Clifford Browder's Blog, page 30

283. Doctors from Hell

          I want to thank everyone who has bought a copy of my new novel; it is much appreciated.  BUT:  Please don't buy it just to be nice; buy it only if you really want to read it.  It will find its readers in time, as most books do.  Here follows the front and back cover and the back-cover blurb.

Bill Hope: His Story:  ($20: Softcover: 6X9”, 158pp: 978-1-68114-305-7; $35: Hardcover: 978-1-68114-306-4; $2.99: EBook: 978-1-68114-307-1; LCCN: 2017933794; Historical Fiction; May 17, 2017): is the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his scorn for snitches and bullies; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; his brief career on the stage playing himself; his loyalty to a man who has befriended him but may be trying to kill him; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. In the course of his adventures he learns how slight the difference is between criminal and law-abiding, insane and sane, vice and virtue—a lesson that reinforces what he learned on the streets. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a yearning to leave the crooked life behind, and a persistent and undying hope.          This is the second title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  The first in the series is The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), mention of which appears at the end of this post. 
         The book 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 sent immediately.  And now on to doctors from hell.
*                 *                 *                 *                 *                  *                           I have known several doctors from hell, though I’m seeing none of them now.  We’ll start with Dr. Creep (not his real name), a dermatologist on the Upper East Side – that mecca for status-conscious physicians -- who had a way of filling up his waiting room with patients, each of whom would get 15 minutes of his precious time.  This annoyed me, but I stayed with him for a while.  Then one day I arrived, punctually as always, for an appointment, and found twelve patients in the waiting room, and not a single seat available.  By wandering through a labyrinth of nearby rooms, I found a vacant chair, but seethed: twelve ahead of me, and yet I arrived on time!  Finally I told his receptionist to cancel me for the day and told her why.  “Oh yes, all right,” she said noncommittally, and I left, never to return.  Since then I’ve seen a dermatologist on East 15th Street in whose office I wait fifteen minutes at the most.  Good-bye, Dr. Creep.
         Next up on my list of doctors from hell is Dr. Omar (not his real name), an ophthalmologist from another culture into whose office I ventured only once.  In the office there were only two people, a husband and wife.  The wife had evidently just seen the doctor and was incensed.  “What is he?” she fumed.  “A God-damned homosexual?  A lady wants to be treated like a lady!”  I was tempted to correct her impression that male homosexuals dislike women, since the truth is exactly the opposite, but I didn’t.  In any case it was a less than promising prelude to my first-time encounter with the doctor.  Summoned in due time to his inner office, I found a fiercely bearded man with piercing eyes and a face that registered not a hint of a trace of emotion; he was the Great Stone Face or, better still, an efficient, well-oiled machine.  Acknowledging my presence with the barest hint of a nod, Dr. Omar examined my eyes without a scrap of conversation, pronounced them healthy, and dismissed me.  I came away feeling like I’d just been examined by a robot.  I never went back.
         Given my icy encounter with Dr. Omar, what or who can surpass him in hellishness to be at the top of my list of doctors from hell?  No one, you might think, barring sadistic fiends and besotted practitioners.  But at the very top of my list is Dr. Grede (not his real name), who presented himself as quadruple board certified in laser eye surgery, which is a lot of certification.  His waiting room was large and well furnished, never crowded, its tables laden with the glossiest of magazines, and his receptionist was charming.  But once you were summoned to an inner room, the August Presence entered with an assistant and, examining first one eye and then the other, dictated a long list of scientific terms, implying dire conditions in both my ailing eye and the healthy one.  Then the Eminence briefly translated the terms into plain English, which only heightened my awareness of vulnerability, impaired vision, and impending blindness.  A list of prescriptions followed, after which he exited abruptly, interrupted just once when I almost flustered him by thanking him for his attention; surprised by this moment of human contact, he brusquely thanked me in turn.  But then and always, as I paid my co-pay to the receptionist, the Eminence’s assistant appeared and informed me that the doctor had ordered this medication as well – she presented a small bottle – costing another twenty dollars.  So I left his office out not thirty dollars – the usual co-pay – but fifty.  Subsequent appointments followed the same pattern exactly, climaxed by the co-pay augmented by another twenty dollars.  Finally I resolved to face them down by refusing the extra medication, but instead I simply switched to an ophthalmologist who felt no need to peddle medications in his office.
         Such is my triad of doctors from hell, though I don’t rank them among the worst of the worst.  None of them was drunk or drug-impaired or otherwise incapacitated; they were all sober, sane, and repellent.  Friends of mine have reported worse cases by far.  One, seeing a dentist for the first time and questioning him about certain dental practices, offended the man to the point of fiery resentment; the dentist could not conceive of a mere laymen presuming to discuss such matters with an experienced professional.  And another friend, seriously ill, was rejected by a doctor who could not be burdened with a new patient and dismissed him summarily; my friend ended up in a hospital and was dead within a week.
         “First do no harm” (primum non nocere) conveys the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath that all doctors subscribe to, but does modern medicine really adhere to this injunction?  As a layman, I can only wonder at such practices as these:
1.    Prefrontal lobotomy, a surgery that severs connections in the brain so as to improve the patient’s mental state.
2.    Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT, also known as shock treatment), a psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically introduced in patients to provide relief from severe depression.
3.    The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, a clinical study run by the U.S. Public Health Service at Tuskegee University in Alabama from 1932 to 1972 to study the progression of untreated syphilis in rural African American males who thought they were receiving free health care from the federal government.
         Re (1):  The originator of the practice, Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz, shared the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for its discovery, even though patients suffered inertia and became emotionally  and intellectually impaired.  As a result of the operation some patients died, some committed suicide, and some suffered severe brain damage, but the survivors were often less disruptive, easier to manage.  In the U.S., some 40,000 people were lobotomized, until the practice, always controversial, was abandoned by the late 1970s.  Among the victims were Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy, and Tennessee Williams’s sister Rose, both of whom were incapacitated for life.
         Re (2):  Requiring informed consent, ECT is used in emergencies, or when all other treatments have failed.  While patients often respond well to treatments, half of them relapse within twelve months.  Though approved for use by the U.S. Surgeon General in 1999, patients often suffer confusion, memory loss, and small seizures.  In the 1980s some 100,000 people received ECT annually.  It came to my attention back then when a young woman who was a friend of our family told my brother that, being emotionally unstable, she was being urged to have the treatment, a prospect that she anticipated with dread.  Why someone already so vulnerable should be encouraged to undergo such a treatment baffled me then, and still does.
         Re (3):  The two previous practices were implemented in the hope of healing, whereas this one in the name of science exposed impoverished African American sharecroppers, a vulnerable and ill-informed population, to gradual physical decline and death.  Besides free medical care (such as it was) and meals, the men were given free burial insurance, but they were never told that they had syphilis and were never treated for it.  The program was terminated in 1972 following a leak to the press, by which time many participants had died of syphilis, 40 wives had been infected, and 19 children had been born with congenital syphilis. The experiment was subsequent labeled “infamous,” but no one was ever prosecuted.
         These practices are no longer current.  But what about such treatments as radiation and chemotherapy for cancer?  They are still standard, but to my knowledge they may, at a cost, buy a little time, but they do not heal.  One friend of mine, a heavy smoker who had contracted lung cancer, chose to enroll in an experimental chemotherapy program, trying a new drug.  The drug devastated him; waking up in the morning, he never knew if he would get through the day with ease or be stricken with crippling side effects.  And the drug didn’t heal him.  He also did radiation. “Where is it?” asked his doctor, while examining him a week later.  “I can’t find it.”   The tumor had disappeared.  Everyone rejoiced, and by way of celebration my partner and I took our friend out to dinner.  But the cancer returned with a vengeance, and  in time he died of it.
         Modern medicine works miracles in some cases and is helpless in others.  Too often, for all its advances, it gropes forward, trying this or that, sometimes healing, sometimes alleviating pain, and sometimes imposing treatments with horrific side effects and little chance of healing.  Only a few doctors merit the label “doctor from hell.”  Most of them are doing the best they can, but the mainstream rarely acknowledges the benefits of alternative medicine, which in some cases – though not all -- has effected amazing cures.

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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:  Sooner or later, the inevitable sequel, patients from hell.  And maybe something else.

         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

282. A Rockaway Mystery: Death, Theft, a Pauper's Grave

         The author's copies of Bill Hope: His Story have arrived and are available.  Here is the publisher's announcement of the book.

Bill Hope: His Story:  ($20: Softcover: 6X9”, 158pp: 978-1-68114-305-7; $35: Hardcover: 978-1-68114-306-4; $2.99: EBook: 978-1-68114-307-1; LCCN: 2017933794; Historical Fiction; May 17, 2017): is the second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his scorn for snitches and bullies; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; his brief career on the stage playing himself; his loyalty to a man who has befriended him but may be trying to kill him; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. In the course of his adventures he learns how slight the difference is between criminal and law-abiding, insane and sane, vice and virtue—a lesson that reinforces what he learned on the streets. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a yearning to leave the crooked life behind, and a persistent and undying hope.          This is the second title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  The first in the series is The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), mention of which appears at the end of this post. 
         The book 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 sent immediately.  And now on to the Rockaways.
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         Rockaway, also known as the Rockaways (a corruption of the Lenape name for the site), is a skinny peninsula in the borough of Queens that faces the ocean and as a result has been a recreational area – first for the rich and later for everyone – but also a site exposed to the rigors of the sea.  Unique though it is by virtue of its location, like many New York neighborhoods it has experienced the ups and downs of development, crime, economic decline, renewal, and gentrification, and in October 2012 it was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy.



         I first knew the Rockaways in the 1950s when I made the long trip by subway and bus from Manhattan to Riis Park beach, one end of which was a gay section that the authorities were well aware of and tolerated … up to a point.  Most of the sunbathers were well-behaved, though I do remember once hearing a young kid emerge from the sea exclaiming joyously, “I just had wild sex out on the sandbar!”  The distant sandbar indeed had a naughty reputation, though I never ventured that far out.  On another occasion I saw the police lecturing two very young boys whose bikinis were deemed a bit too skimpy.  And once I saw three teen-age gay boys talking to two wide-eyed teen-age girls who were sitting on the sand next to them.  “We don’t need you!” one of the boys exclaimed, less with hostility than affirmation.  For the girls it was a lesson in life not taught in the public schools.                  But my most memorable experience on the gay beach at Riis Park is of an exhibitionist giving a performance – just a witty spiel, nothing more -- that drew too much of a crowd.  When the police arrived, he said to them, “Just a few more minutes, please,” and they obliged, allowing him, when a plane zoomed overhead, to finish his impromptu act by staring skyward, arms outstretched, and yelling, “Come back, Dave, come back -- all is forgiven!”  With the crowd convulsed with laughter, he then let himself be led off by the minions of order, to what fate I do not know.
         My one other experience of the Rockaways came years later when, enticed by reports of migrating shore birds in the area, I went out there to Fort Tilden, whose abandoned military installations once guarded that part of New York.  Traipsing along the beach and through the sand dunes, I saw not one migrating shore bird, but a great many graffiti-covered batteries and magazines, relics from World War I originally installed to fend off any aggressive designs that Kaiser Wilhelm might have toward the unoffending borough of Queens.  But graffiti-covered batteries weren’t what I had come for, so I departed therefrom and by bus and subway accessed the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, where birds of all kinds abounded.  So ends this prelude about my scant knowledge of the Rockaways, where recently a strange and disturbing tale has unfolded.


Rockaway beach
Urielevy
         In July 2013 Donata Rea, a resident of the Rockaways acting with power of attorney for the Karen M. Connors Living Trust, applied for Build It Back funds, the city’s program to help homeowners with reconstruction of property damaged by Hurricane Sandy.  Ms. Rea received $60,000 in payments for repairs to the Trust’s two houses on Beach 120th Street, where she herself lived, and turned one of them into an apartment house with three units and leased them to tenants.  When tenants moved in, they were told that Karen Connors was the landlady, yet they never saw her.  Neighbors said that they had seen Karen Connors carried off in an ambulance two years before, and that she had never returned; though puzzled, the tenants continued to write their monthly rent checks to Ms. Rea.    


The Rockaways after Sandy
         That all was not on the up and up on Beach 120thStreet became apparent in 2015, when investigators received a tip in that Ms. Rea had sold two condominiums in Florida belonging to Karen Connors for $146,000,had collected $50,000 in rent from the three apartments, and had signed a contract to sell the house to a buyer for $800,000.
         It turned out that Karen Connors was dead.  The county public administrator’s office learned now that the late Karen Connors had an estate that included not just the two houses on Beach 120th Street, but also two condominiums in southern Florida, and quickly brought action against Donata Rea to recover the property.  Ms. Rea had created the Karen M. Connors Living Trust in a document that, bearing the forged signature of the deceased Karen Connors, gave Ms. Rea not just the two Rockaways houses, but also the dead woman’s jewelry and furniture, and a bank account of more than $32,000.  And shortly after that, again with a forged signature, she had obtained power of attorney over Ms. Connors.  Confronted with these facts, Ms. Rea surrendered the property to the public administrator and was then arrested, charged with grand larceny, and released on her own recognizance.  Ms. Rea’s lawyer insists that his client, unaware of Ms. Connors’ death, had acted in good faith after Sandy hit, trying to help her friend and neighbor restore her damaged property – a matter that will be settled in court.  But it does appear that Donata Rea was a woman of a very enterprising nature.
         The story does not end there.  What had become of Karen Mary Connors?  Age 63, she had died of cancer and a heart attack at Peninsula Hospital Center on November 18, 2011.  When she died, her body was released to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which normally notifies the county public administrator of the death of anyone with no known next of kin, so that office can oversee the estate.  But for some reason that did not happen in this case, so the authorities were completely unaware of her estate.  Result: she was mistaken for a pauper and buried in a mass grave on Hart Island, the city’s potter’s field at the western end of Long Island Sound, where the coffins of the unknown, unclaimed, and unwanted are stacked up by convicts from Riker’s Island and buried deep.  Covered with the crumbling ruins of abandoned facilities of another era, the island today is a forbidden zone, accessible only to grave-digging convicts and the unknown dead.
         So who was this woman who, dying, suffered the double indignity of a pauper’s grave and the alleged theft of her estate by a neighbor?  The only child of a New York City firefighter turned lawyer, she had attended St. Leo College in Florida, graduating in 1972 with a degree in philosophy and theater.  Photographs show an attractive young woman with long blond hair who engaged in many activities at college.  How she spent the years that followed is unknown.  Her father died in 1966 and her mother in 1976, and sometime after that, having never married, she returned to the family’s two-story summer home on the Rockaways, where neighbors described her as a recluse in her later years, more apt to complain about noisy children than engage in conversation: one of those solitary figures, so common in the city, who live and die obscurely.
         What now?  The public administrator will auction off her homes in March, the proceeds going to any cousins who can be located.  Her remains will be disinterred from Hart Island and buried, not in the Long Island cemetery where her parents are buried, since it is full, but in a Catholic cemetery nearby.   And Ms. Rea?  When a reporter knocked on her door, down the street from the Connors houses, a woman inside announced, “She’s not here.”  And who provided the tip that led to the discovery of Ms. Rea’s activities?   A suspicious neighbor?  The authorities haven’t said.
         I love New York, but lost in its feverish intensity are quiet lives that no one notices until they obscurely die, if even then.  What happens after their death depends upon whether or not there are friends or relatives to identify the body, see to its disposal and then administer the will, if there is one, or otherwise claim, and then divide the estate.  Karen Mary Connors was one such person, and her passing would hardly have attracted attention, had it not been for Ms. Rea’s intervention.  May she rest in peace.
         For more on Hart, the forbidden island, see post #233,          Source note:  For the story of Karen Connors and her estate, I am indebted to an article in the New York Times of February 20, 2017.

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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 Doctors from Hell and Their Opposites.  Reports from the medical battlefield, with defeats and victories.

         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

281. BookExpo, BookCon

         It’s on its way!  Author’s copies of my historical novel Bill Hope: His Story are being shipped to me and will soon be available from the author (meaning me).  I can't now present a life-size copy of the front and back covers in this post, but here is a smaller version that includes the back-cover bio and blurb.  Clicking on the link will take you out of this blog, but do it anyway, since the front cover, designed by my press's director, Anna Faktorovich, is impressive; you can then return to this post and continue.  The first title in the Metropolis series, a series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, is The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), which views the period from a gay male perspective, just as Bill Hope views it from the perspective of a street kid turned pickpocket.  Pleasuring is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  And here, for those of you too unadventurous (or lazy?) to click on the smaller-version link above, is the back-cover blurb of Bill Hope:

Bill Hope: His Story is the second novel in the Metropolis series.  New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his scorn for snitches and bullies; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; his brief career on the stage playing himself; his loyalty to a man who has befriended him but may be trying to kill him; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder.  In the course of his adventures he learns how slight the difference is between criminal and law-abiding, insane and sane, vice and virtue -- a lesson that reinforces what he learned on the streets.  Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a yearning to leave the crooked life behind, and a persistent and undying hope.
          I first queried  Anaphora Literary Press, the publisher, on February 3, and the manuscript went to the printer on February 15 – twelve days later!  This is, to put it mildly, unusual.  But if you think this is a slap-dash operation, just look at the front cover: an eye-catcher, if there ever was one, and that’s what front covers are meant to be.  The book’s release date is May 17; anyone who orders online now will get the book after that date, but anyone who orders from me can get it right away.  And now, on to BookExpo and BookCon.
*                   *                  *                  *                  *                 *
         The online announcements are impressive, one following another at a dizzying rate:
BOOKEXPO  REGISTRATION  IS  NOW  OPEN!EMBRACE  THE  FUTURE  OF  PUBLISHING  WITH  USIN  NEW  YORK  CITY  ON  MAY 31-JUNE 2, 2017
                    BOOKEXPOLEADING  THE  BOOK  INDUSTRY  INTO                   THE  FUTURE       DISOCOVER.  ENGAGE.  LEARN.
INTRODUCING  THE  BOOKEXPOADULT  AUTHOR  BREAKFASTLINEUP  FOR  THURSDAY,  JUNE  1
HOTELS  ARE  NOW  AVAILABLE  FOR  BOOKEXPO  2017
And there’s a children’s author breakfast as well, including an author with blue hair.  So can there be any doubt that this is the biggest book event of the year in all North America, taking place right here in New York City at the Javits Center in Manhattan next June?
         Who attends this annual event?  Publishers, authors, agents, librarians, booksellers big and small – in short, anyone and everyone in the book trade, with some celebrities thrown in.  This is where the trade convenes to network and make useful contacts, to see what the latest trends in publishing are, to discover emerging authors and the next blockbuster titles, and to get useful info from industry leaders and peers.  Is the public invited?  Absolutely not.  This is for the book trade only, but the media are welcomed with open arms.  And have no doubt about it, with over 600 exhibitors displaying their upcoming books last year in Chicago, BookExpo is BIG, BIG, BIG.  If God reads books – and who’s to  say He doesn’t? – He’ll be there too, in spirit.
         So am I, an author, going?  Am I, as an author, going to fork over $400 to attend this stellar event and rub shins with a seething mass of book trade biggies, snag an autograph or two, and maybe hook an agent or a publisher?  No!
         Why not?  Because BookExpo is the place for bestselling authors, the biggies of the trade, not for small fry like me.  Because I don’t need anyone’s autograph.  Because you don’t go there to connect with agents or publishers, unless it’s been prearranged; to do so is to mark yourself as pushy and uninformed.  And finally, because the event is huge and I’d wear myself out running from booth to booth, trying to cover it all in one day or even two.  So BookExpo will have to do without my modest radiance.
EMBRACE  THE  MADNESS
         Ah, but close on the heels of BookExpo, which rages from Thursday, June 1, to Friday, June 2, comes BookCon on Saturday, June 3, and Sunday, June 4 -- 105 days, 2 hours, 29 minutes, and 29 seconds from now, as their website informed me yesterday, with the seconds and minutes constantly updated.  (They do like to build anticipation.)  And what is BookCon?  The sequel to and culmination of BookExpo that opens its arms wide to the public, cajoles and urges and exhorts them to come, proclaiming that “BookCon Loves You.”  Here publishers big and small, not to mention self-published authors, hope to lure attendees to their booths and sell scads, gobs, reams of books.  At Chicago last year, the one-day event expected 10,000 attendees, and this year, back in New York, the two-day event anticipates 25,000.  So BookCon (“Con” for consumer, though a bit of conning may be involved), like BookExpo, is BIG, BIG, BIG.  How could it not be, now that it’s back in New York, which, it goes without saying (so I’ll say it), is BIG, BIG, BIG.  BookCon, its website informs us, is “the ultimate celebration of books,” a two-day fan event “where storytelling and pop culture collide.”  Yes, not “meet” or “engage,” but “collide"; sparks fly.  And a video of the 2016 event in Chicago bears them out: it’s frantic, it’s jammed, it’s wild.  So will I, a small fry of the trade, be there?  You bet!  I’ve got my booth already.
BE  WICKED  READ  BOOKS
         So who are these 25,000 expected attendees?  BookCon tells us precisely:
1.    She’s a she, and young: a millennial.2.    She is college-educated.3.    She is into social media.4.    She has disposable income.5.    She is an avid reader.
So what do I conclude?
1.    I have to please Miss Millennial.  But she likes genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, romance, etc.), and I don’t do genre fiction.  Hmm...2.    Good.  She’s literate.3.    Social media?  That means reams of free advertising for the books and authors she likes.  Well, I’m on Facebook, though rather limply.4.    Aha!  Bless her, she can buy books galore.5.    Maybe I can entice her away from genre fiction into my historical fiction and New York-oriented nonfiction.  At least it’s worth a try.
BOOKS  ARE  SEXY
         By way of preparation, I’ve watched the video of the 2016 BookCon event in Chicago.  And what do I see?  A seething horde of attendees, mostly female and young, crowding in, buying books and having authors sign them, and swaying to the music of some hip-swinging singer on a stage with a microphone; when asked how they like BookCon, they exclaim with fervor, “Awesome!”   But where are the guys – the male millennials?  Not here.  The few men seen in the video are either BookCon staff or authors signing books for their fans.  But male millennials?  Hardly a one.  They must be off in the singles bars, guzzling, or exploring exotic wonders on the Internet.
YOU’RE  AWESOMEso am I
         Since a floor plan is available showing the occupant of every booth on the floor, as well as the booths that are unoccupied and therefore still available, I accessed it to find out who my neighbors will be.  We are off to one side in a section reserved for those who exhibit at BookCon but won’t attend BookExpo.  As you might expect, we are indie authors, meaning independent authors who are self-published or published by small presses, unagented, and unknown to the big trade publishers of the day.  In other words, small fry.  Except that some of the small fry seem to be doing rather well.  I contacted four of my future neighbors, asked their advice for a first-time exhibitor, got gracious answers and lots of tips.
YOUREAD?ILOVE  YOU
         Here is their advice, reinforced by BookCon itself, and by a friend who once attended another trade show at the Javits Center:
1.    Make your booth stand out.  Use a catchy banner or poster. 2.    Put out lots of swag (free stuff).3.    Put out lots of business cards.4.    Start preparations for the show months in advance.5.    Get there early to set up your booth.6.    Be prepared to talk a lot; they’ll ask you what your books are about.
 And so:
1.    I’ll put up signs (what do you think all those centered bold letters in this post are?). 2.    I’ll put out candy: Hershey’s kisses – think of the possible double entendres: (“Would you like a kiss?” etc.), and Dum Dums, little lollipops that my bank puts out (I love the name).3.    I’ve ordered 100 more business cards, plus a snazzy card holder.4.   Preparations?  That's what I’m doing right now.5.    I’ll even get in there the evening before, if they let me in, and start setting up.6.    I’ll be a walking blurb, have a brilliant spiel prepared. 
LET’S  BEAWESOMETOGETHER
         And these future neighbors of mine are well worth listening to, since one has successfully published a series of dark fantasy and horror novels and proclaims himself proudly self-published, while in one day at Chicago another who does fantasy fiction targeting readers age 16 to 30 sold 180 books.  I do dark neither fantasy and horror nor fantasy fiction, so I don’t expect to sell like they do, but I wish them well and hope that I can attract some of their multitudinous followers into my own little booth, where I shall try to be as “with it” and “in” as I can.  Indeed, I plan on being the oldest exhibitor on the floor and will play it for all it's worth, proclaiming
GEEZERSROCK


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          BROWDERPOMES:  For two new poems of mine, on ninny serene versus deep, and proverbs for the wicked, click here and scroll down to pp. 34 and 35.
For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. 
For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  
To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  
For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.  

          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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




         Coming soon:  Who knows?

         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

280. Big and Small Presses and the Flux of Publishing

         Yay!  The manuscript of my historical novel Bill Hope His Story has been accepted by a small press, Anaphora Literary Press, for publication, and speedy publication at that, since hopefully it will appear by early June, in time for a near cosmic event to be described hereafter.  Which brings me to the subject of small presses.
           Small presses are a world of their own, filling the vacuum left by the big presses, when the biggies stopped publishing and promoting new authors in hopes that they would one day produce bestsellers or otherwise repay the investment involved.  And who, by the way, are the big U.S. trade publishers, the publishers who sell to the general public?  In New York there are five: HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette Book Group, this last a division of a French publisher based (logically enough) in France.  One might ask what happened to Houghton Mifflin?  A respected and venerable firm, it is based in Boston, far removed from the New York brouhaha; after a bewildering number of corporate metamorphoses, it emerged in 2007 as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 
         Harcourt?  Ah, that rings a bell.  But what is the descendant of the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich of yore, a major New York publisher, doing up in bean town?  Years ago I did editing on a freelance basis for it (Harcourt, not bean town), even working for a while as a researcher/flunky for the great Jovanovich himself, a giant of the trade, being on call 24/7 should he need some information posthaste.  (Ah, there are tales to tell.)  No question, Mr. Jovanovich was a dynamo of a CEO who through a dizzying series of acquisitions turned his company into a major player in the book trade.  And this from a son of immigrants who started out as a Harcourt textbook salesman and within seven years, at age 34, became CEO of the company, which tacked his last name on in 1970.  What mix of luck and fate, what ruthless ambition and superlative ability, what conniving and cajoling, and what demolishing of rivals fueled this meteoric rise, I don’t profess to know, but I suspect they all played their part.
         That William Jovanovich had more in mind than books became apparent when he acquired insurance companies and not one, but two, three, then four Sea World marine parks, thus making Harcourt a conglomerate.  These activities I became aware of when he asked me to fax him a map of Central Park, an imitation of which he was planning to install in one of the parks.  The map was duly faxed, but I and the employee faxing it wondered at his plan to view Central Park from a helicopter, rather than traipsing it on foot.  Strange are the ways of the mighty. 
         In 1982 Mr. Jovanovich took the company out of New York, a move that occasioned much confusion and dismay among the modest toilers in the vineyard, the college textbook editors I worked with, many of whom declined to be relocated to Texas.  But worse was in store.  In 1987 a hostile takeover bid compelled Jovanovich to plan a recapitalization that left the company mired in debt; the stock plummeted, mass terminations of employees and sales of assets followed, and in 1990 Jovanovich resigned as CEO, a sad ending of what had been a stellar career.  Harcourt (soon stripped of “Jovanovich” – sic transit gloria mundi) succumbed to a merger thereafter, and in 2007 it was gobbled up by Houghton Mifflin, which explains how “Harcourt” got tacked on to “Houghton Mifflin.”  If I have lingered a bit on the ups and downs of Harcourt and Mr. Jovanovich, it is to show how the world of big publishing has changed, with more emphasis on mergers and acquisitions, and less on such a stodgy old product as books.  Which is why small presses exist, being still preoccupied with books.
         Though there have always been small presses, and some of them quite prestigious, new ones have appeared in record numbers recently, like phallic mushrooms after a heavy rain.  So don’t say that publishing is dying in the U.S.; in spite of Facebook and twittering tweets, and television and the Internet, people – some people -- do read, and there are books for them from a hundred presses (no, I can’t name a hundred, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist), not to mention self-published books.  Yes, there are books from the Big 5 too – all the best sellers you’ve heard of, and countless more – usually presented with hoopla and hype.  But there are far more self-published titles – more than 700,000 in 2015, versus some 300,000 traditionally published books.  And maybe there are too many books: book sales are falling fast, competition is intense, and publishers both big and small now expect authors to carry the burden of marketing.  Yes, authors – those quiet, reclusive, pen- or key-pushing sensitives addicted to the written word, are supposed to get out there and sell, sell, SELL their books; not by wish but by publishers’ fiat, the hermit has become a huckster. 
         If you consider the situation of small publishers, this isn’t so surprising.  Their situation is precarious, for small presses run as much on hope and aspiration as on financial stability; in other words, many are flirting with failure, perennially risk going bust.  So what are they to do?  The out-and-out vanity press publishes your book for a hefty fee, does little to promote it, and keeps on teasing you with offers of publicity and marketing for further hefty fees.  Other presses survive by demanding a stipulated amount of sales from the authors.  Anaphora Literary Press, my newfound publisher, requires that I buy 50 copies at a 25% discount from the list price ($15 for a $20 book), after which further sales to the author are at the standard author’s discount of 40% ($12 for a $20 book).  And those 50 copies must be sold; they can’t be sent out for reviews.
         Does that sound exorbitant?  Not in the world of small presses.  A small press that was eager to publish a volume of my poetry required 75 pre-publication sales before printing the book.  That meant rounding up 75 friends and acquaintances – most of whom are probably less than ardent readers of poetry – and asking them to buy a pig in a poke.  When I consulted a friend, a published poet who does readings all over the country, he admitted that, even with all his contacts, he couldn’t come up with 75 such victims.  So I said no to the publisher, who, unconvinced by my e-mail rejection (or maybe unaware of it), sent the nicest little note by snail mail, repeating the offer, only to be rejected again.  But what was that, compared to another small press that requires each of its authors to buy 200 (that’s what I said – 200) copies of their book.  I have dark fantasies of their authors sitting at home surrounded by towering stacks of unsold books, coaxing and cajoling their friends to buy just one little book at a bargain price – a terrible test of friendship.  (Indeed, it’s perilous having an author as a friend: “Oh my God, he’s published another book.  I suppose we’ll have to buy it.”)
         So there is my brief glance at the publishing world of today – a world in constant flux.  Which anticipates my next post, on Book Expo and BookCon, stellar events that will take place right here in New York next June.  Never heard of them?  All will soon be explained, plus an account of the most exciting adventure – or the grossest folly – that I have ever perpetrated.

         P.S.  I only have to sell 48 books from Anaphora, since two friends -- uncoerced by me, I swear! -- have promised to buy a copy.



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          BROWDERPOMES:  For two new poems of mine, on ninny serene versus deep, and proverbs for the wicked, click here and scroll down to pp. 34 and 35.

For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. 
For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  
To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  
For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.  


          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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.





         Coming soon:  As just announced, Book Expo and BookCon 2017, with me  avoiding the one and hitching myself to the other.

         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

279. Village Shops: Chocolate High Heels, Tibetan Singing Bowls, Himalayan Salt, and 1970's Jumpsuits

         For me and my books, and the whole sordid story in a nutshell, click here.
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         The West Village is full of little shops, many of them unique, that make shopping here great fun, and show the varied tastes and interests of New Yorkers.  I’ll start with one I have never set foot in, and for good reason: it sells chocolates, and I don’t want to be tempted.  This is Li-Lac (“Chocolates since 1923”), which exists at five locations in the city, the one I know being at 40 Eighth Avenue, only a few short blocks from my apartment.  It boasts of being founded in 1923, when George Demetrious, a Greek chocolatier trained in Paris, came to the U.S. and opened a small shop here in Greenwich Village; today it’s still going strong, given the almost universal human urge to devour chocolate.
         I often pass by the store and see its seasonally appropriate displays in the window: a jumbo turkey ten inches high for Thanksgiving; chocolate Santas for Christmas; heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for Valentine’s Day; chocolate Easter Bunnies for Easter; I’m not sure what for July 4; and witches holding out a tray of chocolate goodies and asking, “Sweets, my pretty?” for Halloween.  In my naiveté I used to think the giant Santas and turkeys were cardboard imitations, but glossy Li-Lac literature that comes to me in the mail assures me that they are for-real solid edifices of chocolate, available for a price: the jumbo turkey (4½ pounds of gourmet chocolate that can feed 35 people) for a mere $75.  Also available are life-size chocolate high heels (yes, that’s what I said: high heels) for $46, a life-size chocolate soccer ball for $75, and a chocolate chess set likewise for $75.  Though I’ve never entered the store, I have sampled its offerings, for our friend John used to bring my partner Bob and me little balls of chocolate that matched his budget: a dollar each, but delicious.  So if you want handmade specialty gifts in chocolate, or just ordinary little runt-sized chocolates, Li-Lac is the place to go.  And their goodies are kosher certified, too.
         A  store that I frequent regularly is Integral Yoga, my health-food store, at 227 West 13thStreet, which in 2016 celebrated its fiftieth year, having opened in 1966, when the neighborhood – now scrubbed-up and safe --  was a ma gnet for drunks and drugs.  When I was first initiating myself into the mysteries of vegan dining, I would walk slowly past the entrance and peer in, without quite having the nerve to penetrate the arcane precincts of this mysterious emporium.  Finally, having taken some courses in vegan cooking that acquainted me with the basics of a vegan diet – whole grains, legumes (beans, peas, and lentils), fruits and vegetables, and sea vegetables – I dared to venture in, and have been venturing there ever since.  Integral Yoga has given me foods that in my young years in the Midwest I didn’t even know existed: kale, collards, pinto beans, chickpeas, chard, granola, tofu, tempeh, kombu, arame, millet, bulgur wheat, quinoa, and countless others.  Without instruction I would never have known that sea vegetables – these dried-up, skinny-looking tangles of fibers – would expand and soften into delicious edibles, once soaked briefly in water.  Nor would I have known that tofu, a bland food much maligned and scorned by the foes of vegan dining, could become delicious if properly prepared and seasoned.  But in time I learned that these exotic foods, and organic versions of familiar ones, could be made into tasty feasts every bit as satisfying as the conventional meat dishes of most Americans.   And all this is offered with a 10% discount for seniors and students.
         And right next to the food store is the Integral Yoga Institute, where I have rarely ventured.  Available there are books galore on appropriate subjects (meditation, yoga, etc.), not to mention classes in chanting, healing, breathing, massage, gongs, drums, Tibetan singing bowls, and Ayurvedic medicine.  There are even sessions in shamanic womb healing; laughter and sound healing meditation; and “Chair, Chi and Prana: Multidimensional You.”  If all that is too much for you, keep in mind the slogan on the wall of the food store: TRUTH  IS  ONE / PATHS  ARE  MANY.  I’ll admit that I’ve confined myself to a vegan diet, and simple yoga exercises with a touch of meditation.  Putting me off just a bit is a brochure for a workshop on nutrition and yoga, with the healer’s picture flashing a beatific smile that I find just this side of insipid – all that health and happiness stretched from ear to ear.  Which probably shows my unenlightened Western mind, feeding my body appropriately while starving my spirit.  I’m convinced that laughter heals and that Tibetan singing bowls do wonders, but I’m not quite ready to face a Multidimensional Me, having my hands full with my current one-dimensional me.
         A Village store of a different kind is the pet portrait store at 545 Hudson Street, where the proprietor, Mimi Vang Olsen, holds forth, usually busy painting a commissioned pet portrait inspired by a photograph, while listening to opera on the radio.  I went there several times with my friend John, who, having recently been hosted by a friend with felines, wanted to buy a thank-you card featuring cats; in the back of the store are numerous dog- and cat-themed cards.  The front door is always locked, but once a quick glance reassures her, Ms. Vang Olsen opens it and welcomes you warmly.  As for her last name, her husband is Danish, though she herself grew up in the West Bronx in the 1940s, the daughter of an Armenian immigrant who had a portrait-photography business.  So if you want your pooch or tabby immortalized, this is the place to go.
          Another store, quite unique, at 523 Hudson Street, just a short ways south (downtown) from Mimi’s, is The Meadow, where I was taken last fall by a young friend who used to live in the West Village.  The name may invoke a weedy field full of summer wildflowers, but in fact the Meadow specializes in salt.  Yes, salt – every kind you can imagine.  In the front of the store are salt blocks of every size, ranging from small ones at $5.00 up to big blocks at $50.00.  Why one would want blocks of salt of any size or price eluded me, but my young friend assured me that he used salt blocks in cooking. 
         Further enlightenment came to me from the Internet, where The Meadow’s website urges viewers to throw away their table salt, and save their kosher salt for de-icing the sidewalk; gourmet salts, it insists, are infinitely preferable, each kind working in a different kind of cooking.  So here I am again, an unenlightened initiate – or non-initiate – peeking into another realm of mystery, of which the West Village seems to offer a profusion, whether we’re talking about chocolate or tofu or Himalayan salt.  And far in the back of the store, for a note of contrast, is an offering of bitters, since what salt is to food, bitters are to cocktails – a few dashes adding depth and complexity to a drink.  One can leave The Meadow anticipating tasty food and zesty drinks.
         Finally, I’ll end with a store I’ve never set foot in, and only recently heard about, but whose name intrigues me: Screaming Mimi’s.   And what do you suppose it purveys?  Rock music?  Parrots?  Unmuzzled prostitutes?  Wrong, wrong, and wrong.   It has vintage clothing like you couldn’t find anywhere else.  But what would you want with out-of-date apparel?  Stuff for theme parties: a 1920s wedding, a 1980s prom, a 1940s bar mitzah – or any period event you can invent.  And many consider its racks and racks of clothing, and tables adorned with hats, as the ultimate in cool.  Fashion students drop in, and costume and fashion designers come by for inspiration.  And where else would you find a “Cape” section or one labeled “1970’s Jumpsuits”?  It’s all there at its new address, 240 West 14th Street, the parlor floor of a brownstone between Seventh and Eighth Avenues (nearer Eighth), between a liquor store and a nail salon, where it took refuge after gentrification chased it out of its former location on Lafayette Street.  Alas, the purple banner with bold white lettering that proclaimed SCREAMING MIMI’S on Lafayette Street is not in evidence.  Instead, if you look up at the front parlor window, you see a sign:
What the world needs isLOVE
Who can argue with that?  But to experience love in the form of vintage clothing, you have to climb a steep brownstone stoop, but since when has accessing the good life been easy?  And by the way, who is Mimi?  No idea; the proprietor goes by the name of Laura.

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          BROWDERPOMES:  For two new poems of mine, on ninny serene versus deep, and proverbs for the wicked, click here and scroll down to pp. 34 and 35.

For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. 
For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  
To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  
For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.  


          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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




         Coming soon:  Anyone’s guess.  Maybe a reprint of a relevant earlier post.

         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

278. New York Skyline: Aspiration or Hubris?

         
         New: For my author page on Amazon (bio, photo, books), click here.

         New York is a city of doers, and one thing they do – constantly, maniacally – is build.  Our beloved New York Times had an article last December, “A Year of Skyline Spectacle and Joy,” that chronicled significant architectural restorations and creations in the city in the year 2016.  The photos accompanying it let readers promenade about the city to see these sites without stirring from their humble abode.  So let’s take a gander together.
         The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center is described by the Times as a “whimsical 110,000-square-foot exclamation mark” on Columbia University’s Upper Manhattan medical campus near the George Washington Bridge.  The south-facing 14-story tower “presents a cheerfully teetering stack of cantilevered terraces, indoor bleacher seats, lounges and stairs,” as seen in a large photo showing the building’s stairs and adjoining rooms blatantly exposed at night through huge glass windows.  Impressive, to put it mildly, and in the Times’s words, “playful, welcoming, warm” – which for a medical school is pretty good.  And as the sun sets, quoth the Times, “the center becomes a beacon in the neighborhood.”  I’m sure it does, but for me the marvel of that neighborhood is the George Washington Bridge, which arches over the Hudson not whimsically but with massive grace; I’ve walked it many a time, going to or from the alien terrain of New Jersey, and have felt it vibrate beneath my feet from the endless parade of traffic rushing across it. 
         Redrawing the city’s western skyline, according to the Times, is the 467-foot-high Via 57 West at 57th Street, seen in a photo as a towering triangle rising up over the Hudson and strewn with dark splotches that I assume are windows or balconies.  It looks like a child’s giant cut-out, a huge scrap of material like nothing I have ever seen, and one that seems incomplete in itself, as if waiting to be assembled with other giant cut-outs and so become something meaningful and complete.  The Times calls it a “warped, mountainous pyramid,” then corrects itself by describing it as a hyperbolic paraboloid, rectangular on the ground with a swooping roof façade.  The newspaper assures us that the stainless-steel skin shimmers with the changing light, which is some consolation, but I can’t help thinking of it less as a building that as some drug-befuddled architect’s revenge on solid geometry.  And since it features rental apartments, people live there.  Imagine living in a rectangular-based hyperbolic paraboloid with saw-toothed balconies that, angled toward the Hudson, make hundreds of facets in the stainless-steel skin.  The very thought of it gives me the shivers.  But I’ll admit that it ain’t dull, and the western skyline can probably use a bit of sparking up.
Via 57 West, under construction in 2015.
Justin A. Wilcox
         Another new development is the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia University’s 17-acre Manhattanville campus, near the intersection of Broadway and 125th Street.  A photo shows a huge nine-story hunk of a building dazzlingly illuminated at night.  It is described as consisting of four steel-frame glass blocks surrounding a glassy core with meeting rooms, presumably for neuroscientists, since this monstrous achievement is a “nexus for neuroscience” and a “factory for ideas.”  A double-skin curtain wall, its two layers separated by “a muffling pillow of air,” is said to let light in while reducing the rumble of the elevated subway outside.  Furthermore, the science center engineers “illusions of ethereal weightlessness,” as does, in my opinion, our new president, whose sturdy presence seems to emit airy ideas.
The Science Center by day, and still under construction.  And very close to the subway.
Columbia University / Frank Oudeman         What fails to engineer anything, least of all ethereal weightlessness, is another 2016 architectural achievement (or nonachievement) chronicled by the Times: the Mulry Square Fan Plant in the West Village, which is where I live (in the Village, not the plant).  Though I pass near it often, I’ve managed not to notice it and so have failed to grieve at its lusterless, prosaic, and totally uninspired appearance.  In fact, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as Mulry Square, which does indeed minimally exist, in a drab sort of way, at the intersection of Greenwich Avenue and Seventh Avenue, about a six-minute walk from my building.  The Times article calls the structure – an emergency ventilation plant that cost $180 million -- “one of the saddest excuses for architecture completed this year.”  Neighborhood groups pleaded for years with the city to build the plant with a design less hideous than a windowless concrete bunker and a few forlorn benches, yet that is apparently what they got, albeit with a fake-brick townhouse façade topped by a curtain-rod cornice.  I’ll check it out the next time I venture up Seventh Avenue, but from all accounts it makes Via 57 West look inspired, and the Vagelos Education Center look like nothing short of a miracle.
         I don’t want any of this post’s comments to suggest that I’m hostile to modern architecture, for I’m not.  Though I’ve only seen sketches of it and not the edifice itself, which will be completed in 2017, I’m in love with Jean Nouvel’s high-rise going up at 53 West 53rd Street, next to the Museum of Modern Art, with its tapering glass pinnacle vanishing into light.  And every night before going to bed, and every dark early morning when I get up, I see and celebrate One World Trade Center, or the Freedom Tower, lights ablaze at the renascent Ground Zero site, a commemorative wonder that I have christened my “Tower of Light.”  New York sometimes commits architectural monstrosities, but it also creates shimmering marvels.  It always has and it always will.
The Freedom Tower at night, seen up close.
Christian Kendzierski
         The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), a mighty force in the city, heartily agrees.  Its special 16-page supplement to the New York Times of January 19 opens with a full-page black-and-white photo viewing the Chrysler Building from above at night – a plunging perspective that is impressive and almost frightening.  And in another full-page spread the commercial real estate agency CBRE shows another remarkable photo of the city at night and announces, “NEW YORK.  NEW CITY.  From the World Trade Center to Hudson Yards to One Vanderbilt to Brooklyn and beyond, New York is a city transformed,” and then goes on to hail the city’s changing skyline.  
         In a Q. and A. in the same section, REBNY chairman Rob Speyer, a lifelong New York who is raising a family here, evinces optimism about the city’s economy, and hails the city as a thriving global metropolis where people from all around the world want to live, work, visit, and study.  Needless to  say, he is “extremely bullish” on the city’s real estate market, and thinks that President Trump’s stimulus proposals, if enacted, should extend and strengthen the current economic cycle.  As so often in this country, total confidence, total optimism, total certainty that all is, and will continue to be, well. 
         But will it?  So often in the past, blazing optimism has preceded a disastrous decline in the economy.  I am no visionary able to predict the future; I only know that booms are followed by busts, that what goes up must come down, and that the farther things go up, the farther they will ultimately go down.  Meanwhile the city’s destiny – at its immediate destiny – seems to be in these towering structures that reach higher and higher into the sky, an expression of the city’s and the nation’s imperative to DREAM  DARE  DO, to be exceptional, to know that, at every moment, the eyes of the world are upon us.  Aspiration or hubris?  Time will tell.  Meanwhile, in every sense, the sky’s the limit.
         A footnote to the above:  In the past two years, 31 construction workers have died while on the job in the city.  Spending in the construction industry is at a record high, but many contractors won’t pay for training programs and safety measures, including those required by law.  Because the federal enforcing agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is understaffed, only a handful of construction sites are inspected.  The result: an epidemic of construction worker deaths.  For progress – if progress this is – there is always a price to pay.

 *                   *                   *                    *                   *                  *
          BROWDERPOMES:  For two new poems of mine, on ninny versus deep serene, and proverbs for the wicked, click here and scroll down to pp. 34 and 35.
For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. 
For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  
To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  
For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.  
          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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




          Coming soon:  ???  Maybe a look at some unique and funky businesses in the West Village, Soho, and Noho.

         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

277. Two Libraries: An Old Friend and a Mystery Building

         For two new poems of mine, on ninny versus deep serene, and proverbs for the wicked, click here and scroll down to pp. 34 and 35.

         This is a tale of two libraries, one an old friend and one a mystery building; I’ll start with the old friend.   The year 2016 has seen many architectural changes in the city of New York.  The one I can most relate to is the reopening, after two years of renovation, of the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, that formidable Beaux Arts structure on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, guarded by two famous sculpted lions.  Behind that Beaux Arts façade and the lions, deep inside and up on the third floor, is the famous reading room where researchers pore over the items they have requested.  
         In years past I have spent hours in the Rose Reading Room perusing books, many of them fragile, fetched up from the library’s innards and delivered to me when my magic number flashed on the screen above the window where you claim the books requested, or where you find, alas, that the items you most want and need are not available.  Sometimes I claimed one thin volume, and sometimes a whole stack of books that I with effort toted back to my seat at one of the room’s long tables.  All round me were other researchers likewise immersed in their work, plus an occasional intruder from the streets who propped some book or newspaper up in front of him (always a him) and pretended to read, while dozing off from time to time, until a library guard nudged him awake and reminded him that sleeping here in the Rose Room is totally and absolutely forbidden. 
         My last project there was reading books – preferably primary sources – about the slave trade in New York, as background material for my unpublished historical novel Dark Knowledge.  So engrossed was I in my research that I failed to look around and above me to appreciate just how magnificent my surroundings were: a room the length of two city blocks, with a 52-foot-high ceiling displaying murals showing fluffy clouds in a wide-arching sky.  The building itself dates back to 1902, when the cornerstone was laid; the roof was completed in 1906, but the library didn’t open until 1911, when on the first day between 30,000 and 50,000 visitors poured in. 
         Given the building’s age, it’s not surprising that time took its toll.  One night in May 2014 an ornamental plaster rosette crashed to the floor of the reading room, causing the library to conduct a full inspection of the ceilings of both the Rose Reading Room and the adjoining catalog room where scholars submit their request and receive the magic number that will let them claim their materials in the reading room.  Restored in the 1990s, the 1911 reading-room ceiling proved to be in good condition, but the library decided to do more than recreate and replace the fallen rosette.  Installing scaffolding and lengthy platforms, it reinforced all 900 plaster elements in both rooms with steel cables, restored the catalog room’s mural, and installed LED lights in the reading room’s chandeliers.  The project cost $12 million and meant the rooms were closed for two years, to the dismay of researchers and the general public, who were serviced in other less grandiose  rooms throughout the building. 
         Today the rejuvenated rooms once again welcome researchers, who need have no fear that a falling plaster rosette will crash upon their noggin, disrupting vital research.  Besides fetching books from the stacks, the two rooms hold about 52,000 reference books, including encyclopedias and dictionaries in various languages.  For one complicated project I once consulted encyclopedias in Spanish, French, and German, as well as a Russian one in translation – a reminder of what outlandish assignments may come to a freelance editor.
         One last detail: why is it called the Rose Reading Room?  Because it is named for the four children of the Rose family that donated the money to restore the room in the 1990s. 

         And now for the mystery building.  There are in fact two mystery buildings side by side on West 13th Street that I pass frequently, but which until now I have never really looked at closely.  One, a three-story windowless slab near Greenwich Avenue, looms strangely, obviously not commercial or residential.  What, then, is it?  A Metropolitan Transportation Authority substation, one of many situated throughout the city, but this particular one hailed by that august authority, the New York Times, as an example of a civic-minded expression of architectural ambition.  Built in the early 1930s, it is described as an Art Deco gem and a neighborhood landmark, prized for its geometric decorations, embossed aluminum doors, limestone frieze, Flemish brick coursing (whatever that is), and square turrets.  Yes, close inspection even of a photo reveals all those things, if only the city’s hurrying pedestrians (myself included) would stop to take them in.
         But what is an MTA substation?  It is a facility, underground or above, that converts high voltage AC current into the DC current used by the subways of New York City.  If that doesn’t clear things up for those who never took a high-school physics course – or even for those who did – I can only add that photos of substation interiors show rows of big boxlike gray structures with gauges and dials that, minus the gauges and dials, remind me of high school lockers where students deposited their wraps, lunches, and other vital items.  There are also panels and cranes and fans and ventilation ducts, and cables and tanks and wires, the exact purpose of which escapes me.  But some substations have been landmarked, and the New York Transit Museum offers tours of substations to those who are eager to learn more about how this city works, even though the public usually exits the tours more confused than ever.  So let’s just say that substations provide the power that makes the trains run.  And if their usually unlovely exteriors are sometimes enlivened with a bit of Art Deco ornamentation, so much the better.
         But right next to the West 13th Street substation is another building,  251 West 13thStreet, that is as impressive and intriguing as the substation is prosaic and plain: a three-story red-brick affair with rounded arches over tall windows that reminds me a little of the Jefferson Market Library on Sixth Avenue.  The 13th Street building was once a branch library that I visited when I lived nearby on Jane Street, but it is now in private hands, handsomely ornate, not a bit Art Deco, its recessed ground floor and basement visible from the street through iron bars, the ground floor’s big windows revealing what seems to be an office.  A notice at the entrance announces, “BE AWARE / This entrance is being videotaped,” which for me makes it only more mysterious.  Also posted there: “Suite 1  Private / Suite 2  Levinson/Fontana.”  All this made me curious about the building’s history, and sure enough, like so many old buildings in the city, it has history aplenty.
         The building at 251 West 13th Street was a branch library right from the start: the Jackson Square Library, built in 1887, as announced by wrought-iron numbers on the red-brick façade, a gift to the city’s newly created Free Circulating Library by George W. Vanderbilt who, unlike many of that moneyed clan, was a bookworm eager to make books available to the public.  But my linking it to the Jefferson Market Library was for the most part mistaken, for that library is Victorian Gothic, whereas this one resembles a Flemish guildhall, reminding me of the handsome guildhall façades lining the Grande Place in Brussels, Belgium. 
         This branch in time played a role in the history of libraries, for in 1899 its head librarian initiated an open-shelf system, giving the public free access to the books, and relieving the librarians of the wearying task of fetching the requested books from distant closed shelves, an innovation that then spread throughout the branches and persists to this day.  Yes, a few books were stolen, but librarians still preferred the open system and considered the losses negligible.  Another problem was contagious diseases, no small matter since a janitor and his son who lived in the building came down with scarlet fever in 1908, causing the library to be shut down for fumigation, the patrons having to trudge some distance to another branch.  In more recent times the library was used by writers, artists, and other professionals, among them James Baldwin, Ring Lardner, W.H. Auden, Gregory Corso, and my humble self. 
         In 1961 plans were made to save the Jefferson Market Courthouse on Sixth Avenue and convert it into a branch library serving Greenwich Village – the branch library that I often visit and get books from.  As a result of this conversion, the smaller Jackson Square Library was closed and sat empty until 1967, when the performance artist Robert Delford Brown bought it.  An  extensive restoration followed, bringing light to the dark interior and hacking away the front doors and much of the ground floor, so that the building now seems to cantilever precariously above the sidewalk.  Here Brown staged frequent happenings and installed his First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, a tongue-in-cheek enterprise with two supreme commandments: Live, and Do Not Eat Cars.  Since the state of nirvana was too difficult to achieve, Brown instructed his faithful how to reach the state of Nevada.
         But that was not the end of the building’s transformations.  In the 1980s the television writer Tom Fontana discovered the building and was struck by it, noting its distinctive appearance and deteriorated condition.  Then, in 1996, learning that it was for sale, he bought it and initiated a restoration that obliterated much of the previous renovation, installed a spacious and airy bachelor’s pad (he is divorced, lives alone) on the two upper floors, and installed his office on the main floor, and other facilities in the basement.  His residence is presumably the Suite 1 indicated at the entrance, and Levinson/Fontana in Suite 2 is the TV production company he has founded with director Barry Levinson. The second floor, once the library’s main reading room, now houses Mr. Fontana’s library, its 6,600 volumes lodged in floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases.  And on the roof, hidden behind the gable at the front of the building, is a sun-splashed deck complete with a suburban-size grill.  The façade was not restored, however, because of the expense involved, so the building may still seem to cantilever above the sidewalk.
         Having no television, I know little about Mr. Fontana, who is said to party a lot; one of his New Year’s Eve festivities drew 400 guests and lasted till dawn.  Though I’m not that party-prone, I still warm to him because he peppers his speech with profanities (as I, alas, sometimes do), has never owned a car, and doesn’t use a computer, preferring to write his scripts in longhand.  His eschewing the computer balances out my eschewing television.  (Veteran followers of this blog know that I love this verb, which sounds like a sneeze – a perfect note to end on.)

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          Browder poems:  For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.  
          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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



         Coming soon:  The changing skyline of the city: what’s to hate and what’s to love.
         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

276. The Heartland vs. New York

         For two new poems of mine in the Winter 2017 issue of GNU Journal, an online literary mag, go here and scroll down to pp. 34 and 35.  Then decide if your serene is ninny or deep, and see if the proverbs apply at all to you.

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        A recent New York Times article explored the meaning of “the heartland,” since it was voters in this region that gave the election to Donald Trump.  But what exactly is the heartland?  Obviously, it’s a central region  far from the coasts, but this is rather vague.  I have always taken it to mean the Midwest, where I’m from.  A recent survey said that residents of twelve states described them as being in the Midwest, which then includes everything from Ohio west to Nebraska, and from Minnesota south to Missouri.  But if you think of it as all of the nation that is far from the coasts, you would have to include everything as far west as the Rocky Mountains and as far east as the Appalachians, and states like Tennessee and Arkansas that have always been considered Southern.  Another definition sees the heartland as the nation’s breadbasket, which then includes all states with a large percentage of farmland: the states of the Great Plains -- the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma – plus Texas, Iowa, and parts of other states like Illinois and Missouri.  It has even been suggested that the heartland is where baseball is popular, which takes in the traditional Midwest.  Given these conflicting definitions, perhaps it is best to endorse the opinion of some historians that the heartland is above all a state of mind.

         So what is this state of mind, and how does it differ from New York?  I think at once of Midwestern values: a laid-back way of looking at things, as opposed to the fast pace and intensity of New York.  Midwesterners think of their part of the country as the norm, compared with which the rest of the country – which most definitely includes New York -- is abnormal or at least not normal.  “Come back to the real America,” a Midwestern friend once said to me, and he was only half joking; he really thought his part of the country was the authentic America, and the two coasts a kind of aberration.  This “authentic” America thinks of itself as quiet, sane, reasonable, not given to extremes.  It believes in what it thinks are traditional American values; it is patriotic, honors the flag, is usually – though not always – inclined to trust the government.  And it goes to church, meaning one of the well-established churches, Catholic or Protestant, rather than some new sect that is noisy, self-promoting, and evangelical; here too it shuns extremes.   
         All of which may be a myth, since there are Midwesterners who are not altogether sane and reasonable, who are vastly suspicious of government, and don’t go to church.  But in the 1930s and 1940s – yes, way back then -- I grew up in a traditional Midwest and can certify that it did once exist, and probably still does so, albeit in a modified form.
         The Midwest that I grew up in – Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago -- was suburban, well educated, professional, not grievously  wounded by the Great Depression, and very WASP.  It flourished on the very fringe of  Chicago, a great, noisy, hectic metropolis that both beckoned and repelled us Evanstonians, who flocked to it for jobs and shopping and theater, while at the same time distancing ourselves from it as an utterly corrupt (and Democratic) city that reeked of vice, crime, and liquor.  As regards the last, I must explain that Evanston back then was officially bone dry, and had been ever since the founding of Northwestern University, whose 1855 charter forbade the sale of liquor within four miles of the campus – a ban that preceded the development of the town itself.  Teetotaling Evanstonians looked with horror at Howard Street, the boundary between Evanston and Chicago, where liquor stores lined the south side of the street, as if eyeing Evanston with scorn and cupidity.  Not that all Evanstonians eschewed alcohol; the strange fumes emanating from the discarded bottles of one neighboring house, detected by me on childhood expeditions up the alley behind our house, told me otherwise, but to get the stuff one had to drive south to Chicago or west to regions just beyond the ban, a forbidden zone sought out regularly by bibulous Northwestern students.
         This heartland of my childhood was WASP to the core, and Republican.  WASP, but not rabidly so.  When a new family moved onto a block, one neighbor might say to another, “They’re Catholic, you know,” to which the other might reply with a muted “Oh.”  Likewise, “They’re Jewish, you know,” or more circumspectly, “They’re of a certain religion.”  Yes, there were African Americans (a term then unknown), but one hardly knew them, for they lived in circumscribed enclaves and weren’t allowed on the public beaches, except for one beach reserved for them.  The churches were aware of these practices, disapproved, but weren’t ready to launch a campaign to rectify the situation.  All in all, the status quo reigned supreme, and as I grew up I accepted it as the norm, even though that vast metropolis south of Howard Street was a mix of ethic groups – Polish, Swedish, Italian, Irish, and what have you – unknown to Evanston.
         And this heartland was also Republican, and in this regard the Evanstonians of my acquaintance did indeed show passion.  This was the era of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, both of them deplored by white, middle-class Evanston.  Not every aspect of the New Deal was denounced, but Evanston Republicans thought of FDR’s greatly expanded Washington bureaucracy as a maze of inefficient agencies  overstaffed with plodding bureaucrats determined to damp down American enterprise with burdensome restrictions.   As for FDR, he was a disaster for the nation, triply and quadruply so when, against all precedent, he ran for a third, and then a fourth, term.  The denigration of the president was taken to a new level by my father, a corporation attorney, who argued fervently that the Commander in Chief wasn’t quite right in the head, having been stricken with polio years before.  As proof he cited a photo of FDR at his office in the White House, his desk topped with mementos and souvenirs accumulated over the years – Tinkertoys, my father called them, insisting that no sane man, and least of all a president of the United states, would clutter up his desk with such trivia.  (My father’s office desk was piled high with papers that only he could make sense of, but these were not Tinkertoys.)
         When it came to foreign affairs, the Midwest of my childhood was decidedly – though not exclusively – isolationist.  It thought of itself as a sane, peace-loving heartland, immune to the warmongering of the east and west coasts, which it viewed as being obsessively concerned with the nefarious doings of totalitarian states in far distant places.  And the supreme isolationist was my father, who nursed vivid memories of World War I and how our allies had entered into secret agreements of which we naïve Americans had no knowledge at the time. 
         When World War II came, courtesy of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Evanston outdid no one in professions of patriotism, and immediately put a guard around our waterworks to prevent sabotage by the treacherous Japanese.  Even the rabidly isolationist Chicago Tribune, a fanatical foe of the president, proclaimed  MY  COUNTRY  RIGHT  OR  WRONG.  But my father was an isolationist to the end, denouncing government bungling (of which there was plenty) and insisting that there were secret agreements that we, the public, knew nothing about – a claim that in the end proved correct.  That we should go to war with Japan, when each was the other’s best trading partner, was insane.  “If the king of Sweden came over here and ran for president,” he announced, “I’d vote for him,” Sweden having remained neutral in both world wars.  In war-ravaged Great Britain my father would probably have been locked up for undermining wartime morale; here his extreme opinions were respected, but not shared, by our neighbors.  (An interesting question: were he alive today, would my father have voted for Trump?  It’s hard to say.  He might have admired the Donald’s contempt for the norms, his rejection of the politically correct, but he would have had trouble supporting a confessed woman-groper.)
         When, many years later, I came to live in New York, as a child of the heartland I was baffled by newspapers in languages I couldn’t read or identify.  My forays into the wilds of Chicago had only gone so far; I had never seen an Orthodox Jew before, or dined in a Chinese restaurant.  That New York differed greatly from the Midwest of my childhood was borne in upon me in a thousand ways.  New Yorkers are intense, highly motivated, cosmopolitan, opinionated yet tolerant, skeptical, diverse.  Nothing about them is muted; they sign petitions, write letters, demonstrate.  They think big, they talk loud, they do.  Are there exceptions?  Of course.  But the New Yorkers of my acquaintance are a far cry from the Midwest of my childhood, whose suburban confines stopped abruptly short of the vast, unruly, corrupt, and fascinating city of Chicago.  Yes, the “heartland” is probably above all a state of mind and therefore subjective – a state of mind far removed from such monstrous and complex conglomerations as New York.  And if many of us have forsaken the heartland for New York, we also retreat on occasion to our heartland for a bit of sanity and repose.  It’s hard to conceive of New York without the heartland, or the heartland without New York; they need each other intensely.
         A note on banks:  Followers of this blog know my love for banks, by which I mean the big international banks, the ones whose names everyone knows.  Consider then the captions of articles on page B1 of the Business Day section of the New York Times of Friday, December 23:
Money Laundering CaseHangs Over Goldman
Deutsche Bank to Settle U.S. InquiryInto Mortgages for $7.2 Billion
Hedge Fund Math:Heads or Tails, They Win
And inside, on page B2:
Justice Department Sues Barclay’s Over Mortgage-Backed Securities
How like that naughty New York Times to hit these guys when they’re down.  Give them a chance!  They may be able to explain transactions like money laundering and dealing in faulty mortgages.  After all, everyone does it – everyone in banking, that is.  So let’s not be too hasty.  Besides, the incoming administration will probably view these matters differently.  Too much regulation harms the economy and impedes prosperity, and prosperity is what we need. So Godspeed, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, and more power to you, Barclay’s!  Be patient and soon all will be well.
         Our president elect, like many a president before him, is not bothered by such trivia.  Among his new appointees to date are six (count ’em, six) graduates of Goldman Sachs: chief White House strategist, Secretary of the Treasury (how these boys like to get close to the money!), director of the National Economic Council, head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a White House advisor, and another Sachsie likely to be named to a position that is as yet unannounced.  (For more on Goldman Sachs, see post #158, “Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid or Martyred Innocent?” Dec. 21, 2014.)

          A note on profanity:  Apropos of post #263, "The Golden Age of Profanity," in which I confessed to indulging in an inordinate amount of indecent and inappropriate utterances, it turns out that, according to the AARP Magazine of January 2017 (p. 14), cussing has several benefits:

It shows a wider vocabulary, which indicates intelligence.It has health benefits, helps reduce physical pain.It helps us to communicate more persuasively and to forge better teams in the workplace.  (57% of workers swear on the job.)I would add:It relieves stress, helps us get through the day.One caveat: If you swear too often (as I certainly do), the power of swearing won't be there when you need it.  So cherish those cuss words, nurture them, and save them up for that occasional necessary blast.


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          Browder poems:  For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.   
          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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.



         Coming soon:  Maybe something on the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, where Jack Kerouac and I have spent precious hours, and after that, the changing skyline of New York. 
         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

         

275. Diversity in New York

         Recently someone asked me what I liked about New York.  Without hesitation I said, “The intensity … and the diversity.”  For the intensity, just watch New Yorkers striding purposefully to work in the morning; these people are doers.  For the diversity, consider: my new podiatrist is from India, and her assistant is from Guyana.  My dentist is a Chinese-American from Hong Kong, and her assistant is from Ecuador.  At election time instructions come to voters in English, Spanish, Chinese, and at least one other language – Japanese? Korean? – that I can’t identify. 
         But my health insurance plan tops this, since its monthly notice of claims filed includes phone numbers for translations into Spanish, French, French Creole, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Hindi, and Japanese.  So it is that I now know how to say “attention” – in the sense of “pay attention” -- in multiple languages, as for example 1. paunawa, 2. chú ´y, 3. atansyon, 4. uwaga, 5. atenção.  (Can you identify these five languages?  The answers are listed at the end of this post.)  And not long ago I met a woman specializing in international equity sales who is from Indonesia. 
         So it has always been.  Back in Dutch days, New Amsterdam was inhabited by Dutch, Walloons, Norwegians, Germans, Italians, Sephardic Jews, Huguenots from France, Bohemians, Africans both free and slave, English refugees from the puritanical New England colonies, Mohawks, Munsees, Montauks, and others – a population like no other on the continent.
         Let’s fast forward to 2016 and expand the notion of diversity.  When I went to a Mexican restaurant on Hudson Street recently, I took a table in front that gave me a good view of the front half of the restaurant.  Sitting at the bar were two men, obviously partners, who were talking briskly to a woman who was clearly a close friend.  At the end of the bar was a woman with long blond hair who was hunched over her mobile device, giving no heed to anyone or anything else.  At a table to my left was a Chinese-American gentleman with a Caucasian woman.  And to my right, at a large table against the wall, were four men, a three-year-old girl, and an infant.  One of the men was cradling the infant in his arms, while a younger man beside him looked on fondly; I gradually realized that this was a gay male couple with a child.  And the other two men?  One black and one white, they were sitting with their backs to me and with the three-year-old girl between them, and here again I gradually realized that this was a second gay male couple with a child. 
         At one point the three at the bar began talking with those at the table, with appropriate oohs and aahs over the two kids.  Then a heterosexual couple came in, the man with a dark beard and the woman with long blond hair, and sat at a table at a certain distance from the other diners, seemingly oblivious of them.  On the wall I noticed two signs:
DON’T  WORRYBE  HAPPY
DEAR  SANTAIS  IT  TOO  LATETO  BE  GOOD?
         Finally the two gay couples got up to leave, with all the bustle and to-do involved in preparing young children for the rigors of a wintry day: scarves, mittens, coats, and a stroller for the infant.  As they left, one of the men turned to me and said with a smile, “West Village – all the gay guys,” and departed.  The hetero couple was still dining quietly at their table, and the woman at the end of the bar was still hunched over her mobile device.  And the menu and the waiter were Mexican.
         A propos of diversity, this blog has been invaded again by the Russians.  For a recent week there were 875 Russian page views, versus 311 for the U.S.  And for the past month, 3063 Russian versus 1363 U.S.  At intervals, this has happened before, but why?  I have no idea; ask Putin.  And here, by country, are the top page views for the past week, a rather typical one:
U.S.                     247France                   32United Kingdom    21Ukraine                 17Germany               16Russia                   12Australia                 7Indonesia                7India                       7China                      6   

         Answers to language quiz:
1.    Tagalog2.    Vietnamese3.    French Creole4.    Polish5.    Portuguese 

     Diversity -- that's what this city and this nation are all about.  Are you listening, Mr. Donald?


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          Browder poems:  For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.   
          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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.






         Coming soon:  The heartland vs. New York.  But what is “the heartland”?  The Midwest, where I’m from?   Anything between the two coasts?  The region where baseball is most popular?  We shall ponder.

         ©   2017   Clifford Browder

274. Sneaking through Customs and Good Riddance Day

         This post is about two things: sneaking something forbidden through the U.S. Customs, and getting rid of things.  Such is life: we accumulate things we want and get rid of things we don't want.   Which isn't always easy.  As we shall see, both endeavors involve a grinder.

Sneaking through Customs
         Sneaking something through customs has always been a bit of an adventure and a trial for international travelers, and New York, a frequent destination, is the site of many such incidents.  When I went to Europe in the early 1950s, bringing back a forbidden volume of Henry Miller, whose works were available in Paris, was a common undertaking.  Hearing of my planned trip, a college friend asked me to bring him a copy of Tropic of Cancer, which of course I did.  Arriving by ship, I disembarked properly dressed in a (seedy) jacket and tie, and had no trouble sneaking my illicit item through customs.  (Later I got my own copy of Tropic of Cancer, read it, and found it hilarious.  That’s right: not pornographic, just flat-out hilarious, as Miller recounts his sexual escapades in Paris over a period of years.)
Today, people too are scanned.  Look at that woman's piercing gaze.
         In 1963 I went again to Europe and returned with no illicit import concealed.  Once again, dressed properly in a jacket and tie, I had no trouble with customs.  But the inspector who whizzed me through gestured toward a young man nearby, showed me a closed switchblade knife, and said, “Those two Columbia College kids got caught.  Dirty books and a switchblade knife!  I get nervous even looking at a switchblade.”  I had to agree about the switchblade: it wasn’t a necessity for a college education.  As for the “dirty books,” he was probably referring to Miller’s output, which was still taboo, and in that regard I was in silent disagreement.  One of the kids was sitting nearby, his back against a wall, while his buddy was being lectured inside by the inspector’s superior.  The one I saw, who looked sheepishly chagrinned and annoyed, was in shirt sleeves and jeans with a ragged jacket  – just the kind of kid that I would search, were I an American customs inspector.  I almost went over to say to him, “For God’s sake, if you’re going to sneak in some Henry Miller, as I did once, don’t dress casual like a college kid.  Dress like I did: jacket and tie, neat, tidy, and bourgeois as they come.”
         The U.S. Customs in those days seemed to be a stronghold of puritanism, viewing imports from a moral point of view in accordance with the laws of the time, even after much of the nation had relaxed into easygoing tolerance.  Three works that originally could not get legally past U.S. Customs had acquired legendary fame and were passionately desired by all rebels of a literary bent: Joyce’s Ulysses (quite legal by my time), Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  How book-mad Americans had lusted for this forbidden triad!
         Joyce’s Ulysses had seemingly blazed the way toward acceptance.  Published in Paris in 1922, it was banned as obscene until Random House, possessing the rights to publish it in the U.S., decided in 1933 to bring a test case challenging the law and informed the Customs Service in advance.  When the anticipated copy arrived at the port of New York, the local official in charge at first declined to seize it, saying that “everybody brings that in.”  He and his superior were finally persuaded to seize it, so the case could go to court.  An assistant district attorney assigned to the case pronounced it a “literary masterpiece” but, under the law, obscene. 
         The U.S. District Court in New York then brought suit against the book, rather than the author, declaring it obscene and therefore subject to seizure and destruction, while Random House argued that it was not obscene but protected under the First Amendment.  The U.S. argued specifically that the work contained sexual titillation, especially Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and “unparlorlike” language; that it was blasphemous, especially regarding the Catholic Church; and that it expressed coarse thoughts and desires that were usually repressed.  Random House’s attorney stressed the work’s artistic integrity and moral seriousness, and called it a classic work of literature.  In his historic ruling  Judge John M. Woolsey decided that Ulysses was not pornographic, and added that if sex was on the mind of many characters in the book, the locale was Celtic and the season, spring.  As a result, Random House immediately began publishing the book, which at last was legally available in the U.S.  It  remained banned in Great Britain until 1936, and if Ireland never officially banned it, it was never available there for decades.
         By the time I reached college, Ulysses was an accepted but challenging classic; no need to sneak it past customs.  But Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, likewise first published in France (ah, those naughty Gauls!), had a much longer wait for legality – from 1934 until 1964.  A clandestine publication of the book in New York in 1940 cost the publisher three years in prison.  When Grove Press got the rights from Miller and published it here in 1961, it provoked over 60 obscenity lawsuits in more than 21 states.  The resulting court opinions varied; a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice pronounced it “a cesspool, an open  sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity” – an opinion that must have inspired many an adventurous reader to seek the book out.  Finally, in 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled state court rulings that found the work obscene.
         And that third in the triad of forbidden books, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover?  Published privately in Italy in 1928, and then in France and Australia in 1929, it was taboo here until 1959, when Grove Press (yes, them again) published it, and a U.S. Court of Appeals judge famously established the principle of “redeeming social or literary value” as a defense against the charge of obscenity.
         Today it isn’t literary masterpieces that the U.S. Customs confiscates, but food, narcotics, weapons, and anything deemed hazardous.  Food?  If, arriving on an international flight, you try to bring fruit or vegetables into the U.S., customs will seize them.  Why?  Because they may contain insects, viruses, or disease.  What then happens to the confiscated items?  The food is taken to a grinding room in the terminal and eliminated.  And if, being fibrous, an item resists the grinders, it is delivered to an incinerator.  Also into the incinerator go narcotics and counterfeit foods like fake Viagra.  There will always be customs officers, vigilantly guarding our health and morals, and there will always be those who try to sneak stuff in.
Good Riddance Day
         I had never heard of it till recently.  It seems that between 12:00 noon and 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 27, some hundred people flocked to Times Square to “shred it and forget it” – to destroy unwanted objects associated with embarrassing and painful memories from 2016, so as to clear the way for a happier and more prosperous 2017.  This new event was inspired by a Latin American tradition in which New Year’s revelers stuff dolls with objects representing bad memories and then set the dolls on fire.
         On this occasion a year ago, people deposited scraps of paper associated with bad memories in a shredder bin for subsequent shredding.  Another participant shed empty containers of prescription pills that harbored bad memories of sickness and misery, and a man brought a laptop whose slow load times had frustrated him for years.  Since the laptop was too thick to go safely into a paper shredder, he pounded it with a mallet, and when the host of the event decided that he hadn’t done enough, she took the mallet and smashed the laptop to smithereens.  Other items deposited included a woman’s memories of an ex-girlfriend, and someone else’s photo of Donald Trump.  All this before a camera-wielding crowd of onlookers.

         And this year?  “He did me dirty,” said a mother of six from the Bronx, who with her four adult daughters as witnesses, scrawled her spouse’s name on a piece of paper and tossed it into the shredder, while onlookers cheered.  Many others did the same, ridding themselves of an ex.  A woman from Harlem brought a push-cart full of old personal records to shred, explaining, “I’m here to shred my whole life.  I need a fresh start for 2017.”  Anti-Trump shredders were numerous, though a tourist from Liverpool shredded “American negativity,” saying, “You guys need to give him a fair chance.”  Another participant deposited computer parts on the ground and smashed them with a hammer, computers seeming to rival the president-elect as candidates for riddance.  A woman wrote “stress” on a scrap of paper and stuck it in the shredder.  A bankruptcy survivor contributed a shoulder bag full of medical bills and bank statements.  And a woman who had flown all the way from San Francisco shredded the hairpiece she had worn after undergoing chemotherapy.  After the hour-long event all participants departed feeling lighter, relieved, ready for a new start.

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          My poems:  For my short poem “I Crackle” and a stunning photo of me, go here. For five acceptable poems, click here and scroll down.  To avoid five terrible poems, don't click here.  For my poem "The Other," inspired by the Orlando massacre, click here.   
          My books:  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), my historical novel about a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client, is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.




         Coming soon:  Maybe something more on diversity in the city.

         ©   2016   Clifford Browder