Culturewatch
The Great Fear (& Independence Day)
Rummaging through Rat Bohemia, People in Trouble, and Forgetting Dolores, I am wondering how to confront or forget Sarah Schulman’s magisterial, if also monumental, heavy-weight, literally door-stopping Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Whew! Who can forget those years of what I once termed (in earlier writing on this crisis and epoch) euphoric fear. Schulman’s novels prophesied it.
Radiation Treatment
So, I am in the tight waiting room sharing space and chairs with half dozen black men in their fifties and sixties — the oldest of them twenty years younger than me. They are all of them thin and dressed in poverty uniform: shabby sweat pants or jeans slipping off slack thighs, loose sweaters and shirts that had once been molded to thicker chests and arms. Tired eyes, mustaches and hair combed, but still unkempt. Worn men, their unprivileged lives on display. They had all of them been driven up by van from black Brooklyn to glossy Mid-town Manhattan for their daily radiation doses.
Address Code
When I read remarks from people prefaced with a series of identity markers (like bar code)—as a gay, het, trans, white, black, disabled, poor, rich, and so on—as if this is who you are, I think, this is not who you are. I think, this tells me nothing I can smell, taste, see, touch, hear. I think, who you are is the bird song you heard through the window that morning, or wished you could recapture from that visit to Tuscany. I think, you are your face in sleep. You are the way you lick the bowl and the way you hold out your hand for a dog to sniff.
Philip Roth’s Ups and Downs (Blake Bailey’s Biography)
Helen Frankenthaler once mused that “artists were like cockroaches, for them everything was grist for the mill…” Philip Roth’s grist came from his close observation of people in his orbit and the world at large. But mostly it came from his own life which he constantly chewed up and regurgitated as fiction until the line between the two blurred.
Walkers in the City: A Brownsville Boy Recalls Alfred Kazin
This is the first chapter in the author’s memoir: Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers (2012). (Paperback edition available from University of Massachusetts Press.)
Nocturne for Washington Square
As a resident of Greenwich Village, my local park is Washington Square. I can’t account for what goes on there late at night. According to the media, there’s a riot going on after dark, with bottles being thrown at cops, brawls and even stabbings. There are those in the neighborhood who want to see a curfew in the park, as well as a skateboard ban and restrictions on how many people can be there. These Good Citizens are aiming at the one source of disturbance they can control: the young. But the atmosphere of frantic abandon is too widespread in the city to be controlled. Many people have emerged from lockdown with intense pent-up feelings, and challenges to the police make law enforcement a tricky task. Last week, a deranged man smashed the windows of my favorite diner and decked the 73-year-old cook. Hundreds of dirt bikes have roared up the avenue under my window at 1 a.m. Bursts of impromptu fireworks pierce the slats of my blinds, and I often hear cries of unleashed rage. In the wee hours, I don’t go out wearing flowers in my hair.
There’s a racial subtext to this issue, since the crowd in the Square includes many people of color, and they bring the culture of their neighborhoods, including music. Race and class have always been the flashpoint of disputes over urban turf, but in the streets of Greenwich Village the rules are lightly applied, even if the mixing doesn’t extend to the high-rent apartments. It’s no surprise that Washington Square is now a site of that diversity, since it has a storied history of free expression. The mood may be hard-edged after midnight, but at twilight, when the sunset is golden in the windows of innumerable buildings, it’s mellow yellow. I have seen no violence, but lots of casual toking and flirting—yes, there is plenty of cruising among people of all races, genders, sexualities, and hair colors that defy the human genome.
New Directions: Aram Saroyan’s Q&A with Gerald Hausman
After meeting Gerald Hausman as a fellow poet and colleague in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, I soon admired his poetry. The work seemed to me a fresh incarnation of a tradition I identified with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Uniquely, looking into those early chapbooks today, the work continues to hold its charge. Over the years, while we stayed in touch and exchanged books, it was only recently, with the publication of two new books, Little Miracles and Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, both of which might be characterized as nonfiction novels, that I recognized he’d in the meantime emerged in a way I never could have imagined. In his prose the same ease and accuracy remain, and a deceptive modesty in the tone, but the explorations have expanded and magnified in all directions. I haven’t read anything that has affected me so powerfully in years. A.S.
Little Miracles: Excerpts from Gerald Hausman’s Memoir
Gerald Hausman arranges stories of his life under four headings–“Starting Out,” “Writing,” “People & Places,” “Traveling.” What follows are chapters from each of those sequences in Little Miracles…
Notes from the Underground
The author–a columnist at Inside Higher Ed–thought this piece belonged in First in the Month. Your editor was glad to take him up on his proposal to reprint it…
In the sort of coincidence that makes a columnist’s work much easier, the Library of America published Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel on April 20 — the same day, as it turned out, that a jury in Minneapolis convicted a police officer of murdering George Floyd last year.
If Bob Dylan Says “Home”
Out our front door, Marin is so steep the mountain goats need crampons. But the Hispanic fellow, early 40s, GE Appliance truck, curbed his wheels and popped out. Adele had the garage door open and he’d spotted the Mustang. “Can I take a look?” .
He walked around it. Twice. “I’ll give you thirty-five, Cash.”
“Let me get my husband. He’s the one who drives it.”
Two Faces of the Sinophile
Les fous sont rois et moi je bois Mao Mao
Towards Giving It the Olde College Try
— for Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
I buried it outside the Hall of Languages, at the top of the hill. Took a shovel, dug a hole in the pristine lawn at the end of the walkway and buried it. No one seemed bothered by it: not the campus police nor the associate prof looking for tenure. No one seemed to care.
That was forty years ago.
Roller Skating Tuesday
Lana Del Rey is set to release a new CD in July. Last time around she didn’t seem intent on “making the next great American record.” The will to go pop (without compromising) that made her Norman Fucking Rockwell undeniable in 2019 was missing from Chem Trails over the Country Club, which she put out earlier this year. The absence of f-words on Chem Trails may be a sign LDR sensed someone like Olivia Rodrigo would render slack style sub-urban (and all sold-out), but it also hints LDR’s rock ‘n’ roll attitude was on hiatus. OTOH, Chem’s Trails‘ “White Dress” came through, with a little help from the video. That, in turn, sent me back to a roller-skating video posted here last summer. Compare and contrast, or just roll on…B.D.