Kirkus Discoveries reviews Richard Grayson's AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN

Today, August 26, 2009, Kirkus Discoveries reviewed Richard Grayson's Autumn in Brooklyn: September-November 1978:

AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN
Author: Grayson, Richard

Review Date: AUGUST 26, 2009
Publisher: Superstition Mountain
(261 pp.)
Price (paperback): $15.00
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-578-03208-5
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: NONFICTION

Three months’ worth of diary entries from a pivotal period in the author’s life and career.

Grayson (The Silicon Valley Diet and Other Stories, 2000, etc.), began keeping a daily dairy in 1969. It’s not entirely clear why he’s decided to publish the entries from this specific time period now, but his first semester teaching at Kingsborough Community College provides something of a narrative arc, and a number of dramatic events occur within these three months—his father’s surgery to remove a facial tumor, the editing of his first collection of short stories and the Jonestown massacre and assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk in San Francisco. Being dropped into the middle of someone’s life is a disorienting experience, and there’s not enough context for many of the names Grayson drops, but a handful take shape as real people: Ronna, the aspiring journalist who wants to keep sleeping with Grayson in spite of his preference for guys; Grandma Ethel, made miserable by the diet designed to keep her cancer in remission; and Rosa, the troubled student who frightens Grayson by lying to his face and then declaring her love for him. But the book is perhaps most intriguing as a portrait of a young man trying to make it as an artist in the 1970s. Almost every day brings acceptances or rejections from magazines with fabulous titles like Nit & Wit, The Smudge and Dirty Linen. Meanwhile, the author name-checks fringe luminaries such as Jonathan Baumbach, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer and Michael Lally. Elsewhere, Grayson worries his friends will think he’s a sellout for signing with the now-hard-to-remember Taplinger Publishing Company. As a writer, the author is known for his stylistic playfulness and irreverent humor, but these diary entries are straightforward and bracingly honest—the young man depicted here is kind, jealous, prickly, ambitious and frightened. Aspiring writers may feel a little less alone after reading this daily catalog of soaring ambitions and crushing doubts.

Those familiar with Grayson’s life and work will appreciate the inside look into these formative months.

Autumn in Brooklyn is available for free reading at Google Books and Scribd.

Monday Night in East Flatbush: Trying to Get into Caribbean Night at Wingate Field

Although we'd read online that on the advice of doctors, an ill Sean Paul had pulled out of his appearance at the Martin Luther King Jr. Concert Series tonight, we figured that would make Wingate Field easier to get into. Caribbean Night was supposed to go on with the replacement headliner, Machel Montato.

But along with hundreds of other people, we wandered around the area surrounding Wingate Field, unable to get in.

We got there around 7:45 p.m., walking up Winthrop Street from the subway on Nostrand Avenue. The usual hawkers of bottled drinks, food, CDs, etc., lined the nearby street, and we were prepared for the usual entrance to Wingate Field, but police officers had gated off the street and told us we had to enter a block north.

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Thinking that was strange, a group of us went up New York Avenue to Hawthorne Street, but cops had blocked that off too. Go one more block north to gain entrance to the field, they told us.

Okay, we thought, Wingate Field goes four blocks north of Winthrop, but the bleachers are on the west side and we didn't recall an entrance there. Perhaps we were remembering it wrong. So we walked another block to Fenimore Street, where a group of us were told we would have to go to East New York Avenue to get in.

That seemed very odd. East New York Avenue was another four blocks north, and two blocks north of Wingate Field's north side at Rutland Road.

We just followed everyone else who looked as if they were going to the concert. At each street, the road was blocked off, cops were checking the IDs of people who said they lived on the block and letting them in if they could prove it, and other cops were waving us north.

But at Maple Street, we saw the cops open the gate a block south of East New York Avenue, and a crowd of us went in. As we walked across, we discovered a mid-block little courtyard, a street really, only totally paved, called Miami Court, where neat little houses faced each other, and then two more, Tampa Court and Palm Court.

The indispensible blog Forgotten NY's feature "Lanes of Mid-Brooklyn" says:

These are three tiny pedestrian alleys that were constructed as part of a building project a few decades ago. They are lined with attached two-story units between Maple and Midwood Streets east of New York Avenue . . .

Anyway, we ended up on the corner of Midwood Street and Brooklyn Avenue, and it was still blocked off. People were getting annoyed, and there were a lot of them. When people asked, they were told Wingate Field was already full and we wouldn't be allowed in until people left.

We asked a cop frankly if he thought it would be just easier for us to go home. "Yeah," he said, so we walked back west, assuming we'd go to Nostrand and back down four blocks to the Winthrop Street station.

But at New York Avenue we saw crowds coming north, and they looked as if they were going to the concert. Most everyone we saw knew that Sean Paul wasn't performing and still wanted to go in for Caribbean Night. At every street - Rutland Road, Fenimore, Hawthorne - cops were still directing people north.

At the corner of Winthrop Street and New York Avenue, we spoke to three young women who'd been in Wingate Field. "It's not full," they told us. "It's like half empty, way less crowded than usual."

So we wondered what was up. We'd seen maybe 300, maybe 400 or more people trying to get in. Had they canceled the concert? It wasn't clear. So we just got on the subway - and yes, an officer was giving a young man a summons as we entered - and returned to Williamsburg.

It was all a blur, but we're grateful for the extra exercise and a chance to see more of the neighborhood, we guess. We would like to know what the deal was tonight at Wingate Field. Calling Marty Markowitz. . .

Sunday Afternoon in Jackson Heights: Theater for the New City Street Theater's "TALLY-HO! or Navigating the Future" at Travers Park

This afternoon we made it from Dumbo Books HQ in Williamsburg to Jackson Heights in 20 minutes thanks to just-in-time G and E trains going only six stations.

We did have a nice sweaty walk from Broadway up almost to Northern Boulevard to Travers Park, but we'd given ourselves an hour's traveling time so we were able to stop at the great neighborhood coffee bar Espresso 77 and get some iced tea.

We were at Travers Park to see Theater for the New City's award-winning Street Theater Company performing TALLY-HO! or NAVIGATING THE FUTURE, an exuberant, rollicking agitprop musical for the Great Recession. With a lively and talented cast, boisterous music and dance, the show satirizes the recent financial excesses that have led us to our current sad state of economic affairs.

With a righteous indignation and 1930s-style call for old-fashioned community organizing and social activism, TALLY-HO! hearkened back to the socially conscious spirit of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project and its populist shows like the Living Newspaper and The Cradle Will Rock.

In a sequence showing the mass poverty of the Great Depression (FDR is heard talking about "one third of a nation") and the salutary forces of the New Deal, the play deliberately evokes that spirit.

And where else can the angry nouveau poor get the catharsis of watching small children in the audience rush the stage to pelt the Madoff-like evil Wall Street manipulator "Bernie Tradeoff" with fake food?

And then get to see the mega-millionaire swindler get eaten by zombies (here called Toxic Assets) and end up as a digested seven-foot piece of shit?

Here's the summary of the production from Theater for the New City's website:

The musical is a morality play about how America, facing financial failure, must set a course through the uncertainty of what's to come. Two accountants—one clever and ambitious, the other sensible and caring—exemplify citizens gripped by our nationwide financial disaster. The status-seeking, flashier one jumps on the speculative bandwagon and prospers with each successively greater scheme. The steady, responsible one takes the low road, but the economy is at the mercy of the passions of the day. The innocent go broke with the guilty. Everyone is buried in a vast mountain of useless commercial paper and misinformation. There's hell to pay, with investors, financiers, and Ponzi addicts going head-to-head in a colossal food fight with seltzer squirting and pie throwing. The two accountants end up in the headlock of a burly muscleman who personifies History. He takes them on a 1930s adventure to witness how New Deal idealism is undermined by modern political canoodling.

The street theater troupe has been taking this around to neighborhood parks and other locales throughout the latter part of the summer. Today we were in a corner of the Travers Park ballfields, with a large audience - encouraged to come over by pre-play loudspeaker announcemnts in English and Spanish - with tons of little kids sitting in the front row.

People were sitting on plastic milk-bottle-type cartons, blankets, towels, the cement or, in our case, the Week in Review section of the New York Times (great op-ed piece on thirtysomething by our friend Porochista Khakpour). Lots of little kids, for some reason mostly blond-haired, are in front of us.

The first "street theater" we can recall seeing was forty years ago, in early August 1969, when we were 18 and watching our housekeeper's five-year-old daughter Jeanette. There was a ragtag troupe of multiracial hippie-ish kids who'd put on these colorful, loud (and to Jeanette and me, breathtakingly exotic) shows on the otherwise-deserted Brooklyn College campus for a week. We went enough so they said, "You and your sister should join us."

We thought it was kind of weird but cool that they thought Jeanette was our sister despite the difference in our races. Jeanette, who'd been born in Haiti, piped up: "He's not my brother, he's my cousin." Which is what she called us. Anyway, Jeanette and I were intoxicated by street theater but too shy to perform.

It's not surprising that the spirit of the late Sixties, as well as the progressive New Deal, hovers over Theater for the New City productions like TALLY-HO! TNC was founded in 1970 and so they've been around for our entire adult lives.

By now, they've brought superb professionism to street theater without losing the "street" ethos. The scene changes here, with the different backgrounds lined up against the face, were effected seamlessly, requiring a good number of sweating, hard-working company members, and what must be incredibly complicated logistics.

There were some wonderful songs in the show and the cast brought Broadway musical professionalism and elaborate production values to street theater. At about an hour, it's just the right length (especially if, like us, you didn't score a spot in the shade on a summer day like today).

This is a collective effort, but the actors playing the two accountants and Bernie Tradeoff (the chorus sings, "Bernie Tradeoff is the guy who wipes away our tears / Bernie Tradeoff will be with us for the next 150 years") were outstanding, as were some of the solo singing turns.

And there's surprisingly sophisticated social criticism here, like the Wall Street crooks' professed desire to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, along with broader comedy as when a grandma, cheated out of her lifetime savings, has a fatal heart attack and Bernie Tradeoff tells her complaining grandchildren, "That's a dead issue. . . go back to your charter school!"

When the personification of History takes the accountants back to the Great Depression and New Deal, young people get a good lesson and the documenting of extreme poverty (a schoolgirl about to faint says, "It's my sister's turn to eat today") and successful community activism, as when rural band together for "penny auctions" to rescue their neighbors' farms from the greedy.

It skirts being heavy-handed and instead seems full of genuine feeling. One line in that segment, a threatening "Anyone who buys a foreclosed place won't find life worth living there," brought a huge mordant laugh from people in the back of the audience.

We loved the show and appreciated the moments of audience participation, as when, à la Tinkerbell, our shouting out our different cell phone rings saves the accountants from being killed by the Toxic Assets. At the end, kids joined the cast members to dance onstage. You can find a real review from Matt Roberson at NY Theater, but here's its conclusion:

Tally Ho, or Navigating the Future, with its solid chorus numbers, sideshow aesthetic, and stirring tribute to the people of The Great Depression, rises way above what most have come to expect from outdoor summer theatre. More importantly though, it both teaches, and practices, the ever-important lesson that some of the best things in life really are free.

We are grateful to Theater for the New City for bringing street theater to regular people in places like Jackson Heights.

After the show, walking around 37th Avenue and Roosevelt Avenue, we remembered how much we've loved this neighborhood since some of our college friends moved here in the 1970s. Like a lot about New York, Jackson Heights is even more magical to us now.

Saturday Afternoon in Fort Greene: The Fifth Annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival

Today we went to the fifth annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival, our fourth year at this event. Despite ominous weather, the festival was saved by MC Laurie Cumbo's encouraging the audience to join in a periodic "sunshine dance," and so the rain held off during the great readings by the kids in the New York Writers Coalition summer creative writing workshops in the park, music by the talented Yacouba Sissoko, and sparkling performances by three of our favorite writers: Touré, Staceyann Chin, and Colson Whitehead.

The event has gotten a lot of press coverage since the first time we went there in our first month back in Brooklyn in August 2006. In 2007 on MySpace and in 2008 on this blog we wrote longish posts about the event. With extensive pre-event coverage by the New York Times Fort Greene blog, The Local, and elsewhere, we know that more professional writers and certainly better photographers than us with our shitty cellphone will cover this event.

We were also hampered by a ballpoint pen that gave out after the second young reader, so we can't write detailed stuff about the individual kids and their work. (Lesson to you kids who are fledgling writers: take it from a longtime amateur, don't forget a backup pen or pencil!) And we had no way to keep track of the kids' names as they were called up, but hopefully someone else can do it.

Two years ago our MySpace blog post began:

Brooklyn's Fort Greene has been home to giants of American literature like Marianne Moore (on Cumberland Street) and Richard Wright (on Carlton Avenue). An earlier resident of the neighborhood, Walt Whitman wrote a Brooklyn Eagle editorial calling for the construction of a local park, "[as] the inhabitants there are not so wealthy nor so well situated as those on the heights…we have a desire that these, and the generations after them, should have such a place of recreation…"

Late Saturday afternoon, several hundred New Yorkers flocked to that place, Fort Greene Park, for the third annual Fort Greene Summer Literary Festival, presented by Akashic Books, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, the New York Writers Coalition (NYWC) and others.

Gathered on a hill overlooking the lush foliage of the park, audience members sat on folding chairs or on picnic blankets or just stood listening to five established writers of poetry and fiction and about a dozen young Brooklyn residents, aged 8 to 16, who read work composed in Saturday creative writing workshops taught by NYWC members.

Laurie Cumbo, executive director and founder of the nearby Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), served as a genial and charming MC, gracefully overcoming any jet lag she may have felt from a plane trip from South Africa the night before. Cumbo kept an event-filled program moving briskly, and her introductions and appreciations of everyone who came up to the rather rickety-looking raised platform to read or perform were both informative and enthusiastic. . .

Last year, in August 2008, we began our blog post like this:

We arrived right on time at 3 p.m. today at beautiful Fort Greene Park for the Fourth Annual Fort Greene Literary Festival. Having been to last year's event (you can read our 2007 coverage on Louise Crawford's Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn) as well as the one in 2006, we knew we were in for a treat. And we weren't disappointed.

Much credit for the Festival goes to the New York Writers Coalition (NYWC), a neighborhood Fort Greene fixture at 80 Hansen Place, and under the direction of the dynamic Aaron Zimmerman, its founder and executive director, and many others, last year provided more than 1000 creative writing workshop sessions at more than 45 locations throughout New York City. (Thanks to NYWC for photos above and kids' photos below; you can see more at their website.)

Kudos for their work on the Festival also go to these presenters: chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council and Fort Greene resident Johnny Temple's indie publishing firm Akashic Books, "dedicated to the reverse gentrification of the literary world"; the Fort Greene Park Conservatory, who've done so much good work (those of Brooklyn natives know in what bad shape the place was before they came along); the well-known agency Global Talent Associates [GTHQ]; and The Walt Whitman Project - a great Brooklyn organization known for events like tomorrow's reading, "Walt Whitman in the Neighborhood," at the Clinton Hill Art Gallery.

This year's featured writers were four current or former poets laureate. . .

Well, that saved us the trouble of rewriting all that stuff, most of which still applies. But after three years, Laurie Cumbo has become more expert in her MC duties (in the first year, she kept calling all the women, even the little girls "Mrs.") and today she was a masterly master of ceremonies, moving things along so fast that the time flew by.

Things have gotten much tighter and more polished, though not less heartfelt and true to the spirit of the event. This year we were on the concrete by the Prison Ship Martyr's Monument, with an imposing backgdrop for the readers and musician, as well as more comfortable (and drier) seating for the audience than the grass provided.

And Laurie really is fantastic. As we said, she showed us in the beginning how to do the sunshine dance, basically sitting in our chairs and moving our arms in a big circle to mimic the roundness of the sun, and she kept saying it was a beautiful day.

Frankly, we were a little grumpily skeptical, since we were sweaty in the humidity after walking from the DeKalb Avenue subway station and annoyed that the restrooms nearby weren't working so we had to go all the way back to the playground on Myrtle Avenue and Portland Place. There were lots of empty seats because people, not unreasonably, probably stayed home due to the probability of more rain.

So what was so beautiful about the day?

First of all, the sweet, enticing music of Yacouba Sissoko, a master kora player from the Djely griot tradition in Mali, who preceded the day's readers.

And of course the kids' poems and stories were beautiful. Laurie brought out the best in everyone, including the three famous guest writers, all of whom have Brooklyn neighborhood ties.

Laurie especially shone when she encouraged and eventually teamed up with an adorable, somewhat shy six-year-old - the youngest of the four writers of the talented Regist family (Talaia, Tema, Tristan and Tayon) - to recite his third and final poem. It was touching and adorable.

The NYWC Youth Writers Workshop readers listed in the program included Shyanne Bennett, Samori Covington, Marissa Eskine, Anwen Burns, Evan Campbell, Michael Farell, Danielle Farell, Mark Anthony Farell, Paul Francois, Joseph Francois, Karen Marks, Savyanna Moody, Jarrett Moore Tyrell Moore, Anjelika Amog and Aidan Amog.

Also, David Nduka, Kayla Quarless, Ashley Quarless, Tema Regist, Talaia Regist, Tayon Regist, Tristan Regist, Aliah Richardson-Gilkes, Najaya Royal, Zoe-Lynn Sheares, Gabriel Treitmeier-McCarthy and Anneliese Treitmeier-McCarthy.

(Links above are to their poems on The Local blog.)

We've seen many of these kids in previous years, so it's kind of fun to see them g
et not only bigger but see the changes in their work. Some of the vocabulary used in the poems and stories seemed more sophisticated than we'd noticed before: more SAT-type words, precise and adult.

There were "wish" poems (lots of kids wish for super-powers, apparently, though some have greater ambitions, and wish to possess their own planets), poems with the themes of peace and justice (social activism is high among this group), funny list poems, poems using anagrams of their name with each letter a quality or trait of the poet, and even some fairly sophisticated rhymed verse.

Obviously the New York Writers Coalition workshop leaders in the summer program, always adept, are doing more kinds of work with the children than we'd seen or heard three years ago. Hopefully they are very proud after the great performances.

The thing that struck us the most, as someone who's published too many books of stories, was the predominance of fiction this year. There were stories from the little ones as well as the older writers, many very funny, some scary, others "slice of life."

The narratives employed dialogue and description skillfully, with the young authors trying out both first person and third person points of view. There were surreal stories, charming autobiograpical stories, and stories that made us in the audience laugh out loud.

Um, that was also true of the three bigger and older writers. We'd give the kind of biographical info in the program or in Laurie's introductions to them, but does anyone who likes good writing not know who they are? We've already read a total of four of the three authors' books and hope to read more. Oh, and each of them is really good-looking and a good dresser. It's kind of unfair. Now that we think about it, the kids were all cute and well-dressed too. . .

At least year they had some good writers who dressed like schlumps. (In other words, like us.)

After the kids read, we again heard from Yacouba Sissoko, whose mastery of the kora, a 21-string harp-lute, creates magical music that can move from being fiery to soothing.

By then a lot more people had gathered for the literary festival now that the threat of rain looked distant.

Thanks to the Fort Greene branch of the wonderful Rice restaurant, we were treated to free milk or soy milk and cookies or little granola chunks, delicious and lovingly wrapped in little plastic bundles.

And in these hard fiscal times for cultural organizations like the New York Writers Coalition, we were invited to donate funds into the "Write Your A** Off" tote bags as people came around the audience.

We last saw Touré four years ago at a book party at McNally Jackson (then McNally Robinson) for our mutual friend Danyel Smith's novel Bliss. It was great to be able to tell him how much we enjoyed his journalism and the stories in his collection The Portable Promised Land.

Today he read a hysterically funny story about a hapless African-American superhero headquartered right here in Brooklyn. Touré's protagonist tries to fight racism but he's powerless against institutional racism (his kryptonite) and abjures beating down evil-doers in favor of crossing his arms and saying "Now you know that ain't right." Flying over Brooklyn, the best he can do when he corners cab drivers who don't stop for black women and their children is to report them to the powerless Taxi and Limousine Commission.

As a result, he gets no respect from neighborhood homeboys, his frustrated wife ("You ain't done nothing you promised at the Million Man March"), or the fellow guests on the Ego Negro cable TV show. The story was clever and bright without shading into cuteness overdose, and we enjoyed it a lot.

We also enjoyed Staceyann Chin's reading of two sections of her recently-published book, The Other Side of Paradise, which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called a "fresh, forthright, affecting memoir."

Always a great performer, Staceyann read an account of a childhood Christmas in Jamaica when she and her older brother Delano, pretty much abandoned by their mother, hilariously debate some religious principles - Delano tells her that the people in Sodom committed a crime worse than blasphemy but won't explain what "being a funny man" actually means - and try to avoid being a "Christmas-monger," hoping for presents from American missionaries. The final scene of this excerpt, at the Christmas church service, is both poignant and outrageously funny.

The same can be said of the second, shorter excerpt from when Staceyann is older and the discovery of some "dirty" magazines with photos of naked blonde women celebrating their private parts and orgasms leads her to a disastrous attempt to explore her own body. Again, it's both comical and tragic, but mostly the spirited, indpendent nature of the narrator shines through.

Colson Whitehead's work is elegant, sharp and erudite, and the first thing he read - a tribute to a poem we learned almost by heart decades ago, T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - was all of those things plus very, very funny. Purporting to be advice to Prufrock from an earthy, crude, street-smart pal, the piece had echoes of the poem throughout.

To us, it was a delight: the references to rolled trousers, peach-eating, "let us go then, you and I," etc. We'd love to have this narrative the next time we teach "Prufrock" to our community college lit classes. It's actually good literary explication doubling as a comic tour de force.

We've read, and enjoyed, Sag Harbor, so we were already familiar with his next reading, an excerpt from chapter five of the novel in which the young narrator, the geeky Benji, gets a haircut and reflects on past haircuts from his father which looks perfect, but just for a few hours, before they become utterly misshapen, wild, and disordered.

There's a wonderful riff and reminiscence here, on the fucked-up-ness of what has passed for normal; Benji is horrified to find his fifth-grade class picture under a pile of comic books and realize how he really must have appeared to others a few years before. The whole book is filled with similar wonderful passages, knowing and subtle and supremely intelligent.

Laurie asked the three authors to come up for a picture with each other, her, and the NYWC Youth Writers Workshop participants who were still there at the end of this year's Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival. To us, it was the best one ever. And the sunshine dance worked! We're grateful to everyone who appeared onstage and to those who did the hard work behind the scenes to make this such a great event.