself known? Through SEO: Search Engine Optimization. The words themselves shake me to the bone. And think of all those little unknowns scrambling to unlock the secret and get themselves more known: intense, competitive. Will I be able to learn this daunting process? I have my doubts; stay tuned. Meanwhile, I take comfort in Rainbow 2019. For a mere $26.27, what an adventure!
Coming soon: ???
© 2019 Clifford Browder
October 13, 2019
431. The Puma of Yuma
BROWDERBOOKS
Nothing of my own today; I’m recovering from the Rainbow Book Fair. Quite an adventure! More of that next week. See the "Coming soon" note at the end of the post below. For my books, go here.
Silas and me at the Brooklyn Book Festival, 2019.Next door, as you can see on the left, was Whiskey Tit, whose online self-description is "Your literary wet nurse." And yes, they did serve whiskey in tiny plastic cups to all comers. Whether that helped them sell books I don't know.
Below is “The Puma of Yuma,” a short lighthearted poem by my long deceased friend Vernon Newton, who could do both deep and serious poetry and the lightest light verse. I think of his light verse as children's verse intended for adults. Here is the poem. A few lines escape me, but the drift, I think, is clear. Bored with his life as a puma, the protagonist decides to mix with people and adapt to their ways, and runs for elected office. Yuma, by the way, is a city in Arizona, as if it mattered. And the puma, or cougar, is a carnivorous mountain lion found in the mountains of the American West.
THE PUMA OF YUMA
I The Puma of YumaWas bored with his lot.
He had battened and fattenedAnd What Had He Not?
With such Skill that the KillOf the Wild? For a tot.
IIThe Puma of YumaMarched down to the City
To make Jokes with Just FolksAbout Justice and Pity,
But his Class, not the MassMobbed by Code and Committee.
IIIO your Town is the CrownOf a true Self-Reliance!
One can laugh at the GaffOf Religion and Science!
Even jeer at the Bier,The small Bier of Compliance.
IVThus he yearned, but discernedThe Time’s Tenor had changed.
Too much Zest, too much JestWere considered deranged.
The Puma of YumaRefused to be manged,
VHe was sure the MatureWere by now self-aware
That the Weak, although bleak,Are entitled to share
What the Strong, by a Song,Can be flattered to spare.
VIYes, a Purr just for Her,And a Purr for Him too
Were a Must if the JustWere to freshen their Due.
The Puma of YumaPraised the Power of “You.”
VIIThe Puma of YumaPicked his Hole, picked his Button.
Not a Peep from a Sheep,Not a Gulp from a Glutton.
With a Prayer, he was MayorAnd Inspector of Mutton.
Source note: The poem “The Puma of Yuma” is from Formulae of Summer / Poems by Vernon Newton, Prose Publishers Incorporated, New York, 1976. A few used copies are available online from Amazon.
Coming soon: Rainbow Book Fair: A Mystery Project, Coney Island Memories, a Proposition, and Cocain
© 2019 Clifford Browder
September 29, 2019
430. Crime of the Century: Theft of the Golden Throne
I HATE COMPUTERS
They are evil, treacherous, and stupid. I had intended to do a double post this week, combining the Golden Throne with an account of Silas and me at the Brooklyn Book Festival, who we met, and how we did. Unfortunately, through a fluke I still don't understand, the double post was deleted -- hours of work -- by my villainous computer, and I don't have it in me to restore it to its full length and complexity. What follows below is a skimpy earlier version of the Throne post, secured from my computer, minus later retouches and the Brooklyn fair. I repeat:
I HATE COMPUTERS
Crime of the Century Theft of the Golden Throne
It’s gone, stolen, vanished, whisked away! The golden throne, that masterpiece by Maurizio Cattelan, was snatched early Saturday, September 14, at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the birthplace and family home of Winston Churchill, where it had been installed in Churchill's bathroom. Such a loss grieves me to the quick. Perhaps I exaggerate in calling it the crime of the century, when we’re only nineteen years into the 21st, but if exaggeration it is, it reflects my shock and chagrin at such a calamity, a horrendous loss to the art world. Obsessed with Brexit, the Brits failed to provide adequate security for one of the world’s great treasures.
Though once acclaimed in this blog – though I don’t know exactly where – Mr. Cattelan’s Golden Throne may have escaped the attention of some viewers. The chef-d’oeuvre I’m referring to is a solid 18-karat gold commode (i.e., toilet) whose dazzling presence once graced the confines of the Guggenheim Museum here in New York. Furthermore, when installed there it was functional, it could actually be used. The Guggenheim’s artistic director announced in 2017 that more than 100,000 people had waited patiently in line to “commune with art and with nature.” And to take selfies, though not, so far as I can tell, of themselves enthroned. Selfies, hundreds of them, visible online. Never let it be said that Americans don’t in the highest degree appreciate art.
stu_spivackThe object of this reverence, being made of 103 kilograms of gold, would, if melted down, be worth more than $4 million. And if converted into gold bars, there would be no way to trace them. The police have arrested a 66-year-old man in connection with the heist, but they have not as yet charged him. They believe that a group of culprits using at least two vehicles were involved. And to make matters worse, Mr. Cattelan’s work was connected to the plumbing of the building, so that its removal caused significant damage and flooding. I find it scandalous that this heinous crime was reported in the New York Times of Sunday, September 15, in an article buried in the first section on page 18. And all the more scandalous, since Mr. Cattelan lovingly named his throne “America.” The artist meant his elite object to be available to all. It was, then, a gift to the American people, and the American people should grieve at its loss. (Mr. Cattelan had hoped it would be installed in the White House, but the White House declined the honor.) May it soon be recovered intact and restored to its intended function, to the joy of all.
Source note: This post was inspired by Kaly Soto’s article, “Golden John Gets Jacked In Art Heist,” in the first section of the New York Times of Sunday, September 15, 2019.
Coming soon: No idea. Maybe something, maybe nothing.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
September 22, 2019
429. When Gays Savage Gays
BROWDERBOOKS
Today, Sunday, September 22, Silas and I are at the Brooklyn Book Festival at Borough Hall, Brooklyn. We have table 120, toward the north end of the fair. If you're in the neighborhood, come by and say hello. (No need to buy a book, unless you feel an irresistible urge to do so.) The fair goes from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. We'll be between Fledgling Writing Workshop (table 119) and Whiskey Tit (table 121). Whiskey Tit describes itself online as "your literary wet nurse." Tough competition, but we'll persist.
When Gays Savage Gays:
The Controversy That Splits
the Gay World Down the Middle
Years ago, from 2000 until his release in 2014, I was the pen pal of a gay inmate in North Carolina. In 2008 and 2009 Joe had a series of stories on gay prison life published online by Q-Notes (now known as QNotes), the leading LGBTQ online and print publication in North Carolina. No sooner had the first story appeared, when a flood of online protests began that only increased as the stories continued to be published. What was the problem? It wasn’t the stories themselves, but a note at the end of each story stating that Joe had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for “indecent liberties with a child and crime against nature.”
[image error] Joe's home at the time. One of them, at least.
They kept moving him around.
State Archives of North Carolina One of the first protests was a lengthy one by a former law enforcement officer who said he was currently employed as an investigator by a Fortune 500 company in Charlotte, NC. I will quote him here in part, abridged.
Giving this writer a voice while he is still incarcerated gives the appearance that Q-Notes is endorsing a pedophile…. Remorse is glaringly lacking in the writings…. As a gay man I take great offense that he identifies himself as a gay man. He is more than likely a pedophile who is attempting to gain sympathy from our community by claiming that he is gay…. He has 20 disciplinary infractions while in prison including forgery, violating North Carolina law, misuse of phone and mail, verbal threats, fighting, disobeying orders and being found in unauthorized locations…. In conclusion, I hope that Q-Notes will cease all publication of his writings.
Q-Notes responded quickly to this early protest. In the issue of January 10, 2009, the editor urged readers to look beyond the messenger to the message. Regardless of the writer’s crimes, the editor insisted, his stories reflect the overall experience of LGBT individuals in U.S. prisons, who suffer discrimination, harassment, and physical and mental abuse from fellow prisoners and guards alike. Mr. Urbaniak lets the gay community have a small glance into a world most of us will never experience. Sitting safely on the outside, he concluded, we can find truths and realities we’ve never thought of before. So spoke the editor. And Q-Notes let the stories continue for their limited run.
This did not stop the protests, quite the contrary. As for instance:
· The published material is focused on the sexual experiences of a conficted [sic] molester within the prison system.· As someone who has the pain and lingering emotional effects of sexual abuse, I find it appalling and repulsive that Q-Notes would publish a column from a man who committed such an offense.· Being a Criminal Justice student … I was also disappointed that Q-Notes decided to publish a column from a convicted child molester.· Q-Notes should not lend a voice to a pedophile, whether in jail or not.· This is disgusting…. We know right from wrong…. In all honesty we shouldn’t really care what goes on inside prison…. I hope this column stops.
So spoke the critics. But others disagreed:
· I am 76 years old and all my life until these last fifteen years I have been told to be remorseful for being gay. And for most of that time I have done penance. But no more. I may not choose to read the prisoner’s writings, but, hey, a multitude of Middle Class squares don’t approve of my attempts at writing, either. If there is a readership for him, there should be a place for his writings, no matter what a Fortune 500 company employee thinks.· Cry me a river, people, damn! I think Q-Note’s decision to publish this column is valid and even though the offense is horrible and inexcusable, it is still a view into an otherwise unknown venue by most of us. In the end, if you do not want to read it, THEN DON’T!· Cry me a river, too…. Think your responses thru before inserting foot to mouth I’ve looked over the charges against this inmate. I’ve come to the conclusion it is a young man and his lover, not an act of violence committed here. The court system unfairly sentenced this man to a long jail term, when a murderer gets a shorter sentence for what I feel is a far more reprehensible crime. [A surprisingly perceptive comment, perhaps made with knowledge of my comment below.]· I find it reprehensible that members of the LGBT community pass judgment on one of our own, facing a system that is built on denying him his rights as a gay man…. By reading about his injustice and the life of a gay man in NC’s prison system (and from experience as a former correction officer, I can tell you it’s accurate) – we should be outraged. We can take a stand AGAINST discrimination, without taking a stand FOR pedophilia.
So there it is: child molestation, and because of it, the gay world split right down the middle. The responses to Joe’s stories come from the angry, the indignant, and the judgmental, but also from the perceptive, the wounded, and the compassionate. All spoke from the heart, though some with more knowledge than others. And through no fault of their own, they none of them knew the true facts of Joe’s story.
To these comments I will add my own, published in Q-Notes in the issue of January 10, 2009.
Though a resident of New York City, I have followed the publication of Joe’s articles, and the controversy they have raised, with great interest. I have been a pen pal of Joe’s since 2000; we have exchanged close to four hundred letters and have often discussed his case and related issues. I have obtained his complete court records and have helped him to write his unpublished memoir, telling in detail how he came to be arrested and imprisoned. I understand the concern of those readers who question the appropriateness of publishing his articles on gay prison life, but I feel that they might change their minds if they knew Joe’s full story. The relationship which led to his arrest was a consensual one. The presumed victim, a teenager, has since testified in court, and stated separately in a signed affidavit, that Joe did not harm him in any way, nor in his opinion would Joe willingly harm anyone; that he himself bears some responsibility for the relationship; and that he favors Joe’s receiving parole. Even if the circumstances were otherwise, I think that Q-Notes would be justified in printing Joe’s articles, and I applaud their having done so to date. I take the issue of child molestation seriously, since three of my friends were molested as children and as a result bear emotional scars to this day. But Joe’s relationship was a very different matter and should not be confused with cases like those. And his honest reporting of gay life in prison merits the attention of the whole gay community. I hope the articles will continue.
Joe too answered the protests. In a message published in Q-Notes on February 7, 2009, he thanked the editor for his supportive editorial, and even thanked the former correction officer who protested the publication of his stories so vehemently. But if he showed no remorse in those stories, he explained, it was because the stories had nothing to do with his crime. He then insisted that he had a great deal of empathy for the victim and his family, which is why he voluntarily entered a program for admitted sex offenders and completed it. He hopes that the readers and the LGBT and straight communities will see him for the person he has become, rather than the person he was when he committed his offense.
A reasonable and fair-minded response. But Joe could not express himself fully, being still incarcerated and hoping for parole. A little later he wrote a final statement, but comments had been closed by then, so to my knowledge it was never published. As for the infractions attributed to him in prison -- forgery, fighting, and so on -- I know for a fact that they were trivial, often the concoction of an angry guard. He never picked fights, often walked away from a threatening inmate and was assaulted from behind.
It is important to remember the setting and time of this controversy: North Carolina, 2008-2009. Though times are changing, North Carolina was, and still is, Bible Belt country. Joe had told me that there are two North Carolinas. There is a liberal North Carolina that includes the state capital, Raleigh, the Triangle of three major universities, and Charlotte. But there is also a very conservative North Carolina, comprising all the rest of the state, including Wilmington, the scene of his arrest and sentencing. The North Carolina gay community felt embattled, and like gay communities anywhere, it was eager to keep its cause separate from anything that smacked of child molestation. Only with that in mind can we understand the reaction to the publication of Joe’s stories.
I discussed man/boy love in post #43, January 20, 2013, which was then republished on June 28, 2016, as #239: “Man/Boy Love: The Great Taboo.” For many months it was the most popular post on this blog. It gives my point of view on a subject that remains controversial today. My main point: listen to the boys. Don’t tell them they were victims; ask them about the relationship, find out if it was consensual. If clearly consensual, I say, leave it alone. The criminal justice system can then do more harm than good, as was the case in Joe’s story – a story that I hope he will make public. The memoir that I helped him write reads like a novel, and its end, written while he was still incarcerated, is heartbreaking. It’s not slated for publication now, but with Joe’s permission I will publish several of his stories about prison life here. Some of them are grim, some are funny; all deserve to be read.
Coming soon: Crime of the Century: Theft of the Golden Throne.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
September 15, 2019
428. Scams, and How to Beat Them
BROWDERBOOKS
A week from today, on Sunday, September 22, Silas and I and my books will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival at Borough Hall, Brooklyn, table 120, toward the north end of Borough Hall. The fair runs from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. If you're in the neighborhood, come by and say hello. Also, Borough Hall is easily accessible by subway. (If I, not knowing Brooklyn, can get there, so can anyone.) Because Silas and I will be meeting at my apartment at 9:00 a.m. or even a little earlier, I may not have time to do a post that day. If not, I'll do it Monday or Tuesday. The fair is outdoors, rain or shine. We'll have a canopy over us, but we'll still pray for good weather.
Silas and me at the Brooklyn Book Festival, 2018.A breezy day. This time I'll wear a cap.
Scams, and How to Beat Them
I have been scammed a lot. Recently I got a phone call, ostensibly from my bank, but the woman spoke so fast that I couldn’t understand a word. Leery of scams by phone, I told her to write me and hung up, knowing that if it was a legitimate call, she would know my address. A day or two later I got not one but two letters from J.P. Morgan Chase in Ohio, saying that they had returned (i.e, not honored) two checks, each for $9,500, written on my savings account by someone in Missouri. If I knew who wrote the checks and the transactions were legitimate, I should contact them immediately.
The checks were clearly fraudulent, so I was relieved that the bank had done the right thing. But some good instinct prompted me to contact an official at my local Chase branch, and she urged me to come in and show her the letters. When I did, she assured me that my account was secure, and then showed me printouts of the checks involved. They were written by the scammer to herself and then endorsed for deposit only, but were drawn on my savings account. Somehow she had learned the routing number of my bank and account number of my savings account.
As the bank representative explained, the checks, though they looked like authentic Chase checks, were suspect for several reasons:
· They were drawn on my savings account, whose routing number and account number appeared at the bottom of each check. But that’s not what savings accounts are for; one writes checks on checking accounts. Why did she do this? Because she had the account number only for my savings account.· It was especially suspect to write two large checks in quick succession. Why not just a check for a small sum, to see if it would work? Then, if it was accepted, write a larger check.· Because of some federal regulation that I haven't grasped, the feds become involved if the amount of the check is $10,000 or more. Knowing this, banks are suspicious of checks involving sums just under that amount.
So the fraud had been thwarted, but there was more to do. First, freeze the existing savings account, to prevent further fraud. Next, open a new savings account, and inform Social Security that my monthly checks should now go into it. Then, wait. If the scammer should write another check on my old account, the bank where she tries to deposit it will get the message, ACCOUNT FROZEN / FRAUD ALERT. At that point the scammer will be exposed and maybe get arrested. The bank representative I was dealing with assured me that this had happened more than once right there in my branch bank. Exposed, the scammer bolts for the door; some are caught, some escape. So the old account, though frozen, will stay open for two months, after which it will be closed forever.
The bank official went on to inform me that all kinds of scams are widespread today. For example, scammers have some small portable device that lets them read the information on an ATM card when it is taken out to be inserted in an ATM; the card’s owner is completely unaware of this. Technologically, the scammers are one step ahead of the banks and the authorities, who are forever scrambling to catch up. Constant vigilance is the best defense, and thanks to it my bank detected the fraudulent attempt to withdraw a large sum from my savings account.
This scam was new to me, but I have knowledge of several others.
· The fear scam. You get a phone call with a recorded voice telling you that if you don’t do something immediately, you will suffer dire consequences. It may be seemingly from your bank, your credit card outfit, or Social Security, who claim they have been trying to reach you, and this is the last notice you will get, before they take action. The scammers hope that fear will prompt you to give them information they can use.· The shame scam. You get an e-mail saying that the scammer has hacked into an account of yours and sees that you’ve been visiting naughty sites online, and if you don’t fork over a stated sum at once, probably in bitcoins, your employer, friends, and family will be informed. Getting such an e-mail, I just laugh and delete it, for I haven’t visited any such site. But a friend of mine had, and when a scammer tried to blackmail him, he refused to pay. He didn’t care if others were informed; in fact, he alerted them to the situation. He refused to be motivated by shame.· The grandchild-in-trouble scam. An elderly person gets word that a grandchild – usually a grandson – is in some kind of trouble and desperately needs money. The scammer is counting on a grandparent’s indulgence and generosity, when it comes to grandkids, and it often works. But when I get such a phone call, as I once did three times in a row, I just laugh it off, having no grandchild.· The sudden friendship or aloha scam. You get a delightful e-mail, seemingly from a young woman, saying that, to judge by your profile, she thinks you are an interesting person and she would like to be friends with you. I call this an aloha scam, because I got one such e-mail that began with a hearty “Aloha!” I almost answered it, but then held back. My profile? Which profile, where? And why is she so eager to be friends with a stranger? Suspicious, I deleted the e-mail and have never regretted doing so.· The credit card scam. You get a very official-looking e-mail informing you that there has been suspicious activity in your credit card account, so they need some personal information from you to protect your account.
As regards the last one, savvy as I am in such matters (or so I like to think), I’ve been fooled twice. The first time the scammer was lucky, for certain recent events made me think the message was legit. When dubious charges to my credit card followed, I questioned them and had to get a new card. Then, a few months later, I got a similar e-mail and foolishly supplied some information. The next day I realized my mistake, reported my card lost (there was no online option to report the fraud), tore it up, and got a new one. You know the saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And I thought myself so savvy! Moral: We’re all vulnerable. Even the most (self-styled) savvy operator can get fooled. The remedy: eternal vigilance. When in doubt, don’t interact with them in any way, delete the message, do nothing.
Some of the scams are obvious, some are not. Scamming strikes me as a vile and foolish way to spend your time, but even if only one person out of a hundred is duped into giving up money or information, it is probably worth it for the scammer financially. Some scammers, I suspect, are living high, very high, on the hog.
And so, good luck to all. Illegitimis non carborundum. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Least of all, the scammers.
Coming soon: When gays savage gays: the issue that splits the gay world down the middle.
© 2019 Clifford Browder
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