Clifford Browder's Blog, page 14

427. Hot Silver

                BROWDERBOOKS

For information on my books, see my post BROWDERBOOKS.  I am also on Facebook.  Should you be inclined (i.e., nosey), from my Facebook personal page you can go to Browderbooksbiz, my business page.  

And on September 22 BROWDERBOOKS -- meaning me, my books, and my young friend Silas -- will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival, table 120, toward the northern end of Borough Hall, Brooklyn.  If you're in the neighborhood, come by and say hello.

Less is more vs. Description

The result of my query to eleven friends as to which of two subtitles for a book entitled New Yorkers they preferred, the short one or the long one.  

1.                                  NEW YORKERS 
                             THEY 'LL ASTONISH YOU

2.                                NEW YORKERS 
            A FEISTY PEOPLE WHO WILL UNSETTLE, 
             MADDEN, AMUSE AND ASTONISH YOU

  
Six preferred the short one, four preferred the long one, and one had no preference.  A divided opinion, edging toward short.  So why have I opted for the long one?

It's a matter of less is more vs. description.  The advantage of the short one: the subtitle, as well as the title, is easy to remember.  But as an expert in these matters advised me, the long, descriptive subtitle is more inclusive, casts a wider net for readers.  More detail means more hooks to snag potential readers browsing online.  There's a good argument on either side, but I've chosen description over less is more.

Blackness that glows

I'm still reading the journals of my deceased partner Bob and am up to volume 22, which covers February 2001 to March 2002. Seated in his favorite Chinese restaurant, scribbling for hours in an elegant bound volume bought in Venice, Bob records his reaction to 9/11, the decay of his beloved Coney Island, time, change, aging, and the loss of old friends.  Also mentioned is the shaking right hand that has corrupted the handwriting he once took pride in (and which may be a sign of the Parkinson's that would in time grind him down and kill him).  His entries are repetitious, for this is only a diary, not a finished work.  But at times he becomes a poet.  On December 19, 2001, at age 64, Bob wrote:

I break into the ether.  To find a way to the black rose and all the charmed dark flowers in the imagination's center.  And to do it perhaps in page-by-page installments in this Venetian journal, within the elysia of my preferred Chinese haven.  I will attempt to crack the secret formula....
          There is a blackness that glows like the integrity of inner range.  It now exists in a Coney Island of death, the long past years.  The corridors and tunnels and serpent tracks.  Petrified in blackest serenity.  Let me choose exacter words.  Ping.  On the head.  The blackness of remembrance. Draperies of black chiffon hang across the structures and spaces.  Or blackest carbon.  Carboniferous paradise by the sea.  Entrenched. Engulfed.  Blooms of black orchidaceae, stalactites, stalagmites, the fall of onyx water through the ridges of the remembered illusions.
          I seize the artifice, by the integers of its construction.  Once pieced together in the forgotten hours of labor, by hands dead now.  The dead yielded to death and the aftermath is a grim one.  Yet grimly beautiful, too.  This I aver -- that the deathscape is glittering in darkest lights.  To be re-seen, in effigy, in smoke, in perspiration, dim collapse, shards, whorls of universe, becoming indeed black stars in a surrounding milky way.  There, you see, is the sequestered Dome, the Kubla Khan apex.  And no Coleridge to assist.  Merely my anchors and props.  My means to the inner field.  I will try.

          What is one to make of this?  Like a lot of poetry, it is imaged, both allusive and elusive, and less than crystal clear.  I take it as the inspired musings of an atheist groping with the mysteries of decay and death.  He mourns the deterioration of Coney Island, a place where he always felt free.  He has seen death claim his father and mother and many friends, and senses keenly his own mortality.  But there is beauty in the darkness, in whose depths may be found the sequestered Dome, the meaning we aspire to and seek.  And toward this goal he will strive.  The Dome is a reference to Coleridge's opium-inspired poem "Kubla Khan," where the emperor "a stately pleasure dome decrees."  But Bob's real literary icons were Proust, for remembrance of things past, and Samuel Beckett, for an eerie and obsessive awareness of decay and death.  What are Bob's later journals, if not a chronicle of the relentless march of time, and his determination to live life fully despite the approach of decrepitude and death?


                        Hot Silver

A recent Sunday was another perfect West Village day, sunny but mild, and not muggy.  I lunched again at Philip Marie, where I asked the young African American hostess if she missed Texas.  "Not on a day like this," she said, with the warmest smile.  "There, you don't get days like this."  And when, after my usual Greek yogurt followed by a cappuccino, I was leaving, I told her, "And I don't miss Illinois."  "Today," she said, "this is the place to be!"

          Given the weather, I decided to walk a ways down West 11th Street toward the river, and ended up going all the way and sitting on a bench near the water.  There was a blue sky with puffs of white cumulus clouds, and a mild breeze.  Rippled by the breeze, the gray-blue water flashed with the dancing dots of hot silver that I so love, and that in my rare poetic moments (yes, I have them too) I call the face of God.

          Walking on to Pier 46, I went out on it and, while other people played ball and did calisthenics on the wide expanse of fake grass, I looked over the side to see if any shoots of seaside goldenrod were sprouting in the rotten wood of the old pier underneath the new one.  

Sam Fraser-Smith
They were everywhere, proof that the summer weather had given them just the right mix of sun and rain, promising an array of bright spiky blossoms in a month or so.  As usual, I was the only one who was aware of them.

          Beyond that, I stopped in my favorite riverside garden, with its bronze rendering of the Big Apple, over which -- or rather through which -- New Yorkers love to crawl, since it is forbidden.  I had the garden to myself and saw it in its rich late-summer splendor: bright spots of red flowers; clusters of blue mint (paired leaves, square stems, and lipped flowers say mint); orange-colored blossoms here and there; pink roses on a thorny bush; a white butterfly fluttering among the flowers; leaves with every shade of green; masses of bright yellow flowers that assault the eye; and in the near distance, sounds of zooming traffic on West Street.  "Too early for Monarchs," I told myself, since they migrate in September and early October.  


But as soon as I had said this to myself, I saw a solitary Monarch, his orange wings with black tracery, feeding in the mint.  


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It was a rich spectacle such as one sees only on a mild late-summer day.  I will treasure the memory of it.

Coming soon:  Scams, and How They Hook Us.

©   2019   Clifford Browder

426. Moray eels, Gregorian chants, and the Charlest

BROWDERBOOKS

Good news:  My historical novel The Eye That Never Sleeps got a good review from Sublime Book Review.  They call it a detective story enlivened with historical detail.  I'm still waiting for that inevitable bad review that usually comes, sooner or later, but so far it hasn't happened. For all my books, go here.

As most of you know,  I'm on Facebook.  For my personal page, go here. For my business page, go here.  And please, "like" the business page, if you can.  Silly as it is, I'm trying to play the Facebook game, and "likes" are a part of it.  

Upon reading my rant about Facebook not being a user-friendly site, my friend Patrick, who is Facebook-savvy, sent me this message:  "I think what you've started to realize with Facebook is that they're there for their purposes, not for ours. (Wow, that sentence contained three homophones!)"

Point taken.  And by the way, do you know what a homophone is?  And if you do, what is a heterophone?



MORAY EELS, GREGORIAN CHANTS 
           AND THE CHARLESTON


This post will be a bundle of Fivesies -- things that come to me in fives.

FIVE  WONDERS  I  WILL  NEVER  SEE
1.   a coral reef2.   a painted bunting3.   Lake Tear of the Clouds, Feldspar Brook, and the Opalescent River4.   wild horses galloping5.   black ice rising from the polar sea 
Commentary:
1.   Jacques Cousteau has described coral reefs as resembling dwarf skulls, petrified mauve bushes, witches’ heads, white walking canes by the hundreds, and frozen parasols, inhabited by feather bonnets that explode into the stinging spines of the lion fish, and moray eels glowering from crevices and baring their savage teeth.  
andre oortgijs
Who wouldn’t want to see such wonders, even at the risk of rapture of the depths, when the diver is tempted by mysterious populations still deeper, and risks madness and death.
Moray eel
Carlo Codispoti
2.   In the opinion of many, our most beautiful bird, the male flaunting bold splotches of blue, green, and red.  I have never seen him, since he disdains the usual south-to-north spring migration path of Eastern birds that brings them to the Ramble in Central Park and to me.  Instead, he winters in southern Florida and points south, then migrates westward to the American Southwest, or to coastal Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.  And to make matters worse for birdwatchers, he is secretive and hard to observe.
Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren
3.   The lake is the source of the Hudson River in the far north of the state, high in the Adirondacks. Water from the lake pours into the brook and the river.  The very names of all three enchant me.  (No illustration can match what I imagine.)

4.   I have seen such horses in the 1953 French film Crin blanc (White Mane), which shows them galloping about the Camargue, a region in southern France bounded by the Mediterranean on the south, and the two arms of the Rhône delta.  In the film the leader of the herd is a white-maned horse, hence the title.  Unknown to tourists, the Camargue has lakes and marshlands that are a haven for wild birds, but also, as seen in the film, herds of wild horses, and the French cowboys that try to capture and tame them.  Though I have never seen them, wild horses also run free in the American West, grazing belly-deep in tall grasses, often dotting the hills as far as the eye can see.  Having removed them from public land, where their grazing has depleted the grasses, the Bureau of Land Management stores 46,000 of them on some 60 private ranches at a cost that eats up much of the Bureau’s budget.  The horses’ natural enemies, wolves and mountain lions, have been eradicated, allowing the horses to reproduce to the point that the grasslands are overgrazed and in danger.  But for me, an Easterner far removed from the West, wild horses suggest a magnificent force of nature that we humans have yet to subdue.


Wild horses in the Camargue.
EmmaLouisa97


5.   Such a phenomenon is described in Robert Macfarlane’s recent bestseller, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, of which I read a review.  He saw a huge mass of black ice rise suddenly out of the Arctic sea, then sink again into the water, perhaps never to be seen again.  (For more about him, see my post #416 and scroll down.)

Polar ice, an 1874 illustration.  But imagine it suddenly erupting
from the depths of the sea.
MY  FIVE  GREATEST  ACCOMPLISHMENTS
1.   I can sing the Marseillaise in French.2.   I can dance the Charleston.3.   I can sing Lili Marlene in German.4.   Singlehanded, I repaired a double-hung window.5.   I learned the optative in Greek.
Commentary:
1.   It’s easier on the voice than the Star-Spangled Banner.  Oddly enough, I last sang it with new acquaintances following a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner on Staten Island.


Bastille Day, 2016.  A band playing it on the Champs Elysées, 
at the start of the annual parade.

2.   Listen, at ninety that’s not bad.  I learned it on YouTube.


Teaching the Charleston to basketball players as an aid to the game, 1926.
Everyone was doing it.  The instructor's cloche hat is unmistakably 1920s.

3.   A song sung on both sides of the lines in Europe and North Africa during World War II.  The British in North Africa got it from the Germans, and the GI’s got it from the British and brought it back here after the war.  Many versions; I learned the original German one sung by Lale Andersen, first broadcast from Radio Belgrade in occupied Yugoslavia in 1941.  Dietrich and others later did it in English.  It's all about a woman who stands beneath a lamppost by a barracks gate, but no, she's not that kind of woman.  It's all about wartime loneliness and longing.


A German propaganda postcard, 1942.  Illustration for the words
"Underneath the lamppost / By the barracks gate ..."

4.   Not once, but twice.  I was replacing a broken sash cord with chain.  The sash cord or chain lets you raise and lower the window.  You have to remove some wood paneling to get at the cord or chain and fix it, and then replace the paneling.  At times you’re tilting the whole window out of its frame.  It’s a miracle I didn’t drop it out the open frame and send it crashing down to the street.  I love the French name: fenêtre à guillotine.


Just an ordinary window, but imagine taking it out of its frame.


5. You think the subjunctive in French or Spanish or Latin is hard?  Classical Greek also has the optative.  It’s like a second subjunctive.  For example: Χαίροιμι ἄν, εἰ πορεύοισθε (I’d be happy, if you could travel).


FIVE  THINGS  I  WISH  I  HAD  DONE
1.   Hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail.2.   Danced up a storm with Brooke Astor.3.   Heard Lawrence Olivier in a famous double bill.4.   Become friends with a young French student who had spent a year in the States. 5.   Heard a Gregorian chant in an old French church, ideally Chartres cathedral.

Commentary


1.  Over 2,000 miles long, it goes from Georgia to Maine.  You start in Georgia in April, end up in Maine in October.  You carry condensed food with you in your pack, let your hair grow wild, long for a hot shower.  It's all up and down, strictly for twenty-year-olds.  A day walker, I've done short stretches, including the Lemon Squeezer and the start of Agony Grind.  Only the start of the Grind, a long, steep climb that lives up to its name.

Endlessly through woods, and up and down and up and down and up.
Jason Hollinger


2.  Known as the Aristocrat of the People, on her tours of schools, day-care centers, and homeless shelters in need of foundation money, she endeared herself to janitors and secretaries and guards.  But in high-society gatherings at night, she flirted with every male in sight, and when she heard wild music pulsing through her, even in  her eighties she danced up a storm.  Our paths never crossed, but I have felt that music too and danced to it like crazy.  Wild, mindless fun.


3.  I never saw the performance, but heard about it from someone who had.  As Oedipus, when blinded, he uttered a bone-chilling scream that left the audience stricken.  Then, after an intermission, he came prancing onstage as a Restoration fop.  For the friend who told me about it, it was the most unforgettable performance that he had ever seen.
4.  A student at a lycée, he had just spent a year in the U.S.  I met him at a party for foreign students in Lyons.  When I asked him about his life in the States, he said, "La vie est plus large."  Hard to translate: life here is broader, richer, less constricted.  Regrettably, I never saw him again to ask him to explain in detail.  He was quiet, self-contained, perhaps in the long run deep, and reluctant to risk his English in a public gathering.  In private I could have encouraged him, become his friend.  One of those should-have-beens that never was.  My mistake, not his.  Missed opportunities can haunt you for years.
5.  I love Gregorian chants for their simplicity, no music other than the human voice.  Two eighteenth-century parchments with the chants, which I got in Paris long ago, hang on my living room wall; with effort, I can translate the Latin words.

And I love Chartres cathedral for its sculpture and its breathtaking stained-glass windows.  To experience the two simultaneously would be an unforgettable experience, but one that I have never achieved.  But dreams live on, stubbornly, teasingly, poignantly.



Coming soon:  Hot Silver

©   2019   Clifford Browder

425. How to Get Rid of Junk Mail

BROWDERBOOKS


Facebook is not a user-friendly site.

First of all, yes, I'm on it, more or less.  For my personal page, go here. For my business page, go here.  And please, oh please, "like" the business page, if you can.  Silly as it is, I'm trying to play the Facebook game, and "likes" are a part of it. 

          So I'm sort of there, though I don't know what I'm doing, and from Facebook I don't get much help.  Having created a personal page, I went on to create a business page, Browderbooksbiz, but couldn't access it.  If I googled "Clifford Browder Facebook," I got my personal page, with no sign of the biz page.  And if I googled the biz page, I got everything but it.  Finally a friend figured it out.  If I googled "Facebook.com," I got the personal page with a link to the biz page. Problem solved!  Simple.  So why didn't Facebook tell me?  Because it's not a user-friendly site.

          And what do I see, when I go to my personal page?  First, the perennial query: "What's on your mind, Clifford?"  (Answer: sometimes something, sometimes nothing.)  And below it, at the moment, a picture of President Trump, allegedly decrying the disloyalty of Jews who vote for Democrats.  And below that, an ad for something called Bluetooth.  And to the right, the earth-shattering fact that I now have 17 likes, and just below it, "You could reach up to 782 people daily by boosting your post for [I think, for the line is half invisible] $29."  Wow!  782 people daily!  And below that, a vertical list of people and the tabs "Add Friend" and "Remove," all of them sharing some mutual friends with me.  Alas, these "friends" are strangers to me, and so are most of the mutual friends.  So I click Browderbooksbiz and move on.

          Browderbooksbiz: A picture of me and Silas with our heads cut off.  Below it, "Page Education:Week 1: Start growing your audience."  I click on it; nothing happens.  Below that, "Write a post."  So yes, I can say something here, if so minded.  Below that, "Get more page links" and "Get more link clicks," and below them, "Get started with automated ads."  Click on any of those, and you're buying a Facebook ad.  Need I suggest that Facebook is out to promote -- or maybe overpromote -- its users?  It is a not too subtle machine to suck money out of your pocket into theirs.  But didn't I know that from the start?  When it comes to overpromoting through Facebook ads, Facebook is suddenly very user friendly.

          A friend, a veteran of the Facebook wars, informs me that I have joined -- wittingly or not -- the Hate Facebook Club.  Perhaps I have.  But I'm new, have lots to learn.  The Better Business Borough hosts online complaints about Facebook's arbitrary account closings, and there are 1,412 Consumer Affairs reviews that (if you can get past the pop-up ads) report similar account disablings and other forms of harassment.  No, I am not alone, and have yet to experience the darkest of Facebook harassments. Something to look forward to, no doubt.  But maybe it's not irrelevant that the following post is all about getting rid of junk mail.
          

    HOW  TO  GET  RID  OF  JUNK  MAIL:
      A  SURE-FIRE  RUTHLESS  GUIDE
We all get it every day, it jams our mail box, it offends us, it overwhelms us.  
Junk mail: here it comes.
Oran Viriyincy
A veteran in these wars, I’ve developed a quick-fire response that reduces my junk mail by half to two-thirds.  Certain appeals and scams I simply won’t fall for; one glance and they are out --  “out” meaning into the trash.  Here are some of them:
·      URGENT / OPEN  IMMEDIATELY. --  Out!
·      OFFICIAL  PARTY  BUSINESS / SURVEY  ENCLOSED. --  I didn’t request it: out!
·      How can 5 cents save a child’s life?  (A nickel is enclosed, visible.).  –  A worthy cause, but I can’t give to them all.  I grab the nickel.  Out!
·      PUBLIC  SURVEY  ENCLOSED.  Response deadline: 9/6/19.  Survey tracking: (a bar code).  --  No time for unsolicited surveys.  Out!
·      GREAT  NEWS  INSIDE!   But you must respond by August 19, 2019.  --  That’s what you think.  Out!
·      EARN 20,000 ONE-TIME BONUS MILES.  Total annual fee: $0.  --  Another bank wants my money.  Out!
·      The contents of this package were recommended specifically for you.  Confirmation is requested.  --  No return address, but I smell a nonprofit.  --  Out!
·      URGENT:  Important news inside.  Plus a special matching gift offer.  --  Another nonprofit that wants my money.  Out!
·      URGENT / Postmaster: do not forward.  For addressee only.  Please return within 14 days.  --  Unsolicited.  Out!
·      A blank envelope with no return address, nothing.  But the postmark says “NONPROFIT.”  --  Out!

         Be quick, be ruthless.  They’re guilty until proven innocent.  Of course a few items in the mail are legit; spare those.  But when in doubt, out!  It slakes our latent sadism, shows we aren’t dupes, gives us a sense of power, and brings us peace of mind.  And when you take the trash out and see all those unopened letters, you can exult:  They didn’t get my money.  
Junk mail: there it goes.
But brace yourself for tomorrow’s mail; more junk will come.  Whet yourself to a keen fury, then strike: out, out, out, out, out.  In the war of life, you are at last a winner.  To reward yourself, have a forbidden cupcake, and if the weather is hot, a sip of cool white wine.

Susan Slater

Coming soon: Five Wonders I Will Never See.  And in the offing: Should gays savage gays?  A controversy that tears the gay community apart and roils the straight world, too.

©   2019   Clifford Browder

424. Five Things I Hate

BROWDERBOOKS


Anniversary.  One week ago last Friday, on August 16, 2018, Bob, my partner of 50 years, died quietly in our West Village apartment.  My mourning now takes the shape of working with his 29 diaries, 9 photo albums, and voluminous correspondence to combine them with my own reminiscences and comments in a joint memoir.   In time everything will go to the gay history archive at the Gay Center on West 13th Street, but two subcollections will go to the Center next month.  And now ...


Sandro MathysDo you recognize it?  Borough Hall in Brooklyn.  A beautiful old building, but next month -- on Sunday, September 22, to be exact -- nobody will be looking at it, because the ample space around it will be hosting the annual Brooklyn Book Festival, open that day only, and outdoors, rain or shine, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.  BROWDERBOOKS -- meaning Silas and me and my books -- will be there, though the Powers That Be have yet to tell us the number and location of our table, now a week overdue.  Still, judging by last year, it can be a fun scene, attracting a cross-section of the city's population, dogs and bikes included.

          Another Brooklyn note, lest residents of that noble Borough think that I, a longtime Manhattanite, deem them unworthy of comment.  Far from it.  Followers of this blog know the morbid fascination inspired in me by Brooklyn's very own Gowanus Canal, once a jaunty little trickle of a creek freshening the rural swards of Brooklyn.  Alas, the genius of American engineering transformed it into the industry-plagued Gowanus Canal of today, whose waters were once plied daily by a hundred ships.  One of the most polluted sites in the nation, today its stink reaches far beyond the narrow confines of its sewage-strewn waters.  


In the background, a newly reopened subway station.  
As for the foreground, the less said the better.
The All-Nine Images

Those waters have now been dredged, purified, and even ceremonially blessed, in a fierce campaign to clean them up and gentrify the neighborhood, but still the stink persists.  Yet there is hope, for I am now told on good authority that the cleanup continues, with installation of a cut-off wall to keep industrial waste -- in this case, tar -- from further polluting the canal.  Also planned is the construction of a sewer overflows retention tank, whose purpose its name sufficiently describes. So the work continues, plus the dream of a purified waterway where children can safely romp, and pleasure craft bob merrily about.  Ah, may that happy day come -- though it won't come soon.  And now, with my blessing hard upon these troubled waters, I shall confess and glorify my hates.  But first ...

I'm on Facebook (more or less).  For my personal page, go here.  For my business page, go here.  And please, oh please, "like" the business page, if you can.  I'm trying to play the Facebook game, and "likes" are a part of it.  And now for my five favorite hates.  Facebook is not -- not yet, at least -- one of them.


FIVE  THINGS  I  HATE

1.   wienies2.   jackhammers3.   pop-up ads4.   "Happy Birthday to You"5.   coffee enemas
Commentary:
1.   Once, in the dining hall at college, I got one with its jacket not removed.  The jacket listed the ingredients, a conglomeration of meat scraps so disgusting that it gave me a lifelong disgust for the product.
Eric Guinther2.   The genius of American technology: we put a man on the moon, but have never muffled a jackhammer.
Hk6rsf
3.  They’ll never hook me this way.  And if I can’t click them off, I leave the website at once, and forever.4.   It isn't sung, it's screeched.  I've never heard it sung remotely on key.  In this regard, it outdoes even the Star-Spangled Banner.  By all means wish people a happy birthday, just don't try to sing it.5.   Never had one.  Said to be a healing modality, but they strike me as a waste of good coffee.

Five  Weird  Things  I  Love
1.   slime molds2.   snakes3.   spiders4.   sharks5.   Destroying Angel

Commentary
1.   They are infinitely varied in form, ranging from clusters of little black spheres to chains of yellowish pretzels to shapeless red blobs to little brown balls.  And they change with time: what is white and oozy in the morning may be a hard black crust by night.  The names themselves enchant me: multigoblet slime, carnival candy slime, wolf’s milk slime, red raspberry slime, pretzel slime.  I have seen a few of them on damp stumps in autumn woods, but never enough.  They are weird, they are beautiful.

Tiia Monto Not always beautiful
Rodney Hodnett

    

2.  Ever since Eve in the garden tempted stupid Adam, snakes have been hated.  (Remember: Satan, to tempt her into picking the apple, took the form of a serpent.)  But I find them beautiful.  (Not Adam and Eve; snakes.)  They slither and slide in the grass, and when threatened, coil.  They are lithe, cunning, elusive, utterly sensual, perhaps wicked.  But perhaps not: in our climate, only the pit vipers and coral snake are poisonous, and they would much rather slither away than confront us, monsters that we are in comparison.   (Why no illustration here?  Ask my computer; it puts the illustration elsewhere.)


3.   These are good guys, they kill mosquitos and flies.  Yes, the black widow eats her mate after sex, but that’s a problem for lusting male spiders, not us.  In fact, their sex life is far richer than ours, involving, bondage, rape, chastity belts, castration, and suicide.  When I find one in my apartment – which is rare – I transport it to a window and release it into nature, where it will surely thrive.
A spider eating a fly.
Thomas Bresson
A black widow spinning her web on a tree branch.
4.   I know them from aquariums, where their streamlined bodies dart and swirl, their mouths showing dagger-like teeth, while their eyes look cold and merciless.  I wouldn’t want to meet one in the wild, but in the Coney Island aquarium, with a good, thick glass wall between us, I marvel at their long, supple bodies, their deft grace in the water.  They are efficient machines for killing.  Scary, yes, but beautiful.
Shiyam ElkCloner
5.   Amanita virosa.  An Amanita mushroom, characterized by (1) a ring or annulus, the remains of a partial veil; (2) a cap with remnants of the universal veil; and (3) a volva, an enlarged base consisting of a cuplike structure, the remains of the universal veil.  (The partial veil protects the spore-developing gills on the lower surface of the cap.  The universal veil encloses the entire mushroom.  Both veils are broken as the mushroom matures.)  And why is it important to note these three characteristics?  Because they say AMANITA, and Amanitas include some of the deadliest mushrooms in the world, responsible for countless deaths.  I often saw this one in the woods while vacationing on Monhegan Island, Maine, its classic white mushroom silhouette sharp against the dark trunks of the spruce trees.  



The volva, or base, of Destroying Angel.
Jason Hollinger
Look at it, but don’t pick and eat it, unless you want to devastate your liver (which may have to be replaced), vomit, have diarrhea, and depart this earth. Destroying Angel: beautiful, but deadly.

Coming soon:  How to get rid of junk mail: a sure-fire ruthless guide.

©  2019  Clifford Browder

423. Hospital charts, or why doctors should take English 101

Hospital charts, or why doctors 
should take English 101

A surprise minipost: samples of doctors' remarks about their patients on hospital charts; I invent not.

Patient has two teen-age children, but no other abnormalities.Occasional, constant, infrequent headaches.She is numb from her toes down.Skin: somewhat pale but present.On the second day the knee was better, and on the third it disappeared.Patient refused autopsy.Patient has chest pain if he lies on his left side for over a year.Healthy-appearing decrepit sixty-nine-year-old male, mentally alert but forgetful.Discharge status: alive but without my permission.
Next time you're in a hospital, who knows what they may say about you?  One more reason to stay healthy.  Think positive, avoid too much sun, eat veggies and lots more fiber.
Coming soon:  As announced: Five Things I Hate.
©  2019  Clifford Browder

422. Karposi's Sarkoma, a Deadly Mystery

BROWDERBOOKS

Work continues on my next nonfiction title.  The exciting front cover is done, I have okayed the interior design, and have offered suggestions for the back-cover blurb.  I'll say more, once a few basics have been settled.

To see my Facebook personal page, go here.  To see my new Facebook business page, go here.  Silas's head and mine are cut off, but at least you'll see the books.  (Brooklyn Book Festival, 2018.)  Sometimes these links work, and sometimes they don't.  Good luck!

So now that I've got a Facebook business page, what do I do with it?  Any suggestions?  Of course Facebook wants me to do ads, so as to put shekels in their coffers.

Small Talk

          I haven't small-talked for quite a while, even though small talk is usually preferable to big talk, being easier to take.  I thought I would mention two former posts, one that used to be the most visited one on the blog, and the one that replaced it.  The no. 1 post today is #125, "Remarkable Women: Eliza Jumel."  Its popularity is quite understandable, since it tells the story of a prostitute's daughter who became the friend of two ex-kings and a future emperor.  The main problem in telling it is deciding which version of Madame Jumel's many accounts of her origins and early years we should believe; I did my best.  Her story has great appeal for feminists today.  (To read the post, go here.  It also appears as chapter 13 in my nonfiction title Fascinating New Yorkers.  For this and my other books, go here.)

          The post that used to rank no. 1 is more controversial. Originally published as #43, it is now republished as #239: "Man / Boy Love: The Great Taboo."  When I self-published my first nonfiction title, No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015), I wanted to include the post as a chapter, but Mill City, the outfit helping me self-publish, refused to include it, if the book was published under their name; they feared legal repercussions.  I was free to publish it under my own name, but I chose not to, since this would have involved inventing a publisher, acquiring ISBNs and bar codes, and other complications.  What did Mill City fear?  Probably, a lawsuit by parents whose underage son had been molested by an older man.  But I only endorsed completely consensual relationships then, and still do now.  To fully grasp my position, you have to read the post. I much regret that it never appeared in the book.  (To read the post, go here.  I am not responsible for certain oddities in the text. Blame my computer.)


                   Karposi's Sarkoma,                    a Deadly Mystery


         A few weeks ago I was visiting the public library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street for the first time in years.  Going down a long third-floor hallway whose walls were covered with material celebrating the Stonewall riots of fifty years ago, I entered the north hall of the ornate reading room, en route to room 328, the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts, at the very end of the room.  There, being expected (one doesn’t go there casually), I signed in and was admitted.  A hushed atmosphere prevailed, and only one or two other patrons were present, their nose deep in a manuscript.  I showed my I.D., took a seat, and waited, armed only with a pencil and a sheet of paper (nothing else, pens included, is allowed).  Soon they brought me the item I had come to see: The Spencer Beach and Barry Leach memorabilia, 1976-1985, a single file of AIDS-related correspondence, photographs, and memorial cards.  Why did this carefully preserved material interest me?  Because I had known both Spencer and Barry, but only a day or two before, in googling Spencer’s name to verify the year of his death, had I discovered the existence of this file.  To explain, I’ll have to leap back in time to 1982, and then even further back to 1940.
         In February 1982 I got an invitation from Barry Leach, a West Village neighbor and acquaintance, notifying me of a memorial service for his partner Spencer Beach.  I was stunned.  I had known Spencer since seventh grade back in our home town, Evanston, Illinois.  I hadn’t seen Spencer for a year or two, didn’t even know he was sick. The service would be held at St. Luke in the Fields, an Episcopal church on Hudson Street near Christopher in the West Village, but a short walk from my building.  I knew the church, had often walked in its gardens.  Of course I would go.    
         Spencer and I had met in seventh grade in 1940 and went through junior high and high school together.  He was dark-haired, full-faced, fleshy, well-mannered and witty, but in appearance anything but tidy.  Though bright, at school he was always in trouble, usually because he talked too much – wittily, but much too much.  Just to get him from one classroom to another was a problem.  He was not allowed to walk with the other boys; instead, while the boys filed down the hall, another boy in our class – a born disciplinarian, as tight-lipped and strict as Spencer was lackadaisical and loquacious – was assigned to march him through the halls.  Stories of Spencer’s misadventures at school regaled my mother for years; she thought them outrageously funny.
         Spencer’s refinement was made apparent to me one week when, quite by chance, I left a handkerchief at his house and another at the home of a classmate and friend, Dick Sherill.  Dick returned the handkerchief, soiled and crumpled, and held at arm’s length between two fingers, with a look of extreme distaste.  But Spencer returned the other handkerchief, folded neatly and freshly laundered, with a faint trace of cologne.  Yes, for a thirteen-year-old male, he was exquisitely refined.  And as final proof of it, he alone of all my friends said “Excuse me” if he farted.
         During those pre-high-school years, while other boys tossed footballs or slugged baseballs in dreary vacant lots, Spencer and I were doing fantasy skits where he might be the king of some imaginary country, and I his treacherous prime minister, scheming to overthrow him.  Enlivening our drama, if we were at my house, was my mother’s handsome black cape from France, which, when draped from Spencer’s shoulders, marvelously enhanced his royal dignity.  And when it cloaked my mischief, I smiled cunningly from its ample folds, the very essence of treachery and deceit.  We were, of course, gay, though we didn’t know it.  At the time I was actually attracted to girls, my interest in them lacking just one essential: good old hard-core lust.
         Spencer’s affinity for royalty, especially British royalty, was longstanding and pronounced.  In his young years he had posed as a monarch, improvising a crown and scepter, and bribing his younger sister to attend him as some kind of courtier or functionary.  And when we were in his bedroom, he would interrupt our trivial talk with the sudden reverential announcement, “And now we are going to look at my scrapbook of the coronation.”  From a desk drawer he then produced a large scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, both articles and photographs, reporting the coronation of King George VI in 1937. 
         The photos showed legions of yeomen of the guards with long pikes, and horse guards with plumed hats, attending an ornate centuries-old carriage – solid gold, Spencer assured me – drawn by four teams of horses.  Inside the coach, barely visible, was the soon-to-be-crowned king.  Then, inside Westminster Abbey, Spencer’s slightly blurred photos showed hosts of ermine-caped dignitaries, the duke of this and the bishop of that, and the future king and queen with long trains carried by attendants.  Spencer explained each photo: the anointing of the king with holy oil, then his receiving a sword, a royal orb, a gold girdle, a mantle, and finally, from the venerable hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the crown.  Adorning his noggin now was a monstrously big hunk of gold, silver, jewels, and ermine-trimmed velvet that I would have hated to have burdening my brow.  At the end of the ceremony the solemn-faced king seemed overly garbed and overly whelmed by all this paraphernalia, but Spencer described each object in awed tones that precluded any criticism.  Finally, with great care and solemnity, he shut the scrapbook, as if he had just witnessed the ceremony himself.  He had shown me, I later realized, Britain’s last great splurge of pomp and circumstance, before the sobering horrors of the war.
The crowning of George VI.
From an illustration of the time.

         Also distinguishing Spencer was his talk.  Always entertaining, it was superior, unique.  He told me
·      How according to a contemporary chronicler, Queen Elizabeth of England “taketh a bath once a year, whether she needeth it or no.”  ·      How he once heard his matriarchal grandmother comment to his mother on Edward VIII’s abdication of the British throne to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite already divorced once, with a second divorce pending: “He has abandoned the ship of state for a tramp steamer!”  (Spencer’s obsession with royalty was obviously a family addiction.)·      How in Victorian times the verb “sweat” was too gross to be used for humans.  “Animals sweat, people perspire, and young ladies glow.”·      How the young Chopin died of a venereal disease contracted from his mistress, George Sand.
This last, patently untrue, he probably told me so as to see how gullible I was.  When entertaining stories came from him, I was probably much too gullible.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, their titles after
 his abdication.  Does she look like a tramp steamer?
         Years passed, and we went our separate ways, first to college and then, me to Europe and New York, and Spencer to the Army.  Yes, Spencer, so well-mannered, so dignified in his monarchical fantasies enhanced by my mother’s cape, served two years in the Army!  It was the Cold War, and only my 4F status due to a heart murmur kept me out.  When I saw Spencer later, gone was his childhood obsession with royalty, though not his manners and deftness of speech.  In the most matter-of-fact way he assured me that he could operate thirteen infantry weapons of the United States Army.
         In the 1970s Spencer, now in his forties, got in touch with me again.  By now Spencer and I were long since out, and he and his partner Barry were living at 100 Bank Street, but a short distance from where I and my partner Bob were living.  Of course we met and socialized.  Spencer’s partner, Barry Leach, struck me as youthful for his years (he was in his fifties), but also wise, mature, and compassionate.  A recovered alcoholic, in the spare time his regular job allowed him, he worked closely with Alcoholics Anonymous.  In talking about his work Barry often quoted the Serenity Prayer adopted by AA, which is usually attributed to the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:  “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."  
Anamix
         Though he had never had a problem with alcohol, Spencer was fascinated by AA and its work, and was now totally devoted to working with Barry to help gay friends and couples who were fighting alcoholism.  Their work involved close friendships, counseling, and meetings animated by an almost religious fervor -- a communion that functioned on three levels simultaneously: social, emotional, and spiritual.  This was not my world or concern, but I wished them well.
         I had not seen Spencer for a year or two when Barry sent me the invitation to Spencer’s memorial service, to be held on February 21, 1982, at St. Luke in the Fields.  When I went, I found a large basement hall filled with a crowd that included Spencer’s three siblings; Barry presided.  As announced in the invitation, it was not a religious service.  Tributes were paid to Spencer, and people were invited to speak.  Many gay friends praised Spencer for his help in their recovery from alcoholism, even telling of how, although sick and bedridden, he had called a meeting of one group and announced from his sick bed, “No self-pity!”  Having long recommended the Serenity Prayer to others, he was now living it.  Put off by all the AA participants, one man in his forties got up to declare, “I’m a two-fisted drinker.”  This bothered no one; they were used to such comments from the non-addicted.
         After many others had spoken, I got up and told them of my long friendship with Spencer, and of his misbehavior at school.  “Spencer terrorized that school,” I announced, with comic exaggeration that was at times close to the truth.  Then, shifting rhetorical gears, I told of his cult of royalty, especially British, ending with his reverential announcement, “And now we are going to look at my scrapbook of the coronation.” 

         At the end of the memorial service, Spencer’s sister Ellen, the only sibling old enough to remember me, called me over and insisted with a smile, regarding her brother’s behavior at school, “It wasn’t as bad as that.”  I too smiled, but having witnessed it, I knew what I knew.  Barry thanked me, seeing in Spencer’s antics at school the seeds of his later spunk and determination to help his troubled friends.  After the service he went off on a cruise with a woman friend to relax and take stock of things, now that his partner was gone.
         Spencer had died on January 1, 1982.  Instead of sending flowers, he asked his friends to make donations for Karposi’s Sarcoma research.  What Karposi's Sarkoma was, I had no idea, but whatever it was, I assumed that Spencer had died of it.  A mystery, and a deadly one.  Only later, as word of the AIDS epidemic spread, did I realize that Spencer was one of its first victims in the city.  At the time of his death, the term “AIDS,” meaning Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, hadn’t even been invented.  It was first used by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a statement dated September 24, 1982, some nine months after Spencer’s death.  And only in 1984 would HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, be identified as the cause of AIDS.  But already, on March 4, 1983, the CDC had announced that AIDS primarily afflicted homosexual men, injection drug users, Haitians, and hemophiliacs.  And talk of the Gay Plague began.

         Karposi’s Sarcoma, I have since learned, was one of the AIDS-defining illnesses of the 1980s.  A skin cancer discovered by Moritz Karposi, a Hungarian physician, in 1872, it was an opportunistic infection facilitated by the patient’s weakened immune system.  Caused by a virus different from HIV, it was presumably spread through saliva.  “Deep kissing” by gay men and bisexuals was thought to be responsible.  When hospitalized for tests in 1981, Spencer had been given two diagnoses: Karposi’s Sarkoma and lobar pneumonia.  Pneumonia could be treated with antibiotics; KS, being viral, could not.  Though his relationship with Barry was solid, from stray remarks of theirs I gathered that Spencer and Barry had met in a gay bath house, and that their relationship was open, allowing each partner casual adventures on the side.  This may have made them vulnerable, whereas Bob and I, being strictly monogamous, were not.
         So there I was in 1982, witnessing one of the first AIDS deaths in the city, without even knowing it at the time or having heard the terms “AIDS” and “HIV.”  Both terms would soon become a part of the city’s and the world's daily vocabulary for many years to come.
Chart showing the spread of AIDS
in the late 1980s and 1990s.
        In 1985, through a friend I learned that Barry Leach had died of a heart attack.  His death and Spencer’s were a great loss to the gay community.  They had worked so hard and done so much for so many.  For me personally, with Spencer died a part of my youth.


Coming soon:  Five Things I Hate, with commentary.  And Five Weird Things I Love.

©  2019  Clifford Browder

421. Lady Gaga: She Makes Madonna Look Tame

BROWDERBOOKS

I have just finished approving the cover of my next book, a self-published work of nonfiction comprising posts from this blog.  It's the most original and unusual cover I have ever had, for which I thank 1106 Design.  Next, the back cover blurb.  I'll announce the title and show the cover, when work on the book is more advanced.  But the cover really excites me.


Lady Gaga: She Makes Madonna Look Tame

My friend Silas told me that as an undergraduate he liked Lady Gaga's Telephone video, so I decided to investigate.  I found it on YouTube, and here is what I saw.  First, a view of a prison wall topped with barbed wire.  Then, sexy young women in cells peer out behind bars, as Lady Gaga, her blond hair in coils, enters in a garish outfit and high heels, flanked by two other women.  They  proceed down the aisle between cells, watched by the inmates  Is she touring the prison?  Suddenly the two women push her into a cell, strip her, and lock her in.  Clearly, this is no tour.  So far, no music.
         Scene change: the prison yard.  She appears, her blond hair still coiled and elegant.  A man appears (how did he get in?), kisses her ravenously; she kisses him back.  Two women fight savagely, as others scream and cheer.  Announcement: a phone call for Lady Gaga.  She goes to a phone, picks up the receiver, bursts into song, dances.  Now she is dancing wildly with other women in the aisle between cells, some six of them in the skimpiest bra and panties, pulsing to savage music in a dance like no prison on earth has ever witnessed.
         Scene change: the prison interior again, minus dancing.  Her lucky day, a guard announces; she is being bailed out.  She walks out under a preposterous large black hat that would dwarf anyone but Gaga.  She gets in a yellow car where Beyoncé, beautiful but not garishly dressed, sits behind the wheel.  Beyoncé to Gaga, “You’ve been a very bad girl.  A very, very bad girl.”  Gaga looks unrepentant.  They drive off, the yellow car streaking across the landscape.
         Scene change: a roadside restaurant.  A young black man at a table, coughing.  Does he know Beyoncé?  Music, wild dancing.  A kitchen full of dancing cooks.  Is Gaga putting some drops in a coffee cup?  The coughing man sips, slumps down, passes out.  Beyoncé says something about Gaga stealing him from her (it’s pretty vague).  Wild, wild dancing.
         Scene change: a landscape.  A radio announcement of what seems to be a mass homicide, with two women fleeing the scene of the crime.  Gaga and Beyoncé in the yellow car again, speeding off.  Beyoncé makes Gaga promise they will never come back; Gaga promises.  Their hands clasp, as if making a pact, and the car speeds away. Words on the screen: TO  BE  CONTINUED.   (To see the video, go here.  but skip the ad at the start.)
         To be continued?  Not for me, I’m not tempted by a sequel.
Lady Gaga in 2016.  For her, this is tame.
Eric Garcetti
         What is one to make of this?  Assuming you’re not a dance-crazy teenager, that is.  First, it’s what her followers want and expect, so my comments are not too relevant.  It's a mishmash, a mix of things -- a story that's not even half told, with hints of shame and guilt and masochism, and even a touch of lesbianism.  She’s so wild, so outrageously weird, that the craziness of the setting, a women’s prison, hardly needs to be commented on.  The prison is no more real than Madonna’s cathedral in her Met Gala 2018 video, a mere pretext for Gaga’s wild singing and dancing.  And that singing and dancing is not bad.  In fact, if you like crazy wild dance music, it’s really very good.  I happen to like such music and in my time did a bit of crazy dancing, where you just let the rhythm pound through you and let go, totally willing to make a fool of yourself.  If that's what you want – and a lot of young people obviously do – Lady Gaga’s Telephone video can’t be beat.  It’s mindless, it’s fun. 
         Lady Gaga was born Joanne Angelina Germanotta in New York City in 1986. Her working-class parents sent her to Catholic schools, where she felt like a misfit, being too provocative or too eccentric.  Wanting her to become "a cultured young woman," her mother had her taking piano lessons from age four on, and in time she developed a love of music and later studied acting as well.  By 2008 her singing career was well under way and she was becoming hot stuff under the name Lady Gaga.  The world hasn't been the same ever since.

         As Lady Gaga she has been so flat-out weird, that she makes Madonna look tame.  As with Madonna but even more so, for one of my ripe years the weirdness risks upstaging the music, which in its noisy, roaring way isn't bad.  There’s room for both these gals, but if I had to choose, I’d go with Madonna.  Maybe not all of Madonna, but with what I know, the Met Gala 2018 video, where she appears, properly cowled (for a little while), in the semblance of a cathedral.  These woman are true performers, and to achieve their final product they and their huge casts must rehearse exhaustively and exhaustingly.  Both were raised Catholic, but it didn't stick.  And offstage – as if they ever were – they are clowns, and in the world we live in, a bit of clowning is appropriate.  Let’s not leave all the farce to the politicians.

         Frenzied craziness seems to be what’s wanted today.  Was it always like that?  Not really.  Neither the minuet of the eighteenth century nor the waltz of the nineteenth permitted it.  They were stately and elegant.  But things were changing.  Imported from Paris in the late 1860s with other frivolities, the cancan was fiercely wild and naughty for its time, and New Yorkers flocked.  It was a dance for performers onstage, not for the public, but Victorian morality took a near-fatal blow when, as Offenbach’s rousing music sounded, one hundred dancers, prancing on two hundred shapely legs, kicked high, and then turned around to hike their skirts and flaunt their frothy derrières.  Suddenly the whirling, giddy patterns of the waltz seemed prim and proper.



         In the so-called Gay Nineties lovely Lillian Russell radiated a magnetic stage presence as she sang pop songs and light opera, mesmerizing audiences.  And for something spicier, there was the song “Ta-ra-ra-boom–de-ay,” which began here but really took off with a naughty music hall version in London that made singer Lottie Collins famous.  


The English music hall singer Lottie Collins, 1892.
When she sang "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," audiences went wild.
And with early 1900s came the Dance of the Grizzly Bear, which the “in” set danced, and whose movements supposedly imitated the movements of a bear.  It was the latest thing first in San Francisco, a notoriously wild urban conglomeration in the Far West, but came to Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910.  Those Follies were extravaganzas with legions of scantly clad girlies, a feature that Hollywood would adapt, with a touch of propriety, in the musicals of the 1930s.  Other crazy dances of the early twentieth included the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot, and the Boston Dip, causing New York City in 1912 to ban them as “huggly-wiggly dances” and degenerate, which probably made them even more popular. 


Ziegfeld Follies of 1916.
        The twentieth century brought us the Roaring Twenties.  Along with booze and mobsters and speakeasies, came jazz and the Charleston, a dance that was plenty wild and crazy.  (I know because, in the safety of my apartment and with only imagined 1920s jazz, I’ve done it.)  And by the 1940s, with the Depression followed by World War II, it was time to “cut a rug,” to jitterbug.  At my high school dances most of us did the fox trot, sometimes hugging close to slow, romantic music, and sometimes doing it faster to jazzier music.  But when really wild music like Two O’Clock Jump was played, a few couples took over and danced what was called the Lindy, as wild a dance as young people ever did.  Wikipedia likens the Lindy hop to the Jitterbug, but I and my friends in the Midwest in the early 1940s didn’t think of ourselves as jitterbugging, and we knew the word “jitterbug” as a verb only, not a noun.  Jitterbugging was what a select few did to wild music.  But we did a milder version of it, too: hold close, break, turn the girl, hold close, break, turn the girl, a version of which I saw a young couple do in a restaurant only last year.  These dance names are as flexible and fluid as the music they were danced to, and they varied regionally.


Jitterbugging, 1943.
The Lindy Hop in Sacramento, 2006.
It's still being done.
         With the 1950s came Rock n’ Roll.  Elvis the Pelvis took over, insidiously seductive, singing “Love me tender, love me true,” his gyrating hips kept carefully out of view on television.  It wasn’t wild, but it was sexy as hell, and audiences loved it.


Elvis Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1956.
         And now couples weren’t dancing close, the man’s arm around the girl, but apart, facing each other.  Then in the early Sixties the Beatles took New York and the country by storm.  Amazingly, they kept reinventing themselves and coming on fresh.  Also flourishing were a dozen other groups, the Rolling Stones prominent among them, and a whole counter culture with its own literature and, God knows, its own music.  All this was to the bafflement, and often the admiration and envy, of that rebellious generation’s elders, those tragically over the age of thirty.  (“Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” was the motto.  I, alas, was a bit over thirty.)
         And so on and so on.  Why labor the point?  Since at least the 1860s, we in America have had wild, crazy dancing and wild, crazy singers galore.  So let Madonna and Lady Gaga have their moment.  It’s only a moment in time, glorious while it lasts, but very short.  So let the good times roll, until …  Well, until they don’t.  You can watch from the sidelines, or you can join the dance.  Or you can ignore it all and get on with the serious things of life.  Your choice, and lots to choose from.  As for me in my sober senior years, is that some 1920s jazz I seem to hear and want to Charleston to, or just a cancan?  I’ll take either one.
Coming soon:  I dunno.  Next Sunday seems so far away.

©   2019   Clifford Browder
         

420. Staten Island

Surprise!  Surprise!  

An unannounced midweek post by a guest blogger, my friend Victoria Hallerman, a longtime resident of Staten Island who has been my guide there many a time, showing me the wonders of her island, undreamed of by most Manhattanites.  Victoria is a published author, and she maintains a blog about her and her husband's experience in 1976 running a movie palace, a story that is fascinating, sad, and hilarious.  I invited her to speak frankly on the subject of her beloved island, and that is what she has done.  Brace yourselves, Manhattanites, here she comes. 

Staten Island, the Edge of the Known World
         She says I should write about Staten Island: it’s out there somewhere...people, she says, are afraid of it, “or they think it’s the land of big hair and too much make-up.” Well it’s out there all right, but Upper West Siders afraid of Staten Island? I don’t think so.
         Twenty minutes later, I walk into Kirsh on the Upper West Side, my favorite cafe for writing. A man, strolling past, says to a woman, “Staten Island? (chuckling) –  doesn’t really exist.” He drools the words in a string of smugness, while they move on. Now that’s more like it, what I’m used to, what I’ve come to accept: people in Manhattan aren’t aware enough of the island that anchors the other side of the Verrazano Bridge to fear it.
         We (Staten Island) are the third-largest of New York City’s five boroughs, with the smallest population. We contain more parkland (9,300 acres) than any other borough, including better than 94.10 acres of forest in High Rock Park, part of the Greenbelt, where you can hike till your shoes are worn through. Staten Island exists all right.
         Yet, as if to ratify the views of the man on the street, when we islanders plan a trip to Manhattan, we persist in saying, “I’m going to the city.” We don’t just accept our outlier status, we claim it as the booby prize some other New Yorkers think we deserve. Ditching the hair and the outer borough accent, Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl got out; that was her victory. She “passed” for what was considered a real New Yorker.
         Somehow Staten Island often gets left behind. We were charming and rural in the nineteenth century, a place “city” people went to eat oysters and enjoy the harbor view. A short list of notable people who once lived in the forgotten borough is surprising: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the abolitionist Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, Herman Melville, Frederick Law Olmstead Sr., and  photographer Alice Austen – to name a few –  all lived on the island and/or were born there.
         But for lack of a subway connecting the island to Brooklyn that was almost built, Staten Island in the twentieth century became Pluto, ejected from the NYC solar system, or if you prefer to think of the city as a theater, we became its backstage. Here’s where the mounds and mounds of pre-2000 garbage from all five boroughs (1947 forward) and the tragic remains of the 9/11 attacks got buried. Fresh Kills Park is dealing with that very slowly, turning the garbage back to nature, if not without some rough botanical transformations.
         I’ve endured condescension from Manhattanites for fifty years, in conversation and in print, and I’m sick of it. A recent friend of the island, Ian Frazier of The New Yorker, seems to have friends here, and especially in his post-Hurricane Sandy piece of February 3, 2013, has written deeply, without hubris or insult, about the borough I’ve called home since 1969. In another article I’ve been unable to locate but remember reading, about the raising of the deck of the Bayonne Bridge, the writer (New York Times?) insisted it was okay to close the Bayonne for several years, insisting that nobody really uses that bridge anyhow. That’s right, nobody but Staten Islanders.
         Perhaps my friend, who started me off on this post, is right after all: people are often afraid of what they don’t know or understand, and Staten Island, a 23-minute ferry ride from the lower tip of Manhattan, is baffling in many ways. There are, for example, at least two Staten Islands, but almost nobody knows that. I’ll write about that next time I’m a guest blogger for Clifford, that fearless adventurer who journeys to the very edges of the known world, which would include Staten Island.

*                 *                 *                  *                  *                 
Victoria Hallerman is a published poet and author whose upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, relates her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, in 1976.  Her blog, with a new post every Wednesday, is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were:
www.startswednesday.com/blog.  
I hope she will do more guest posts about Staten Island in the future.         Coming soon: Lady Gaga: She makes Madonna look tame.

©   2019   Clifford Browder

419. Indie Publishing: A Breakthrough or a Rip-off?

BROWDERBOOKS

My latest book, the fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.


 

A story of the strangest friendship that ever was: a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him. 

Reviews

"What a remarkable novel!  Clifford Browder's The Eye That Never Sleeps is an exciting cat and mouse game between a detective and a bank thief that is simultaneously so much more.  A lively, earthy stylist with a penchant for using just the right word, Browder captures a city pullulating with energy.  I loved this book right down to its satisfying, poignant ending." --  Five-star Amazon review by Michael P. Hartnett.

"New York City in the mid-nineteenth century is described in vivid detail. Both the decadent activities of the wealthy and the struggles of the common working class portray the life of the city."  --  Four-star NetGalley review by Nancy Long.  
"Fascinating!"  --  Five-star NetGalley review by Jan Tangen.
For the full reviews of the above three reviewers, go here and scroll down. 
"Well written, flowing with a feeling for the time and the characters."  --  Reader review by Bernt Nesje.  
The Eye That Never Sleeps is certain to amaze and engage not just historical mystery fans, but anyone seeking an exciting new read.  --  Five-star Readers' Favorite review by K.C. Finn.  
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Also ...
My nonfiction work Fascinating New Yorkers has been reviewed by The US Review of Books. Reviewer Gabriella Tutino says, "There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC." For the whole review, click on US Review.

For more about my other books, go here.

                            INDIE  PUBLISHING: 
A BREAKTHROUGH OR A RIP-OFF?



         Recently I paid $201 to Readers’ Favorite, an online book review and book contest site, for five express reviews for my new novel, The Eye That Never Sleeps.  I splurged, for this is their most expensive plan, bringing you 5 reviews in 2 to 3 weeks.  You can also get 1 or 3 reviews for less, especially if you are willing to wait longer.  I did this because my novel had received only 2 pre-publication reviews from NetGalley, even though many authors with my publisher have received 10.  The cost of NetGalley was shared with my publisher, my cost being $399.  Readers’ Favorite publishes only four- and five-star reviews, which reduces the risk of a bad result for authors.  I got 2 five-star and 3 four-star reviews.  But their offer of a gold seal to stick on my book, proclaiming it a 5-star winner, I rejected.  They wanted $50 for 250 1.5-inch seals, and I know a rip-off when I smell one.  But their online seal costs nothing, so I took it.


I then notified my publisher, Black Rose Writing, of the five reviews.

         The publisher’s reaction surprised me.  He urged me not to use Readers’ Favorite in the future, stating that my five reviews were worth less than one.  Readers’ Favorite reviews don’t carry a lot of weight, he explained, since they are almost always positive.  He recommended two other review sites instead.
         I thanked him for the alternative suggestions, but took exception to his view of Readers’ Favorite reviews.  Mine were not done slapdash.  They are substantial, intelligent, and sensitive, and have been especially good in appraising the historical setting, and not just the characters and plot.  (To see the reviews, go here.)  Five reviewers who had never heard of me or my books have now read and reacted to one of them in a positive way.  Their reviews grade the book's appearance, plot, development, formatting, and marketability separately, leading to the overall opinion that is the reviewer's final grade.  In addition to which, the author gets to grade the reviewer.  These are the most comprehensive reviews that I have ever received.  In short, I got my money's worth.

         Furthermore, as I have pointed out to my publisher, when people come to my stand at a book fair, they are impressed by good reviews, without knowing anything about the reviewers.  Just as, if they see a gold sticker on a book proclaiming it a WINNER of an award in some book contest, as is the case with another of my books, they are impressed, even though they’ve never heard of the contest.  Good reviews nudge them toward buying, and so does an award.  And let's face it, we authors are out to nudge folks into buying.
         This may sound like a cop-out, but I think that I and my publisher are both right.  He is right to disparage review outfits that take authors’ money and give suspiciously positive reviews to all comers, just as I am right in insisting that, at least in this case, I got something of value out of the reviews.  Since then I have consulted the Alliance of Independent Authors, a global nonprofit association of self-publishing authors founded in 2012.  Their award and contest ratings, designed to separate out the valid ones from the dubious ones, give Readers’ Favorite a cautionrating, their lowest.  (Good guys get recommended, bad guys get caution.)  So score 1 for my publisher.  With further online research I found a discussion of Readers’ Favorite by a number of authors in 2016.  About half the authors were leery of the outfit, while the other half were satisfied with their reviews and voiced no complaint.  So opinion was, and still is, divided.
         This brings up a gutsy fundamental question: Should authors have to pay for reviews?  This practice, so reviled in politics, now dominates the “indie” (i.e., independent) publishing world, made up of small presses and self-publishing services.  Which is my world as an author.  Thanks to POD (print on demand), there is no need for publishers’ warehouses, or for nooks and crannies of an author’s tiny big-city apartment, to be crammed with unsold books.  No book is printed, until an order for it is received.  This has revolutionized publishing, as a host of small presses and self-publishing services have sprung up to fill the gap left by the bottom-line-obsessed big publishers, who for most writers are inaccessible.  Today, it has never been easier to get a book published.  If small presses reject an author’s work, the author can self-publish through a service designed to do exactly that.  So the market is flooded with small-press and self-published books, some of  them excellent, and some of them just plain junk.  A lifelong fan of sci fi, for instance, having always dreamed of doing a sci-fi novel of his own, can – at a cost – do it, even though it will differ in no way from a thousand other sci-fi novels on the market.  Mediocrity triumphs.
         So the whole indie publishing world has bypassed the gatekeepers.  And who are, or were, the gatekeepers?  First, the five big presses, all based in New York, that read only agented submissions: HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette.  (Hachette -- isn't that a French publisher?  Yes, and a big one, but with a division based in New York.)  Obsessively concerned with sales and little else, up till now the Big Five have dominated the market.  Also keeping the gate, and mostly keeping it shut, are the agents, who for new authors without contacts are almost inaccessible.  In another post (#407, “Damn the Gatekeepers, or Why I Go with Small Presses or Self-Publish”), I have related my misadventures with agents, and explained why I prefer small presses or self-publishing, a decision that I still endorse today.  Indie authors know that their chances of making the New York Times bestseller list, or even getting a review in the Times or some other big-name publication, are just about nil.  This means that a vast segment of the reading public will never hear of us, and we accept that.  But as the indie publishing world has surged, available reviewers are flooded with books to review.  And so, this being a capitalist society where everything has its price, reviewers charge money.

         The indie publishing world has now become a huge machine for getting authors to part with their cash.  Everybody wants our money.  We have to decide which deals are worth the cost, and which not.  Yes, we can get some of our friends to do reviews of our books at no cost, and some readers will do the same unbidden by the author.  But as everyone in this business – publishers, editors, fellow authors, readers, and reviewers – keep proclaiming in a resonant chorus, the more reviews, the better.  So authors are wooed by reviewer outfits citing the impact of their reviews, as attested in glowing terms by outrageously successful authors.  How can authors not be tempted by these offers promising “honest” reviews, meaning that favorable results are not guaranteed?  Here are the reviews we need … for a price.
         I mentioned earlier that the Alliance for Independent Authors rates book awards and contests.  According to them, Readers’ Favorite reviews merit their lowest rating, caution, a finding that I, at least in part, disagree with.  I have now read through their ratings of some 118 book awards and contests, and find that only a measly few survive their scrutiny and earn their top rating, recommended.  Such ratings risk being too exclusive, too pure, for the grimy world we live in.
         Among book contests with the rating of caution are two that gave a WINNER status to my nonfiction title No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015).  My book won the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction, and first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards. 




These and similar contests have been criticized for offering a large number of awards for books in various categories, instead of just one, two, or three prizes in all.  Yet it’s precisely because of those categories that I entered these contests, anticipating less competition, for instance, in a nonfiction category Travel / Regional / Northeast.  And it paid off twice, plus “honorable mention” in a third contest.  “Honorable mention" is a nice way of saying "semifinalist," which isn’t worth much in itself, since it is shared with a host of other authors.  But it acquires a degree of significance if linked to the two first-place awards.  And since the “honorable mention” was in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards contest, which enjoys the coveted recommended rating from the Alliance, so much the better.

          So now that I know how my two first-place contests are rated by the Alliance, do I reject them?  No way!  Regardless of that rating, they help me sell books.  The Indie Excellence Awards gave me – for a price (everybody wants my money) – gold stickers proclaiming the book a WINNER.  Those stickers now adorn every copy of the book in my possession.  I only regret that the Reader Views contest did not, for a reasonable price, offer stickers as well.  (It didn’t offer stickers at all, thus forgoing a juicy bit of additional revenue, which is hardly the American way.)   At book fairs, people who see that book with its sticker couldn’t care less what contest it won, as long as it was a WINNER.  What sells, sells.
         No reviewer is, or up till now has been, more esteemed than Kirkus.  Founded in 1933 and based in New York City, its magazine has acquired a reputation for providing unbiased professional reviews.  Now it publishes both in print and online.  For a new author, to be reviewed by Kirkus – favorably, one hopes – is a dream.  A Kirkus review can put you on the literary map and launch your career as a writer.  But what are the chances that an indie author, self-published or published by some small new press, will be reviewed?  Next to nothing, of course.  But all is not lost.  For a mere $425 and up, Kirkus, out of the goodness of its heart and the munificence of its greed, offers a “traditional” 250-word review in 7 to 8 weeks.  And for $575 in the same time frame, you can have an “expanded” review of about 500 words, with an expedited option for $725.  A positive review can even earn the coveted Kirkus Star.  And if the review is negative, you can choose not to publish it, thus making it disappear into the sinkhole of oblivion.
         Sound familiar?  Very much like the deal offered by Readers’ Favorite, as described at the start of this article.  If Readers’ Favorite, now exposed as an upstart copycat, is to be condemned, why not the illustrious Kirkus as well?  But those lucky authors who, having paid good cash, get positive reviews, will fight for Kirkus.  Who wouldn’t?  And if they get the Kirkus Star, they will defend Kirkus to the death.  But for me, Kirkus has tainted its once unblemished reputation.  Kirkus is a whore.





         But whores exist, because there’s a paying market.  The more reviews, the better.  All those awards and contests rated caution know this well, and thrive.  And I know it too, and in this grimy world will get reviews where I can.  Free, when possible; otherwise, for a price.  Free or paid for, the dear little things count, they sell.  And if even bestselling authors confess to having paid for Kirkus reviews -- and they do confess it --  maybe someday I will, too.  If you're going to patronize a whore, you might as well take, for a price, the best-looking one on the block.






    WINNER     WINNER     WINNER     WINNER     WINNER          


Coming soon:  Lady Gaga: She's crazy, but I dig her music.
©   2019   Clifford Browder

600. BROWDERBOOKS

                                          BROWDERBOOKS


Silas and Me at BookCon 2017.
Me on the left.


All my books, historical fiction and nonfiction, relate to the wild, crazy, maddening, and hugely creative city of New York. I love this place, warts  and all.  It's the most exciting city in the world.  My books are about its people and its happenings, past and present.  All are available online as indicated, or from the author.  Here they are, fiction and then nonfiction, with the most recent titles first.  And for more on New York, see the other posts in my blog.
FICTION
4.  The Eye That Never Sleeps (Black Rose Writing, 2019).  The fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  The story of the strangest friendship that ever was, involving a dapper young bank thief and the detective hired by the banks to apprehend him.  A historical mystery or historical thriller, if you like.  Reviewers call it a page-turner that will hold you to the very end.

 

Hired by the city’s bankers to apprehend the thief who is plundering their banks, private detective Sheldon Minick develops a friendship with his chief suspect, Nicholas Hale, an elegant young man-about-town who is in every way the sober Methodist detective’s opposite. They agree to a truce and undertake each to show the other the city that he knows and values.  Further adventures follow, including a cancan, a gore-splattered slaughterhouse, and a brothel with leap-frogging whores.  But when the truce ends, the inevitable finale comes in the dark midnight vaults of a bank.
Not a standard detective story.  Sheldon Minick is scared of women, wears elevator heels, and loves to belt out Methodist hymns at church.  He is fascinated by Nicholas Hale, who is young, dapper, free-spending -- a risk-taker, deft with women, bisexual.

Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


Reviews
"What a remarkable novel!  Clifford Browder's The Eye That Never Sleeps is an exciting cat and mouse game between a detective and a bank thief that is simultaneously so much more.  A lively, earthy stylist with a penchant for using just the right word, Browder captures a city pullulating with energy.  I loved this book right down to its satisfying, poignant ending." --  Five-star Amazon review by Michael P. Hartnett.
"New York City in the mid nineteenth century is described in vivid detail. Both the decadent activities of the wealthy and the struggles of the common working class portray the life of the city."  --  Four-star NetGalley review by Nancy Long.  
"Fascinating!"  --  Five-star NetGalley review by Jan Tangen.
(For the full reviews of the above three reviewers, go here and scroll down.)
"Well written, flowing with a feeling for the time and the characters."  --  Five-star reader review by Bernt Nesje.
The Eye That Never Sleeps is certain to amaze and engage not just historical mystery fans, but anyone seeking an exciting new read.  --  Five-star Readers' Favorite review by K.C. Finn.




Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

3.  Dark Knowledge (Anaphora Literary Press, 2018), the third novel in the Metropolis series.  Adult and young adult.  A fast-moving historical novel or historical thriller about New York City and the slave trade, with the sights and sounds and smells of the waterfront.  Researched from primary sources whenever possible.


New York City, late 1860s.  When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, he is appalled.  Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade.  Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered.  What price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it?
Reviews

"A lively and entertaining tale.  The writing styles, plot, pace and character development were excellent."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by BridgitDavis.
"I am glad that I have read this book as it goes into great detail and the presentation is amazing.  The Author obviously knows his stuff."  Four-star LibraryThing early review by Moiser20.  

"Slavery is a hard topic to portray in a nuanced light. Browder does a commendable job at doing so by balancing out the characters' different opinions about the former slave trade, and the book never reads as apologetic literature."  US Review of Books review by Gabriella Tutino.

"Thoroughly enjoyed this historical book!  I recommend to read!  Facts accurate!"  Five-star Goodreads review by LisaMarie.

"I enjoyed reading Dark Knowledge and Clifford Browder definitely managed to recreate the vibe and feel of that era so that I could almost smell the salty sea air and feel myself transported to that period.  The characters are very well drawn.... Clifford Browder succeeds in highlighting the horrors of slavery through this book. This is great read!"  Five-star Readers' Favorite review by Gisela Dixon.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

2.   Bill Hope: His Story  (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017), the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a persistent and undying hope.
For readers who like historical fiction and a fast-moving story.




Reviews
"A real yarn of a story about a lovable pickpocket who gets into trouble and has a great adventure.  A must read."  Five-star Amazon customer review by nicole w brown.
"This was a fun book.  The main character seemed like a cross between Huck Finn and a Charles Dickens character.  I would recommend this."  Four-star LibraryThing review by stephvin

"This book is a really good yarn of a story.  Bill Hope is a sweet rascal of a character who doesn't give up on people once he's invested in them.  I can't recommend this book enough."  Five-star Barnes & Noble customer review by ladynicolai.

"This is an easy read about a hard life. Bill Hope grew up on the street, in late 1800s New York, with all the trappings of a street kid. It's the story of a pickpocket wanting a better life. All the cards seem to be stacked against him, and you can't help pulling for him. Interesting characters, a bustling city, poverty, privilege, crime, injustice combine to create a captivating tale.  Five-star Goodreads review by John Wheeles.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

1.   The Pleasuring of Men  (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a respectably raised young man who chooses to become a male prostitute in late 1860s New York and falls in love with his most difficult client.  LGBT genre fiction.  Gay romance, historical.

What was the gay scene like in nineteenth-century New York?  Gay romance, but women have read it and reviewed it.  (The cover illustration doesn't hurt.)


Reviews
"At times amusing, gritty, heartfelt and a little sexy -- this would make a great summer read."  Four-star Amazon customer review by BobW.
"The novel is deftly drawn with rich descriptions, a rhythmic balance of action, dialogue, and exposition, and a nicely understated plot.  The Pleasuring of Men is both engaging and provocative."  Barnes & Noble editorial review by Sean Moran.

"The detail Browder brings to this glimpse into history is only equaled by his writing of credible and interesting characters.  Highly recommended."  Five-star Goodreads review by Nan Hawthorne.

"Altogether this is a tale encompassing both sophisticated wit and humour, and yet the subject matter is the grotty underbelly of society as enacted by its leading citizens—including the Reverend Timothy Blythe, D.D. Indeed, as I followed Tom’s sexual romp through the streets of New York, I couldn’t get the image of that other Tom out of my mind i.e. “Tom Jones.”. It is absolutely delightful. Five Bees."  Gerry Burnie's Reviews.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

NONFICTION

2.  Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies (Black Rose Writing, 2018).  A collection of posts from my blog.  Short biographical sketches of people, some remembered and some forgotten, who lived or died in New York.  A cardinal archbishop known in certain circles as "Franny"; a serial killer who terrorized the city; a pioneer in female erotica who had two husbands and kept a "lie box" to keep her two lives straight; and many more.  New York is a mecca for hustlers of every kind, some endearing and some scary, but they are never boring.
Historical biography, U.S. biography, New York.  An award-winning finalist in the Biography category of the 2019 International Book Awards.



Reviews
"Fascinating New Yorkers by Clifford Browder was like sitting down with a dear friend and catching up on the latest gossip and stories. Written with a flair to keep the reader turning the pages, I couldn't stop reading it and thinking about the subjects of each New Yorker. I love NYC and this book just added to the list of reasons why, a must read for those who love NYC and the people who have lived there." Five-star NetGalley review by Patty Ramirez, librarian.
"Unputdownable."  Five-star reader review by Dipali Sen, retired librarian.
"I felt like I was gossiping with a friend when reading this, as the author wrote about New Yorkers who are unique in one way or another. I am hoping for another book featuring more New Yorkers, as I couldn't put this down and read it in one sitting!"  Five-star NetGalley review by Cristie Underwood.

"Fascinating New Yorkers is a pleasure to read and I look forward to reading more works by this author." Five-star Reader Views review by Paige Lovitt. 

"The writing is fresh and engaging....  Each biography essentially chronicles the rise and fall of its subject matter and divulges a juicy secret or two.  There's something for everyone here in this collection of profiles, and it serves as a source of inspiration for readers who love NYC."  US Review of Books review by Gabriella Tutino.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

1.   No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World  (Mill City Press, 2015).  Winner of the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016.  All about anything and everything New York: alcoholics, abortionists, greenmarkets, Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, my mugging in Central Park, peyote visions, and an artist who made art of a blackened human toe.  A mix of memoir, history, and U.S. travel book, New York.

If you love the city (or hate it), this may be the book for you.  An award winner, it sold well at BookCon 2017 and 2018, and at the Brooklyn Book Festival 2018.


Reviews
"If you want wonderful inside tales about New York, this is the book for you.  Cliff Browder has a way with his writing that makes the city I lived in for 40 plus years come alive in a new and delightful way.  A refreshing view on NYC that will not disappoint."  Five-star Amazon customer review by Bill L.
"To read No Place for Normal: New York is to enter into Cliff Browder’s rich and engaging sixty years of adult life in New York. Yes, he delves back before his time – from the city’s origins to the 19th Century that Ms. Trollope and Mr. Dickens encounter to robber barons and slums that marked highs and lows of the earlier Twentieth Century.  But Browder has lived such an engaged and curious life that he can’t help but cross paths with every layer and period of society. There is something Whitmanesque in his outlook."  Five-star Amazon customer review by Michael P. Hartnett.

“I thoroughly enjoyed 'No Place for Normal: New York' by Clifford Browder and highly recommend it to all fans of entertaining short stories and lovers of New York City.  It would also make an interesting travel guide for people who just want to learn more about the city that never sleeps!”  Reader Views Literary Awards review by Sheri Hoyte.
Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

©   2019   Clifford Browder