Clifford Browder's Blog, page 28
June 11, 2017
302. BookCon, Where Authors Collide with Readers
Here, as promised, is my post about BookCon 2017, with emphasis on exhibitors, to be followed in a week by another on attendees. First, what is BookCon? Advertised as being “where storytelling and pop culture collide,” BookCon is an annual book fair, usually held in New York at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center following BookExpo. So what is BookExpo?
BookExpo and BookCon
BookExpo is an annual event, held this year at the Javits Center on Thursday, June 1, and Friday, June 2, where the book trade talks to itself. The public is excluded, for this is a gathering only of those involved in the book trade, meaning publishers, authors (especially bestsellers), agents, and librarians, as well as filmmakers looking for the next blockbuster book that might be made into a blockbuster film. It’s all about networking, keeping in touch with old contacts and developing new ones, and sniffing out the latest in publishing trends. It is most definitely not about finding an agent or publisher, and to approach someone on the floor with this in mind is to brand yourself a pushy newbie and suffer the consequences.
BookCon, which only dates from 2014 and follows hot on the heels of BookExpo, is an event where the book trade welcomes consumers (hence “con”) with open arms, and feasts them with titles old and new, author talks and signings, giveaways, and geeky book-related products. This year it was held at the Javits on Saturday, June 3, and Sunday, June 4. So if the trade excludes the public for the first two days, it then repents of its action, rediscovers readers, and throws its gates wide open. And the event is BIG: held last year for a single day in (to the dismay of many) Chicago, it expected and presumably got 10,000 visitors. But this year, held for two days in New York, which likes to do things BIGGER THAN BIG, it anticipated 25,000, of which I was one.
Into the labyrinth
So ill informed was I, as a very small published author, that until last winter I had never heard of BookExpo or BookCon, and had never set foot in, or even glimpsed from a distance, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (named for a deceased but well remembered U.S. senator from New York) at Eleventh Avenue and West 34th Street, on the booming west side of Manhattan. What alerted me to these events was an unsolicited e-mail offer from some outfit I’d never heard of, promising – for a tidy sum – to get me into the book event and connect me with an agent. Though I was justifiably skeptical of the offer and deleted it, it occurred to me that maybe I should look into the matter myself, with the result that, after much time spent online, I enrolled in BookExpo as an author to the tune of $400, which I thought a bit steep, since other participants got in for less, and without authors there would be no such event, no publishers, and no agents either. Then, poking about further online, I realized that BookExpo was not for me, since what I needed at the moment was readers, not contacts with agents and publishers, who today couldn’t be bothered with small fry like myself. Result: I got my $400 refunded and, by forking out a mere $2,000, rented a 10' x 10' exhibitor’s booth for BookCon. Sheer folly, of course, since I had no idea what I was getting into. But it would look good in a query letter to small publishers, who want to know an author’s marketing plan, and it would satisfy my modest appetite for adventure. So began the BookCon for Dummies phase of my adventure.
By way of preparation, I saw on an online plan of the show floor that my booth #2876 was in the BookCon section -- the section for small presses and indie authors who wouldn't attend BookExpo -- way up in the northwest corner of the floor. I wondered if visitors would find their way to me in what looked like a remote backwater, but when I learned that the famous Strand Bookstore would have a big booth right next to me, I breathed a sigh of relief: they would draw traffic into my aisle. On the BookCon website I also watched two videos showing hordes of visitors swarming into the one-day 2016 show in Chicago, and informing me that attendees were 52% female millennials, the rest being older women and, in smaller numbers, men. A problem: these young women read genre fiction -- romance, sci-fi, fantasy, young adult, horror, thrillers -- which I don’t do. So could I entice them into historical fiction and nonfiction? KNOW YOUR READERS is standard advice to authors these days, so for each of my three offerings I tried to do just that.
Know your readers
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011). New York, late 1860s. A respectably raised young man decides to become a male prostitute, servicing the city’s elite, then falls in love with his most difficult client. Gay romance, if it must be labeled. I decided to put out 20 copies. Probable readers: older gay men, as I had learned in hawking it at the Rainbow Book Fair five years ago. Not a likely hit for BookCon, alas. Yet the reviews of it on the Goodreads website have all been by women, which gave me pause for thought. (Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)
No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (self-published with Mill City Press, 2015). An award-winning selection of posts from my blog, with such subjects as Occupy Wall Street, the Gay Pride Parade, alcoholics, abortionists, grave robbers, peyote visions, my mugging in Central Park, steamboat wars on the Hudson, and an artist who made art out of a blood-filled squirt gun and a blackened human toe. Again, 20 copies. Probable readers: anyone who lives, has lived, or would like to live in New York, and anyone who is visiting, has visited, or would like to visit the city. Pretty broad, perhaps, but the best that I could do. (Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)
Bill Hope: His Story (Anaphora Literary Press, 2017). New York, 1870s. From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, a young street kid turned pickpocket spills out in a torrent of words his career as a thief who wants better, his numerous prison stays (escaping once in a coffin), his forays into polite society, his testimony before an investigating committee, his hate of snitches and bullies, and his stay in a lunatic asylum, from which he emerges to face death threats and possible involvement in a murder. Forty copies of this one, since it was the most recent, just hot off the press. Probable readers: anyone interested in history, especially history of New York, anyone interested in action adventure and crime. Again, pretty broad. Maybe older males. (Available from Amazon.)
And how many books did I hope to sell? Not many, by bestseller standards, since female millennials were probably not my audience. I hoped for 40 or more sales, would consider 20 disappointing, and decided that 30 would be minimally acceptable. A modest projection, I thought, though I didn’t dismiss the grim possibility of my sitting glumly in my booth, totally neglected by the multitudinous swarm of young women hurrying elsewhere.
Such were my assumptions about readers and sales. Regarding readers, I was completely and outrageously wrong.
Next, learning who some of my future neighbors in the BookCon section of the exhibit floor would be, I contacted them by e-mail and, being in the BookCon for Dummies stage, asked if they had any advice for a newbie. They were all delighted to hear from me and offered lots of advice.
Put out lots of swag
Attendees love swag, meaning free stuff, so put out lots. I decided on candy and at first thought about Hershey’s Kisses, since everyone loves chocolate, and the double entendre possibilities were endless: “Would you like some of my kisses?” or “Don’t leave without a kiss,” and so on. But then I thought about fingers smeared with chocolate getting near my beloved books and opted instead for hard candy, specifically, lollipops with lots of colors. A big heap of it in a bowl on the table in my 10’ x 10’ booth.
Gotta have a gimmick
Everyone agreed that you had to hook the attendees’ attention, get them to notice your modest little booth among those many others. Possibilities: a big colorful banner, free bookmarks, anything to catch their eye. My solution -- a series of bold-face signs: BOOKS ARE SEXYBE WICKED: READ BOOKS,YOU READ? I LOVE YOUYOU’RE AWESOME / so am I
I would present them on a bookstand on the table and at intervals remove the top one so as to reveal the next one, and then, if I heard music from a distance and began to pulse with it, climax them with
GEEZERS ROCK
I would probably be the oldest exhibitor there and meant to play it to the hilt.
Polish your spiel
Some attendees would want to read the blurb and decide on their own, but others would ask what it was about, so exhibitors should be ready with a good spiel to snag their interest. So I worked up a pitch. Example: for the New York stories: “All about the good side and the bad of New York. My mugging in Central Park was definitely not good, but it made me a real New Yorker – I had joined the club.” Hopefully it would get a laugh or at least a smile.
Don’t do it alone
I had thought it might be cool to handle it all myself, but who would cover for me if I ran to the john or went out for lunch? And how would I get all my books to the Center? So I asked my young friend Silas Berkowitz, whom I had met a year before at a college alumni gathering, and he jumped at the chance, seeing it all as an adventure. He works for Microsoft, has a flexible schedule, and is tech-savvy, so he seemed a perfect fit. His knowledge of tech would let him handle credit card payments and do something called lead retrieval, scanning attendees’ badges to obtain their e-mail addresses for future contact. And for all the years between us, we laughed at the same things, and our interests overlapped. With me at 88 and him at 26, we would be an odd couple, though “couple” is hardly the word, since we were not in the usual sense of the word (honni soit qui mal y pense) a couple, just friends.
The odd couple. No need to say who's who.(Unless otherwise attributed, all the photos in
this and the next post are Silas's.)
Make it fun
Of course, that goes without saying. But from my experience at the Rainbow Book Fair in 2012, and stories my artist friend Henry told of dealing with potential buyers, I know the woes of hawking your wares in person: someone shows an interest – even a keen interest – in what you're offering and then, having fueled your hopes of a sale, they walk blithely away. But BookCon is a festival, a fun time, so you have to squelch any feeling of annoyance or disappointment and hope for better. Sour looks and frowns are taboo. So flash your signs, offer them candy, smile, and have fun yourself; it will (hopefully) communicate.
Know the lingo
I picked it up online. You’ve got to feed the buzz. You want to be one of their faves, one of their besties. You want to geek out. lol
So much for advice. But how to get my stuff to the show?
Getting there
Exhibitors coming from a great distance contract with Freeman, the exclusive provider of freight services for the show, to ship their books and other stuff to a warehouse in Maspeth, New York, for later delivery, or they schedule the delivery so it arrives at just the right time at the Center. But one reason the show had tempted me from the start was that, living in the West Village, I was only a short ten-dollar taxi ride from the Javits. The move-in for BookExpo, with all the big publishers bringing hundreds of books and all kinds of stuff for their lavish displays, would be a frenzied horror, but the move-in for BookCon, the venue for small presses and indie authors like me who eschewed the delights of BookExpo, was very precise and limited: 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, June 2, immediately following the close of BookExpo.
So it was that Silas and I stacked three cartons of books in my aging laundry cart, plus more books in our shoulder bags, and through the wonders of tech (his idea, of course) summoned a car by Lyft to my very doorstep in the Village, and took a quick ride up to the Javits at Eleventh Avenue and West 34th Street. When we got out and made for the entrance, we took a quick glance around us and saw towering high-rises under construction nearby, dwarfing by their height the massive glass box of the Javits. The Hudson Yards just to the south of the Javits were definitely “hot” real estate; the whole West Side was booming.
The Jacob K. Javits Convention CenterEden, Janine and Jim
Inside, we found ourselves in a vast airplane hangar-like structure with huge stretches of space, big signs overhead announcing future events, and another giant sign, which we reached after a walk the equivalent of four city blocks, welcoming us to BookExpo and BookCon. We went at once to the registration counter and collected our red-ribboned exhibitor badges, without which we couldn’t get in, and hung them around our neck. But we had arrived a little before 5:00 p.m., when BookExpo ended and our move-in began, so we sat for a while nearby and met a couple visiting from China who wanted to see the U.N. building; the wife spoke English, so Silas gave her directions and we wished them well – a reminder of the international attraction of this city and the Javits.
At the magic hour of five we entered the huge exhibit floor and trudged this way and that until we saw a distant overhead sign that said 2800. Since our booth was #2876, we headed that way and found a vast lot of ... nothing. Right where we thought we should be located: nothing! At least, nothing that looked like our little section of BookCon. So Silas took off to find the office of Reed Exhibitions, who were running the show, to learn what the problem was; returning, he said there had been a little error, but the booths would soon be installed. Exploring further, he found a very empty booth numbered 2876, but no table or chairs, and most of the nearby booths likewise empty. I in turn scurried off to query Reed and was told: “No need to worry. The tables are on their way.” So we waited in the empty booth, screened in back by an eight-foot black curtain, and on either side by a low three-foot black curtain. Not that the place was deserted; beyond the end of our aisle there was a wide entrance to the loading docks, and fork-lifts came from there lumbering down our aisle like looming monsters, carrying huge cartons to other distant booths with displays far more elaborate than ours. Finally, about 6:00 p.m., workmen began arriving with the missing tables, and once ours was installed at the front of the booth, similarly draped in black, we felt that the booth, though still minus chairs, at least existed. Wanting to get a good night’s sleep, we decided to go home, hoping that the chairs would also arrive. Which they did, for we found them there when we arrived on Saturday morning.
Me in the booth, with the Strand postcards and magnets close by.Fellow toilers in the vineyard
Once we had installed our books, signs, and candy on the table, I took a quick look around at our neighbors. Just next to us was the Strand Bookstore booth, selling everything but books: postcards at a dollar apiece, magnets to be mounted on a refrigerator door or any metallic surface, T-shirts, totes, and even socks with brief messages like “ I love New York.” The postcards were mounted on stands right next to us, so we could feast our eyes on their messages:
FOR MOST OF HISTORY ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMANKEEP CALM AND CALL MOMMAKE AMERICA THINK AGAINGAY RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTSNEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTEDA WELL-READ WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS CREATURE
I couldn’t resist buying one:
New York-ernoun – a fast-walking, fast-talking person who livesin the best city on earth.ex: “Get out of my way, I’m walking here.”
This is the abrasive image that New Yorkers themselves like to project, but I would argue that New Yorkers are in fact less aggressive, less rude, just direct and to the point.
And right next to the postcards were the magnets, with similar messages:
WE ARE EACH OF US A LITTLE UNIVERSEBORN TO READ / FORCED TO WORKYOUR GRAMMAR MAKES ME (SIC)I AM A CRAZY CAT LADY AND PROUD OF IT
How “with it” can you get? I predicted that the Strand products would fly off the shelves and the racks.
Just across the aisle from the Strand was Book Beau, advertising itself as “the best way to love your books.” And what did it offer? A water- and stain-resistant "sleeve" (thin bag) to protect books and make them look beautiful; there were many patterns, and they were indeed beautiful.
Next to Book Beau and just across from us was Kirin Rise Studios, with a big banner showing a young woman, maybe Asian, who was evidently the heroine of a novel by an author named Ed Cruz. Later I would learn that she lived in the year 2032 and used martial arts to fight bravely against government corruption and corporate greed – something we could use in 2017. But just what the booth was selling was never clear to me.
Next to Book Beau was what Silas and I came to refer to as the “mystery booth”: a booth at first empty, with a sign reading TRADE SECRET TRILOGY / 13 CUTS, which meant nothing to us. Later an African American family with a young child came to occupy the booth, but what they were up to baffled us. They were evidently presenting a series of books, but by whom and about what was not apparent. Later I learned that the author was “DOJ,” which hardly cleared things up. And a small card that we retrieved from their table had texts in such small print, and in such fancy type, that their enterprise remained shrouded in mystery. And this right across from the flagrantly and deliciously commercial offerings of the Strand!
At the magic hour of 10 a.m. on Saturday, June 3, the gates to BookCon 2017 swung wide open and hordes of female millennials, plus assorted others, began pouring onto the exhibit floor. We saw the first arrivals in the distance, some of them hurrying in our direction. Our adventure was at last beginning. “Two against twenty-five thousand,” I said to Silas. “How can we lose?”
Coming soon: Part 2 of BookCon, focused on attendees, plus notes on two of my BookCon neighbors, authors Jill Hynes and David Mammina. Who were the attendees, where were they from, what did they want, how did Silas and I interact with them, which books sold, and who were the buyers? Surprises galore; I would never have guessed.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
June 4, 2017
301. From Porn to Pathologist: More New York Occupations
The release date for Bill Hope: His Story was May 17, so those who have already ordered it from Amazon should be receiving it shortly, and anyone who wishes to order it can do so and have it promptly shipped.
For six LibraryThing prepublication reviews of Bill Hope:
His Story by viennamax, stephvin, Cricket2014, Shoosty, terry19802, and graham072442, go here and scroll down.
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This post continues my chronicle of weird, unusual, and unique professions in the city of New York.
Pornographer. Unusual? Hardly; they’re found in every city, town, and village in the country. But not everyone has been hailed as the Sultan of Smut, least of all the last such operator in Times Square. So meet Richard Basciano, a Baltimore-born former bricklayer and boxer who began selling sex magazines and buying real estate in New York in the early 1960s. I remember those racy, turbulent days, when revolution and sexual freedom seemed to run rampant, and a street-corner newsie would ask his customers, “Do you want a Screw?” and whisk out from underneath the New York Times a copy of Screwmagazine rife with porn. In such an atmosphere Mr. Basciano, who considered pornography not harmful to the community and even a deterrent to rape, was destined to prosper, and prosper he did.
42nd Street in 1985. Ah, those were the days...! This was a time when 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, close to that mecca for tourists, Times Square, had become a lively and very conspicuous site for porn, and Mr. Basciano’s seedy storefronts, offering peep shows and more for a quarter, in time would net him millions. I remember that block, for whenever I found myself in the neighborhood, I would walk the downtown side of the street in the early evening to drink in the seedy atmosphere: old movie-house marquees proclaiming ADULT MOVIESHOTTEST LIVE ACTS IN USGIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
and the sidewalk seasoned with porn-hungry tourists, Puerto Rican hustlers, and flamboyant young drag queens keeping an eye out for the “bulls,” their term for the police. I’m sure that, without realizing it, I was walking by Mr. Basciano’s properties, too. In 1977 his Show World Center theater opened at the corner of West 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, a flashy 22,000-square-foot supermarket of porn occupying four floors of a twelve-story building, and topped by a three-floor penthouse where Mr. Basciano lived lavishly, with his own private gym and boxing ring. He was described by those who knew him as gentlemanly, but reclusive and cunning. On the four lowest floors were peep shows, X-rated films for a quarter, adult books, and live sex acts too lurid to be described in print; whatever his clientele wanted, they got. Yet everything was just barely within the law, so that the local authorities were never able to arrest him. (When a building of his collapsed in Philadelphia, on the other hand, he had to pay $27 million in damages.) Who or what occupied the other five floors of the Show World site I haven’t ascertained; they certainly enjoyed some lively neighbors. By the mid-1990s, when 42nd Street was being ruthlessly Disneyized and made family-friendly, Mr. Basciano still owned about a dozen sex shops and employed 400 people. When, late in that decade, his properties were condemned for new office buildings and refurbished entertainment venues, he reaped a windfall of $14 million. Show World Center survived, albeit in a sanitized form, but the tide of decency prevailed, and the McDonald’s of sex closed in 2016, its real estate value bound to net Mr. Basciano or his estate another windfall of millions. He died in Manhattan on May 1, 2017, at age 91.
Museum founder. If you’re an avid collector, what do you do with your 14 Christopher Woods, 4 Bacons, 10 Warhols, and 34 Renaissance and Baroque bronzes? Just look at them and marvel, one would think. But what if you have quantities of art in storage and want others to see it, too? Donate the stuff? Maybe. But why not open your own museum instead? Such was the decision of J. Tomilson Hill, whose private gallery is slated to open in the fall of 2017 in a two-story space on West 24thStreet in Chelsea, inside a new condominium building named the Getty. Born and raised in New York, where he was visiting museums at an early age, Mr. Hill attended Harvard College and Business School and is now the billionaire vice chairman of a private equity firm. His new gallery will have free admission and feature his own collection, valued at over $800 million, which includes both modern works and old masters, art that he especially wants to share with students in the city’s schools. His Upper East Side apartment is likewise crammed with art, as are his residences in East Hampton, Paris, and Telluride, Colorado. He may jet about the world, but wherever he has a pied-à-terre, there are sixteenth-century bronzes or Cy Twombly’s massive graffiti-like scribblings to make him feel at home. He knows artists and curators, but has no art adviser, spends hours reading and thinking about art, makes his own decisions and his own mistakes, though his wife has veto power over those decisions. “I’ve got all these ideas,” he says of the exhibits he wants to do. “Now I’ve got to find a curator to say, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ ”
Tattoo artist. Is our skin a blank canvas waiting to be colored, drawn, or stained on? The answer is yes, if you’re a tattoo artist or one of their patrons. A worldwide phenomenon going back to primitive times, tattoos have been thought to heal or protect, or have served to indicate social affiliation or adulthood. That’s interesting, but personally I feel no need to flout any such message to the world, and can’t help but think that any but the smallest and most discreet of them is tribal, primitive, and grotesque, especially when I see half a torso covered over with these cunningly contrived graffiti. This opinion of course marks me as a square, uncool, and hopelessly out of it, a classification that I gladly accept, even though the New York Historical Society is now offering an exhibit entitled “Tattooed New York.”
Bartender in a New York gay bar.JoeInQueens
In nineteenth-century New York tattoos were mostly confined to seamen, a class apart, though young men of good stock often in their youth went to sea; a favorite tattoo subject, needless to say, was women, and the more unclothed the better, this being the only female companionship available for long months at sea. And during the Civil War soldiers had their names tattooed, so they could be identified if slain in battle. But in peacetime no lady or gentleman of the brownstone-dwelling middle class would think of such a painful and barbaric display.
Jorge Royan By the twentieth century tattooing had evolved into a complex art form with ink and watercolor designs that had achieved a degree of acceptance. Most tattoo artists worked in cramped booths in local barber shops in the Chatham Square area of Manhattan, tattooing day laborers and tourists who went “slumming” on the nearby Bowery. When Social Security was initiated in the 1930s, people who had trouble remembering their numbers had them tattooed onto their skin. But most tattoo parlors had as neighbors the saloons and flophouses of the Bowery, sanctuaries for the desperate, the drunk, and the defeated, which did little to enhance their image. Then, in 1961, with a world’s fair looming in the city, the Health Department decreed that tattooing was the cause of a hepatitis outbreak and got it declared illegal. But the trade persisted, albeit by night in apartments and basements. It thrived in the rebellious 1960s and the punk wave of the 1980s, and finally, in 1997, the ban was lifted, and the underground art became, in some circles, all the rage. Now considered an art form, tattooing invaded the galleries and finally even the museums, which brings us to the exhibit at the New York Historical Society; how much more “in,” more mainstream can you get?
Here's how it's done.Eneas De Troya
Today there are tattoo parlors all over the five boroughs, and they often specialize. Some do cartoons, others offer Japanese or Polynesian designs, or skulls, psychedelic patterns, monster heads, birds of paradise, crosses, and of course the inevitable and time-sanctioned Old Glory. Depending on your choice of tattoos, you can come off as sweet and soft, weird, funny, patriotic, menacing, or defiant. As for the tattoo artists themselves, photos show gentle old men in T-shirts, bearded machos, bespectacled Asians, and females with bold red lips and fiercely mascaraed eyes, the arms of all of them, and sometimes the legs as well, richly and imaginatively adorned. So if you want to be “modified,” to undergo change and adventure, Bang Bang and Sweet Sue and Megan Massacre are waiting for you. Some of them even take walk-ins and a few, to conciliate vegans, use animal-free inks. The price? $100 and up. Sometimes way, way up.
Cemetery archivist. Yes, we’ve done archivists already, but really just one, and she was a hotel archivist. But cemeteries – especially the old ones – have more than the dear departed on hand, so they need archivists, too. Take Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which dates from 1838, and through whose broad manicured lawns and noble monuments I once treaded long ago, while doing research for a biography. Today, in an office near the imposing Gothic Revival gatehouse the archivist, Anthony M. Cucchiara, guards treasures retrieved from a boiler room and garbage heaps and now displayed in glass cases or stacked in piles waiting to be sorted. There are mausoleum keys; photos and filmstrips of the deeased; a ledger recording deaths from scarlet fever, dysentery, and mania in the 1840s; and an 1853 letter from President Millard Fillmore declining an invitation to the inauguration of a statue in the cemetery. Queries come in from researchers all over the world, and Mr. Cucchiara is there to answer them. He finds preserving documents and making them accessible extremely rewarding. “It’s fun to bring them to life,” he says, ever ready even in these circumstances to elicit a smile.
Forensic pathologist. You work in a long blue monkey suit, gloved, a white cap on your head, and a blue mask over your nose and mouth. Surrounding you are your colleagues, similarly robed, gloved, capped, and masked, and close by is your toolbox containing knives, forceps, scalpels, and scissors. You and your colleagues cluster around a subject on a gurney who is mottled green from decomposition. You cut into the torso; a greenish fluid oozes out. You reach both hands into the body, search for the liver, can’t find it; your gloves drip. You crack open the chest with clippers, remove the heart and the lungs. A whirling saw opens the skull so you can reach in and lift out the brain. When you are done, you go on to the next subject, and then the next and the next. Such is the work of a forensic pathologist in a city program training medical examiners, the officials who perform autopsies on deceased persons whose deaths are sudden or suspicious, or result from crimes, accidents, or suicides. It is an occupation in great demand throughout the country, and New York City, where every conceivable kind of death can be encountered, is a renowned training ground for the profession.
Examining a digitized body. This way it's less messy.Infovalley
Your day starts at 8 a.m. in the drab building at 520 First Avenue that houses the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, where you present case histories to senior medical examiners, forensic anthropologists, police detectives, and medical students. Then you check the body bags in the mortuary, and by 9:30 a.m. you’re in the autopsy room getting started on your first case of the day. By afternoon, after seeing to at least three cases, you reconvene with the other trainees to report your findings. Then you go to the fellows’ room to draft a report for each autopsy, following which you might order lab tests, interview relatives, and consider other evidence before closing a case. Seeing the relatives can be disturbing; some trainees can’t help at times but weep. But others derive comfort from the thought that they are the last person to care for the deceased, bridging their death and life. Obviously it’s not an occupation for the squeamish; you wouldn’t be in it if you didn’t think it important, and if what you see everyday put you off. In a city like New York, it’s absolutely necessary and always will be, which in itself is some kind of consolation. And it doesn’t hurt that it pays well, too. On this happy note, I’ll conclude.
Source notes: For this post I am again indebted to articles in the New York Times:
Sam Roberts, “Richard Basciano Dies at 91; Times Square Sultan of Smut” (May 7, 2017).
Robin Pogrebin, “A Billionaire Builds His Passion Into a Museum” (July 29, 2016).
Holland Cotter, “Ink: How It Got Under New York’s Thick Skin” (February 3, 2017).
Eve M. Kahn, “A Brooklyn Cemetery Is a Resting Place Rich in History” (July 15, 2016).
Winnie Hu, “Learning to Speak for the Dead” (June 12, 2016).
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BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: Maybe a post on BookCon 2017, where I and 25,000 attendees are right now colliding. Maybe one post on exhibitors and another on attendees. Some wild stuff is happening.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
May 28, 2017
300. New York Occupations: Strange, Unique, and Weird
The release date for Bill Hope: His Story was May 17, so those who have already ordered it from Amazon should be receiving it shortly, and anyone who wishes to order it can do so and have it promptly shipped.
For six LibraryThing prepublication reviews of Bill Hope:
His Story by viennamax, stephvin, Cricket2014, Shoosty, terry19802, and graham072442, go here and scroll down.
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New York City, with its great diversity, has every kind of occupation, some unusual, some unique, and a few just flat-out weird. This post and the next will have a look at some of them.
Structural engineer. Suppose you’re buying an old house or a brownstone. How do you know if it’s architecturally sound? Before closing the deal you hire a structural engineer to look it over. A walk-through inspection costs $400 to $800, but if it saves you from acquiring a nightmare, it’s worth it.
[image error] Maybe they needed a structural engineer.서울특별시 소방재난본부
Environmental consultant. Environmental regulations can be a baffling maze of requirements, and New York is fiercely regulated. In old buildings, asbestos may have been used in construction, and lead in paint; both are toxic. Waste must be disposed of properly; your building may be in a flood zone; your planned renovation may have undesirable consequences; and so on. If, as a property owner or business, you aren’t sure if you’re complying and you fear a fine, you hire an environmental consultant to make sure you’re in compliance.
Sidewalk vendor. They’re all over the place, selling food, accessories, souvenirs, art, and books. But Kirk Davidson, who sells books on the west side of Broadway near 73rdStreet on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is a special kind of vendor, for he has been there for years, a neighborhood fixture, and leaves his stock out overnight under plastic. He began with a flimsy folding table and a few items in 1986, but now offers a host of books stacked high on ten or more tables. Some neighbors approve, others say his tables are an eyesore and block a congested sidewalk. Over the years he has been served with summonses and suffered seizures of his stock, but has usually won dismissals by pointing out errors in the summonses and citing laws on free speech. But that’s not the end of it, for he then sues the city for unlawful enforcement and seizure, and claims to have netted settlements totaling $80,000. Recently the city assigned two police officers on rotating shifts to make sure his tables were not left unattended, which violates the law – an assignment, Mr. Davidson emphasizes, that costs taxpayers unconscionable sums. No question, he’s a real New Yorker, full of chutzpah and hustle, but now he’s decided to limit himself to four tables, “just enough to pay my bills and live on.”
Hennem08Hotel archivist. A hotel with its very own archivist? Weird. But not if the hotel in question is the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue between East 49th and 50th Streets in Manhattan, a luxury hotel famous for its two-tiered ballroom, its celebrity residents, and a vast lobby that I used to visit briefly, to hear harp music drifting gently down from a harpist on a balcony above. The archivist, Granada-born Deirdre Dinnigan, sits in a cramped room in a windowless corner of the hotel’s second-floor administrative offices, cataloguing and researching more than 4,000 objects that include filigreed brass room numbers, menus, letters, staff uniforms and linens, fine china, ashtrays, silverware, and yellowing ads from the 1950s – a job she loves. But a Chinese insurance company bought the hotel in 2014 and plans to convert it into luxury condominiums with a much smaller hotel component. While the hotel will include the archive, Ms. Dinnigan is worried about keeping her job. Meanwhile she’s working diligently to catalogue materials and also to record the oral histories of longtime employees. But in March the hotel shut down for its two-year renovation, forcing guests to leave, some of them in tears.
Wigmaker. He has 600 pounds of hair – gray, brown, and blond – in his Staten Island garage, where the hairs sit in bundles and, uncoiled, are three feet long and almost reach the ground. He is Nicholas Piazza, the grandson of Sicilian immigrants, who for decades made custom wigs and hairpieces for such luminaries as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor, and singer Lena Horne. He is one of the few remaining Old World wigmakers, trained mostly by Jewish and Italian immigrants in the centuries-old trade of making wigs by hand, an intricate process producing hairlines that blend into the skin. But wig-making today is not a dying industry, since celebrities have made it an “in” thing, very cool, and wigs are also in demand for Metropolitan operas and Broadway musicals. Yet the master wigmakers of old are fading away, replaced by imports from China, where the painstaking work is done by thousands of factory workers. And since hairlines are really a challenge, lots of today’s wigs feature bangs. Genuine human hair has become hard to obtain, but at age 68, working part-time in a Midtown salon, Mr. Piazza has enough to last him out. And the cost of his wigs? $3,850 and up.
U.S. Coast Survey, Coast Chart No. 21, New York Bay and Harbor, 1861. Staten Islandand Brooklyn almost kiss at the Narrows. To continue in an erotic mode, the erection at
the bottom of the map is Sandy Hook.
Channel master. In this age of air travel it’s easy to forget that ocean liners and cargo ships come and go in the port of New York. But the Outer Harbor – the waters beyond the Narrows but this side of Sandy Hook – is a maze of shallow channels between shifting sandbars, and to negotiate those channels requires the knowledge and skill of members of the Sandy Hook Pilots Association. (A brief geographical note: The Narrows is where the entrance to the harbor is the narrowest, between Brooklyn and Staten Island. Sandy Hook is a long, thin finger of land that sticks out from New Jersey to enclose the Outer Harbor, beyond which lies the open sea.) It is the job of these 75 pilots (4 of them women) to go out in small boats to board incoming and outgoing vessels and guide them through these channels. Their job is more essential than ever today, since the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989 and spilled millions of gallons of heavy black crude; such an accident in the waters around New York would be disastrous for the U.S. economy. But today the pilots are maritime college graduates, and after a five-year apprenticeship they take a four-day state exam that requires them to know every rock, reef, shoal, pipeline, and cable in the harbor. Calm waters make their job easier; bad weather with high winds is another matter.
A pilot boat in the Inner Harbor, 2007.Crematory manager. The walls are lined with niches containing the ashes of deceased New Yorkers, some of the remains in old cinerary urns displayed in glass-encased time capsules with displays of photographs and keepsakes. The interior of the building has marble floors and walls, stained-glass windows, Oriental rugs, and antique furniture. But towering above the neo-Classical building is a smokestack to convey heavenward – or at least skyward – the fumes from incineration, for this is the Fresh Pond Crematory in Middle Village, Queens, presided over by J.P. Di Troia, president, and his wife, the vice president. Mr. Di Troia insists that cremation is an efficient and graceful alternative to burial, and his four high-temperature retorts have performed 270,000 cremations since Fresh Pond opened in the mid-1880s. His uncle ran the place when Mr. Di Troia was a child, and he began working there at age 17 and subsequently worked his way up to vice president, and then to president when his uncle died. He considers himself the keeper of 40,000 souls (Ring Lardner among them), and when he leaves each night, he says good-bye to them. Adorned with mementos of the departed, the niches, he insists, are a celebration of lives.
A modern crematory oven. You think crematory manager is a rather strange occupation, even weird? Wait till you see what’s in next week’s post.
Source note: For much of the information in this post, I am indebted to articles in various editions of the New York Times:
Corey Kilgannon, “A Sidewalk Vendor Amasses Books, Lawsuits and Nearly 200 Summonses” (August 11, 2017).
Julie Satow, “Meet the Keeper of the Waldorf Astoria’s Salad Days” (July 24, 2016).
Annie Correal, “Last of the Master Wigmakers” (April 9, 2017).
Emily S. Rueb, “Channel Masters in a Crowded Harbor” (November 20, 2016).
Corey Kilgannon, “Keeper of 40,000 Souls” (September 11, 2016).
* * * * *
BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: The Sultan of Smut, an $800 million collection (and it isn’t smut), Bang Bang and Megan Massacre, deaths from mania in the 1840s, and cracking open a chest (the human kind) with clippers: more where-but-in-New-York occupations.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
May 21, 2017
299. The Chelsea, the Craziest of Hotels
The release date for Bill Hope: His Story was last Wednesday, May 17, so those who have already ordered it from Amazon should be receiving it shortly, and anyone who wishes to order it can do so and have it promptly shipped.
For six LibraryThing prepublication reviews of Bill Hope:
His Story by viennamax, stephvin, Cricket2014, Shoosty, terry19802, and graham072442, go here and scroll down.
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Imagine a landmarked hotel with a handsome wrought-iron interior stairwell and walls adorned with art, but now described as a junky-infested flophouse pulsing with creative energy. A hotel where young singers check in, write a few songs, and check out, then use the illustrious name of the hotel to help sell their records. A hotel where young would-be starlets stay for a few weeks to suck up the bohemian atmosphere, then check out and hopefully go on to greater things, or maybe never check out and grow old and weird, becoming fixtures in the weirdest of scenes. A hotel where young punk rockers in black leather jackets, tattered clothing, and mohawks lounge about in the lobby, adorned with black eye makeup and tattoos, and at intervals beg to stay in room 100, only to be told, “There is no room 100!” Imagine a hotel where film crews suddenly arrive with trailers blocking the street, set up tables on the sidewalk, and pile junk in front of the door, then crowd the lobby and stairwells and elevators, shooting TV episodes and even big-budget Hollywood films, yelling all the time and running noisy machines that blow the hotel’s fuses. A hotel where residents might come home to see a naked model posing for a film crew right in front of the door to their room. Where the tenants wear black leather or the latest high fashion, or blue hair, or a rumpled suit that makes them look like Dylan Thomas, or T-shirts and khakis like they wore in college. Where the bathroom may have a floor, sink, shower curtain, and tub caked with black, greasy grime, or blood on the toilet and floor, and old needles and baggies strewn about, deposited by trespassing junkies. A hotel where, whenever tenants complain to the manager, he denies flat-out that anything going on is illegal or out of order or wrong.
Welcome to the legendary Chelsea Hotel, a venerable 12-story Victorian Gothic structure at 222 West 23rd Street in Chelsea, long a haven for struggling writers, artists, musicians, outlaws, freaks, and crazies. Built in 1883 as a lavishly decorated co-op apartment residence, in 1905 it became a residential hotel catering to theater luminaries like Sarah Bernhardt, who reputedly slept in a coffin, as well as Lillian Russell, Mark Twain, and (under various names, in hiding from the law) O. Henry. In the 1930s the brooding novelist Thomas Wolfe lived in room 831, where he wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.
Beyond My Ken
The 1940s and 1950s were hard times for the Chelsea: stained-glass windows, mirrors, and ornate woodwork were torn out, as spacious suites were divided up into tiny rooms, and the hotel became little more than a flophouse. Many of the old residents refused to vacate, thus preserving some of the original architectural detail, and impecunious writers continued to flock there. It was at the Chelsea – where else? – that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, having imbibed heavily at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, collapsed, and was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died a few days later. In the 1960s various Andy Warhol superstars checked in, and Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls was shot there in 1966. Bob Dylan resided there from 1961 to 1964, as did other cultural luminosities and oddities, including Valerie Solanas, famous for shooting Andy Warhol. Punk rockers and gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe frequented the hotel in the 1970s, followed by Madonna and various artists in the 1980s and beyond. Indeed, one might ask who of the cultural elite didn’t show up there at one time or another. Or at least, who of the avant-garde crowd of the time, usually in the early and less recognized phase of their career.
The Chelsea's wrought-iron stairwell.Calton Presiding over this weirdest and most creative of hotels was its proprietor, Stanley Bard, who was born in the Bronx in 1934 to Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His father had bought an ownership stake in the place in 1947, and the son began working there as a plumber’s assistant just ten years later. After that he got a B.A. in accounting from New York University and served in the Army following the Korean War. When his father died in 1964, Stanley took over, thus inaugurating the Chelsea’s era of greatness … and weirdness. Round-faced with blue eyes and a hearty grin, he was partial to creative types of every stripe and hue, welcomed them with open arms, and was amazingly indulgent when it came to lapses in behavior and the payment of rent. Word of his benign management soon spread, which explains the influx of creative personalities mixed in with assorted deadbeats and weirdos. Not that the Chelsea of recent times was the elegant hostelry of yore. The halls were dimly lit with long fluorescent tubes; the walls had cracked plaster, peeling paint, and exposed wires; the furniture was old and crumbling, the carpets stained and dirty; and pests roamed freely in the utter absence of exterminators. But if anyone complained of roaches or mice, or a lack of heat or running water, or violence in the halls, or a filthy bathroom littered with the paraphernalia of junkies, Stanley Bard simply denied the facts put forth to him. According to him, the writers and artists on the premises were happy, brilliant, and prosperous, glad to be living in the Chelsea’s luxurious accommodations. Con man or perennial optimist gazing through rose-tinted spectacles, he maintained this illusion for over 40 years, while tolerating or even encouraging the eccentricities of tenants. If an artist who owed him two months’ rent came to him in tears, fearing eviction, he would say, “Don’t worry, keep painting, keep painting.” In spite of the hotel’s deteriorating conditions, creativity flourished and evictions were rare.
The lobby of the Chelsea Hotel in 2010. Historystuff2
In Legends of the Chelsea Hotel Ed Hamilton, himself a resident, chronicles the strange people and stranger doings typical of the hotel. For instance:
· An underground filmmaker who claimed he had become a voodoo priest in Haiti and had a Zombie slave in his apartment.· A drunk resident who scared his neighbors by practicing swordsmanship in the hall, having got a role in a Shakespeare play.· A white-haired lady who threatened junkies with a gun whenever they tried to shoot up in her bathroom. · An aging actress living on food stamps who hadn’t paid rent in seven years.· A delusional photographer who claimed mysterious intruders were trying to steal his photographs.· A young woman who worked off and on as a model and put off paying rent, promising to pay it when she sold a Larry Rivers painting worth fifty thousand dollars, but who finally had to move out.
But there were famous residents as well. After his breakup with Marilyn Monroe in 1960, playwright Arthur Miller moved in, wanting a quiet place where he could work in peace, but was soon badgering Stanley to send someone up to his room to vacuum a carpet caked with grit. Jack Kerouac may or may not have written On the Road on the premises (accounts differ), but evidently had sex there with Gore Vidal. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it was there that Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch.
And there were grim doings as well. When a junky died in one of the rooms, the police took over the ninth floor, and tenants were barred from going up, until a body bag was removed on a stretcher. “What’s going on on the ninth floor?” someone asked Stanley Bard. “Nothing,” said Bard. “Why would you ask that?” “There were cops all over the place!” “No there weren’t.” “Yes there were!” “You may have seen one or two policemen. They probably have a room here.” “Joe’s dead, isn’t he?” “Joe? Oh no, Joe’s fine. He just went on a little vacation. Europe, I think. He’ll be back in a couple of years, I’m sure.” Stanley Bard’s denial of unpleasant reality was absolute and unflinching. Nothing of the incident appeared in the papers, and tenants almost wondered if they had seen a body bag or not.
Sid Vicious, January 1978.Chicago Art Department
Room 100 – the one the young punk rockers kept clamoring to stay in – had witnessed another horrendous event not easily denied. On the morning of October 12, 1978, Sid Vicious, formerly with the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, woke up in a drug-induced stupor, found his girlfriend Nancy Spungen stabbed to death in the bathroom, and called the police. In his confused state of mind Vicious confessed to the crime and then denied it, and was promptly arrested and charged with murder. Four months later he died of an overdose while out on bail awaiting trial. His guilt seemed obvious to many, but some have argued that a drug dealer killed her while Vicious was unconscious, and others have asserted that Nancy killed herself. So began the legend that brought young punk rockers flocking to the Chelsea in hopes of gaining access to the room; when management denied its existence, they carved their initials into the door with their switchblades, and improvised memorials by putting roses in empty liquor bottles with cigarettes, joints, used needles, and love notes. Some even carved the wall with slogans:
TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIEDON’T LET THEM TAKE YOU ALIVELOVE KILLS
Bard replaced the door several times, then tore out the walls and divided up the rooms in the apartment between the two adjacent rooms. So from then on, when he told the rockers there was no room 100, he was telling the truth. But the young punk rockers still flocked to the hotel. To stay in the Chelsea Hotel required nerves of steel and endurance; it wasn’t for the timid, the sensitive, or those needing rest and quiet.
And the hotel today? It was overtaken by the relentless gentrification of the Chelsea neighborhood, which doomed its status as a sanctuary for artists and weirdos. In 2007 Stanley Bard was forced out by the heirs of the other co-owners, who then sold it, and in 2011 it was closed for renovations. When Bard died in Florida in February 2017, he rated a lengthy obit in the Times. Long-time residents remain in the hotel to this day, harassed by construction noises. The present owners plan to reopen it in 2018, but, renovated and scrubbed up, it will not be the Chelsea of legend. I walked by it recently and found the façade masked by lofty blue scaffolding above, and the ground floor fronted by tunnel-like scaffolding with a plaque beside the entrance announcing the building’s listing with the National Register of Historic Places. Flanking it in the tunnel is Doughnut Plant on one side and Chelsea Guitars on the other.
Source note: For much of the information in this post I am indebted to Ed Hamilton’s Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). For more about the Chelsea, you can’t do better than read this memoir.
* * * * * *
BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: Strange occupations in New York City. Who cares for the fine chinaware and filigreed brass room numbers from the Waldorf Astoria's legendary past? Who made Jackie Kennedy Onassis's wigs? Who brings the ships in safely through the shallow, sandbar-ridden Outer Harbor? Who calls himself the keeper of 40,000 souls and says good-bye to them every night when he leaves for home? More where-but-in-New-York stories.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
May 14, 2017
298. Matriarchs
For six LibraryThing prepublication reviews of Bill Hope:
His Story by viennamax, stephvin, Cricket2014, Shoosty, terry19802, and graham072442, go here and scroll down.
* * * * * *
In honor of Mother’s Day I have decided to discuss matriarchs, though a matriarch is not necessarily a mother, and a mother is not necessarily a matriarch. Even in supposedly patriarchal societies, matriarchs rule with a heavy hand. They come in all sizes, shapes, and persuasions, but for me the quintessential matriarch is WASP to the core: dominant, often prejudiced and set in her ways, but with an admirable sense of social responsibility and justice. If someone does her a service, she will certainly repay them in some way; not to do so would be reprehensible. Interspersed in the text that follows are photographs of matriarchs of various societies; see if you can find any common denominator.
Mathilda Wahlberg von Reis (1827-1917),a Swedish matriarch. Long ago, reading a biography of Edith Wharton, I encountered a description of one of her grandmothers who was certainly a matriarch. An elderly widow, she could no longer handle the stairs in her brownstone, so she had moved downstairs into a rear parlor. When, at her insistence, the family assembled in the front parlor, her ample presence, enthroned in an armchair, was carried by four sweating cousins. That brief mention sets the scene perfectly; who can doubt but that this woman radiated power?
Analea Keohokalole (1816-1869), a Hawaiian matriarch.Have I myself known matriarchs? My maternal grandmother was a soft and gentle soul, the wife of a judge, but no matriarch. My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, had a firm and spiny quality to her, and was full of sound, good sense. She must have shown rare intelligence right from the start, for her father had her attend a local college in Indiana that was just beginning to admit women. When her husband, my father’s father – a brilliant young lawyer spoiled by his adoring mother and sisters – became a hopeless alcoholic with no sign of recovery, she divorced him, wanting no alimony, and sent her four young sons out on the street to sell newspapers. Divorce was rare in those days, but Grandmother Browder wanted no more of a pathetically addicted spouse. Living with my Aunt Emma and her husband on the near south side of Chicago, my grandmother often visited us in Evanston, just north of the city. I can still see her arriving at the door dressed in sober black, a rather lean and bony figure with a tasseled cane. She often sat down with me and told me stories from the Bible, which she didn’t take literally, usually finding some natural explanation for seeming miracles. But she was full of practical advice as well. “Hal,” she told me more than once, addressing me with my childhood nickname, “don’t ever be afraid to talk to a politician. They have to listen to you.” She should know; by approaching local politicians she got all her sons jobs as pages in the state legislature in Indianapolis, and by approaching Indiana’s two senators and her congressional representative she got her youngest son into Annapolis. And this back when women were supposed to stay locked in the domestic sphere and couldn’t vote. She was a great talker, but so were all her family. At the dinner table they would all talk at once, voicing strong opinions, and she often found herself looking from one diner to another to find a listener, and usually settled on me. Since in such circumstances she was hardly dominant, perhaps she isn’t quite the quintessential matriarch.
Phoebe Apperson Hearst (1842-1919), matriarch of the Hearst family,mother of the journalist William Randolph Hearst.
A true matriarch was the maternal grandmother of my friend Spenser, who told me stories of her. She was from south Evanston, nearer Chicago, and viewed residents of north Evanston like my family with just a trace of suspicion; we were newcomers, definitely not old money, intruders muddying the waters of settled Evanston society. Even her son-in-law, Spenser’s father, was slightly suspect, bringing to the family solid money but little social position or prestige. When Spenser was about nine he heard Grandmama tell his mother, unaware of his presence nearby, her opinion of King Edward VIII of England abdicating the throne so he could marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, an American socialite and – horrors! – a divorcee. “He has abandoned the ship of state,” she announced, “for a tramp steamer!” Poise and presence of mind she certainly had. Spenser told me how she hosted the family’s Thanksgiving dinners. On one memorable occasion Lily, her African American servant, entered with the turkey on a platter while beaming a triumphant smile, then tripped and, to the dismay of all, sent the turkey rolling across the floor. “That’s quite all right, Lily,” said the grandmother. “Bring in the other turkey.” So Lily retrieved the fallen turkey, disappeared into the kitchen, and minutes later, walking very carefully, entered the dining room again with the “other” turkey, and a good dinner was had by all.
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Neneh Houca, circa 1981, a Senegalese matriarch.Matriarchs have often been presented in films. Joan Crawford repeatedly played variations of the queen bee, and Jo Van Fleet could do such roles marvelously. They are the kind of role that veteran character actresses long for. In theater, Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest usually steals the show with her mannered speech and arrogance. A more recent example is found in Tracy Letts’s award-winning play August: Osage County, where Violet Weston dominates her family, reassembled after the death of her husband; though addicted to prescription drugs, she is ruthlessly assertive.
In his novel A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul describes an Indian family in Trinidad, the Tulsis, who live together communally in the same decaying house and are dominated by a matriarch. Whenever anything untoward occurs – usually the fault of a son-in-law – the mother falls into a state of collapse, and the daughters cluster attentively around her, while the sons-in-law stand about helplessly, and the children, seeing that no one is watching over them, run wild. Which shows that seeming vulnerability is yet another way to dominate a family.
Queen Victoria, 1887. They don't come more matriarchal than this.A matriarch of a different sort was the mother I heard about in a moving story narrated by one of her sons on the radio. When he announces to his family that he is gay, all seems to go well, but he soon learns otherwise. While he is away in college his mother instructs the family to assemble all his belongings in the back yard – his books, clothing, photographs, everything -- and when they have done so, she sets fire to the pile and watches as the flames consume the last vestiges of her absent son. Her authority is such that no one objects or interferes. The son soon learns that he is no longer welcome in the house and spends the next several years in a state of shock and dismay. Finally, having received no answer to his letters, he confronts his mother at her office. When she comes down the hall and sees him there, unannounced, she quietly turns her back on him and retreats, having said not a word. They never see each other again, and only after her death is he able to communicate with other family members, who did not approve of her action but could not in any way change it. Such is the matriarch at her fearful worst.
Another breed of matriarch was described to me by a friend of a friends who once visited acquaintances in a small Southern town. Dominating society there was a lady of the old school, perhaps a widow, who when she walked down the street was greeted respectfully by name, with a tipped hat, by every man who crossed her path. When the Northern visitor, whose name was O’Malley, was introduced to her in her home, she quietly remarked, “I don’t suppose a Yankee has been in this house since the Civil War. And your name is O’Malley – Irish, of course, and that means Catholic.” A long pause, then: “Mr. O’Malley, I hope we can be friends.” With this invitation, and the handshake that accompanied it, history was made.
* * * * * *
BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: The legendary Chelsea Hotel, where artists and writers rubbed elbows with junkies and deadbeats, and the manager denied that anything was amiss, when the police brought a tenant down in a body bag.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
May 11, 2017
297. New York: Names for a Big and Sinful City
For six LibraryThing prepublication reviews of Bill Hope:
His Story by viennamax, stephvin, Cricket2014, Shoosty,
terry19802, and graham072442, go here and scroll down.
* * * * * *
Pearls of wisdom from that great American thinker, Yogi Berra:
You can observe a lot by just watching.
No one goes there nowadays, it's too crowded.
A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore.
Ninety percent of the game is half mental.
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What’s in a name? New York has many names, as for instance:
· The Big Apple· Gotham· Metropolis· The City That Never Sleeps· The Empire City· Gomorrah· Sodom
· Babylon on the Hudson
But where did these monikers come from?
The Big Apple. There are lots of suggestions. Was the city once full of apple orchards? Was there once a madam of a brothel named Eve? (If so, where was Adam?) And so on. It seems that back in the 1920s John Joseph Fitz Gerald, a racing writer for the New York Morning Telegraph, heard some stable hands in New Orleans refer to New York as “the big apple that all horsemen aspire to race at.” He used the name in his column, and other writers adopted it. Widespread use came in 1971 as part of an official tourist campaign, and it has been used ever since. In my favorite little riverside park near the Hudson there is a bronze sculpture by Stephen Weiss of an apple with a hole in it that people like to crawl through – one of many renderings of the name. (Yes, I mentioned it in the previous post.)
Gotham. Washington Irving used the name in an 1807 issue of his literary magazine Salmagundi, while mentioning the legends of an English village named Gotham in Nottinghamshire. In the 1940s it appeared as the name of the city where Batman and Robin darted over rooftops in pursuit of evildoers, a sexy comics twosome if ever there was one.
Gotham, Nottinghamshire. Not quite the Gotham we're familiar with.Andy Jamieson
Metropolis. Not widely used like the others, but the name of the city where Superman did his stuff. Comic magazines of the 1940s seemed to think New York needed superhuman help.
One way to clear the streets.Gary Dunai
The City That Never Sleeps. First used in a 1912 article by the Fort Wayne News. Popularized by the song “New York, New York” in the 1977 film of the same name. Yes, in this city something is always happening somewhere even in the depths of night. When I returned from a Maine vacation on an all-night Greyhound bus ride, the moment we reached Harlem and the West Side of Manhattan in the early hours of Sunday, you could see people on the streets, and stores with their lights ablaze, proof that a lot of New Yorkers are night owls.
AmericasroofThe Empire City. If New York is the Empire State, why not? And would the state have that name, if the city wasn’t a part of it? I doubt it. Yes, New York merits being called the Empire City. George Washington allegedly said, “Surely this is the seat of the empire,” and the name appeared in a newspaper in 1836.
If this isn't an empire city, what is?Bernt Untiedt
Gomorrah. One of several Biblical names used to designate the sinful city. Popularized by Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmadge in 1875 at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a nondenominational church in Brooklyn.
Sodom. The inevitable companion to Gomorrah, though I can’t document it. I’m sure that it was used by ministers from the provinces in the late nineteenth century, when they came here to witness in person the sins and vices of the big city, so they could go back home and regale their pious congregations with vivid descriptions of same. (There is, by the way, a town named Sodom in Putnam County, New York, but that’s another matter.)
Lot flees as Sodom and Gomorrah burn. Many a minister has wished the same on New York. Gustave Doré, 1875.
Babylon on the Hudson. Perhaps an invention of mine, since I have used it in my historical fiction, but again, surely it was used by those visiting ministers eager to witness and chronicle the city’s dissolution. New York could of course be likened to the Whore of Babylon in the book of Revelations. And if you Google the name, you’ll find references to a You Tube video suggesting that New York may quite literally be the wicked Babylon that God had in mind when speaking of the end times. And Amazon offers for sale a 1932 book entitled Babylon on Hudson by Anonymous, hardcover, for a mere $39.99, which is a sly way of saying forty bucks.
The Whore of Babylon, as rendered by the English artist Henry John Stock, 1902.
Ah, those late Victorians.
To which I might add: The Locomotive Pulling the Rest of the Nation into the World of Tomorrow. This and similar phrases were uttered by urban boosters in the late nineteenth century, when New York was leading the way in finance, fashion, lighting, transportation, and the telephone.
If I don’t add “Sin City” to the above, it’s because that is the name of strip club in the Bronx where, the Internet assures me, “anything goes,” as for instance drugs, noise, and public drinking and urination. Online reviews range from “awesome” and “warm and welcoming” to “creepy” and “going to hell,” with the warning to watch your wallet, and an assertion that the girls “smell like a can of tuna left open for days.” Is this New York City writ small? No, that would be grossly unfair to the city. I’m sure that most of our strippers don’t smell like aged tuna.
* * * * * *
BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: Maybe the Chelsea Hotel, a mecca of free spirits, junkies, and deadbeats, where you might come back and find a naked model posing for film crews in front of the door to your room.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
May 7, 2017
296. Wonders of a West Village Walk
For six LibraryThing prepublication reviews of Bill Hope: His Story by viennamax, stephvin, Cricket2014, Shoosty, terry19802, and graham072442, go here and scroll down.
* * * * * *
Pearls of wisdom from that great American thinker, Yogi Berra:
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Never answer an anonymous letter.
Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
* * * * * *
This post is about a walk I took in the West Village on Sunday, April 30, an overcast day with a bit of wind. Nothing spectacular happened, just a series of small adventures that demonstrate the richness of trivia available in many New York City neighborhoods where one can walk casually without the trouble of a car and the need to find a parking space.
Was this the source of my high?Nick Lott First, my brunch at Philip Marie, a popular restaurant at the corner of West 11th and Hudson, but a block from my building. They put me at a table with a good view of the table by the front window and the busy sidewalk outside. As I consumed my yogurt with strawberries and granola, followed by apple and pear cobbler a la mode and -- unusual for me -- a cappuccino, I took note of the diners nearby. At the table by the window were two young guys with beards, probably a couple, who were talking earnestly. To my right, at a table for four against the wall, were three young women who were talking with great animation, often howling with laughter. Probably they were young professionals enjoying their weekend off. Though I could see one of them whose face was very expressive, and whose hands were constantly gesturing, I couldn't get snatches of their conversation. At the table next to them, barely visible from mine, were two elderly men, probably gay but not lovers. At other tables not visible from mine were young couples, and families with young children. All in all, a feisty mix typical of the West Village.
In addition to these neighbors in the restaurant, I could see a group of some six or eight young gay men out on the street that got bigger as more young men, and one young African American woman, joined them. There was much joking and laughter and many hugs of friendship, as opposed to hugs of love, but they hardly noticed when an ambulance with flashing lights but no siren raced past them on Hudson Street, a reminder of mortality in the midst of youthfulness and joy. Next, after some hesitation and arguing, the group slowly drifted away down West 11th toward the river.
Leaving the restaurant, I decided to follow them toward the river. Not having walked over to the river since autumn, I wanted to stretch my legs and go at least part way. At the corner of West 11th and Greenwich Street, just opposite the Spotted Pig restaurant, I noticed a boutique I had never seen there before. It seemed ablaze with color and the door was wide open, so in I went, and found myself the only visitor, surrounded by elegant displays of female footwear, some flowery and some bejeweled, plus handbags and other accessories, all of the items bright with colors but always tasteful and, I was sure, pricey in the extreme. This, I learned from the young woman in charge, was the flagship boutique of Ivy Kirzhner, featuring her spring 2017 collection, and they had been there for a year without my knowing it. The display was dazzling, even though I was not the intended target, and I complimented the young woman on it and collected a card announcing “Ivy Kirzhner, New York.” Later I would Google her and discover that she is a seductively attractive young woman with distinctly Asian features and dark hair topped by a large bun, New York born and bred (Ivy, not the bun), whose products have attracted a cult celebrity. And her very un-Asian name? She is married to artist and photographer Alex R. Kirzhner and lives in the city with him and a rambunctious little bulldog named Hamlet Bacon. Tasteful goods, trendy and pricey: very New York, giving me a quick glance into an aspect of the city I have rarely experienced: fashion.
Going on from there toward the river, I forgot to look up at the controversial Palazzo Chupi, a pink architectural monstrosity (or daring innovation; opinions differ) that I have chronicled before. Reaching the river, I crossed West Street and walked along the riverfront to Pier 46 at the foot of Charles Street. Going out on the pier, I found a large group of families with young children having a picnic on the artificial grass, with a host of colored balloons: a reminder that the West Village is more than gay guys of all ages and young hetero professionals not yet settled into long-term relationships and the responsibilities that such relationships impose. It was a real fun scene.
Next I went to the Millennium Garden, my favorite riverside garden, a dog-free sanctuary featuring artist Stephen Weiss’s three-ton bronze sculpture “Apple,” a large apple with a hole through it that visitors are not supposed to crawl through, though the younger set, being New Yorkers, usually do. A plaque tells you that Weiss dedicated the work to the city of New York and to his neighbors of the Far West Village, of whom I cannot count myself one, since my building is a bit too removed from the river. I had the garden to myself, but what caught my eye this time was not the sculpture, but scores of tulips in full bloom all around me. Some were orange and red with hints of yellow, and others, not as tall, were what I decided was a very dark crimson, maybe not quite purple, since they had no hint of blue: a beautiful color that I had trouble labeling. Crimson, I have since learned from the Internet, is a “deep red color inclining to purple,” so maybe that’s what it was after all. Whereas scarlet is a bright, brash red, crimson strikes me as being dark and mysterious. Never before have I seen flowers of just this color or been so obsessed with identifying it. Spring madness, or just a cappuccino high?
Coming back along the river, I saw three ducks a short ways from the shore, but couldn’t identify them because there was no sunlight; maybe male mallards. Then I looked up and suddenly discovered, steaming downstream right opposite me in the river, a huge cruise ship, the hugest I have ever seen, with at least ten tiers of staterooms capable of housing hundreds of guests on voyages to distant places. Others were staring at it too, and when I asked a man who was photographing it what it was, he squinted at the vessel and said, “Norwegian Cruise Line.” So the Vikings have come to us and in this case, so he told me, have visited the Intrepid, a World War II aircraft carrier now serving as a museum at Pier 86, uptown at Twelfth Avenue and West 46th Street. Later, Googling the line on the Internet, I learned that there are a host of these giant vessels – the Norwegian Bliss, Norwegian Epic, Norwegian Spirit, Norwegian anything -- any one of which might have been the one that I saw. And what do they offer us? Trips to the Caribbean, Bermuda, the Mexican Riviera (wherever that is), and even Alaska: a whiff of international adventure (at a cost) to season my little West Village walk.
Piergiuliano ChesiSurely that was the end of my walk, you might think, but no, one more tiny adventure awaited me. On the front stoop of a residence on West 11th Street was a big bag with a sign: REMEMBER THE ADVENTURE OF MAPS. Curious, I looked in the bag and found there a bunch of highway maps. Leafing through them I took out one of Northern France, one of Maine, and one of New York City and Long Island -- all places I have been to. Remembering how I am trying to get rid of household items, not accumulate them, I put back Northern France and Maine, retaining only New York City for reference. A comedown after the Caribbean and Alaska, but much more relevant. “Thank you” I scribbled on the sign and came on home, my mind full of flowery and bejeweled shoes, colored balloons, purple tulips, and voyages to Bermuda and Alaska (I was once in Alaska, but not on a cruise ship): a where-but-in-New-York experience that would not have been the same, had I not been walking alone. A reminder that New York isn't just monuments and Times Square and the crunch of rush hour crowds; it's also quiet little things that just happen.
* * * * * *
BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: Maybe, in honor of Mother's Day, a post on matriarchs, or the names for New York City and where they came from, or Browderhell and who I would delight to lodge there. Sooner or later, probably all three.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
April 30, 2017
295. I Hate Poetry
For a press release of my new novel, Bill Hope: His Story, go Bill Hope can be ordered from Amazon and will be shipped after the release date of May 17, 2017. But the paperback, which goes for $20, will cost an additional $4.95 for shipping, unless you order books totaling $25 or more. The book is also available now from the author and will be mailed immediately ($20 + postage). And now, on to poesie.
* * * * * * * *
I hate poetry, and I’m not the only one. “I, too, dislike it,” says renowned poet Marianne Moore (in her lifetime, a fellow West Village resident) in her much-quoted poem “Poetry,” which continues, “there are things / that are important beyond all this fiddle.” But then, of course, she goes on to hedge her bet:
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers init after all, a place for the genuine.
And so on, and so on. What, after all, would you expect from a poet? A total, absolute, and scathing rejection of the stuff? Does a baker hate bread, or an alcoholic hate booze? Of course she loves poetry, can’t get off it. But the deliberate prosiness of her lines undermines her intention; her “Poetry” is just prose chopped up in short lines to look like poetry. Poets, please note, are cunning.
These thoughts and those that follow were inspired by poet Charles Simic’s review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (a title that warms me to the cockles of my heart) in The New York Review of Books of April 6, 2017. At the start of the review is an English translation of two lines of the Roman poet Martial, who is famous for his biting, pithy satire. (Martial’s sting is probably lost in translation.)
Don’t let the boy just loaf about: If he writes verses, kick him out.
That the review is written by a poet, and a well-known one at that, is a fair indication that the reviewer will differ with the author reviewed, and the same might be said of this post, written by a self-confessed poet with shiny words on his tongue and rancor in his heart. Moral:
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
Simic goes on to recall Shelley’s deluded assertion that poetry is “something divine,” countered by poet Molly Peacock’s reminder that while bread is necessary, poetry is not -- at least, not in the way that bread is. Simic also cites Plato’s famous denunciation of poets for passing off their fantasies as truth, for which he banished them from his ideal Republic. (We won’t dwell on the fact that Plato himself was, at moments, a brilliant poet and visionary, albeit in prose.) With both Molly and Plato, I heartily agree. And it’s still a common and justifiable belief that poets aren’t right in the head, for why else would they choose a lifetime of poverty and ridicule? In this regard, right on, Mr. Simic, right on! Maybe we can trust you after all … maybe.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. With a name like that he'd have to be a poet, the ethereal style.
Also on the side of the anti-poets, and cited by Simic, is the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, who in his essay “Against Poets” insists that no one really gives a damn about poetry, even though they pretend that they do. I’m not familiar with Mr. Gombrowicz’s works and can’t even pronounce his name, but once again, I applaud. Sugar, he suggests, is good for sweetening coffee, but not for eating by the spoonful; excess of poetry, plus the sentiment and piety that go with it, can be wearying. Having in my time read a vast deal of mediocre poetry – poetry that aspired to lift me to the heights, but often dumped me in the dumpiest of dumps – I continue to applaud.
Simic finally gets to Ben Lerner’s book, The Hatred of Poetry, which observes that poetry is often met with contempt, rather than mere indifference, and is often denounced, rather than simply dismissed. True enough, says Simic, but it’s because the critics were frightened off it in school. But he takes more seriously Lerner’s contention that poets today are too self-involved, too apolitical, too indifferent to the social woes around them, and therefore out of touch with the rest of us.
Enough of Simic; what does Browder think? Be warned: from at least fifth grade on I was scribbling something or other; I was Literature in an eighth-grade morality play about Every Youth; and by high school I was exuding scraps of poetry now mercifully consigned to oblivion.
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
Since then, off and on, I have dabbled, and even more than dabbled, in concocting the stuff, propelled less by genius or an avowed sense of mission than by a gut instinct, a totally irrational urge to use and misuse words, for which I have received – deservedly, no doubt – scant recognition or reward. I will say that a lot of the rejection letters these days are anything but blunt; in saying no, they almost have tears in their eyes. I don’t complain about rejections, since this is the lot of most poetic scribblers, and the lack of recognition arms me for my fight against the very urge itself, and for periodic bouts of self-contempt not for myself overall, but for myself as – alas! – a poet. If there were a twelve-step program for recovering poets (“Poets Anonymous”?), I would join it.
And why shouldn’t we hate poetry? The stuff is
· Sticky, icky, gooey with feeling· Pretentious· Often obscure· Concerned with flighty little moments of experience – i.e., with trivia· Written by eccentrics, flops, and perverts· Read mostly by old-maid librarians and schoolteachers (usually frustrated poets themselves), and an assortment of unmanly dainty types and hypersensitive freaks· Profitless· Time-consuming· Addictive· And above all, irrelevant.
To round it off, just consider the photo of Marianne Moore accompanying the review: an elderly woman in a broad-brimmed hat and a flowing black cape, smiling at a plumed white cockatoo perched on her wrist. Oddball, weirdo, eccentric! Case closed.
Here she is, black-caped, minus hat and cockatoo.
The magisterial style, beloved of feminists.
But of course it never is. Back in the nineteenth century, middle-class citizens of this and many cities had a poetry shelf in their libraries that they replenished with purchases from time to time. Who were they reading? Not Whitman and Dickinson, whom we have since enshrined. No, they were reading such stalwarts of poesy as Longfellow, Whittier, Tennyson, and Browning. Late in the century Browning became such a rage that Browning Societies sprang up all over the country, dedicated to reading his weighty and impenetrable later poems and teasing meaning out of them. When Longfellow’s lengthy poem Evangeline was published in 1847, there were lines around the block as eager readers flocked to get it, and as late as 1941 it was still being inflicted upon eighth graders, I being one of them, to the point that the opening line, “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,” is imprinted in my mind. As for his other epic, The Song of Hiawatha, I'll simply quote the opening lines:
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,By the shining Big-Sea-Water,Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis...
"Gitchee Gumee," if it matters, is Longfellow's rendition of the Chippewa name for Lake Superior. As for the meter, never has trochaic tetrameter been so abused.
Yes, back then people used to read poems, even long ones set in Gitchee Gumee, but such is not the case today. Once, when reading a biography of the Russian writer Pushkin, I encountered a description of a trip of his to the Caucasus, where he entered a village recently wrested by the Russians from the Turks. Meeting an old man in the village, he talked with him – I don’t recall in what language – and happened to mention that he was a poet. The old man looked at him with awe: “Blessed is the day when I meet a poet!” Such an utterance gives an insight into another society where poetry is not merely tolerated but honored, a society in sharp contrast to our own.
It’s tempting to say that no one really reads poetry in this country today except poets, who usually think their own stuff better. But that’s not quite the case. First of all, the poetry reading scene in New York City is hot, hot, hot – readings all over the place. That, of course, is New York, a quirky, trendy place full of oddballs, and in no way typical of the nation. But there are small presses that – God help them! – specialize in publishing the stuff, and they claim to be so swamped with submissions that they have to shut their submission portal until further notice, or charge a submission fee, or publish only the winner of a contest whose submission fee is often twenty or twenty-five dollars. (Ah, those contests: to make one poet happy, you have to make four hundred others unhappy, even while sucking in their moolah.)
E. E. Cummings, a 20th-century poet, the slouchy
style -- quite a contrast with Shelley. They come
in all sizes and shapes.
Which brings us to “po biz,” the business of poetry, a scene where allegedly starving poets compete for juicy awards and fellowships, and try desperately to get a paid position teaching poetry writing at some delusional institution of higher learning. And why those classes? Because today everybody wants to be a poet, just as everybody wants to be a playwright or novelist or whatever, and canny operators are taking full advantage and raking in millions … or at least a few thousand, enough to keep their precarious operation afloat. And it’s not just kids; a friend of mine, an accomplished poet, also teaches retired businessmen who always wanted to write poetry and now indulge themselves, paying a hefty fee in spite of their deplorable lack of talent. The poetry bug lurks deep in the innards of many of us, like a microbe for which there is no cure.
Conclusion: yes, poetry and poets exist today, and po biz is exploiting would-be poetasters with diligence and cunning. We need accountants and bricklayers and exterminators and garbage collectors, and what do we get? Poets. Thousands of them, scribbling away. Which is one more reason why I and so many other sane and clearheaded individuals hate poetry.
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
Toward the end of his lengthy review, Simic tells how in the rowdy late 1960s he participated in the Poets in the Schools program in New York City. Broke, he did it to snag the measly fifty bucks a day that it paid. (Starving poets again -- what folly!) Going to the principal’s office, he would find a guide waiting there to escort him through unruly hallways to a classroom where equal pandemonium reigned. The teacher then silenced the kids by shouting, “We have a poet with us today!” Confusion as the kids looked wonderingly at each other, not sure they had heard her right. A poet? Here? Now? Disbelief.
“Do you like poetry?” Simic asked.
They shook their heads, some pretended to gag, and one or two spat in disgust.
Undaunted, Simic asked, “Have you ever written a love letter?”
Embarrassed silence; obviously, they had.
“Would you like to hear a love poem?”
Silence signifies assent. So Simic read them some poems by e e cummings (aka E. E. Cummings), Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others, each time asking if they wanted to hear more; they did. Then he read poems on other subjects, and they listened with great attention and began making perceptive remarks. After class a few even lingered to ask where they could find one of the poems he had read. End of story.
Please notice how the clever Simic, greedy for a buck, manipulated these malleable young minds – a maneuver that he boasts – yes, boasts! -- of having used effectively with college students as well. On this sorry note I will end.
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
* * * * * *
BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: What's in a name? The names for New York City, and where they come from.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
* * * * * * * *
I hate poetry, and I’m not the only one. “I, too, dislike it,” says renowned poet Marianne Moore (in her lifetime, a fellow West Village resident) in her much-quoted poem “Poetry,” which continues, “there are things / that are important beyond all this fiddle.” But then, of course, she goes on to hedge her bet:
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers init after all, a place for the genuine.
And so on, and so on. What, after all, would you expect from a poet? A total, absolute, and scathing rejection of the stuff? Does a baker hate bread, or an alcoholic hate booze? Of course she loves poetry, can’t get off it. But the deliberate prosiness of her lines undermines her intention; her “Poetry” is just prose chopped up in short lines to look like poetry. Poets, please note, are cunning.
These thoughts and those that follow were inspired by poet Charles Simic’s review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (a title that warms me to the cockles of my heart) in The New York Review of Books of April 6, 2017. At the start of the review is an English translation of two lines of the Roman poet Martial, who is famous for his biting, pithy satire. (Martial’s sting is probably lost in translation.)
Don’t let the boy just loaf about: If he writes verses, kick him out.
That the review is written by a poet, and a well-known one at that, is a fair indication that the reviewer will differ with the author reviewed, and the same might be said of this post, written by a self-confessed poet with shiny words on his tongue and rancor in his heart. Moral:
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
Simic goes on to recall Shelley’s deluded assertion that poetry is “something divine,” countered by poet Molly Peacock’s reminder that while bread is necessary, poetry is not -- at least, not in the way that bread is. Simic also cites Plato’s famous denunciation of poets for passing off their fantasies as truth, for which he banished them from his ideal Republic. (We won’t dwell on the fact that Plato himself was, at moments, a brilliant poet and visionary, albeit in prose.) With both Molly and Plato, I heartily agree. And it’s still a common and justifiable belief that poets aren’t right in the head, for why else would they choose a lifetime of poverty and ridicule? In this regard, right on, Mr. Simic, right on! Maybe we can trust you after all … maybe.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. With a name like that he'd have to be a poet, the ethereal style.Also on the side of the anti-poets, and cited by Simic, is the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, who in his essay “Against Poets” insists that no one really gives a damn about poetry, even though they pretend that they do. I’m not familiar with Mr. Gombrowicz’s works and can’t even pronounce his name, but once again, I applaud. Sugar, he suggests, is good for sweetening coffee, but not for eating by the spoonful; excess of poetry, plus the sentiment and piety that go with it, can be wearying. Having in my time read a vast deal of mediocre poetry – poetry that aspired to lift me to the heights, but often dumped me in the dumpiest of dumps – I continue to applaud.
Simic finally gets to Ben Lerner’s book, The Hatred of Poetry, which observes that poetry is often met with contempt, rather than mere indifference, and is often denounced, rather than simply dismissed. True enough, says Simic, but it’s because the critics were frightened off it in school. But he takes more seriously Lerner’s contention that poets today are too self-involved, too apolitical, too indifferent to the social woes around them, and therefore out of touch with the rest of us.
Enough of Simic; what does Browder think? Be warned: from at least fifth grade on I was scribbling something or other; I was Literature in an eighth-grade morality play about Every Youth; and by high school I was exuding scraps of poetry now mercifully consigned to oblivion.
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
Since then, off and on, I have dabbled, and even more than dabbled, in concocting the stuff, propelled less by genius or an avowed sense of mission than by a gut instinct, a totally irrational urge to use and misuse words, for which I have received – deservedly, no doubt – scant recognition or reward. I will say that a lot of the rejection letters these days are anything but blunt; in saying no, they almost have tears in their eyes. I don’t complain about rejections, since this is the lot of most poetic scribblers, and the lack of recognition arms me for my fight against the very urge itself, and for periodic bouts of self-contempt not for myself overall, but for myself as – alas! – a poet. If there were a twelve-step program for recovering poets (“Poets Anonymous”?), I would join it.
And why shouldn’t we hate poetry? The stuff is
· Sticky, icky, gooey with feeling· Pretentious· Often obscure· Concerned with flighty little moments of experience – i.e., with trivia· Written by eccentrics, flops, and perverts· Read mostly by old-maid librarians and schoolteachers (usually frustrated poets themselves), and an assortment of unmanly dainty types and hypersensitive freaks· Profitless· Time-consuming· Addictive· And above all, irrelevant.
To round it off, just consider the photo of Marianne Moore accompanying the review: an elderly woman in a broad-brimmed hat and a flowing black cape, smiling at a plumed white cockatoo perched on her wrist. Oddball, weirdo, eccentric! Case closed.
Here she is, black-caped, minus hat and cockatoo.The magisterial style, beloved of feminists.
But of course it never is. Back in the nineteenth century, middle-class citizens of this and many cities had a poetry shelf in their libraries that they replenished with purchases from time to time. Who were they reading? Not Whitman and Dickinson, whom we have since enshrined. No, they were reading such stalwarts of poesy as Longfellow, Whittier, Tennyson, and Browning. Late in the century Browning became such a rage that Browning Societies sprang up all over the country, dedicated to reading his weighty and impenetrable later poems and teasing meaning out of them. When Longfellow’s lengthy poem Evangeline was published in 1847, there were lines around the block as eager readers flocked to get it, and as late as 1941 it was still being inflicted upon eighth graders, I being one of them, to the point that the opening line, “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,” is imprinted in my mind. As for his other epic, The Song of Hiawatha, I'll simply quote the opening lines:
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,By the shining Big-Sea-Water,Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis...
"Gitchee Gumee," if it matters, is Longfellow's rendition of the Chippewa name for Lake Superior. As for the meter, never has trochaic tetrameter been so abused.
Yes, back then people used to read poems, even long ones set in Gitchee Gumee, but such is not the case today. Once, when reading a biography of the Russian writer Pushkin, I encountered a description of a trip of his to the Caucasus, where he entered a village recently wrested by the Russians from the Turks. Meeting an old man in the village, he talked with him – I don’t recall in what language – and happened to mention that he was a poet. The old man looked at him with awe: “Blessed is the day when I meet a poet!” Such an utterance gives an insight into another society where poetry is not merely tolerated but honored, a society in sharp contrast to our own.
It’s tempting to say that no one really reads poetry in this country today except poets, who usually think their own stuff better. But that’s not quite the case. First of all, the poetry reading scene in New York City is hot, hot, hot – readings all over the place. That, of course, is New York, a quirky, trendy place full of oddballs, and in no way typical of the nation. But there are small presses that – God help them! – specialize in publishing the stuff, and they claim to be so swamped with submissions that they have to shut their submission portal until further notice, or charge a submission fee, or publish only the winner of a contest whose submission fee is often twenty or twenty-five dollars. (Ah, those contests: to make one poet happy, you have to make four hundred others unhappy, even while sucking in their moolah.)
E. E. Cummings, a 20th-century poet, the slouchy style -- quite a contrast with Shelley. They come
in all sizes and shapes.
Which brings us to “po biz,” the business of poetry, a scene where allegedly starving poets compete for juicy awards and fellowships, and try desperately to get a paid position teaching poetry writing at some delusional institution of higher learning. And why those classes? Because today everybody wants to be a poet, just as everybody wants to be a playwright or novelist or whatever, and canny operators are taking full advantage and raking in millions … or at least a few thousand, enough to keep their precarious operation afloat. And it’s not just kids; a friend of mine, an accomplished poet, also teaches retired businessmen who always wanted to write poetry and now indulge themselves, paying a hefty fee in spite of their deplorable lack of talent. The poetry bug lurks deep in the innards of many of us, like a microbe for which there is no cure.
Conclusion: yes, poetry and poets exist today, and po biz is exploiting would-be poetasters with diligence and cunning. We need accountants and bricklayers and exterminators and garbage collectors, and what do we get? Poets. Thousands of them, scribbling away. Which is one more reason why I and so many other sane and clearheaded individuals hate poetry.
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
Toward the end of his lengthy review, Simic tells how in the rowdy late 1960s he participated in the Poets in the Schools program in New York City. Broke, he did it to snag the measly fifty bucks a day that it paid. (Starving poets again -- what folly!) Going to the principal’s office, he would find a guide waiting there to escort him through unruly hallways to a classroom where equal pandemonium reigned. The teacher then silenced the kids by shouting, “We have a poet with us today!” Confusion as the kids looked wonderingly at each other, not sure they had heard her right. A poet? Here? Now? Disbelief.
“Do you like poetry?” Simic asked.
They shook their heads, some pretended to gag, and one or two spat in disgust.
Undaunted, Simic asked, “Have you ever written a love letter?”
Embarrassed silence; obviously, they had.
“Would you like to hear a love poem?”
Silence signifies assent. So Simic read them some poems by e e cummings (aka E. E. Cummings), Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others, each time asking if they wanted to hear more; they did. Then he read poems on other subjects, and they listened with great attention and began making perceptive remarks. After class a few even lingered to ask where they could find one of the poems he had read. End of story.
Please notice how the clever Simic, greedy for a buck, manipulated these malleable young minds – a maneuver that he boasts – yes, boasts! -- of having used effectively with college students as well. On this sorry note I will end.
On the subject of poetry, never trust a poet.
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BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: What's in a name? The names for New York City, and where they come from.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
April 26, 2017
294. Four Things All Humans Need
For a press release of my new novel, Bill Hope: His Story, go Bill Hope can be ordered from Amazon and will be shipped after the release date of May 17, 2017. But the paperback, which goes for $20, will cost an additional $4.95 for shipping, unless you order books totaling $25 or more. The book is also available now from the author and will be mailed immediately ($20 + postage). And now, on to the four things.
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It came to me recently out of nowhere, in a flash: the four things all humans need:
1. To know fulfillment.2. To not be alone.3. To go home.4. To be free.
This assumes that we have what I call the basic basics: food, water, shelter, warmth – which, in today’s world, is quite an assumption. But given that we have these basic material needs, I see my four other needs as fundamental. They can be interpreted literally or figuratively, since each is open to multiple interpretations. Is “home,” for instance, a real place we remember and want to return to, or is it a place we have never in this life visited? Does “not to be alone” mean we want company, or something else? As for freedom, there are so many kinds. And these four can overlap: home or freedom might be our fulfillment; to not be alone may mean going home; and so on.
But maybe I’ve left something out. Ask yourself if these four are complete, or can you think of something else to be added? Let me know, and if your suggestion doesn’t seem to fit into any of my four needs, I’ll add it.
* * * * * *
BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: As announced – I Hate Poetry.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
April 23, 2017
293. Americans Are Pigs
For a press release of my new novel, Bill Hope: His Story, go Bill Hope can be ordered from Amazon and will be shipped after the release date of May 17, 2017. But the paperback, which goes for $20, will cost an additional $4.95 for shipping, unless you order books totaling $25 or more. The book is also available now from the author and will be mailed immediately ($20 + postage). And now let's have a look at litter.
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Recently I visited the Jefferson Market Garden on Greenwich Avenue near Sixth Avenue in the West Village. As I walked its paths, I noticed litter near the fence and picked up all I could. The litter was only near the fence, where passersby on the sidewalk outside could toss it onto the grounds; the rest of the garden was clean, for people who visited it were not ones to foul it with litter. But the litter near the fences reminded me of something the renowned theater director Harold Clurman once said, in commenting on a scene from a play about life in small-town Middle America: “Americans are pigs.” He said this in a certain context, but it has stayed with me ever since.
New York litter, as seen by a Dutch visitor.Steven Lek
Yes, Americans are pigs. We have many redeeming qualities, but when it comes to litter and the environment, we are pigs. We take gardens for ashtrays, and parks for dumps. In my hiking days a trail sometimes went for a short distance alongside a highway, and always, without exception, the shoulder of the road was littered with plastic cups and spoons, tinfoil, crumpled paper napkins, cigarette butts, whatever, and the litter often went for eight or ten feet off the road. People in passing cars toss stuff out the window and, for them, it is disposed of, vanished, gone. Yes, it has gone, but it hasn’t vanished; it has added to the litter along the highway. I experienced this especially on the Palisades and in Pelham Bay Park.
Once, on Staten Island, I was hiking through the woods in Wolfe’s Pond Park, hoping for a bit of nature, but what struck me most was the litter. Disgusted at first, I finally began to feel a weird fascination at the richness and variety of it, and began jotting down notes that would later become a poem. Looking at that poem today, I find a chronicle of the specifics encountered back then:
· Cheese Doodle bags· Yoohoo bottles (“Five vitamins, three minerals”)· matchbook covers (“Finish high school now”)· Tangy Taffy wrappers· dented Budweiser cans· crumpled tinted tissues· soggy mattresses· Eureka disposable dust bag and filter packages· empty Merit and Marlboro and True cigarette packages· Snickers and Doublemint wrappings· Pepsi bottles· deranged grocery carts· bits of foam rubber and sponge
This list is, in its strange way, a comment on American consumerism, and as regards the culprits involved, the proximity of Tottenville High School is not irrelevant; the youth of our nation are just as culpable as their motorized elders. But the presence of discarded grocery carts and mattresses incriminates the elders of the neighborhood as well, or rather, it incriminated them back then, since I don’t know what the situation is today.
Wolfe's Pond Park in 2008. There's hope: I see what looks like only one small bit of litter.
An attempt at better in New York, courtesy of the EPA: a cement trash can, not easily overturned or stolen. But have you seen one lately?
This was back in 1973.
Our litter can sometimes achieve the status of surreal. The French Surrealists of yore imagined a locomotive abandoned in a forest as surreal, but in this country their fantasy has become only too real. While hiking the Blue Trail in the Greenbelt of Staten Island (with apologies to the responsible citizens of that borough), I crossed over the Staten Island Expressway on an abandoned highway ramp known as Moses’ Folly, a relic from an attempt by Robert Moses to ram a highway right smack through the Greenbelt, a project that was stopped by local opposition. The abandoned ramp, lunging high in the air to nowhere, is surreal enough, and the graffiti covering it do not detract from the victory, literally monumental, of the embattled local residents and environmentalists. But after crossing the expressway on the ramp, the Blue Trail turns sharply to the left and steeply descends a wooded ravine to a trickle of a stream, before climbing up another steep incline to another abandoned ramp and continuing on its way. In that wooded ravine are found numerous abandoned cars, overgrown with vines almost to the point of vanishing: litter on the grand scale, if you like, and absolutely surreal, but litter none the less.
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On Broad Channel in Jamaica Bay, Queens, while accessing the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, I once also encountered an abandoned car and, incensed at this violation of otherwise unspoiled nature, relieved my bladder on the offending vehicle.Visitors to our cities have commented on the prevalence in the streets and parks of used condoms and orange peels, concluding with some justification that Americans have a great propensity for making love and eating oranges. I would add plastic as well: plastic cups, plates, knives, forks, and spoons that I have found fouling the most delightful vistas of natural scenery, not to mention the gutters and abandoned lots of our cities. And in winter, when the trees are stripped bare of foliage, one can see, impaled high up on twigs like tattered ensigns, a host of plastic bags.
Yet Americans, when they set their minds to it, can do better. The state of Maine, where I have often vacationed, has highways free from litter. The moment you cross the state line, you notice the change, the result of a statewide campaign to keep Maine green. And here in New York City, the volunteers of various conservancies and neighborhood organizations have done wonders in cleaning up our parks and public spaces.
“Keep Britain tidy” read signs that I used to see during a visit long ago to England. “Tidy” is not a concept to be applied to the United States, a vast nation stretching the width of a continent; we’re just too big to be tidy. But if every citizen picked up a single bit of litter every day, the result would be astonishing. For years now I have made it my concern to pick up bits of litter in a little public garden near pier 46 and the Hudson River, determined to at least keep this one small bit of nature untainted. But beyond that, I won’t hold my breath. Humans are capable of keeping their cities clean; a world traveler of my acquaintance assures me that Tokyo, with a much greater population than New York, is spotlessly clean and unlittered. But here in the U.S., except for a blessed minority, we are too hurried, too involved on our busy lives, to be distracted by such trivia. Yes, alas, Americans are pigs.
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BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon: I Hate Poetry.
© 2017 Clifford Browder
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