Clifford Browder's Blog, page 15

Readers' Favorite Reviews

Readers’ Favorite reviews of The Eye That Never Sleeps

Review #1: Review by Kathryn BennettReview Rating: 5 Stars - Congratulations on your 5-star review!  The Eye That Never Sleeps by Clifford Browder takes the reader to New York City in the 1870s. A fantastic, fast-moving city of movers and shakers that had within its streets plenty of odd couple relationships. Once such relationship is a friendship between a young detective and a young bank robber. Detective Sheldon Minick and bank robber Nicholas Hale call a truce to their cat and mouse game of cops and robbers and show one another the New York City they know, from the fanciest places in town to the dirtiest in the poorest areas. Once this truce is over, what will happen? Can friendship survive when one man breaks the law and the other is charged to uphold it?

There is something that has always been fascinating about the 19th century, especially in a big city like New York. It is a place that is full of hustle and bustle today, but to imagine it during this golden age when all the big names from the Industrial Revolution were at their zenith is amazing. Bringing all that glitter and soot together into the story of just two men from the big city is a fantastic idea. You feel the personal connection of following these characters, but you also get the bigger backdrop of New York City during this age.

This book is a delight to all the senses, and I felt like I could have been at any of the places these men went to as their story unfurls. At times you can almost hear the sound of 1870s New York ringing in your ears, or smell the factories or, worse, the docksides. Whether you are someone who likes a good detective style novel or a historical tale, you will love this book because you solidly get both. I won’t tell you how the story ends or what happens when the truce is up, but I will say you don’t want to miss this book.Top of Form
Bottom of FormReview #2: Review by K.C. FinnReview Rating: 5 Stars - Congratulations on your 5-star review!  The Eye That Never Sleeps is a work of mysterious historical fiction penned by author Clifford Browder. In a detective novel set in the late nineteenth-century grime of New York City, we meet two central characters who live the polar opposite of one another’s lives. The glamorous and loose-living bank robber Nicholas Hale lives a life of excess and elegance amongst the glitz and glam, whilst the detective on his case, Sheldon Minick, combs the grimiest locales of the city to find his quarry. A quirky alliance allows them into one another’s worlds, changing them to the point where the detective becomes torn about turning the robber in, despite all his new ally has shown him of the world.

Stylish, compelling and filled with character, this was an excellent read from start to finish. Author Clifford Browder captures the highs and lows of historical New York City with a clear love for the place, repainting the grimy noir of slaughterhouses next to the glamour of the high life. The plot twists around the central friendship, slowly building and giving away its secrets as the relationship between Hale and Minick grows. Even as the conclusion looms, there’s a powerful sense of not wanting their time together to end: a rare quality in books these days. What results is a highly atmospheric and compelling narrative of lives lived and eyes opened. Overall, The Eye That Never Sleeps is certain to amaze and engage not just historical mystery fans, but anyone seeking an exciting new read.


Bottom of FormReview #3: Review by Samantha CovilleReview Rating: 4 StarsNew York in the 19th century is seen through the eyes of two vastly different men embroiled in the same case. One is the slick bank robber who not only steals money but steals hearts as well. He's the exciting life of the party, glitz and glamour type of guy. The other is the detective who has been tasked with solving the crime. He's the ordinary, unassuming, random guy next door type of man. But their unusual friendship together will take you through a tour of New York that covers everything from the upscale neighborhoods to grimy downtown. Clifford Browder's The Eye That Never Sleeps will have you entranced from page one.

Crime fiction is always a hit or a miss for me and The Eye That Never Sleeps was a big hit in my opinion. I believe it can be attributed to the fact that author Clifford Browder goes beyond the norms of crime fiction and not only gives us the excitement of a good crime, but also the endearing and slightly comical budding friendship between two polar opposites. Browder's writing style is fresh and full of good descriptive language that paints the backdrop of the story in fine detail. I picked up this book and then only put it down when I absolutely had to for a break, and even then it was begrudgingly. This is a unique read that draws you into a time, place, and people and doesn't let you go until the very end. A strong showing for Clifford Browder.Top of Form
Bottom of FormReview #4: Review by Caitlin Lyle FarleyReview Rating: 4 StarsA spate of robberies urges the president of the Bank of Trade to hire private investigator Sheldon Minick, ‘The Eye That Never Sleeps,’ to catch the safe-cracker responsible in Clifford Browder's The Eye That Never Sleeps. Minick finds his first clue while undercover at the annual ‘Thieves’ Ball’ in New York—a newcomer to New York’s criminal underworld called Slick Nick Prime, whose dapper airs, particular hobbies, and habits correlate to the profile of the safe-cracker. As Minick watches Nick through his web of informants, little does he realize that Nick is watching him too. An unlikely camaraderie forms between the two men, and when Nick offers a truce in exchange for the opportunity to introduce Minick to the glitz of the high life, Minick accepts. As these two men explore each other’s sides of the city, will Minick convince Nick to leave his life of crime behind, or will he be corrupted by Nick?

Browder draws an entertaining spectrum of opposite and complementary personality traits in Minick and Nick that makes their unusual and complex relationship entirely plausible. The sense of budding friendship intertwined with the tension of their necessary rivalry is absorbing as Minick and Nick venture into slums and fancy restaurants by turns. While historically accurate, the attitude of the day towards women and people of color on those occasions it enters the narrative might be jarring for today's reader. This includes Minick’s regard of his own wife. The Eye That Never Sleeps provides an intriguing character study as Nick and Minick play a cat and mouse game of unusual proportions, one in which the victor is impossible to guess until the end.Top of Form
Bottom of FormReview #5: Review by Tiffany FerrellReview Rating: 4 StarsMr. Sheldon Minick might not be the most interesting of men but he is one of the best detectives around in Clifford Browder’s The Eye That Never Sleeps. So when a series of serious bank robberies occur, he’s first on the case with theories of his own. Every moral fiber in his body tells him that the culprit is none other than his next-door neighbor Nick Hale. What if he isn’t though? As Minick starts taking an interest in Hale, the same goes the other way. The two begin a bond slash truce in which they show each other different sides of the city. A new lifestyle for each of them. When the bank is robbed for a third time though, something isn’t right. Maybe Hale isn’t the perpetrator of these notorious bank heists after all? From the depths of the poorest places in New York to the ritzy upper-class high life, the two form a friendship of sorts. Is Nick really the bank robber terrorizing the city, or has Sheldon Minick made a mistake? Surely not, but he’s playing a dangerous game all the same.

It’s been a really long time since I read a historical crime mystery that I liked! I’m a huge history lover and of course since the story is set in the Victorian era that only made it more appealing to me personally. Browder really created two characters that you could connect with and like. I actually loved Nick’s character even though most of the time you find yourself hating the obvious enemy or crook. Even in the end I still liked him. The chemistry created between the two main characters who were detective and thief was so well done that it kept me on my toes until the very last sentence. The Eye That Never Sleeps is a great midnight mystery to enjoy and I highly recommend it to all crime and mystery loving fans.

418. What we really do on the Fourth.

BROWDERBOOKS


Silas and me at the Brooklyn Book Festival, 2018.
We'll be there again this year.  Maybe my hair will be combed.
Three bits of news:

1.  I have signed a contract with a self-publishing service to publish my next nonfiction title.  This is a step into the unknown, or at least the unfamiliar.  More of this as things progress.

2.  A self-styled word witch in Arizona will interview me next December.  Having never been to  New York, she asked me for a paragraph about why New York is special.  Here is what I gave her, well aware that New York is not for everyone:


What ties my blog and my nonfiction titles together is my love of New York.  This is a very special place, noisy, congested, and turbulent, but also wonderfully diverse and creative.  We New Yorkers know all the city’s faults, but we love it anyway and couldn’t live anywhere else.  We’re doers, we walk fast, we think fast.  (“The pace of New York!” was the immediate observation of a friend of mine, on her first visit to the city.)  While the rest of the country talks sports, we talk opera, theater, film, dance, and art, and are glad to have more than our share of them.  Going down the street, we sense energy and determination, and are grateful to be living in the most exciting city in the world.  It’s wild, it’s big, it’s crazy, it’s always changing yet always the same, it’s New York.
3.  Readers' Favorite reviews has given The Eye That Never Sleeps two five-star reviews and three four-star reviews.  My publisher is of the opinion that these reviews are of little value, but I disagree.   This brings up the subject of how "pay to play," so reviled in politics, has become the norm in indie publishing, meaning the world of small presses and self-publishing.  I will discuss this matter in a future post.  It's complicated.

For more about my books, go here.


      What did we do on the Fourth?
So what did we do on the Fourth?  The answers are in – about twenty of them, enough to draw some conclusions.  (One person I queried declined to answer, perhaps puzzled by my intentions.)  Nobody entered Nathan's traditional hot-dog-eating contest on Coney Island, and for that I am grateful.  

But few of us were patriotic as Tammany politico G. Washington Plunkitt understood the word, since he mentioned sitting in a hot, humid hall listening to a reading of the Declaration of Independence, followed by four hours of speeches and music, before the champagne- and beer-anointed Tammany celebration could begin in the basement of Tammany Hall.  So here are our ways of doing the Fourth, presented in categories.  Admittedly, these categories are arbitrary, since a given answer may fall into two or three of them.  I’ll use the category that seems most relevant.
TRAVEL
Yes, some of us were traveling on the Fourth, which meant that little by way of celebrating could be done.
·      One friend was waiting with her husband at Calgary International Airport in Alberta, Canada, for a flight to New York, returning from a two-week visit to Japan and her native Taiwan.  She hoped the Fourth at the airport would be quiet.·      Another friend was flying home to New Jersey after visiting his family in their favorite summer vacation spot, Traverse City, Michigan, which was hosting the National Cherry Festival, with cherries all over the place.  At Newark Airport he took a train to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where he and his partner have been living for a month, an hour’s commute from his job in New York.  They then had a grilled dinner on their building’s communal terrace, and from there watched fireworks at night.·      Another friend was with her husband in Paris, with no special plans for the Fourth.  But inspired by me, she decided to read the Declaration.
RURAL  AND  SHORESIDE  DELIGHTS
Some of us were relaxing in the country, happy to be away from the city and its pressures and noise.
·      One friend was with her partner at their country house, hacking at the jungle of weeds in their garden, then taking a quick dip in their pool.  A light lunch, then a nap, then dinner in a nearby restaurant.  No interest in the nonsense being staged in Washington; hopes afternoon rains will descend on the presidential parade.A·      Another friend was staying with friends, “unplugged,” at a lake house that, ironically, belongs to a patrician English family.  Grilled hamburgers and sausages on the Fourth, and discussed but didn’t see fireworks.  Has also discovered an unexpected devotion to kayaking.   
    A friend who lives on Staten Island went to the Fort Wadsworth Overlook and sat in the shade on a lawn chair, gazing out at all of New York harbor, with the city in the distance.  As she did so, she listened to a seaside concert of band music from several decades.·      Another friend who lives on a little island off midcoast Maine announced that she would notbe watching the “despicable man in Washington.”  Pressed further, she confessed to consuming a cold tuna salad and strawberry shortcake, followed which she watched a beautiful sunset and the fireworks of the towns along the coast, their noise sounding like distant thunder.  She also sent photos showing flags and bunting on display at her shop and on the front porch of a nearby guest house, which for me is a reminder of how the Fourth used to be celebrated, and maybe still is, in small towns throughout the country.


[image error] Hitchcock [image error] Hitchcock

FAMILY
Yes, some of us hung out with family, whether a big clan or a small one.
·      One resident of Lincoln, Nebraska, went to a lake outside of town where his grandmother used to live, and visited with nieces and nephews, and lit fireworks by day and by night.  (Fireworks are legal in Nebraska on and around July 4.)  Result: sunburn.·      A resident of Alexandria, Virginia, had a cookout on the Fourth with his partner, parents, siblings, and cousins by the dozens, prior to a big family reunion on July 6, some thirty strong.

NOTHING  MUCH
Some of us did little or nothing related to the Fourth.
·      A friend in Massachusetts said the only Fourth-related thing he and his partner did was to avoid Trump’s “Stalinist parade” on the Mall.  They don’t really observe any holiday.·      A friend in North Carolina made banana nut bread on the Fourth, which he pronounced delicious, but otherwise did little else.·      A resident of south Texas announced that she doesn’t celebrate holidays.·      A friend in Brooklyn Heights went to a friend’s house in New Jersey for a barbecue, but then came back to the Heights and hid in his apartment, as his beloved Brooklyn Heights Promenade got overrun with people wanting to see the Macy’s fireworks.  He felt grumpy like a true New Yorker.·      One friend ignored the holiday completely because his longtime partner had some kind of an attack and is now in the hospital for tests, unable to recognize his partner or remember his name.  Not a stroke or seizure, perhaps an infection.  My heart goes out to them both.

RARE  AND  SPECIAL
Some of us marked the holiday by doing something special and rare.
·      One friend went to a couple of friends’ barbecues, but also donated money to RAICES, a Texas nonprofit, in support of treating immigrants humanely at the border.  She feels queasy about celebrating the nation’s hypocrisies with regard to liberty past and present.·      Another respondent and a friend saw three movies in three different theaters back to back, getting drinks or snacks near the theater entrances in between.·      A cousin in Kokomo, Indiana, said that Kokomo celebrates its automotive heritage just as enthusiastically as it celebrates the nation’s birthday.  The Haynes-Apperson Festival celebrates local pioneers who claim with some credibility to have produced the first U.S. automobile (sorry, Henry Ford).  It fills the town square with booths selling food, and other vendors who rip kids off by luring them into playing silly games, while a nearby park becomes an elaborate carnival with all kinds of rides.  Located a quarter of mile away from the brouhaha, she avoided it at all costs, but took bran muffins to a friend recovering from surgery.  Otherwise, she hid.  But her husband, being a beer distributor, had no time off; his trucks ran all day.·      Another Kokomo resident sat with family under a beach umbrella and did some reading at a nearby quarry that has a beach, and then did a few laps on jet skis, an aquatic motorcycle.

TRADITIONAL
For me, a traditional Fourth involves flags, a parade, and fireworks.  When I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, long ago, one of the family (me, when old enough) got out through a second-floor front window onto a little balcony, and placed an American flag in a holder designed to receive a flag pole.  This done, Old Glory flapped gloriously in the breeze, matching other flags flown by our neighbors.  There was nothing political involved; we just did this to celebrate Memorial Day and Independence Day.  Then there was a long and impressive parade that we watched on Central Street, and a magnificent display of fireworks at Dyke Stadium, the Northwestern University football stadium, that night.  Personal fireworks were still legal, but could not be sold in Evanston.  For them, you had to go north to No Man’s Land, a stretch of lakeside land not incorporated as a part of a town; there, free from local ordinances, fireworks aplenty could be had.  We lit sparklers that traced patterns of sparks when we waved them in the air at night; little sticks called snakes that, when lit, stretched out like tiny black snakes; and Zebra firecrackers, which popped and crackled wickedly.  Somehow we managed not to burn or blow ourselves up, but this was all small-time kid stuff compared to Dyke Stadium at night.  Only one respondent, maybe two, did anything approaching my memory of the Fourths of long ago.
·      On the afternoon of the Fourth, a friend in Lincoln, Nebraska, took her kids to a neighborhood party in a park   There the kids paraded down a sidewalk with decorated bikes and wagons, following which they ran in a sack race and tossed balloons.  In the evening she took them to their grandmother’s place and (quite legally) set off fireworks.·      Another friend, based here in the city, had dinner with friends who live near the East River.  Then they went out to watch the traditional fireworks that were set off down around the Brooklyn Bridge.

         And what did I do?  After reading the Declaration (nine minutes), not much.  I made a note at the time, but I can’t find I, it must be lost into the sands of oblivion.  I cooked in, but I don’t remember what.  And I listened to classical music on WQXR, so I must have had a dose of Bach and Beethoven and Vivaldi, though I can’t be sure.
CONCLUSION

Most of us don’t celebrate the Fourth in the traditional, old-fashioned way.  Does that mean we aren’t patriotic?  I hesitate to say so.  Yes, maybe we take our freedom for granted.  But maybe just doing things that our society allows us to do, whether travel or relaxing in the country or kayaking or jet skiing or seeing movies or just loafing about, is a way of celebrating freedom.  Instead of talking about it, you just do it, you live it.

Coming soon:  Either something that happened 37 years ago, whose full significance I've just come to realize.  Or how "pay to play" has come to dominate indie publishing (and everything else, it would seem).  Or Lady Gaga: She makes Madonna look tame.

©  2019  Clifford Browder

417. Kill

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.

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.

                              Kill


Kill: the word in English, a monosyllable, has a directness to it that no other language I know of can match.  It is blunt, keen, harsh.  Shakespeare is aware of this when, in 
Act 4, Scene 6, he has Lear say
And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law,
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!
         But we also use it more gently.
·      “He made a killing in the market.”·      “We’re just killing time.”·      Fred Trump to his son Donald: “Be a killer.”·      “You kill me.”
In none of these is it a matter of depriving someone or something of life.  What the last one means depends on the context.  It is very twentieth-century, very American; I heard it in the movies.  It means “You’re overdoing it, but I’m not fooled.”
         Have I ever seen a killer?  Yes, but not a human.  At the Aquarium at Coney Island I have seen a shark swimming in a tank.  His supple, streamlined body, his eye, his jaw with jagged, inward-curved teeth – all these features suggest a living machine designed to hunt and kill.  And the more a victim struggles to escape, the more those teeth cut into him, rendering escape impossible.
Vahe Martirosyan         Humans have tried to create machines for killing, so they don’t have the grim responsibility of hacking off a head, or firing a gun, or pulling a lever that sends the doomed man’s body plunging into space.  The electric chair, once so highly esteemed in progress-addicted America, has proven untrustworthy, as evidenced by gasps and twitchings of the victim.  
Man in an electric chair, 1908.
But the French came up with a far more efficient device, evidently invented by a surgeon named Antoine Louis, but promoted by a deputy in the National Assembly, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin.  A child of the Enlightenment, Guillotin was shocked by the thought of the condemned being broken on the wheel, or drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake, or drowned.  He hoped that a more humane method of execution would ultimately lead to abolition of the death penalty.  On October 10, 1789 – three months after the storming of the Bastille – he  addressed the reform-minded Assembly, declaring, “With my machine I take off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.”  He and his machine were mocked at first, but on June 3, 1791, the Assembly made the guillotine the only means of legal criminal execution.  Workers shunned the job of making it, until a German harpsichord maker agreed, on condition of anonymity, to manufacture it.  It was tested on animals and human corpses, perfected, and then busily employed in killing the Revolution’s innumerable victims, the king and queen among them, followed by the fanatical Robespierre.
Showing Louis XVI's head to the crowd.  A German engraving, 1793.
         Legend has it that Dr. Guillotin not only gave his name to the machine, but died by it as well.  No, he died in 1814 of natural causes at age 75.  Embarrassed by their connection to it, his family asked the government to change the machine’s name, and when the government refused, they changed their name instead.  But the guillotine was the standard form of execution in France until the death penalty was abolished in 1981.  And Hitler loved it; during his rule, thousands died by it.
         If the guillotine is so painless and efficient, why hasn’t it been adopted here?  Because, I think, it’s messy.  Heads roll, blood flows, the body is mutilated.  With hanging, at least the corpse is intact.  We like neat, bloodless executions, even if the victim gasps and twitches.  A nasty business, no matter how you look at it. 
         Dr. Guillotin wanted executions to be private, but the Revolution made them public, so the populace could cheer when the executioner showed them the severed head of the king or some other victim of significance.  The tricoteuses of the executions, those fiercely knitting Madame Defarges, have themselves become legendary.
         There is, buried deep in many of us, a delight in watching others being put to death.  Throughout history governments have turned executions into public events, ostensibly to show that crime doesn’t pay, to display the fate of its challengers, those who presume to threaten its security or that of society.  In Tudor England executions were well-attended public events, and victims pronounced what they hoped would prove to be memorable utterances.  Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, facing execution for adultery, is said to have humiliated Henry by proclaiming, “I had rather be the wife of Culpeper than queen of England!”  Memorable indeed, though not supported by any eyewitness account.  More likely, knowing her last words would be reported to the king, she asked for forgiveness, hoping to protect her family.  She was only 18.
         In this country executions were also often public.  As for lynchings, by their very nature they were public events, and even celebrations.  Postcards often showed the dangling hanged bodies of the victims, usually  black males, with a host of smiling white witnesses, including even women and children.  One wonders at the state of mind not only of those posing proudly near the dangling bodies, but also of those who sent the postcards by mail.  Who did they send them to, and with what scribbled message?  One appears online, on a postcard from Waco, Texas, dated 1916: “This is the barbecue we had last night.  My picture is to the left with a cross over it.  Your son, Joe.”
         The postcards were also kept as souvenirs and in time became collectors’ items.  It is worth noting that the Nazis never stooped to selling souvenirs of the death camps.  In the U.S., by 1908 the postcards had become so common, and to many so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned them from the mails.  After that they continued to be sold in antique stores whose proprietors whispered to prospective buyers that they were available, though not on display.  These souvenirs so offend me that I cannot reproduce them here.  Nor would they be appreciated today by the residents of the communities involved, which were by no means all in the South.  These celebratory killings occurred also in Cairo, Illinois (1909), Anadarko, Oklahoma (1913), Duluth, Minnesota (1920), and Marion, Indiana, 1930.  They are accessible online at Wikimedia Commons, for those who want to see them.  I have seen them and received their message, and that is quite enough.
         I have told elsewhere, and more than once, how my father was a hunter and fisherman, and raised his two sons to be the same.  With me, it didn’t take.  Though he taught me to use a shotgun at age 16, I had no desire to kill the blackbirds that he hoped would appear overhead in autumn fields where we patiently waited, or the occasional rabbit that scurried away from us.  And I hated the pain in my shoulder from the recoil of the shotgun, when fired.  Though in his will he left his guns to his sons, we were quite happy to sell them.  Sad.  In this regard (and others), we were not the sons he had wanted.  The guns involved, by the way, were shotguns used for trap shooting and hunting.  He had no interest in handguns, much less automatic weapons (unheard of in his time), and would be dismayed by their availability today.
The legendary Annie Oakley shooting a shotgun before spectators
in Pinehurst, NC, date unknown.  What she's shooting at isn't clear.  
       So I am not a killer?  Wrong.  Under certain circumstances I can kill with gusto.  But only the roaches that infest my apartment, in an old building whose cracks and crevices – too many to ever be filled – provide them with nesting spaces where they can rest up by day and prepare for their nocturnal forays.  When, heeding the bladder imperative, I go to the bathroom at night, I surprise gangs of them in the wash basin and tub and either chase them into a waiting glue trap, or – BAM BAM BAM – pound them with the smooth cap top of an empty medicine bottle.  Many escape, but not all.  Still, I am not an indiscriminate killer.  Roaches, yes; spiders, no.  Spiders I always spare, though I may relocate them to a green plant or release them to the world outside.  Any bug that kills flies and mosquitos is a friend of mine.
My enemy.
Robert Webster
My friend.
L. Shyamal         When to kill and when not to is a problem besetting us all.  It comes up repeatedly in regard to abortion and the death penalty.  Both involve human life, and for this reason both of these issues perplex me.  All my friends here in New York support freedom of choice, meaning they support a woman’s right to have an abortion.  When women say that men should not tell them what to do with their bodies, I listen and agree.  But when the pro-life camp declare that life begins at the moment of conception, I also agree, and cannot easily dismiss their emphasis that human life is sacred, and not to be taken lightly.  Which puts me in a bind
Anti-abortion protest, San Francisco, 1986.
Nancy Wong
        Similarly, I am troubled by the taking of life by the state through the death penalty.  If life in an unborn child is sacred, why not in a convicted criminal as well, no matter how heinous the crime?  And the all-too-frequent miscarriage of justice – the absence of DNA testing, the evidence never presented at trial, the subsequent recanting of witnesses – make the death penalty all the more questionable.  Yet the pro-life people tend to support it, and the pro-choice people tend to oppose it.  And I’m caught in the middle, open to the arguments on both sides.
Anti-death penalty protest at the Governor's Mansion, Austin, Texas, 2005.
Texas Moratorium Network
         And the debate rages on.  In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times of June 23, a whole series of letters to the editor, responding to an article against the death penalty, present the pros and cons.  A New York resident tells of serving on a jury for a murder case where there was no doubt that the accused did slit the throat of an elderly woman and let her bleed to death in front of her lifelong partner.  Would the writer have voted for the death penalty, had it not been abolished in New York?  Absolutely.  But a pro-life practicing Catholic in Florida opposes it, convinced that it is neither a deterrent nor less costly than life imprisonment.  And the others support either the one view or the other, citing cogent reasons for their stance.  And there I am again, right in the middle, sympathetic to arguments both pro and con.  What I don’t understand is how, when human life is involved, people can make up their mind quickly and emphatically, without hesitation.  I’m  wishy-washy, if you like, but keenly aware of the complexities involved.  Regarding both abortion and the death penalty, the two sides have a point to make, and they make it with conviction.
         Here’s a positive note to end on.  From time to time I have what I call a kill day.  No, I don’t go out on the street and start shooting; that’s not my style.  A kill day is when I leave to one side my usual practices and devote myself to tasks that may seem negative and destructive, but are necessary and, in their way, positive.  I may make a long-delayed decision that involves canceling some commitment – maybe a donation to a nonprofit that no longer makes sense to me, or attending some worthy but irrelevant affair.  Above all, I throw things out.  I go to my desk, look for clutter.  A file with clippings for a blog post I’ve decided not to write?  Out.  A record of requests for reviews from reviewers who said they would, but didn’t?  Out.  A file of items pertaining to BookCon, the two-day book fair at the Javits Center, that I’ve decided not to do again?  Out.  A big cardboard folder that I thought I might use, but haven’t?  Out.  You get the idea.  Far from being savagely destructive, kill days can be a time for cleaning and clarifying, for de-cluttering your apartment and your mind, for achieving focus.  We all should have one from time to time.  They simplify, they cleanse.

Coming soon:  The Fourth: how we really celebrate it.  And then: AIDS.
©   2019   Clifford Browder

416. Descent into Darkness: Revelations, Fecundity, and Death

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.

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.


Small Talk


While walking along University Place the other day, I was slow in getting across the street, causing a yellow cab to blast its horn at me as I reached the curb just as the light changed.  This did not endear me to yellow cabs.
One block later the light changed and I waited as traffic began to flow.  But a young woman of about 18 or 20 resolutely started across the street, even though the light was against her.  Another yellow cab blasted its horn at her.  She stopped in the middle of the street and turned to face the cab, forcing it to stop.  She then gave the driver the finger and, having made her point, continued blithely across the street, finally allowing the cab to proceed.  
Moral: If two feisty New Yorkers collide, it's the one with the most chutzpah that wins. If anyone can be said to win.



Descent into Darkness
Revelations, Fecundity, and Death

This will be a strange kind of post, because I know where it begins, but I don’t know where or how it will end.  It will be a mix of myth and memoir and I don’t know what else.  So if you have a moment and are curious, come along on my journey, a descent into the depths of darkness.  Let’s see what we find down there.
How it began: the Underland
         In the New York TimesBook Review section of the Sunday Timesof June 16, 2019, there is a review entitled “What Lies Beneath” by Terry Tempest Williams.  The book reviewed is Underland: A Deep Time Journey by the British author Robert Macfarlane.  Above the review is a large illustration by the distinguished artist Armando Veve that demands our attention.  Veve’s work is subtle and intricate; the more I look at it, the more I see.  That his name appears only in the smallest print is shameful.
         At the top is the above-ground world we know, with a spade and a pile of dirt (someone has been digging), a butterfly and a plant, and a dog sniffing the ground.  Just below is a tunnel leading to three cartoon-like mice, two playing instruments and one singing.  We also see a rabbit snug in its burrow, an onion or turnip growing underground, and a bunch of mushrooms pushing their roots deep.  Just below that is a ribbed monster – dead? alive? – its open mouth with sharklike jagged teeth, and some birds flying toward it.  Under that is a man in goggles creeping along a tunnel whose wall is lined with stacks of skulls and bones.  The man’s helmet has a light flashing ahead of him to reveal a small insect or spider.  Beyond that is what the man is probably looking for: a cave wall with stick-like human figures in a boat, and an animal they may be hunting, suggesting the art of prehistoric humans.  Beyond that is a manmade tunnel leading into a dark interior, and a window, embraced by creeping roots, showing a modern room with a computer screen, wires, and dashboards on a counter.  And below all that, at the very lowest level, is a pipe with twists and turns whose mouth oozes a yellowish fluid.  Crouching next to the pipe  are three demonic creatures, one with clutching clawlike hands seizing severed human heads impaled on spikes, as all three devour with gusto a heap of tiny naked humans.
         Confused?  So am I.  But I’m also fascinated.  Armando Veve’s fantastic illustration suggests biological growth and fertility, prehistoric monsters, a cave explorer, the latest tech, and infernal demons committing some kind of monstrous human sacrifice.  A world of underground darkness, but what does it mean?
         Maybe Ms. Williams’s review will help.  Macfarlane’s Underland, she says, is an epic exploration and examination of darkness and underground caverns.  The author takes us to ancient barrows in Britain’s hills, the understory of a forest, a physics lab investigating “dark matter” from a mine, underground rivers in Italy, and pictographs found in Norwegian sea caves.  Darkness, Macfarlane suggests, may bring revelation.  He is concerned about the loss of biodiversity, the cost of development on a plundered planet.  He follows a guide into the catacombs of Paris, sees hundreds of skulls once evacuated from the city’s cemeteries, and even spends several night in this lightless, hidden world.  How, he asks, can we communicate to future generations the dangers of the world we today are creating?  “Are we being good ancestors?”
         Which clarifies a little, but only a little, the illustration’s myriad allusions.  And with this inspiration from a review and illustration of a book I haven’t even read – and am almost afraid to read – I commence my own personal journey down into depths of darkness.
Descent into Darkness: Revelations
         I have never had a thing for caves and catacombs and underground exploration.  Mammoth Cave in Kentucky never tempted me.  Yet when I walk the streets of Greenwich Village, on the sidewalk I see steps leading steeply downward into darkness, and am fascinated by the thought of what may be down there.  Darkness breeds mystery.  I know, of course, that in basements one finds boiler rooms, meters, furnaces, and storage space for stores.  But the darkness still piques my curiosity, though never to the point of tempting me to go down there.  In fact, those steep descending stairs rather frighten me; the thought of suddenly losing my balance and plunging headlong is almost terrifying.   Dark basements – not to mention caves and catacombs -- are not for me.


Mammoth Cave
        With one exception long ago in my childhood, when a dark basement enticed me and brought me revelations.  This was in the house I grew up in, in Evanston, Illinois.  On rainy afternoons when I had the house to myself, I explored the basement.  I knew that I could reach it going down exactly twelve steps, just as I knew that sixteen steps would take me up from our living room to the second floor.  And at the foot of the basement stairs were two closets that I explored many times.  The first closet was well lit by an overhead light, and its shelves were jammed.  There were Christmas decorations put away for another year, an old Philco radio, one of my mother’s hats in a hatbox, a fan, old shoes, and a box labeled “Mother’s hair” that did indeed contain her shorn locks, retained I don’t know why.  But the great find was my parents’ love letters, my mother’s calm and reasonable, my father’s crackling with humor and wit.  Above all I found a letter of hers listing thirteen numbered reasons why their marrying might not be a good thing.  It was the calm appraisal of a woman not deeply in love, but tempted by the belated courtship of a man whose temperament and habits might be incompatible with her own.
         All this came to mind when my parents erupted into verbally ferocious quarrels.  To my father’s taunting accusation that she had dominated her childhood and adolescent friends, my mother replied defiantly, “I had spunk!”  And when, on another occasion, he reproached her bitterly for “the letter with the thirteen points,” I got the allusion at once.  Some years later, when I was home from college for Christmas, I found my father drugged with some new medication that made him talkative and reminiscent.  When I was alone with him in the living room, he told me, “A woman doesn’t fall in love the way a man does.”  Meeting her when he was in his forties and seemingly satisfied with a carefree bachelorhood, he had fallen head over heels in love with her, courted her devotedly, and when she was out of town, wrote her letters that sparkled with wit.  The letter of the thirteen points had shocked and dismayed him.  Though no mama’s boy, he had always been close to his mother, to whom he showed the letter.  “I can’t believe Mabel really means this,” she reassured him, and he continued the courtship and won her over; the result was my brother and myself.  My parents were close in some ways, and far apart in others; not a perfect match, somehow it endured.  Did my father remember that he had once, under medication, told me these things?  I doubt it; he never mentioned them again.
         And the other basement closet?  Deeper in the basement, it had no overhead light and no shelves, was simply a big space plunged in darkness.  With a flashlight I discovered there my mother’s musty old steamer trunk that had accompanied her to Europe in 1919, and another empty old trunk.  And in the shadows behind them, a deflated football that I had flung there once, after an officious uncle, thinking my brother and me unathletic and risking sissyhood, had given my father, to assist in our manly development.  Burdened with glasses as I was, and hating sports as I did, I had consigned it to oblivion, and there I delightedly left it.  So much for my childhood explorations of our basement’s dark depths.
         Look how far from Robert Macfarlane’s fascinating book we have come.  But my digression stems from his discovery that darkness can bring revelations.  In my basement explorations I learned things that my parents never knew I had discovered, things too private and too painful for them to have ever, under normal circumstances, revealed to me.  I have kept them secret to this day.
Fecundity                  I have said that I was never one to explore caves and catacombs, but when visiting Gothic  cathedrals in Europe, I was fascinated by crypts, the deepest part of the church, and the oldest.  (The Greek adjective kryptos  means “hidden.”)  Not quite a cave, perhaps, but a cool, dark, secret place dating back to the present church’s predecessors, and often containing a tomb.  

         No less than five churches were built on the same site as the magnificent Gothic cathedral of Chartres, most of the earlier ones destroyed by fire.  When, long ago, I visited the cathedral to stare in awe at its stained-glass windows, I also descended to the crypt.  In that deep, dark space I found a Christian bas relief, the subject of which I don’t recall, and also, I believe, some Romanesque frescoes, but little else.  There is also a deep ancient well, though back then it may not have been accessible to visitors.  The oldest part of the crypt dates from the ninth century, but long before the Christians came, the Druids considered the site and the well sacred.  Pagan worship on the spot of a Celtic mother goddess may have inspired the Christians to dedicate a church there to the Virgin Mary.


The well in the Chartres cathedral crypt.
Guillaume Piolle
         So there she is, worshiped in a dark, secret place: the Virgin Mary, preceded by a Celtic mother goddess, the two of them evoking in my mind the ancient, cosmic, and inescapable Wonder Woman, Eve the temptress and slut who has not three faces but ten or twenty or a thousand: the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, with her skirt of snakes and necklace of severed human heads, who both regenerates life and consumes it, and the Virgin of Guadalupe; Gypsy Mystical Rose Lee and a host of other Queens of Quiver titillating throngs of lustful males; the well-named Mother Monster, Lady Gaga minus her raw-beef garb, plastic bubbles, and tattoos (or maybe with them); the strutting and palpitant Madonna (yes, that Madonna) whom multitudes of gay boys flock to, exalt, and revere; the Bitch of Chaos, out of whose messy flux of matter (materia, mater, mother) the Creator (more of Him another time) fashioned this baffling but fascinating heap of atoms in which we find ourselves immersed.  She is Earth itself, that pulsing dark matter of the universe, that mix of bones and seeds, skulls and spore, whose muggy late-summer growth of wormwood and mugwort and sneeze-provoking ragweed threatens to overtop and hug and smother us, until we're rescued by the merciful decay of autumn and the chill of winter.  They, thank God, beat back her hot intensity into a sullen and resentful sleep, months of it, broken at last by the stark brash brat of spring leaping naked from her groin to flaunt his genitals and startle and renew us, creating new pain, new life, new miracles, and new religions to redeem us and inspire.
         Whew!  I didn’t really see that coming.  Rehearsed?  Not at all.  Subsequently, a little light editing to eliminate a repetition, insert a comma, or change a word or two, but otherwise untouched.  It spewed out of my head between 5:10 and 5:25 a.m. on June 20, 2019, the last day of spring.  I warned you that I didn’t know where this post might go.  I still don’t.


 Eve tempting Adam with the apple.  
After Albrecht Dürer, early 17th century.

Coatlicue, the monster-headed Big Mama of the Aztecs.
etnoboris

Lily St-Cyr, circa 1946.

Earth Goddess, plant sculpture by Eric Yarnell
in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, 2014.
Eric Yarnell
Death
         Yes, crypts were used, among other things, for burials.  And the dark lower regions have always been associated with death, while the upper ones offer light and life.  In Greek mythology the poet and musician Orpheus sings his grief for his deceased wife Eurydice so poignantly that it moves Hades, lord of the underworld, to give her back to him on one condition: when he leads her out of the land of the dead, he must not look at her.  Only when they reach the upper world of the living, does he look back at her, but she still has one foot in the realm of the dead and so is lost to him forever.  For me, one of Greek myth's most poignant stories: to almost, but not quite, cheat death.


Orpheus and Eurydice, by the English artist Frederic Leighton, 1914.
         Hades was also a place of punishment and horror: Sisyphus repeatedly rolls his rock up the hill, only to see it roll back down again, and Tantalus, ever hungry, tries to reach fruit on a branch that always recoils from his grasp.  The Christians would double up on this, hurling unrepentant sinners into fire and brimstone and demonic torture in the depths of hell.


Hell, a mosaic by Coppo di Marcovaldo, circa 1301, in the Florence baptistery.
Resembles the monstrous trio of human-devouring demons in Veve's illustration.
         Are the tombs of the dead to be violated?  Today we assuredly say no, but artifacts from ancient tombs have a way of ending up in modern museums, their provenance doubtful, or in the elegant homes of the wealthy, no questions asked.  When I was growing up I heard of the discovery, in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, of the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun, dubbed King Tut in the press, and of a curse put upon anyone who should disturb a pharaoh’s tomb.  Disturbed it was, in 1922, by a team of British archaeologists who marveled at its contents and shipped them off to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.  A few years later, it was said, all those archaeologists were dead. 


Opening the inmost shrine of King Tut's tomb, 1922.
         The story of the curse is dubious, but its popularity reflects our lingering discomfort at the thought of a tomb being ransacked.  Hart Island, at the western end of Long Island Sound in the Bronx, is where New York City’s anonymous unclaimed bodies, identified only by a number, are buried in stacks of plain pine coffins by inmates from Riker’s Island.  Yet even there, in this mass cemetery on a remote island closed to the public, the inmates have been known to caution one another: “Respect, guys, show respect.”  As well they might.  In former times the dead were thought to hover about, especially on All Hallows Eve (Halloween), causing trouble if disrespected.  

          In 2012 the Field Museum in Chicago offered a new show of its Egyptian mummies with CT scans penetrating the sarcophagi to reveal the most intimate details: genitals, decayed teeth, missing limbs.  “You’ve never seen mummies like this!” the museum declared; visitors flocked.  Among the mostly positive comments of the public on websites advertising the show, one stood out: “Bury the dead, you sick people!”  Rare is the mystery of darkness that modern technology fears to penetrate.  Even the dead aren’t safe.

         Such are my thoughts on descent into darkness, revelations, fecundity, and death.  Much, though by no means all, of what is shown in Veve’s illustration for Macfarlane’s Underland has been touched on.  If you have the Times Book Section for June 16, have a look at the illustration and see what I have missed.  But a glance won’t do; take time.  And if you’ve ever descended into darkness and had adventures there, be sure to let me know, especially if they involve a womb/tomb room.


Mystery of darkness: a sky photographed by Philippe Alès, 2014.
Philippe Alès
 Coming soon: Kill.



©  2019  Clifford Browder

415A. Have we betrayed the Fourth?

     It's Independence Day, the Fourth of July.  And hot.  Just as it was hot when the Founding Fathers got together in Philadelphia in July 1776 to write their famous Declaration.  So how have I begun this holiday?  By reading their Declaration.  It took all of nine minutes (I timed myself).  I'm not boasting about it, because until a few years ago I did anything except read it or otherwise honor it on the Fourth.  Its lucid prose reads beautifully, though one short section is an embarrassment, mentioning King George's inciting "domestic insurrections amongst us" (presumably slave rebellions) and attacks on the frontiers by "merciless Indian Savages" -- two matters we'd rather not be reminded of.  Even so, a remarkable document.  But in it, as in our Constitution, the word "Democracy" does not appear once.  The Founders were founding a republic, a government by the consent of the governed, without a monarch or hereditary nobility, but not a democracy.  For them, democracy meant mob rule, and that they didn't want.  Thirteen years later the French Revolution, with mobs parading severed heads of victims in the streets, would confirm many of them in this opinion.



     So what are my plans for today?  Having read the Declaration, I have no other plans.  It's hot, so I'll stay in and hug my fan.  (Only the living room has A/C, and I'm rarely in there, except when I have guests.)  I'll continue reading about how to use social media, and continue to wonder what happened to my gift to the Arbor Day Foundation in Nebraska, which encourages us all to plant trees. (The gift, conveyed electronically over a month ago, disappeared in transit and hasn't been seen since.  Ah, the wonders of technology!)

    So here's a question I'm putting to all my friends: What are you doing on the Fourth?  I know you're busy, so just answer in a sentence or two, but be honest.  My own plans are hardly grandiose.  I want to see what Americans really do on this hot, hot holiday.  The more answers I get, the more valid my conclusions, which I will then publish.

Here's how the National Archives in Washington does it.
     George Washington Plunkitt, a New York City politico of the late nineteenth century, told how five thousand Tammany men assembled every year in Tammany Hall on July 4 to hear the reading of the complete Declaration, followed by patriotic speeches and a glee club.  They sat in that packed hall for four hours, sweating (no air-conditioning back then), aware of 100 cases of champagne and 200 kegs of beer awaiting them in the basement, once the speeches were concluded, but listened intently.  And when  the Declaration was read, they erupted in an explosion of hurrahs. Tammany was as corrupt a system as ever existed, but its stalwarts were, in the traditional sense, true patriots who believed in the United States of America.  And what did the reformers do on the Fourth? According to Plunkitt, they ran off to Newport or the Adirondacks.

Fireworks in Washington.  This is how we celebrated it
when I was growing up in Illinois.
Is it okay to make money off of it?
     Have we betrayed the Fourth?  Are we no better than the reformers Plunkitt so scorned and detested?  Or is there more than one way to mindfully celebrate it?  Let's find out.  Tell me what you're doing this Fourth.  I won't use your name, but what you say will tell me a lot.

Coming soon: Descent into Darkness.  Then: Kill.

©  2019  Clifford Browder

415. World Pride Day: Hope or Hype?

Bad news:  I'm fed up with Instagram.  It deliberately won't let you publish posts from a desktop computer, only from a smart phone.  I don't plan to get a smart phone.  If I can't publish posts, I don't need Instagram.  I've disabled my account. Tootsie, good-bye.


      World Pride Day: Hope or Hype?

         Yes, today is World Pride Day, with thousands of visitors expected in the city, and I ask myself, is this hope or hype?  A bit of both, I think.  Let’s consider.
         The brouhaha has been brewing for a week.  Last Wednesday, while walking down Christopher Street to a podiatrist appointment, I passed the storied Stonewall Inn, and in front of it were visitors taking photos of each other with the Stonewall as the backdrop.  The whole West Village has sprouted rainbow flags; hardly a shop or store or restaurant fails to have at least a bit of rainbow posted in its windows, and police barricades line Bleecker Street under my window, even though the parade will start uptown in the 20s, come down to the Stonewall, and then make a U-turn and go back uptown to dusband.  Just a block from my building, the Philip Marie restaurant, where I often lunch, has a whole bunch of flags out in front, while across from it the legendary White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas quite literally drank himself to death, shows not a patch of rainbow.
         Is this an oversight or intentional?  My deceased partner Bob told me long ago how he and his good friend Rose, a Brooklyn-based lesbian, once went there.  The moment they set foot inside, they felt a palpable chill: gays were not welcome.  So Bob and Rose left, and Bob never set foot there again.  Nor have I, though things may well have changed.  But the lack of a shred of rainbow is curious; today, to display rainbow flags or bunting during Gay Pride Week is just good business.  If all goes as in the past, even though this year the parade won’t come down here, later today all the restaurants in the area will do a roaring business.  And yesterday, in the sidewalk dining area of one restaurant on Hudson Street, I saw two brawny guys at a table, both stripped to the waist.  Granted, it was hot (and will be again today), but I sensed in it a touch of gay presumption and, to be honest, I didn’t like it.  Liberation can be messy.
         Gay presumption?  Yes, Gay Lib, while it meant freedom, also involved a bit of presumption.  I remember reading, probably in The Village Voice, of “liberated” gay men strolling the Village streets and leering without shame at the young sons of families  walking by.  This disgusted me.  But for the fast-track gay crowd, gay lib meant more than this.  It meant wild partying with lots of drugs and liquor, multiple sex partners, plenty of action and not much sleep.  But Nature – whatever that is – has its ways.  The result: AIDS. 
         Which is not to deny the positive side of Liberation.  The veterans of the Stonewall riots of fifty years ago, when drag queens bared their claws and took on the police, are coming forth once again to tell their story, as in a whole special section of the Times of last Sunday (I haven’t seen today’s paper yet) that I intend to read, or at least scan.  (It takes me at least a week to read, even selectively, the Sunday New York Times.)  Usually the tone of these reminiscences is heroic and uplifting.  But let’s have a look at the account of another veteran of those days, my partner Bob, who left an archive of gay history, including journals from the mid-1950s on, of which I have scanned 21 to date, with several more to go.
         So what does Bob say of the Stonewall riots of June 1969?  Not a word.  Not out of indifference, but because he wasn’t yet in the habit of recording his daily thoughts and experiences.  After a high school journal of the 1950s, he doesn’t record much until March of 1977, and even then the entries are spotty, with only random entries.  But I can safely say that for him and me and our friends, all over 30, the Stonewall riots were a distant and puzzling event.  Fight the police?  Are those kids crazy?  Only with time did we come to grasp their significance, and the fact that Gay Lib was here to stay.  Then some still held aloof, but many of us joined the parade.  (Me, literally, in 1994.)  We had to, for we remembered only too well what it had been like before.  To get the flavor of those days, and how it was even long after the riots, let’s have a look at Bob’s journal.
July 29, 1977.  With my parents last night.  Strangely, against my will, I reacted to the subterfuge of my life.  They don’t know all of me, and sometimes this concerns me, affects my mood.  My veneer was, as usual, perfect (so I think), but the effort to maintain a composure takes its toll, as it did last night.
October 29, 1987.  AIDS continues and casts an awful sadness on gay life and, for me, the Village.  This is a different West Village from 10 years ago.  As I write this, the fact is that there isn’t a glimmer of a REASON for the horrible disease.  It remains an awesome mystery.  Cliff and I stand apart from ever acquiring the disease, insofar as we’ve remained monogamous throughout our relationship.
June 23, 1989.  Sunday is Gay Liberation Day and commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.  Oh, how I’ve aged.  [He was now 49.]  I see myself surveying the Stonewall Bar in the days following the event -- there were strands of lights outlining the sign over the entrance – there was an excitement on Christopher Street as tangible as a heady wine.
September 27, 1990.  [After being moralized by an old friend turned Christian fundamentalist.]  I will not be viewed as a degenerate.  I have an excellent realization of my worth as a person.  I do not want to know anyone who cannot accept my gay nature.  I’m proud of all that I am, and that “all” includes much that is intelligent, sensitive, and kind.
February 19, 1992.  Dr. Fox [his doctor] expressed his anguish over the impending death of his friend.  AIDS.  A horrifying, wracking end period in cruel progress.  I held him and expressed my deepest concern.  Incredibly sad.       
September 8, 1992.  [Following a Newsweek cover story, “Gays Under Fire,” inspired by anti-gay statements at the Republican presidential convention.]  The gay community is now a known factor, it isn’t going to disappear, it is substantially large (larger than I ever realized, say, 30 years ago), and it is politically, legally, artistically active.  It blazes across the landscape, becoming more and more vivid.
August 10, 1993.  Sadism.  There has come to light recently a possible case of serial murders of gay men, middle-aged, over the last two years, where the unfortunate victims were brutally dismembered, with body parts stuffed into plastic bags.  Most of the murdered were last seen in gay bars both in the Village (the Five Oaks) and mid-town.  Frightening.
         So much for now.  The testimony of a sensitive and observant gay man, usually scribbled in a favorite Chinese restaurant, while sipping wine, a Manhattan, or a cognac on the house.  His entries give a flavor of how it was like back then, the ups and downs, the pride and the fear.

Coming soon: Descent into Darkness: Revelations, Fecundity, and Death.

©  2019  Clifford Browder

414. Donald Trump Soaked in Sweat and Other Tales of the Plaza

BROWDERBOOKS

Good News:

#1.  I'm on Instagram!  Just one photo now, but more to come.  Go here. 

#2.  Fascinating New Yorkers, my latest work of nonfiction, has been announced as an award-winning finalist in the Biography category of the 2019 International Book Awards.

 

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.  
This is the fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. Three more, and then the big one; stick around.
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.



    DONALD TRUMP SOAKED IN SWEAT 
     AND OTHER TALES OF THE PLAZA

         There are three sections of the Sunday Times that I almost never read: Sports, Styles, and Real Estate.  Imagine my surprise, then, when on the first page of the Real Estate section of June 9, 2019, I saw an article by Julie Satow that I absolutely had to read.  Topped by a large photo of a massive French Renaissance-style building of circa 1907, it bore the title, “The Widows of the Plaza,” and the subtitle “Forget Eloise.  Wealthy dowagers once held court at the luxury hotel.”  In a chapter entitled “Legendary Hotels” in my unpublished but (I hope) ultimately forthcoming work of nonfiction, New Yorkers: The Feisty People of a City Where Anything Goes, there is a chapter, “Legendary Hotels,” that includes a brief account of the Plaza, a soaring mass of a hotel at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, just across from the southeastern corner of Central Park.  There I mention its celebrity guests over the years, and its famous Oak Room, closed in 2011 because of champagne- and drug-ridden orgies by Lady Gaga and her rowdy pals.  There too, and elsewhere in the book, I mention the reservation of a room in 1964 for “four English gentlemen” who turned out to be the Beatles on their first American tour.  The attempts of female fans to access the Fab Five, including two who mailed themselves in cartons to the hotel, caused the management to vow never again to house these superstars, a privilege that they gladly ceded to less legendary and more riot-tolerant hostelries.  For the Plaza, in its heyday, was quiet, elegant, and sedate, the perfect home for the multitude of dowagers chronicled in the Times article.


         The Plaza’s most famous resident never set foot there, for she was a fictional creation.  I mean, of course, Eloise, the precocious and mischievous six-year-old featured in Kay Thompson’s series of children’s books published in the 1950s and illustrated by Hilary Knight.  Eloise endeared herself to readers and later appeared in a film.  But even Eloise cannot top the real-life wealthy women who, right from its opening in 1907, resided and reigned royally amid the late Victorian splendor and sedate elegance of the hotel.  Julie Satow’s article brings them memorably to life.
         When Princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy moved into the hotel’s largest suite in 1909, 90 percent of the hotel’s guests lived there full-time.  The Princess, who liked to be addressed as “Your Highness,” arrived with three French maids, three attachés, a marshal, a courier, a butler, a chef, a bodyguard sporting a tall plumed hat and a sword, a dog, two guinea pigs, an ibis, a falcon, several owls, and a family of alligators.  Divorced twice, she had obtained her title from her second husband, a minor Russian prince.  Photos show an attractive woman with a mass of dark hair topped by a bun.
Self-portrait of Princess Vilma.
         An artist as well as a princess, she advertised her portraiture services and soon recruited as a client Major General Daniel E. Sickles, who was 92 and minus a leg lost at Gettysburg.  When the two attended a Ringling Brothers circus at Madison Square Garden, she found a baby lion there so adorable that the obliging general bought it for her.  Named for him, the lion was lodged in the bathtub of her suite, which must have made Her Highness’s bathing awkward.  In time the lion outgrew the tub and the management’s patience, so the Princess donated General Sickles (the lion, not the general) to the Bronx Zoo.
         The source of the Princess’s wealth remained a mystery, but when World War I broke out, her wealth vanished.  Bedeviled by creditors, she decamped, leaving behind an unpaid hotel bill for $12,000.  In 1923 she died in a cramped room on East 39th Street, surrounded by unsold artwork and one maid, and still bedeviled by creditors.  Wikipedia, that revered source of online facts and trivia, adds that she was Hungarian-born, did (perhaps) a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II and one of Admiral Dewey, lived in Berlin and Nice before coming here, and had a lifetime allowance from her second husband, the Prince.  And she is still with us, buried among notables in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
         You think Princess Vilma was the most eccentric of the dowagers residing at the Plaza?  Not necessarily, for she had plenty of competition.  How about the recluse who hadn’t left her room in years, but called for her chauffeur and car every day at 10 a.m.  Or the fastidious old woman who spent her days patrolling the hotel’s perimeter, clearing the sidewalks of cigarette butts by stabbing them with her umbrella.  And then, there’s Clara Bell Walsh.
         Clara Bell Walsh arrived at the Plaza in 1907, the year it opened, and exited horizontally a half century later.  The daughter of wealthy Kentucky family, she was a skilled horsewoman and hostess, credited with holding the first society cocktail party.  She held forth in her suite wrapped in ermine, her nails matching the color of her dress.  Her celebrity guests sat on brocade Edwardian sofas among tables laden with Chinese lamps, costly thingamabobs, and tiny animal figurines.  One of her soirées had the female guests dressed as poor little rich girls, and the men in little boys’ sailor suits. This aging kindergarten crowd had to run an obstacle course to get to the bar, where drinks were served in baby bottles.  The world-famous party-giver Elsa Maxwell urged party hosts to do the unexpected, the weird; Mme Walsh had no need of Elsa’s advice, for she got there by herself.  No hearth-clinging homebody, she was often seen in the Persian Room, the hotel’s nightclub, and sortied to dinner parties with fake eyes painted on her eyelids.  And to have her hair done, she patronized the men’s barbershop in the Plaza’s lobby.
The Oak Room
Jazz Guy
         The most cantankerous of the Plaza widows was Fannie Lowenstein, a latecomer who arrived at the Plaza in 1958.  A young divorcée, she promptly married a fellow resident who had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and who lodged her in one of the few rent-controlled apartments at the Plaza.  When her husband died, she continued to live in splendor in their three-room suite, paying $800 a month for what might have rented for $1,250 a night – an arrangement that the city’s real estate industry decries to this day.  Since she couldn’t be evicted, the Plaza staff treated her with deference, fearful of provoking a tantrum.  When she came down for dinner in the evening, the musicians would serenade her with the theme song from the Broadway musical “Fanny.”  But one Sunday, when she came to the Palm Court for brunch and was piqued by some perceived slight by management, she is said to have relieved herself – urinated, I assume – on the rug in front of a shocked crowd. 
The Plaza in 1923.
         When Donald Trump bought the Plaza in 1988, la Lowenstein was one of the few widows still living there.  She was soon complaining of “indoor air pollution” in her suite, insisting that it caused her curtains to shrink and her Steinway grand piano to get moldy.  She called the city repeatedly to complain, and soon inspectors were bombarding management with urgent notices.  Though Trump was then divorcing his first wife, Ivana, amid rumors that he was having an affair with Marla Maples, his future second wife, he told The National Enquirer that his relationships with them were “smooth as silk in comparison to my contacts with Fannie Lowenstein.  When she’s done with me, I’m soaked in sweat!”
         Though always subject to caution, online sources add a few deft touches.  A little old woman of eighty, she walked around as if she owned the place.  The staff were terrified of her, called her “the Eloise from hell.”  Failing health finally dislodged her; she moved to the Park Lane and died there, age 85, in 1995.
                  Surrounded by their dogs, diamonds, and nurses, the dowagers lived extravagantly  and became known as the “39 widows of the Plaza,” though in time they numbered over 39.  People would visit the hotel just to rub elbows with them in the hallways, or glimpse them in the ornate downstairs lobby, where they might sit reading the New York Times.  One manager took to walking outside to get from one end of the building to the other, so as to avoid the lobby, where widows lolling on divans awaited him with volleys of complaints.  And the staff, when besieged by vociferous widows, developed a secret signal: a tugging of one ear indicated that a sudden summons elsewhere from a colleague would be welcome.  But when the Depression of the 1930s came, and the Plaza was in dire need of paying guests, it was the steady flow of rent from the widows that saw the hotel through.
The Plaza today, as seen from Central Park.  Its Victorian elegance is overtopped by supermodern high-rises.

         As for the Donald, he has said that he “tore himself up” to get it, paying $407 million, or a record-breaking $495,000 per room.  But a few years later it went bankrupt, though he of course did not.  In real estate, the Trump touch is lethal.  As of July 2018, the Plaza is owned by Katara Hospitality, the hotel division of the state-owned Qatar Investment Authority of Qatar.  And is the famous Oak Room open today?  Alas, only for private events.

Coming soon: Descent into Darkness: Revelations, Fecundity, and Death.

©  2019  Clifford Browder

413. Madonna: She Overwhelms Me, She Cuts Me to the Quick

BROWDERBOOKS

Good news: Fascinating New Yorkers, my latest work of nonfiction, has been announced as an award-winning finalist in the Biography category of the 2019 International Book Awards.


 

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.  
This is the fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. Three more, and then the big one; stick around.
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.  

                                     MADONNA
  SHE OVERWHELMS ME, SHE CUTS ME TO THE QUICK


David Shankbone
         She’s wild, she’s crazy, she’s noisy, she’s over-the-top.  She’s Catholic and sacrilegious, self-obsessed and sexy, Carmen Miranda minus the bananas, the queen of too-muchness, the witch of grotesque.  Also, at times, a frenzied super slut, a mindless singing G-string, a nun turned gymnast with gobs of stripper and a jot of clown.  Boldly lipsticked with long blond hair, she prances and dances, she pulsates, she leaps.  Not bad, for a 61-year-old with six children, four of them adopted, plus one by an ex-lover and one by an ex-husband.
         Her performances are showbiz on steroids, a cross between a cathedral and a circus, a light show and a Mass.  They engulf you like a cosmic explosion, a fireball of energy that will singe your eyeballs, scorch your ears, and leave you dazzled, glutted, gutted, limp as spinach, burnt out as an ash.  She is, in a word, Madonna.

Here, not quite a blonde.flickr.com/photos/rwoan 
         She sounds inescapable, but I escaped her for decades, dismissing her as just another fad of the younger generation that would fizzle out in time.  Fads – they come, they go.  But this one is well-preserved, still around, still crazy.  The world’s  most famous female singer, she has sold more than 300 million records worldwide.  A corporation, I’m told, and worth $800 million.  Never fear, she’ll make a billion soon.
         She was born Madonna Louise Ciccone (yes, "Madonna" is really her name) to an Italian American father with a degree in engineering, and a mother of French Canadian descent, in Bay City, Michigan, on August 16, 1958.  Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, she was raised a Catholic, and boy, does it show up in some of her performances.  With the name “Madonna,” she has said, she had to become either a nun or what she is.  In high school she got good grades, did cartwheels in the hallways between classes, and hiked up her skirt during class, to give the boys an eyeful.  Not the behavior of a future nun.
         In 1968, at age 20, she dropped out of college and came to New York with $35 in her pocket.  It was the first time she’d ever flown in a plane or taken a ride in a taxi.  She began working as a backup dancer for other artists, became herself a singer, wore fishnet stockings and a crucifix, recorded, and exploded into fame; the rest is history.  Two husbands to date, both divorced, and a slew of lovers.
Not always in a robe and cowl.
         I do wonder how I could have missed her.  I too am a transplanted Midwesterner who fulfilled himself in New York.  And her birthday, August 16, is the date of my partner Bob’s death.  But let’s not push it.  She and I are oceans and eons apart.  Yet at this late date my young friend Silas, a devoted fan of hers, teased up my morbid curiosity by announcing that he had just spent a small fortune to be in the front row of a concert of hers next fall.  Impressed, I decided to take a glance at this irrepressible phenomenon.  Some glance!  It was mind-shattering, it cleaved me to the quick..
         Having seen twice now, full-screen on You Tube, her Met Gala 2018 performance, I am overwhelmed.  The Met Gala is an invite-only annual fund-raising event for the museum’s Costume Institute, where female celebrities parade their lavish and impossible gowns before a battery of cameras.  The 2018 theme, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” was well calculated to inspire Madonna’s Catholic-obsessed psyche to heights and depths of fervor. 
         The performance starts out with clanging bells in what seems like a Gothic cathedral with stained glass windows and a procession of monks in long robes and cowls.  These shadowy figures, her all-male, all-gay chorus, sing Gregorian chants, with intermittent lightning flashes and pictures of the Virgin.  Then, as the audience’s excitement mounts and their ovation crescendos, she appears at the top of a flight of stairs, in a long purple robe and a cowl, fiercely lipsticked, her golden hair in braids, with not a wrinkle in sight.  Her voice projects resonantly the words of “Like a Prayer”:
                         “When you call my name
It's like a little prayer
Down on my knees
I want to take you there
In the midnight hour
I can feel your power
Just like a prayer
You know I'll take you there.”
         This I love, for she is singing a love song – “I want to take you there” echoes repeatedly – but, well-garbed from the neck down, she is anything but sexy.  Then she tosses the cowl back and slowly, still singing and always in a spotlight, she descends the steps.  Finally, at the bottom, she tosses off the robe and reveals herself in what looks like a corset over a white gown, which, Silas observed, is still the most clothed he has ever seen her.  Next, she is surrounded by four girls in white who paw her and grapple with her, as if to silence her, but this struggling woman is not to be silenced. 
         A second number follows, and then a third entitled “Hallelujah,” which almost has a Protestant touch, with two dark-clothed men in clerical collars walking solemnly behind her, followed by another processional chorus, against a backdrop depiction of Christ on the cross.  Not since Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” had I heard so many resonant hallelujahs.  This, too, I loved.  As for the whole pseudo-religious setting, I can only say, once a Catholic, always a Catholic, no matter how far you stray from the Church.  From its very start Protestantism, wary of overwrought ritualism and embellishments, and enamored of simplicity, had a good bit of asceticism.  Raised a Protestant, as I was, Madonna would never have become Madonna.  At least, not this Madonna.
         It was hokey, it was supertheatrical, it was contrived.  But so, by its very nature, is all theater.  I liked it because it surprised me, it wasn’t what I had anticipated.  If you want to sample it yourself, go here.  But be prepared for sound.

         The other performance that Silas showed me full-screen on YouTube was totally different, a kind of girlie show where she strutted and pranced and contorted herself in a far more secular setting.  This didn’t get to me at all, for girlie shows are a dime a dozen, and always have been.  At times she reminded me of Bette Midler strutting grotesquely on a stage in Washington Square Park following a Gay Pride parade of years ago. 
         Madonna, so Silas tells me, was hot stuff in the 1980s, when she first skyrocketed into fame, so shocking the Church that it threatened excommunication.  Today, he says, when younger people see her as a bit passé, her pseudo-Catholic hocus is routinely shrugged off.  But she did, for that generation, what performers in the past have done for theirs.  A long tradition precedes her.
Hellzapoppin poster, 1938.  More girlies than hellfire.
         For novelty shows that seem to break all the rules, on Broadway there was Hair in the 1960s (I saw it, loved it), and Hellzapoppin in the late 1930s (I saw the movie, remember people being roasted over the flames of Hell).  As for girlie shows, nothing in its time matched the Ziegfeld Follies of the 1920s and before, which I also saw in a Hollywood film about Flo Ziegfeld.  I especially recall a soaring stage tower with a chorus of scantily clad chorus girls, climaxed at the very top by a male performer fully dressed in top hat and tails, singing genially.  
Ziegfeld Follies of 1916.  Watch out, Madonna,
here's competition.  But maybe she can't sing.
Only the Great Crash of 1929, impoverishing Ziegfeld, and the impresario’s death in 1932, put an end to it.
Florenz Ziegfeld, 1928.  The year of my birth, one year
 before the Crash.  Is there a link?
         But girlie shows date back even further.  There were the Floradora girls of a Broadway show of 1900, a sumptuously clad sextet in picture hats with frilly parasols, who entranced the males of the time.  They all married millionaires and one of them, Evelyn Nesbit, a stunning beauty, was the unwitting cause of a famous murder, when her obsessively jealous husband shot her ex-lover, Stanford White, the most famous architect of the time, in the rooftop theater of the Madison Square Garden before scores of witnesses.


         The first girlie show was probably the Black Crook, a splashy Broadway musical of the 1860s and 1870s with an impossible and forgettable plot.  It featured bevies of chorines in flesh-colored tights, a hurricane of gauze, a grotto with nymphs and gods that rose magically out of the floor, fairies lolling on silver couches in a silver rain, angels dropping from the clouds in gilded chariots, and a cancan of 200 shapely legs kicking high, then turning to lift their skirts and show their frothy gauze-clad derrieres.  What Madonna was to the 1980s, the Black Crook was to its time.  It shocked, it titillated.  From it came the Broadway musical and the burlesque show, both of them offering skimpily clothed, exuberant female stars. 
         And before that?  The traveling circus, born in Putnam and Dutchess counties, New York, and adjacent western Connecticut, with clowns and elephants, and rhinoceri labeled unicorns, but no clothed or unclothed women.  And before that?  Great Awakenings, revival meetings with fire-and-brimstone sermons that terrified sinners into shakings and frothings at the mouth, and swoonings and cries of “hallelujah,” as they staggered up to the mourners’ bench to beseech the Lord to save them from the fiery pit.  
A Methodist revival meeting from the Second Great Awakening, 1839.  This is how the
Protestants used to do it.  Spectators were powerfully wrought upon.
          Americans have always wanted entertainments that were big, noisy, cosmic, and convulsive.  Madonna, you’re in a long and glorious tradition.  More power to you.  Rage on till you creak.
Coming soon:  The woman who left Donald Trump soaked in sweat, and other quirky moneyed denizens of the Plaza.

©  2019  Clifford Browder
         

412A. An Idyllic Walk to the River

          Another idyllic walk down West 11th Street toward the river, cherished because it was a summerlike late-spring day, sunny, but without the muggy heat of summer.  Lunch again at Philip Marie on West11th and Hudson, where they squeezed me in after a ten-minute wait at the bar, giving me table no. 1 by the front window, where I had a marvelous view of Hudson Street and could people-watch  The usual babble of lunching New Yorkers, punctuated by bursts of raucous laughter.  At a nearby table, four heads together with camera-ready smiles for a photo taken by the waiter, then more plastic smiles as they took photos of each other.  As I left, I chitchatted outside with the host, who reminded me that next weekend was World Pride Day.  Even with the parade starting down here and going uptown, the opposite of the usual direction, he wearily anticipates huge crowds in the Village.
         From there I proceeded down West 11th toward the river, and en route stopped once again at the Robin Rice Gallery at no. 325, where I was the only visitor, and Michael McLaughlin’s ocean photographs, entitled 41 Degrees Latitude, are still on display.  (See post #404.)  A new exhibition, “Summertime Salon 2019,” featuring a host of photographers, will open on July 17, with an evening opening reception on that day that I hope to attend.
         So on to West Street and the river.  There I sat on a bench, stared toward the sun, and with the gray water rippling in the breeze, saw streaks of silver pulsing from bank to bank: the astonishing sight ignored by others that I have called the face of God.  Overhead, cirrus clouds stretched their thin white tissue against the blue sky – an indication, I’ve been told, of a change in the weather; for tomorrow, rain is indeed predicted.  A sailboat puffed its white sail in the distance, a racing speedboat trailed a stream of white spume, and a cruise boat with a mere two levels of cabins pushed arrogantly by.  The only discordant note was an African American woman on a nearby bench screaming into her phone, “What do I get?  Tell me that, what do I get?”  And then: “Purify the water in Florida, that swimming pool,” and other comments that I couldn’t and wouldn’t make out.
         On to Pier 46, where I detected no hint of the seaside goldenrod that would root in pockets of soil on the rotten old wood pier below and bloom in the fall.  On the fake green grass, mixed and same-sex couples doing calisthenics, some of the couples so perfectly synchronized that they must have practiced together many times.  And the inevitable tattooed hairy hunk drinking up the sun that will guarantee him trips to the dermatologist a decade or two hence.  Looking downtown, the city’s skyline: the Freedom Tower in splendid isolation, and the elegant Woolworth Building, its Gothic splendor overtopped by bulbous, jagged high-rises that offend the eye.  Such is progress.
         A sign on the riverside promenade: A SUMMER OF FUN, with notices of the week’s events in HRPK, which I brilliantly deciphered as “Hudson River Park.”  Then my little garden with the bronze statue of an apple.  Blue, white, and yellow flowers, and prickly-stemmed red roses.  Again, the fullness of summer without the summer’s muggy heat.
         On the way back along West 11th Street toward home, one more adventure.  At Hudson Street a white older woman asked if I cared to take her arm crossing the street.  Surprised, I did, and found that linking arms with her gave me perfect balance.  She explained that she had lost her husband, with whom she did this all the time.  Continuing toward Bleecker Street, we chatted.  She is an artist who lives across from St. Vincent’s Hospital, or whatever has replaced it.  She has lived in the Village 25 years, just as I have been there over 50.  She misses little shops that have been chased out by high rents, as do I, and can’t afford a studio in the Village.  I told her I’m an author living high above the Magnolia Bakery of “Sex and the City Fame,” mentioned my blog, and gave her my card, inviting her to contact me by e-mail.  In front of my building we parted.  Will I ever see her or hear from her again?  Who knows?  Stay tuned. 
         A charming ending to another idyllic walk down West 11thStreet to the river.  A repetition, but each walk slightly different.  Tomorrow, with the rain, back to humdrum affairs and sober business.

412. Fire

BROWDERBOOKS


 

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

"Well written, flowing with a feeling for the time and the characters."  --  Reader review by Bernt Nesje.
For two more reviews, both five stars, go here and scroll down. 
This is the fourth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. Three more, and then the big one; stick around.

My latest 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.  

                                                 Fire

            It was an ordinary evening at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop in North Beach, San Francisco, in the spring of 1960, with the usual complement of Beatniks, poets and writers of undiscovered talent, bohemian hangers-on, tourists, and a few unclassifieds like myself.  A fugitive from Academia, I was living in the Golden Eagle Hotel on Broadway at $5.00 a week, scribbling poetry, and heating coffee in the morning and cooking potatoes in the evening on an electric frying pan borrowed from a friend.  At the Co-Existence Bagel Shop I was and wasn’t of the scene, neither square nor “in,” an observer from the sidelines who almost, but didn’t quite, fit in.  The usual babble prevailed, when John, a regular in a crumpled jacket and tieless, sat at the piano and started playing.  He often played; at first, no one paid attention.  But as he played, something began to happen.  A spirit seized him, he played on with increasing intensity, sweat on his forehead, his fingers pounding the keys frenziedly, until slowly the babble subsided, and everyone gathered round.  So it went for about ten minutes, the music wild and inspired, until at last he stopped and slumped down on the piano bench, exhausted, while the crowd cheered and applauded wildly.  What had happened?  As he played, the fire was in him.
         Once, at a concert at Ravinia, the outdoor concert hall in the wooded outlands of Chicago, I was privileged to hear the young American pianist William Kapell, who had undertaken to play Rachmaninoff’s second or third piano concert --  I forget which – with the blessing of the composer’s widow, who had heard him play it.  It was a much anticipated performance; one sensed the audience’s excitement.  Then, when he finished, Kapell sprang up from the piano and rushed to shake the hand of the exhilarated conductor, while the audience applauded wildly.  The obvious excitement of performer and conductor showed that they knew they had brought off something spectacular, something unforgettable.  The fire was in them.  Memorable.  Sadly, Kapell died in a plane crash in 1953; he was only 31.
William Kapell, 1948.  The fire was in him.
         I recall once seeing a play by a new young playwright who had learned the tricks of playwriting and produced a technically flawless script.  But the play never quite took off.  Never did a character come wildly, savagely alive and overwhelm the audience.  The writer had learned his craft, but the fire wasn’t in him.  And when I was in my first playwriting class, the instructor told me at the end that just two of the students, me and another, showed promise.  All the others were learning the craft, but the fire wasn’t in them.
         Obviously, in these instances I am using the word “fire” to express that fierce inner urge, that blind need to do, that drives creative people.  Without it, nothing happens – nothing of value.  With it, things do happen, even though they may be clumsy, misshapen, unfocused, in dire need of discipline and direction.
         But “fire” has many meanings, many contexts.  In the city one hears only too often the screaming sirens of fire engines rushing to a fire, for in congested urban neighborhoods fire is a constant threat, countered by the ability of fire trucks to get to the scene of a fire within minutes.  On the two occasions when there was a fire in my building, the firemen were there almost before I knew there was a fire.  It’s the people living quietly and comfortably in rural areas who are most at risk.  Their ears are not ravaged by the daily scream of sirens, but it may take twenty or thirty minutes for the firemen to reach them – time enough for a house to be engulfed in flames.  Used in the literal sense, “fire” can suggest danger, provoke alarm.  Shouted, it causes panic.
A fire in New York City, August 2008.
H.L.I.T.
         Back in nineteenth-century New York, when older buildings were often built of wood, and electricity had yet to replace candles and candelabras for illumination, the risk of fire was great.  Theaters needed much illumination at night and were therefore especially vulnerable.  Few of them lasted more than ten or fifteen years. The famous Bowery Theater burned down four times in 17 years, and was destroyed once and for all by fire in 1929.
         My childhood experience of fire involved no risk or alarm.  When my father bought a house in the suburbs because I was on the way, he also bought a load of oak wagon hubs and spokes.  The hubs were solid brown cylinders with a hole in the middle and slits or openings on the sides where spoke were inserted that stretched out to the rim of the wheel.  These hubs were stored outside in a dark open space under our ground-floor summer porch, and when my brother and I were older, he had us fetch in a few from time to time, so there would always be some dry ones in the basement.  Then, on special days like Thanksgiving or Christmas or whenever we had guests for dinner in the winter, he would put a hub in the living-room fireplace, put kindling under it, and light it.  The oak hub would burn for hours while we socialized in the living room, and would still be burning when we returned there after dinner.  When little, I would sit on the oriental rug, or on a low hassock, and watch, hypnotized by the flickering flames, the crackle and smell of wood burning, and the sparks that would fly out and hit the screen that kept the hub and its fire from rolling out on the hearth.  To my eye the hub became a burning medieval castle, with flames flickering out the slits that looked like windows where archers could shoot arrows at besiegers.  But this castle was doomed.  Finally, its guts consumed, the hub would split open and crumble in fragments emitting orange flames.  At the very end, those fragments became orange embers that slowly turned black, and the hub, reduced to black and gray ash, would fade into the darkness of the cooling hearth.
A wagon hub with an axle in in it, and wheel spokes.
Our hubs had the axle and wheel spokes removed.
inkknife_2000
But our fireplace burned hubs, not logs.
         Once I saw a real castle, in fact a whole walled city, seemingly engulfed in flames.  While traveling about France by rail, with occasional forays hitchhiking, I found myself in the great walled city of Carcassonne on Bastille Day, July 14, 1952.  Climaxing the holiday celebration was a spectacular display of fireworks set off that night from behind the ramparts of the city.  Standing with a crowd of onlookers outside the city walls, I saw sky-splitting bursts and streaks of fire giving the impression that the whole city was under siege and in flames.  Not a castle, then, but a whole fortified city, enhancing and magnifying my childhood impression of a burning castle.  No fireworks that I have ever seen since could match the display that night.
Imagine all this at night, engulfed in bursts of fire.
Harry
         In ancient times in the West, fire was long viewed as one of the four elements, the others being earth, water, and air.  By its very nature it is active, imbued with energy.  It gives light and warmth and comfort.  It is life, as opposed to death, which is dark, inert, and cold.  And if fire also causes destruction, that destruction is not necessarily final.  Fire changes things, transforms them, regenerates.  Fire in a forest cleans out fallen trees and brush, and helps the forest regenerate itself and grow.  Fire is masculine and akin to the sun.  Long ago I saw a film showing the surface of the sun constantly throwing out torrents of fire: an unforgettable display of the sun’s intense energy, on which the earth depends.  In Greek myth Prometheus defies the gods by stealing fire from the sun and giving it to humans, thus making progress and civilization possible.  For this he is punished by Zeus.  Immortal, he is chained to a rock where, each day, an eagle comes to devour his liver, which then grows back and is again devoured.  So it might have gone forever, had not husky Hercules, a born meddler and obtrusive do-gooder, come along and freed him.  If fire isn’t a gift from the gods – as some might have it – it is at least a gift from a daring trickster who sacrifices himself for our good.
Prometheus stealing fire from the sun.
Jan Cossiers, painting, 1637.
         Fire is at the core of the earth, as smoking volcanoes remind us, until their eruptions disgorge flows of lava that devour everything in their path.  Think of those running fugitives embalmed in volcanic ash at Pompeii, caught and smothered while in the very act of fleeing.  People in the vicinity of seemingly dormant volcanoes live in fear.  Long ago I saw a film showing villagers in Indonesia taking bound goats and other creatures up to the edge of a crater, where they cast the sacrifices into its smoking depths.  This, they hoped, would pacify the god of the mountain, capricious, demanding, and violent, a god of fire not to be ignored, but to be constantly fed and appeased. 
         You don’t have to live near a volcano to be scared of fire.  In recent years people living in regions ravaged by drought and then by fire have described their shock and terror upon seeing a wall of fire suddenly racing toward them to engulf their home.  Some survive by flight, others by jumping in a pond or swimming pool; the unlucky ones succumb to smoke and fire.  A wall of moving fire, a spectacle so totally overwhelming as to suggest the face and power of God, some all-embracing and all-devouring force beyond our comprehension.  Yes, fire terrifies.
Mount Etna, September 1989.
         And fascinates.  Mount Etna in Sicily, the highest active volcano in Europe, still erupts periodically, sending plumes of smoke and ash high into the air.  When conditions are deemed safe, tourists can visit it today, and always have.  Many years ago – just when, I don’t recall – visitors could, with good timing, go up to the crater and peer into it.  Local guides who knew the volcano’s patterns timed the visits to occur in the intervals between explosions.  Led by them, visitors rushed up to the crater, looked over the edge into the face of fire, and were quickly hurried away to a safe distance, before the next explosion.  And even today, though travel agencies prefer not to mention it, there is danger.  In March 2017 a sudden explosion of Etna hurled molten rocks and steam down upon visitors, injuring ten; luckily, unlike in many past explosions, no one died.  Photos of the eruption show a stunning burst of yellow and red in the night sky.  The visual beauty of such incidents, and the danger, continue to bring tourists to the mountain.
Molten lava, Hawaii, 1998.
         Yes, there is beauty.  In the summer of 1960 I went with my friend Bill to see the Ciudad Universitaria on the southern edge of Mexico City.  Adjacent to the campus we discovered a landscape such as we had never seen before and have never seen since.  Known as the Pedregal, was all jagged and black, with pockets here and there of green, where bits of soil had been deposited that supported life.  This tormented black surface was the hardened lava from a volcanic eruption of 5000 BCE.  Weirdly beautiful, it was slowly and grudgingly permitting inroads of vegetation to reclaim it.  The real threat to this lunar landscape was not tourism – we were the only visitors there – but urban development.  Back then it was beginning already, though with attempts to blend development with the landscape, not destroy it.  Since then, development in the area has since run amuck, providing ostentatious residences to Mexico’s wealthy.  But my first Pedregal impression remains intact: lava = frozen fire.

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         When lightning suddenly streaked through the sky, followed by claps of thunder, prehistoric humans must have been terrified.  If they worshiped a god of fire and sought to placate him (it was usually, though not always, a him), who could blame them?  But fire could also be a friend and ally.  They learned to tame it and cook with it, and in their caves at night, a fire at the entrance offered protection from the terrors of darkness, and the wild animals prowling in the night.
         Inevitably, fire is linked to eros.  We refer to a former girl- or boyfriend as “an old flame,” and in French a sudden infatuation, or love at first sight, is termed a coup de foudre, a bolt of lightning.  Years later, the girl I once went steady with in high school (yes, honestly, I really did) said to me, “I don’t ever want to get burned like that again.”  We had been infatuated; the flame was mutual, though in time it flickered out.  When a girl in France wanted to flirt with me (yes, that happened too), she made what her sister called une déclaration enflammée; I was flattered.  A torch song (no, this isn’t a plug for Harvey Fierstein) is a song where the singer laments an unrequited or lost love; the beloved is unaware of the lover, or indifferent.  The song usually oozes self-pity, but you can’t help sympathizing with the poor sap still in love.
         But “fire” has other meanings, too.  Why do we say “I got fired,” meaning, “I lost my job”?  Some cite the Donald’s “firing” contestants in the reality TV show The Apprentice in 2004, but come on, the phrase was in use long before that; I’ve heard it all my life.  (Trump allegedly even tried to patent the phrase “You’re fired!”)  A more convincing explanation goes back to the 1910s and the National Cash Register Company.  NCR’s founder, John H. Patterson, was a quirky genius.  To deflate an employee's ego, he would fire him for  some trivial reason, then hire him back.  On one occasion he sent an executive out to visit a customer.  When the executive came back to the company headquarters, he found his desk thrown out on the lawn and in flames; he was “fired.”
         This incident leads to a consideration of fire as a purifying agent, and death by fire as a kind of purification.  I once told of a mother who, upon learning that her college-age son was gay, in his absence assembled all his belongings in the back yard and, in the presence of all the family, burned them.  From that day forth until the day she died, she had nothing to do with him, never contacted him once.  Whether she thought of it that way or not, burning his belongings was, for her, a kind of purification, an elimination of someone who she thought had brought shame on the family.
         Why witches and heretics were burned alive, rather than suffering some other form of death, escapes me.  Online sources give the history of burning at the stake, but to my knowledge don’t explain the why of it, except, in the case of witches, perhaps to eliminate any witchcraft that even their remains might commit.  For the heretics, it may have provided one last chance to repent, which a severed or strangled head might have trouble expressing.  Accused of heresy and condemned to the stake by the Spanish Inquisition, at least one victim, Francisco de Espinosa, made the requisite confession and was spared.  Instead, he served three years in prison, and for the rest of his life had to wear a penitential garment meant to mark and humiliate the condemned.  Better than fire, he decided.  The mere threat of it served to purify Christendom of the poison of heresy and render its spiritual body clean and healthy.
Giving him his very last chance, the Church is there to the end.
Engraving by Pieter van Gunst, after Ottmar Elliger (1633-1679).
Wellcome Images         Fire is profoundly ambiguous.  We need it and we dread it.  It soothes, it terrifies.  It is a blessing and a curse.  Like it or not, we cannot do without it.
Midsummer festival bonfire, Finland, 2003.
Janne Karaste
Coming soon:  Madonna: She Overwhelms Me, She Cuts Me to the Quick.

©  2019  Clifford Browder