Word for Word Lunch Poems at Bryant Park + Jeffery Renard Allen at Powerhouse

Among the many treasures New York City offers year-round is the weekly Word for Word series at the outdoor Bryant Park Reading Room, right behind the New York Public Library's Schwarzman Research Branch. Organized by Paul Romero, the poetry readings occur on Tuesdays (and some Wednesdays) in the evening and Thursdays at lunch time from January through the late fall, , except on major holidays, and feature a diverse range of readers. This year's lunchtime readings have been organized around specific presses and poetry organizations and groups, so poets published by Coffee House Press, Song Cave Press, WordTech Communications, and affiliated with CUNY and Blue Flower Arts have read so far.

Yesterday, as part of a summer-long tribute to the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Frank O'Hara's (1926-1966) legendary Lunch Poems (City Lights Books), Patricia Spears Jones invited four fellow poets to read poems inspired by O'Hara book and work, and one of his central figures and themes, New York City. Poets Lydia Cortes, Sharan Strange, Jocelyn Lieu, and Jessica Greenbaum, as well as Patricia, each read a poem by O'Hara--including some of my favorites, like "A Step Away from Them" and "Steps"--followed by their own. O'Hara's casual tone, his engagement with the everyday, his often breezy treatment of desire and love, his incisive humor, and his urbanity, all surfaced in the poems of each poet. 

Cortes read several poems that dealt with her Puerto Rican heritage; Strange also explored city life, including a poem that mentioned another poet who was present, Thomas Sayers Ellis, snapping photos throughout, and ended with an unforgettable tribute to her mother; Lieu read a series of "Hard Times Haikus" that weren't exactly haikus but distilled experience, with concision and wit, as effectively as that form can; Jessica Greenbaum invoked Florence Nightingale; and Patricia, accompanied by rain, and then by an umbrella-bearing Paul Romero, brought Paris, philosophers, Ellis (again), curses, and Freedom Summer into the mix. Though I headed off to lunch with another poet friend who attended the reading, the poems, O'Hara's and everyone elses, were satisfyingly filling all by themselves.

Lydia Cortes

Jessica Greenbaum

Jocelyn Lieu

Sharan Strange

Paul Romero, and Patricia Spears Jones

***

Later that evening, at the Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn, poet, fiction writer and professor Jeffery Renard Allen read from his acclaimed new novel The Song of the Shank, which fictionalizes the life of Thomas Green "Blind Tom" Wiggins (1849-1908), a 19th century enslaved African American whose piano performances were legendary in their day. Jeff began the reading by talking how an Oliver Sacks article he read years first hipped him to Blind Tom's story; he noted his particular fascination with Sacks's discussion of the "autistic sublime," which he attempted to depict in his text. Other aspects of Blind Tom's life, such as his performances on behalf of the Confederacy, and his refusal, after a certain point, to perform, required a complex rendering that Jeff, as the author, had to negotiate.

He then described how he transformed Wiggins's troubling story into a novel, which took him a decade to write and which involved several false starts. His ultimate discovery entailed eliding certain historical specificities, staying aslant of Blind Tom's interiority, pushing the boundaries of realism, and taking a few other authorial liberties to bring the story to life. He also learned a few things he did not know before, such as that "the blind can cry." (I didn't know this either, but I won't forget it.) Although there are no recordings of Blind Tom's music, a Brooklyn-based performer, John Davis, has reconstructed some of them, but Allen relied primarily on his imagination. The stellar reviews he has received so far strongly affirm his approach.

After Jeff finished reading and answering questions, performer Genovis Albright accompanied him, performing one of Blind Tom's infamous tunes, "The Battle of Manassas," which sounded a lot like "Dixie." One of Blind Tom's performance techniques was to play multiple tunes--sometimes three at once--simultaneously, and Albright appeared to do this briefly, which immediately brought to mind the music of Charles Ives. I asked Albright about this, specifically mentioning his symphonies, but he wasn't sure what I meant, and afterwards I sent Jeff a note thanking him for the reading but also rhetorically wondering whether any Ives scholars had investigated whether he heard Blind Tom's performances. Given that both may have lived in and around New York at the same time, it would not be inconceivable, would it? Jeff's reading deeply sparked my interest, and The Song of the Shank is at the top of my list of summer reads.

Jeffery Renard Allen

Genovis Albright

Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Zadie Smith

Just days after winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for her extraordinary novel Americanah (Knopf, 2013), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie participated in a public conversation yesterday evening with fellow writer Zadie Smith. The event took place at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, and was sold out in no time. Thankfully the Schomburg and NYPL were ready, and the event streamed live, and is archived below in case you, like me, were unable to get in, or are nowhere near the New York area. Enjoy!

Random Photos

As so often is the case, I have numerous blog entries half-begun but cannot find the time to complete them. Soon, soon.... In their place, photos. (I am not yet succumbing to the mostly textless lures of Tumblr, I tell myself). And I can muster a paragraph longer than 140 characters. I also will not blame the snow and cold, which are, I read recently, supposed to provoke action. (Cf. Max Weber.) Please click on the images to enlarge them (I think that still works, though Blogger, like every other site, changes its functionality, with little fanfare, explanation or guidance.)

Only in Manhattan: a trouserless man
relieving himself in front of the New
York Public Library (when I mentioned
this to one of the library guards, he
shrugged and waved me on)

The Woolworth Building, shrouded in fog 

In Chelsea Market, an arch of lights

One of the countless worksites in Manhattan
where a luxury tower will soon rise

Along 9th Avenue 

Near 6th Avenue and 19th Street,
yet another worksight (and lift)

Vincent Katz and Chris Stackhouse
at the launch party for the final issue
of the lit journal Vanitas, at Zinc Bar

My colleagues Jim Goodman and Rachel Hadas
at their Writers at Newark reading at
Rutgers-Newark

A young woman eating a large
bell pepper on the PATH (I'd
never seen anyone eat a bell pepper
like this in public--until her) 

The passageway connecting the PATH
World Trade Center site with
Brookfield Place and the North Cove Marina

Inside Brookfield Place's atrium 

World Financial Center ferry heading
to Jersey City (in the distance, left to
right are: Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island,
and the Goldman Sachs tower)

Looking southeastward, from
Brookfield Place's other atrium
(this was the old World
Financial Center, west of the WTC) 

More of the endless snow!

Birds on the light-rail wire, Jersey City 

The Freedom Tower, Frank Gehry's torqued
luxury tower, and the Brooklyn Bridge
from Dumbo (I never tire of this vista) 

Jared Friedman, at This Red Door

On 125th Street, in Harlem

Now gone: the old, reliable Gray's
Papaya (I grabbed a quick bite here
many a night during my penniless
days as an NYU grad student)

"Lunch Hour NYC" Exhibit @ NYPL

Depression era sign, Lunch Hour NYC (NYPL.org)

I spend at least one or two days of almost every week at the New York Public Library's Research Branch (the Schwarzman Building, soon to undergo a monstrous transformation), but so narrow and routine are my tracks there that it took a post on Jeremiah's Vanishing New York to draw me to the "Lunch Hour NYC" exhibit on the library's first floor. It is a delight, and if you're in Manhattan and anywhere near 42nd St. and Bryant Park, devote a half hour to seeing it. The gist of the exhibit is that in many ways New York City differs from the rest of the country, but in terms of lunch, a word whose definition the exhibit accords its own display, New York has often been very distinctive, as well as a pacesetter for the rest of the USA. From oyster carts and pretzel venders, to bagel-brimming delicatessens, to the Horn and Hardart automats that gladdened not only numerous city dwellers' stomachs but Hollywood screenwriters' imaginations as they dreamt up scenarios and settings, to that American culinary staple, peanut butter, as a lunchtime nutritional staple, to sumptuous power lunches where the city's (and often the country's and globe's) most important people made sure to be seen, the exhibit casts a wide net and offers many pearls.

All about peanut butter for lunch (NYPL.org)

Fr. Divine, immortalized by Ralph Ellison (NYPL.org)

Lunch, it turns out, first appears in 16th century English as a rendering of the Spanish lonja, meaning a slice of ham (from the Oxford English Dictionary: R. Percyvall Bibliotheca Hispanica Dict. at Lonja de tocino,  A lunch of bacon, frustum, lardi.), while its supposed derivative, luncheon, appeared a decade or more before, with the same meaning. As the meal following breakfast, lunch, the more popular term, was considered "a vulgarism or a fashionable affectation," in the early 19th century (from the Oxford English Dictionary: H. D. Best Personal & Lit. Mem. 307
The word lunch is adopted in that ‘glass of fashion’, Almacks, and luncheon is avoided as unsuitable to the polished society there exhibited), and still in its salad days if salads hardly made any menus but those of the penniless, but by the end of the century it had gained currency and become the name of the midday meal all English-speakers know today.

The automat case handle (NYPL.org)

The automat case (NYPL.org)

Opening one of the doors, with free
recipes inside (NYPL.org)

There's a little section devoted to the Algonquin Hotel and its legendary "round table," with drawings and photographs of notable attendees, including Alexander Woollacott and Dorothy Parker. There is a section devoted to African American lunchers, with an immense reproduction of a cafeteria packed with black diners. I grew up hearing "Why don't you go sell an apple?" as a snide remark, and the exhibit includes materials, like the poster above, detailing how this was for the most destitute of the destitute in the city (and others), at least temporarily, an employment option. Another wall features archival material and historical documents on dieting, which gained in popularity in the post-World War II era. Not only New York-based magazines, especially those geared towards women, but some restaurants attempted to capitalize on the growing interest in growing thinner and more svelte. At the exhibit's end perch artists' books, which show how great a subject lunch food can be in the right creative hands. Across from it, a multi-screen wall flashes images recent lunch-takers in the city, capturing and underlining the diversity and commonalities that have marked New York mid-day dining habits for nearly two centuries. The exhibit is one of the few free (visual, tactile, intellectual) lunches you can get in New York, and you won't gain a pound enjoying it.

A menu from 1954, I believe (NYPL.org)

Ladies who lunch, in 2012 (NYPL.org)

Garcia Marquez, Writing No Longer + NYPL's Showdown + Cal-Berkeley Library Crisis

First came the email from Reggie H., then I saw the report on Raw Story followed by one on the Guardian's site stating that Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian author and journalist who received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, is now, according to his brother Jaime García Márquez, suffering from dementia exacerbated by treatment for lymphoma that was first diagnosed in 1999.

Gabriel García Márquez (Photograph: Miguel Tovar/AP)

García Márquez is best known for his superlative 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), the most acclaimed and widely read, and perhaps most paradigmatic in terms of the genre of "magical realism," of all the Latin American "Boom" novels of the 1960s and 1970s.  His subsequent novels such as Love In the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del colera, 1985) and The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto, 1989); short story collections including No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961) and Leaf Storm and Other Stories (La hojarasca, 1961, his very first published book); and his journalistic nonfiction volumes like Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Cronica de una muerte anunciada, 1981) and Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín (La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile, 1986) all have only cemented his fame. (One of my favorite of his novels is one of his most experimental and forbidding, consisting as it does one long block of paragraph-less prose, The Autumn of the Patriarch [El otoño del patriarca], 1975.)

García Márquez's work has influenced innumerable writers, including his peers, across Latin America and the globe. Throughout his career, he has been an outspoken man of the political Left, an indefatigable commentator on contemporary events, and a larger-than-life figure in the world of global letters, sometimes brawling in print, sometimes with fists (cf. Mario Vargas Llosa). He published his most recent book in 2004, Memory of My Melancholy Whores (Memoria de mis putas tristes), and the Raw Story article points out that it received mixed reviews, but then so did some of his later books. Jaime García Márquez told his student audience in Cartagena, Colombia that his brother, now 85 years old, "has problems with his memory" and can no longer write. The chemo checked the lymphatic cancer, but, as has been noted sometimes with other cancer patients, damaged the writer's brain. He added, "Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him." García Márquez's cessation of his writing practice is a loss for literature, but what he has produced will stand forever as an extraordinary testament; his masterpiece by itself will certainly endure, as will many of his other works, especially the short fiction and novels. As for the writer himself, I hope that his suffering is minimal, and that he spends his remaining days in Mexico, where he has lived for decades, in comfort, with loved ones.

***

I have refrained from posting extensively on the New York Public Library's plans to radically redesign its landmark Research Branch building, at Bryant Park, into a lending library with expanded Net access infrastructure and a café (or several), as well as with an attenuated staff, moving a large portion of the stacks now within the building and below the park to an offsite facility near Princeton, New Jersey, while also closing two branches, one the well-patronized but shabby Mid-Manhattan Library right across the street, the other the science and technology library that shares a building with the City University of New York's Graduate Center, in the old B. Altman Building near 34th Street, because the NYPL's Research Branch and its collections are among the treasures I love the most in New York City, and because whenever I begin to post on the topic I find my blood pressure starting to rise.

An 19th map of Boston and its environs (collection of NYPL)

I am not the only one: the proposed changes have provoked a furor among researchers, writers, and everyday New Yorkers, and many are not rolling over and keeping quiet, despite the vast amounts of wealth those seeking the changes wield. What the NYPL is facing, however, is not an isolated case; all over the country, libraries are facing reduced funding and privatization, just as public institutions in general are. It is hardly news to say the commons, and the common good, funded by all for all, is increasingly under threat in favor of what is of interest, however narrow and poorly thought out, to those at the very top of the economic pile. In the case of the NYPL, New York City and surrounding areas have one of the great libraries in the world, rivaled in its breadth and depth in the United States by only a few other institutions, including the libraries at Harvard University and the Library of Congress. And the NYPL is public, so anyone can come into the Research Branch, apply for a card to read and review books and, once the process is underway, have those books in hand, be they contemporary novels, an early edition of Benjamin Franklin's diary, rare architectural monographs, obscure early 20th century American newspapers in Chinese or Russian or Yiddish, and so forth.

This aspect of the library's mission is apparently not so important to the people pushing to have the stacks gutted and the new infrastucture installed. I think immediately of the assault--because it has far surpassed indifference--on the humanities and social sciences by people not just on the political right but even among "left"-leaning technocrats, none of whom seem to recognize the ancient and ongiongbusiness-driven model of operation poses.  As I noted, the brouhaha the proposed changes has provoked keeps growing. As the Guardian's Jason Farago says in his article "What lies behind the battle over the New York Public Library, "Hundreds of writers, from Peter Carey to Mario Vargas Llosa, have gone on record against the plan. An exhaustive exposé in the literary magazine n+1 raised the temperature, and the current issue of the New York Review of Books contains page after page of tetchy point v counterpoint. Whatever the fate of our library, a lot of people are going to be very angry when this is all over."

They will be, we will be. The we being the majority (call us the 99%) who treasure the library as it has been and is and could continue to be, with adequate funding and support, or, if as was the case when the global financial crisis caused by the 1% led to a temporary halt in these dreadful plans, the they could be those who want to tear the library's innards out to put in...who knows what, but whatever it is, it will most certainly become antiquated by the time they are heading to their graves, or cryobanks, or wherever obscene rich people will be going in the future. I think of the rapid changes in technology that have occurred even since I began writing this blog in 2005, and how I didn't foresee an app version of this site nor can I envision what forms it might take down the road.

What the future holds for digitization, for access to digitized works, for standardization of digital platforms, for libraries in general, I cannot say, nor can people whose daily livelihood is to consider the answer to these questions.  Most certainly an affordable, particularly a free, universal digital online library would benefit all humankind who had the ability the access it, but physical public libraries themselves would still play important roles all across the globe. Yet in the NYPL, in its marble halls, in its splendiferous Main Reading Room, in its other special rooms and collections, and I can attest to this fact having spent a great deal of time in it, there are books from 2005, from 1905, from 1805, from 1605, from much further back, that I have held, looked through, taken notes from, read and studied carefully, with ease and pleasure.

Will any technology for reading devised today last as long as these texts? We don't know. But the NYPL's ample collection makes a case for what has perdured and continues to do so. If only the NYPL's trustees and its current CEO realized this and proceeded accordingly.

***

Asian language texts are arranged on shelves in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at UC Berkeley on Friday, June 15, 2012. University Librarian Tom Leonard is proposing a consolidation of resources in about half of the libraries on campus. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle / SF

I'll end today's blogging with a link to a story about the severe challenges facing one of the major public university libraries in the US, that of the University of California, Berkeley. Budget cuts have led to reduced staffing, pared down purchases, and now, to a horrible choice the university's chief librarian, Tom Leonard, faces: whether to close 16 of Cal's 24 libraries, or 10, but run the remaining ones with fewer librarians and staff members. San Francisco Chronicle journalist Nanette Asimov, writing on the SFgate site, makes clear how a sizable section of the faculty responded (and I'm surprised even more did not sign on):

Leonard expected to announce the libraries' fate in July. Instead, the faculty objected to being told they had just two choices for the wondrous athenaeums: horrible or terrible.

"There are no first-rate universities in the world without a first-rate library," 110 faculty members declared in a petition asking the university for an extra year to find other ways of keeping Cal libraries not just afloat, but great.

There are no first-rate universities in the world without a first-rate library, or, I would add, a first rate public library, at the very least, nearby. A truism by any measure, and closed libraries, or librarian-less libraries, do little good for anyone, including the books and other materials in them, and grimmer outcomes are sure to follow.  Instead of shuttering the libraries by 2/3rds vs. nearly 1/2, however, Provost George Breslauer and Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, already the target of Occupy-related protests in the past, will convene a "blue-ribbon panel" to study the issue and recommend options by August (2 weeks ago), to be implemented in December of this year.

This is serious business not just for Berkeley's students, faculty and staff, but for the state of California and for knowledge creation in general.  It is, unfortuately, of a piece with similar shifts all over; I am going to avoid hyperbole, but to put it simply, all these changes amount to flushing ourselves down the drain. We can still stop it, but we have got to get past complacency, fear, and everything else that is entropically leading us towards our own self-cancellation. We have to, and we can.

Happy Rosh Hashanah + At the Fashion Tent

Shana Tova Umetukah. שנה טובה

I hadn't realized a week had passed since my last entry, on 9/11. My days have been melding together in a balmy, pleasurable fashion. Although fall officially arrives next Monda it's already begun to settle in. One of the major harbingers of the new season is the beginning of the academic year, and another is New York Fashion Week, which concluded today. It's headquartered at the giant tents that devour a huge central swathe of Bryant Park, just behind the Research Branch (now the Steven Schwartzman Branch) of the New York Public Library, where I've been spending a good portion of the summer writing and research. A little while back I posted some photos of the tents going up, and then two days ago, I decided to take a break from several writing projects to get some air and see up close what was going down.

My feelings about the fashion world are conflicted: on the one hand I'm drawn towards its focus on aesthetics, beauty, creativity, innovation, wit, glamor, and style; on the other hand I detest its overall sexism, racism, classism, its psychologically and emotionally damaging effects on women (and men), and its endless recycling, its self-importance and its essentially exclusionary quality. Perhaps someone will draw or has drawn a theoretical line between the arguments of J. J. Winckelmann's "Essay on the Beautiful in Art" and Anna Wintour's editorial eye (and I haven't yet seen The September Issue); it might make make for an interesting conversation or not. But I'll hold off on that for now. I did notice that the models arriving and departing, like the people working (wheeling in those suitcases filled with who-knows-what, the photographers, etc.) were a diverse lot, but those who appeared to be attending as VIPs were far less so. I also found it telling that when the models of color were leaving, most of the photographers took far less interest in them. (Cf. fashion magazines, etc.)

At any rate yesterday I stationed myself right on the other side of the banister and barricades dividing the park's open, public sections from the private pitch leading to the back entry, by which models and VVIPs arrived, of the Mercedes Benz-sponsored big tent (House?), just as Phillip Lim's show had ended, Alexandre Hercovitch's and Milly by Michelle Smith were beginning, and people were beginning the process of arriving for Anna Sui's spectacle later in the day. I stood right next to a number of stringers, freelance and amateur photographers, a few of whom nearly got into fistfights with the official paparazzi when a celebrity (I'm not sure who it was, because I couldn't see her) arrived. One paparazzo bragged that he was ready to engage in a smackdown, though given how expensive his camera equipment looked, I suppose it could have occurred only after he'd safely stored everything away.

The fashion industry is supposedly suffering, like most aspects of our economy, from a serious downturn. There are simply not enough people financially able, let alone foolish enough, to drop thousands of dollars--cash or even less likely these days, credit--on a frock or pair of shoes or a handbag. Or one of those Peewee Hermanesque Thom Browne tiny suits that became the rage a few years back. This reality, so evident in all the empty storefronts dotting Manhattan's streets, has led to some ridiculous whining by some designers, as this New York Times piece recounts, but it also has led some designers, as is the case for people across the country and globe, to greater resourcefulness amid their despair. From what I could see, the parade of very rich and stylish people, many of them so thin they could pass through keyholes, continued, but perhaps there were fewer of them this year, and their hold over the larger society has lessened. A sequel to the first Sex and the City movie (and the TV show) is filming right now in Manhattan, and I wonder if this new reality will inform its script. Hollywood seems not to have gotten the message, from what I can tell, a few films notwithstanding. In terms of celebs, I spotted the one and only übersocialite Tinsley Mortimer; Ramona Singer, one of the Real Housewives of New York; and Lauren Conrad, who is a star of the popular TV show The Hills, though there were other famous-looking people, but I must admit I don't regularly read the New York Social Diary so I didn't know them from Eve.

After a few hours of snapping photos, observing the waves of excitement and ennui, chatting with the security guards and other photographers, counseling (as if I knew anything about anything) a young publicist who was trying to get into the fashion industry, and talking with an elderly tourist from Texas who was alternately bemused and bored with the procession while expressing repeated concern about the models' emaciation, all of which I found more enjoyable than any of the reality TV shows I regularly watch, as it was unscripted, far more democratic (anyone and everyone, from the employed to the homeless, took seats or positions, behind the barricades, and commented freely as the parade of wealth and privilege proceeded, with alternating bursts of awe, delight and annoyance), I went back to the library and continued my writing projects.

Today, I returned, for a briefer visit, but when I was leaving the library, I noticed one of the main first-floor auditorium had been sealed off, behind a cordon, for one of the last shows, Anne Klein's. (I thought they'd gone out of business.) I couldn't convince the guard to let me snap even one picture beyond the closed door--public library though it may be, contributor though I may be, the space, like that of the park, was turned over unyieldingly to private, very wealthy interests. Instead, he let me photograph him. It was supposedly the show of the season.

Photos follow, enjoy!


Library alcove curtained off for a fashion show event

Disappearing behind the curtain

Behind the curtain, pre-show schwag, lined up in the library

Outdoors, in between shows

One of Milly by Michelle Smith's models, before the show

Rich attendee, waiting to be admitted

Philip Lim models, post-show

Fashionista tumble (over a park chair!)

Fashion insider, in a kilt/skirt

Daring style

Three fashionistas

Fashionista arriving

Rich attendees, arriving

Young woman holding her pose, while the frenzy begins behind her

The official paparazzi go crazy over whoever the famous person was

A model and photographer, pre-Milly by Michelle Smith show

Fellow photographer, videotaping the entry of the grandees

Lauren Conrad, of The Hills

Tinsley Mortimer, socialite

Fashionistas arriving (cf. the ruffled sleeves; according to The New York Times, they're a "trend")

(Model?) lolling

Fashion march

A model, someone notable (or both)