Art Pants Company has published Richard Grayson's Boy Meets Brooklyn as an e-book available at the Amazon Kindle store for 99 cents. It is also available in a 288-page trade paperback edition for $14.99 at Lulu.
The promo stuff says in part:
Richard Grayson has been keeping a daily diary compulsively since the summer of 1969, when he was an 18-year-old agoraphobic about to venture out into the world -- or at least the world around him in Brooklyn. His diary, approximately 600 words a day without missing a day since August 1, 1969, now totals over 9 million words, rivaling the longest diaries ever written.
But Grayson is not merely an eccentric with graphomania. His nonfiction has appeared in PEOPLE, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE ORLANDO SENTINEL, THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC, THE NEW YORK POST and numerous other periodicals.
ROLLING STONE called Grayson’s first short story collection, WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, published in 1979, “where avant-garde fiction goes when it becomes stand-up comedy,” and NEWSDAY said, “The reader is dazzled by the swift, witty goings-on.”
Grayson’s other short story collections have also received acclaim. LIBRARY JOURNAL called LINCOLN’S DOCTOR’S DOG (1982) “excellent” and said of I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1983) that “Grayson is a born storyteller and standup talker.” THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW said Grayson’s I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC (1996) was “entertaining and bizarre” and “consistently, even ingeniously funny.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY called Grayson’s THE SILICON VALLEY DIET (2000) “compulsively talky and engagingly disjunctive”; KIRKUS DISCOVERIES termed Grayson “an audacious and wickedly smart comedic writer” in its review of HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES (2005); and THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, reviewing AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET (2006), said, “Grayson has a fresh, funny voice.”
Boy Meets Brooklyn begins in August 1969 and ends on New Year's Day 1971.
Grayson has already published the next six volumes of the diaries of his late teens and twenties as THE BROOKLYN DIARIES, featuring SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1969-1975; WINTER IN BROOKLYN: 1972-73; SPRING IN BROOKLYN, 1975; AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN, 1978; MORE SUMMERS IN BROOKLYN: 1976-1979; and A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY, 1980.
The second set of six volumes of his diaries have been published as THE EIGHTIES DIARIES, which include SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS, 1981-1984; LATE SPRING IN SUNRISE, 1982; WEST SIDE SUMMERS, 1984-1987; INDIAN SUMMER: PARK SLOPE, 1985; SPRINGTIME IN LAUDERHILL, 1986; and EIGHTIES’ END: AUTUMN, 1987-1989.
Five volumes of THE NINETIES DIARIES published include SUMMER IN NEW YORK: 1990, LAST SUMMER IN ROCKAWAY: 1991, FIRST FALL IN GAINESVILLE: 1991, SPRING IN GAINESVILLE: 1992-1994, and AUTUMN IN GAINESVILLE:1994-1996.
We are heartbroken this morning to learn from the New York Times that the extraordinarily versatile and compelling novelist, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, has passed away. She was our friend and mentor and teacher, the most generous writer we've ever known, who taught us so much that we could have never repaid her in a thousand years.
Our diary book Spring in Brooklyn is dedicated to her. It takes place in the spring of 1975, the second semester of our (and everyone's) MFA program in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, when we had a Fiction Tutorial with Susan. We had to fight to get assigned to her; the director of the fiction program favored metafiction, as did the other fiction writing professors, and Susan taught mostly in the poetry program.
But having read her first novel Falling and fallen in love with it, we knew we wanted to learn from someone who wrote more realistic fiction. Susan was an excellent critic and gave us practical knowledge about submitting (she said Gordon Lish at Esquire might write "Feh!" on a manuscript he disliked; she told us to send our stories with young female protagonists to women's magazines using our initials rather than our first name) and the details of the writer's life.
We have read with enormous pleasure nearly one of her incredibly varied books. TheTimes obituary by William Grimes gets that right:
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, a novelist with a gift for evoking complex characters in the grip of extreme psychological stress and physical suffering, notably in “The Madness of a Seduced Woman” and the Vietnam War novel “Buffalo Afternoon,” died on Friday in Chicago. She was 71.
The cause was complications of a stroke, her husband, Neil J. Schaeffer, said.
Ms. Schaeffer made a strong debut with the semiautobiographical novel “Falling,” published in 1973, which captivated critics with its brisk, entertaining stroll through very familiar fictional territory: middle-class Jewish life in Brooklyn, psychoanalysis, the struggle for self-discovery and fulfillment.
Quickly, Ms. Schaeffer broadened her scope, deepened her sympathies and staked out more ambitious fictional ground. Her second novel, “Anya” (1974), a reimagining of wartime Poland and the experiences of a young woman who makes a new but unhappy life in New York, signaled another direction, confirmed in the expansive family novels “Time in Its Flight” (1978), set in 19th-century Vermont, and “Love” (1981), about two Jewish immigrant families whose story extends from the turn of the century to the late 1970s.
“The Madness of a Seduced Woman” (1983) reaffirmed Ms. Schaeffer’s talent for imagining the lives of women on the brink, in this case a transplanted farm girl in 19th-century Vermont whose obsessive love for a stonecutter leads her to commit murder and attempt suicide. Her trial is more than a judicial proceeding: it raises questions of choice, instinct, destiny and female identity.
Confounding readers and critics who regarded combat as the exclusive reserve of male writers, she turned to Vietnam for her eighth novel, “Buffalo Afternoon,” for which she conducted extensive interviews with veterans of the war. The story begins in Brooklyn, where an Italian-American teenager, Pete Bravado, enlists in the Army to escape an unhappy family life. He lands in hell when he is shipped off to Vietnam, and a second hell when he returns, prey to inexplicable rages and unexpungeable memories.
Almost unanimously, critics praised Ms. Schaeffer for the immediacy and conviction of her combat scenes and the psychology of men under fire. In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas Proffitt, a former Vietnam bureau chief for Newsweek, called it “one of the best treatments of the Vietnam War to date, and all the more impressive for the fact that its author never heard a shot fired in anger or set foot in that country.”
Ms. Schaeffer seemed somewhat surprised at the surprise.
“I did not find it difficult to write about men in war,” she wrote in a statement for her publisher, W. W. Norton. “Everyone believed it could not be done by a woman — as if men would somehow be alien beings to a member of the opposite sex. I have never understood that attitude.”
Susan Fromberg was born on March 25, 1940, in Brooklyn and grew up in Rockville Centre on Long Island. She studied literature at the University of Chicago, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1961, a master’s degree in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966, writing her dissertation on the novels of Vladimir Nabokov.
In 1967 she took a teaching position at Brooklyn College, where her future husband was a colleague in the English department and her students included Ramona Lofton, a poet whom she encouraged to write a novel. “Push,” published in 1996 under Ms. Lofton’s pen name, Sapphire, became a literary event and the basis of the 2009 motion picture “Precious.”
Ms. Schaeffer, who returned to the University of Chicago in 2002 to teach English and creative writing, published several poetry collections, including “The Rhymes and Runes of the Toad’ (1975) and “Alphabet for the Lost Years” (1976), and two children’s books, “The Dragons of North Chittendon” (1986) and “The Four Hoods and Great Dog” (1988). She was also a frequent contributor to the Book Review in the 1980s and ’90s.
In addition to her husband, Ms. Schaeffer, who lived in Chicago and South Newfane, Vt., is survived by two children, Benjamin, of San Francisco, and May Brown, of Colorado Springs; a brother, Jeffrey, of Los Angeles; and two grandchildren.
In her later novels, Ms. Schaeffer pursued what she liked to call “the autobiography of the imagination.” She treated subjects as various as Greta Garbo, explored through a fictional double in “First Nights” (1993), and the conflicted love of twin sisters for each other in “The Golden Rope” (1996). Her penultimate novel, “The Snow Fox” (2004), took her to medieval Japan, where female passions confront cruel circumstance — a constant in the author’s imaginative world.
We were just getting to know Susan in the spring of 1975, but after that semester, we continued to seek out her advice and guidance. She helped us get more than one teaching position and publication, and we corresponded for decades afterward. In 1978 we wrote a "cameo of the poet," a little profile of her for the Buffalo-based poetry magazine Buckle. Her versatility and her encouragement to reach past our comfort level as a writer made her an inspiration.
From Spring in Brooklyn:
April 14, 1975
Today I went to see Susan Schaeffer give a lecture in SUBO. I really admire her, for she seems to be “together.” She says her dream is to stay in the Neponsit Home for the Aged for a few weeks and to be waited on and not have to do anything, as she’s been teaching full-time since she was 23.
Susan appears to be such a “regular” person despite her recent success. “You go to another city and people make a fuss over you like you were something special,” she said. “And then you go home and your family still thinks you’re lazy and your kids think you’re stupid or whatever.”
Wednesday April 23, 1975
Susan Schaeffer liked “Alice Keppel” a lot, the other stories less so. She said I should send it out and not worry about rejection notices; she’s gotten as many as 300 a year. She let Prof. Mayer read the story and he thought it was good.
Susan seems to be really interested in me as a writer; usually, she’s really tight with just the Poetry people. And she doesn’t seem spoiled by her success and didn’t seem perturbed about not winning the National Book Award, but of course she’s had a week to regain composure – although I doubt that she needed to.
The hour tutorial went so fast; it’s a pity we have only more tutorial left, for she’s taking a leave of absence next year.
We know that many other friends, readers and former students of Susan's are feeling as bad as we do at the moment. Our deepest sympathies go out to Neil, who was our boss once, and to her children and other family members.
Susan said, "You never know how a story ends until you read the last page." We're devastated that we can never hear from Susan again, but we will reread some of her books to the last page and keep her in our hearts.
We had a nice time this morning at Dobson Ranch Park but felt sorrow upon reading there an obituary notice for the great poet and translator Edwin Honig, who was not only a first-rate writer but someone we liked and deeply admired from the time we met him at The MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1980.
Actually, we'd appreciated Edwin Honig's writing before that because we'd discovered his work in the late 1970s when it appeared in some of the little magazines we read (and sometimes appeared in ourselves). He was then the age we are now, and he'd had a long and productive career both behind him and still ahead of him.
We took walks and talked about growing up in Brooklyn -- Ed's mother was still living in Brownsville then -- and discussed literature and other subjects. He was working with another MacDowell fellow, the talented (and extremely nice) composer Anne LeBaron for whom he produced the text for Lamentation/Invocation, for baritone, clarinet, cello and harp. Here is the full obituary by Richard C. Dujardin from the Providence Journal:
Edwin Honig, a poet, playwright and translator who taught at Brown University for a quarter century before retiring in 1983, died at his home on the East Side Wednesday after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 91.
Honig once told former Providence Journal columnist Wanda Howard that he was 13 when an alert teacher at the high school he was attending in Brooklyn, N.Y., introduced him to poetry, putting him under the influence of such writers as Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. [Our note: it was Abraham Lincoln H.S., where his early poetry appeared in the 1935 literary magazine and year book.]
Thanks to his grandmother who spoke Spanish, Arabic and Yiddish but little English, he said, he also developed an intense lifelong interest in Spanish and Portuguese.
All together, he wrote 10 books of poetry, 3 plays, 5 books of criticism and 8 translations, one of the earliest of which was on Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet murdered by Franco’s fascists in Granada. It was published in 1944. Four decades, later he was knighted by the president of Portugal for helping to introduce Fernando Pessoa to the English-speaking world and was similarly honored in 1996 by the king of Spain for his translations of Spanish poets and playwrights.
Honig, who taught at Harvard University before going to Brown, received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mishkenot Sha’Ananim in Jerusalem, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
He would later compile nearly a half-century of his poems in a volume titled “Time and Again,” and was working on a second volume, “Over Time,” when he became ill.
In “To Restore a Dead Child,” he released decades of sorrow over the death of his 3-year-old brother who was run over by a truck when Honig was just 5.
“Honig has been a poet whose sorrow is always coming home ... No poet of our time has more fiercely presented man’s tragic mortality even as he finds an impressive variety of means by which that mortality is admitted and sublimed,” wrote Daniel Hughes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
He was the husband of the late Charlotte Gilchrest, who died of cancer in 1962, and the ex-spouse of Margot Dennes, from whom he was divorced. He is survived by a sister in Colorado, Lila Putnam, and by two sons, Daniel and Jeremy, and was cremated in a private service Thursday. Brown University said it plans a memorial service in Honig’s honor in the fall.
When we first met Edwin Honig, he was working on what would become the poem of his we treasure most. We reprint it here:
To Restore a Dead Child
1
1925 Sometimes while I sleep I hear the single cry and tire screek that never end. My blond and foolish brown-eyed brother lugging his fretful love shambles after me as the cunning Mack truck lurching out of nowhere cuts him down.
He's a long dead almost-three. I'm a long lived five just turned sixty-one still running in a dead heat with the rolling cab that swooped him up heading for the vanished hospital.
It's then on waking I feel the snot of infant faces leak into my mouth.
2
Hearing it wake, we feel the windy calling to each other of the kindred sleep and death in the morning opening of the eyes of country horses, the odor of earth's dampness in the crystal tree light, and the touch of rough bark on fingertips.
Seeing it, we feel again the worn heart welcoming the slow envelopment of dark, the falling off of sight in the old gray house, when sun's heat passes and the first breeze lifts a faint dust along the hedges.
Remembering, again we see the embers crumbling in the grate, the fire flaring up again, the pause before the turning shadow spans the polished floor and drifts into the open world, a street that wanders endless as a silent grief that will never know itself.
3
We walked out of time into the woods of pain and never seemed the same again. We tilted with the hope of finding ourself in another skin, and bent on recovering, turned with open eyes to find welcome in the arms of a dead brother -- sleeping his dream of being, a dream so long unfulfilled there was no time even to begin to live it, till in his own hope we lived what we believed may have been reserved for him.
4
Watching the immense self scattering ocean ruffle out before us, our wonder stirred and time became an intricately formal mating, night on day on night, a repeated wave flash signaling the act and its abating, and the last long rolling into shore turned into a fresh aspiring of newborn creatures to join the greater mating sky and ocean, and the creatures reeling beyond our wonder mingled with the lifetimes of our aged parents, each one apart, our cheerful sister's pregnant daughter, also apart, and this briefly sunlit reawakening stung alive the still unanswered black and blueness we never would be clear of -- though no longer cherishing the old bruised core, no longer poised against the battering disablements, we simply gazed again and let our wonder live again, and die.
5
For everyone the call of light, seeing figures of the creatures from the mountain and the sea: an eagle flying and a snake whipping past the chicken coop, a horse neighing in a flash of meadow, with wayward water there to slake the thirst a moment. As light descends, following the slow shapes bulking briefly in their place, it makes as if to stop and give them way and cause, as if to stroke and praise their substance fully before each creature passes into its own remove with rapid smile print (as on your face and mine appears held there by heads soon to be no longer yours or mine) till it lets the shadow quicken, overtake the bobbing bulks, and rise immensely over like a mercy to devour them.
6
As we would have it, it would be nothing simple or profound, nothing easily attained, long worked for or perfected. It would be of a wholeness, full and large and figured in its substance. It would be all engrossing to itself and others -- like the playing of a mindless tune between a richer music and a silence: a peaked and dribbling sound, a sound wavering in descent but kept in measure, and in that measure letting all know how deeply it could love the silence following.
7
Not to be listening yet to be heard in the huge inconsequences of the heart, where having conveyed the full measure of our hate as a gesture of belief in something worse than ourself is barely to have escaped self murder, the intended sacrifice become the bound body of love in a younger self -- wearing a brother's features still scored through the dead boy's memory -- forever jammed between the tonnage of his death and self hate's last convulsions, like the lost deserter fixed in an ice cake some intruder yells up early one spring.
8
As the light descended the night was pierced a moment and there was seen in the vagueness of a shadow a form more his than our idea of him, and the shadow wobbled into a figure merging with the hope of his lost being come to be again, as we tried swiftly to put on the dark loose patches fallen from him in the light -- trying to fill and fill all that was left of his living clothes before his body vanished
9
No longer would he have to run each time we left him before our mindless going struck him as needing to be answered, and the need make him fly to us and press his body on us briefly.
For now, if again we left without a smile or hand wave, he would no longer need to fret or wonder how to weight the meaning since as last reminder he had left his body printed on us.
Here is a clip of this great poet in the 2010 film by his cousin Alan Berliner, Edwin Honig: A Poet's Alzheimer:
The Dumbo Books Foundation is pleased to announce the winner of the first annual Dumbo Books Foundation/Betty Smith Award for Brooklyn Writers. The award will be given annually to a distinguished writer, residing in Brooklyn, who exemplifies the tradition and excellence of Betty Smith in her classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The award, given in an amount corresponding to the writer’s ZIP code, ranges from $112.01 for residents of downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO to $112.39 for residents of Starrett City. Candidates for the Dumbo Books Foundation/Betty Smith Award for Brooklyn Writers are proposed by nominators from across the borough whose experience and vocations bring them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent. Winners are chosen by a selection committee, a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation. Both nominators and selectors serve anonymously. The Dumbo Books Foundation does not accept applications or nominations for the award. The 2009 winner is Tao Lin of Williamsburg, who will receive an award in the amount of $112.11.
When the greatest economist of the twentieth century married the most famous Russian ballerina of her day, Londoners marveled
Was there ever such a union of beauty and brains As when Lydia Lopkovka married John Maynard Keynes?
This evening at the fabulous BookCourt in Cobble Hall, we got to see a similarly spectacular coming together of two great American talents, Brooklynites Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, who've produced a graphic novel, The Alcoholic, of which Kirkus Reviews has said, "Rarely does a collaboration produce a graphic novel of such literary and artistic merit" and which The Los Angeles Times has called "a scabby and subversive masterpiece."
We are big fans of both these guys - in our 2006 review of Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs in The American Book Review, we called Ames "perhaps the wittiest writer of his generation." We also loved Haspiel's artwork in collaboration with our old acquaintance Harvey Pekar on American Splendor and The Quitter and his other comics, not least of which his 1980s drawing of Richard Grayson. So we got to Cobble Hill early and were in BookCourt's back room at least 15 minutes before the scheduled 7 p.m. reading/discussion with the author and artist. But we were out of luck: all the chairs were already taken or saved. But we figured Ames and Haspiel were worth standing for.
What we didn't know, and would find out only when we tried to leave, that there were over 100 people standing outside the inner room and even some on the street in front of the store. So we were lucky to have a great view and to be able to clearly hear Jonathan's trademark "hairy call" opening and closing.
We've experienced the three "hairy calls" before, most recently at last spring's PEN Awards ceremony at Lincoln Center, where our seatmates, the poet Kate Gale and writer Mark E. Cull of Red Hen Press, publishers of many great books and also our Silicon Valley Diet, were kind of surprised by Ames's thrilling trilling. To be honest, we thought until just looking it up that they were actually "Harry calls" because we don't associate Jonathan Ames with hair. To us, Ames's copies of his male pattern baldness, which he passed out to the crowd to remind us that he knows he's losing (um, lost) his hair, were also old news. And he really needs to update it because, like the Arctic ice cap, his follicles have continued to disappear.
The event began a bit late because of the overflow crowd, but it was a terrific evening. Both Ames and Haspiel are big supporters of BookCourt, which has been a great resource for Brooklyn booklovers since 1981 (see The Written Nerd's excellent report on the store), and so the celebration of The Alcoholic had a neighborhood feel - as well as lots of cups of red wine passed around so the audience could better identify with the novel's hero, Jonathan A. The novel's author, who may or may not be the model for the book's protagonist, read his hilarious essay "I Shit My Pants in the South of France," which The Signal described quite well:
It was a piece Ames penned when he was a columnist for the New York Press during the mid-'90s, which he included in his collection of essays What's Not To Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer. It chronicles his visit to a strange doctor in SoHo for his first colonic - a water enema incurred for the purpose of cleansing the beleaguered colon - and the aftermath, noting that it was "completely autobiographical, however embarrassing that is."
As he had a lubricated tube inserted into him, which Ames said conjured images of Laurence Olivier in "Spartacus," he recounted an adventure from 1983 when he spent the summer taking classes in the South of France.
Following this exercise in scatological participatory journalism - we are of the half of humanity who loves scatological humor and can't get enough of that shit - Jonathan and Dean took questions.
The first two asked them about their favorite comedians and boxers (Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Patton Oswalt) and then someone asked about the collaborative process in creating a graphic novel. The author and artist said that no drawing was done until things were written. Jonathan showed Dean old photos of himself, since the book is "semi-autobiographical," so that Dean could know, for instance, what Jonathan looked like in kindergrarten. Dean said that he always focuses on one aspect of a character, and Jonathan's obviously was his prominent nose. Jonathan explained that DC had sent him material about how writers work on graphic novels: with each page, he wrote out the number of panels and then described the captions and dialogue to go within each.
Sometimes Dean would change a word or discuss his ideas for the story but they rarely disagreed - except at one point Jonathan felt his character was leering where he should have looked sweeter. Mostly, every two weeks, ten pages would go back and forth. Dean would pencil them and then ink them.
The creators of The Alcoholic said the work involved "lots of kismet," as they'd "traveled lateral roads" of drinking and drugs in their lives, albeit in very different ways. In response to a question about how they met, Dean said that as an admirer of Jonathan's classic essays in The New York Press, he saw him one day at the Fall Cafe on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens (our aside: we love the place too and have gone to great poetry readings there) and introduced himself. What Jonathan said was particularly amazing was that Dean would often draw scenes from his life, like a childhood basketball court, exactly how it looked in real life. And he admired Dean's devotion to realism: to get drawings of Asbury Park right, Dean downloaded and studied dozens of photos from the Internet.
We were going to ask Dean how collaborating with Jonathan was different than working with Harvey Pekar but someone beat us to it. Dean said that "Jonathan is a writer; Harvey is a savant," that Jonathan "thinks about narrative structure" whereas Harvey "doesn't care what you draw" and might be happy if it were just his own head talking in every panel. Jonathan said he tried to make things interesting for his friend Dean so was conscious of putting in fight scenes and pretty girls into the narrative. Someone asked Jonathan about his current projects, and he mentioned the HBO pilot of Bored to Death in which Jason Schwartzman will be playing his alter ego (rather than play himself as he did on Showtime's What's Not to Love?). Next summer Jonathan's new book, a collection of fiction and non-fiction The Double Life is Twice as Good, will be published.
We asked Dean about his projects, and he mentioned Fear, My Dear, the second installment of his Billy Dogma trilogy and another book just coming out this month, but "for four-year-olds," entitled Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever. After some more interesting questions about the constraints of writing graphic novels (Jonathan said he was forced to be concise, though he felt he usually was anyway) and how their friendship was affected by the collaboration (Dean said that from their first meeting, the two men hit it off, though Jonathan kept refusing his invitations to hang out and do stuff with Dean and his friends; Jonathan said that at the time he'd been in a relationship with a woman who didn't allow him to go out), the creators of The Alcoholic wrapped things up around 8 p.m. and many in the huge crowd went to get their copies of the book signed. We stayed up too late reading The Alcoholic but we aren't sorry. As the L.A. Times said, the humor and a truly wicked honesty kept the pages turning.
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; 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: New Jersey's famously controversial Amiri Baraka, a legend and a favorite of ours since the summer of 1969, when we saw a production of his plays "Dutchman" and "The Toilet" in the basement theater at Brooklyn College's Whitman Auditorium;
Bed-Stuy's "Janitor of History," Louis Reyes Rivera, a living bridge between African and Latino American communities whose work we first caught late at night years ago at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe;
and the best-selling (The Pursuit of Happyness, with Chris Gardner) and award-winning Quincy Troupe, former State Poet of California, now living in Harlem, who we first knew as a teacher at Richmond College (since merged with Staten Island Community College to form the College of Staten Island) when we were getting our M.A. in English at that school by the St. George ferry landing in 1973-74. While the theme for this year's adult writer Festival guests was poets laureate, it just as well could have been, as far as we're concerned, Grand Old Men of People's Poetry. We suspect the organizers might be criticized for a lack of women writers, but they dominated in previous years, and these guys are not exactly the Establishment. And we've gone to a lot of events this summer where people were onstage, but this was the first one where all the performers whose next birthdays will range from age 60 to age 75.
Considerably younger - and the highlight, again this year, for us - were the two dozen or so kids from NYWC's summer New York Youth Writers Workshop at Fort Greene Park. Last year's MC, Laurie A. Cumbo, executive director and founder of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), again did a wonderful job but was particularly adept at putting the kids at ease (we overheard her telling them beforehand that "any butterflies in your stomach will fly away just before you go on") - as well as pronouncing sometimes challenging, if beautiful, names. We came early enough to score a coveted seat in the shade and got to look at the makeshift stage all afternoon amid the ginkgos, maples, and weeping willows, with the mellow golden tones of the imposing art deco Brooklyn Tech building as the backdrop.
Laurie first introduced a great performance by the Indoda Entsha Percussion Ensemble, whose core group has been together for 17 years under the director of E. Preston Riddick aka A'ma Sakura Ka. They play a powerful and seductive blend of traditional West African, Afro-Cuban and hip-hop music, and today the men in the band were joined by five female dancers in bright African garb who got things off to a lively start. Then the kids from the NYWC workshop came up to read; some of them we remembered warmly from last year's Festival.
Aleisha Small, first up, read two coming home narrative poems, "Mystical Keys" and "The Stormy Night," followed by Paul Francois, whose longpoem "Bad Day," in his matter-of-fact style surrealistically invoked the kind of flying bacon we've heretofore encountered only in the visual art of James Rosenquist.
David Nduka delivered two poems, one about basketball and James Brown, the other about a cat who attacks the President! . . . and starts a riot! Aliyah Jones' first poem began, I am a bird soaring in air / I hate being eaten. We know the feeling.
Bengum Abam-Depass's contribution was a list poem of things he likes, like visits to Texas and lots of adjectives, while Christopher Small's "My Mom" was a tribute to the woman "who protects me" and "mostly talks on the phone." Alberta Devor read a plaintive poem in the voice of a tree who has "grown taller than all of my friends."
Next up, Tristan Regist reprised the "stormy night" theme, this time darker - all hope is lost - and then read a beautiful poem about the "sound of fear" in which he said fear "smells of cayenne pepper." Then Aidan Amog recited a jaunty ode to the scooter of his dream. Both Aidan's poems employed sophisticated tropes and complex syntax. Anneliese Treitmeier-McCarthy's long poem, befitting her status as one of the older kids, was a thoughtful and eloquent look at "Wartime in a Child's Eyes," narrated by a girl huddled in a basement during the bombing of her hometown. Anneliese was followed by the much littler Talaia Regist in a pink polka-dot dress, whose poems were about growing wings to fly to Florida to visit grandma and a reflection on "Happiness." Happiness for us was listening to her poems.
Josiah Livingston, a cutie in dreads and shorts, read "The Things I Care About," in which the environmentally-conscious young poet celebrated "all the polar bears in Antarctica." Immediately afterward, the scholarly Ijangmarie Abam-Depass read a love letter to her Montessori pre-K and a narrative showing how good can come out of even broken glass.
Joella Fraser, in a little red dress, read "I Open the Door." What do you think the speaker saw when she did that? Hint: it's really, really scary. She followed with a piece called "Don't Tell Me" that reminded us of Jamaica Kincaid's classic monologue "Girl."
Osose Ebesunum, one of the older girls, read a whimsical narrative about being hit by lightning and being transformed into, in turn, a flying girl, a mermaid and the crown princess of a secret city. Her "Ode to Snow" asked, "Why don't you come every day?" Um, it was a good poem but as with some of Amiri Baraka's work, we disagree with its sentiments. Raquel Hoisen, another older poet (still under 13, we'd guess), told about a fish who was simultaneously imaginative, belligerent and claustrophobic and then in "A Troubador's Song" used not only sophisticated rhyme but skillfull anastrophe (Lost the enemy was).
Najaya Royal, one of last year's standouts, whom we also saw earlier this summer at the Women's Health Festival in Bed-Stuy, read her now-classic (to us, anyway) "Teardrops" and "If I Were a Song," which invokes the hope found by field slaves in their inspiring music, a theme that would later be taken up by the adult Louis Reyes Rivera.
Joseph Francois, another poet we enjoyed last year, used rhyming couplets to good effect in "The Day I Fell Down" and call-and-response (Could someone say amen?) in "If I Could Fly," while Ashley Quarless fetchingly read a moving poem in the voice of a dying tree.
Gabriel Treitmeier-McCarthy contributed a poem about his cat and another one about a fearsome storm that nevertheless ended with a line that relieved our fears: However, I survived. Future rock star that he is, Gabriel daringly eschewed the steps and jumped off the platform following his solo. Although that was a hard act to follow, Kayla Quarless was up to it with her "I Am Sad in Winter" (see, not everyone likes snow) and "Don't Tell Me to..." (go to bed/ turn off the TV/ shut the computer/ teach my sister social studies). And then Tamara read one of the afternoon's most sophisticated lyrics, "Where Are the Stars?" and the sharply-drawn "Behind the Door."
Anjelika Amog (in case you haven't figured it out, a lot of these poets are siblings, like William and Dorothy Wordsworth or Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti) recited "Boredom," avoiding the fallacy of imitative form by enlivening the poem with lines like boredom smelling like week-old cheese. She also included skillful use of slant rhyme, and her next poem, equally complex, employed allusions to childhood chants like "Rain, rain, go away" in the middle of the narrative.
Jediael Fraser read "Nervousness," which evokes tasting "your own taste buds because they're huddling together" and "clouds laughing at you and booing you offstage." Needless to say, Jediael went offstage to applause and cheers following his second poem, which employed an ABAB rhyme scheme and whose setting moved from Prospect Park to Disneyland to the bright lights of Broadway.
Last but not least was Shyanne Bennett, who at first seemed as if she embodied some of what the speaker in Jediael's "Nervousness" was experience but soon settled into a beautiful long poem that was married an emo sensibility to a spiritual awakening for "weary eyes, tired eyes." Laurie Cumbo then asked all of the poets to come forward to the stage for a group photo and a final round of appreciative applause by the audience. As Laurie warned parents that the adult readers' work would probably contain, not surprisingly, "adult content" not suitable for young'uns, the Indoda Entsha Percussion Ensemble were brought back on for a reprise performance.
Starving, we trekked over to Myrtle Avenue - a street we still recall as "Murder Avenue" from back in the bad old days (though we do miss our stalwart Myrtle Avenue el) - for a slice of Sicilian at the always-friendly Little Louie's pizzeria on the corner of Adelphi. We came back satisfied - and with a can of Diet Pepsi - for the performances of the poets laureate.
Louis Reyes Rivera read excerpts from his 155-page epic poem in progress, Jazz in Jail, an allegory in which Jazz gets together all the forms of music engendered by the African Diaspora and is put on trial for conspiracy. Reyes Rivera used the rhythms and tricks of jazz, hip-hop, doo wop and bebop - as well as varied voices in selections like "Where Silence is Brass" and "Amicus Curiae" to blinding effect. Strongest of all was Reyes Rivera's final section in the voice of Mother Blues, a lament in the form of legal argument indicting history for misappropriating the music of the slaves, from the fields to, well, 20th century New York City: Ask Alberta Hunter why you find her so blue She said she'd be be paid for the sounds she made But never got paid her due
(We were lucky enough to see Alberta Hunter sing at our beloved Cookery on West 8th and University in the Village after she'd finally, in her 80s, been rediscovered following too many years of obscurity as a nurse on Roosevelt Island.) Hal Sirowitz, up next, walked unsteadily onstage and had to read sitting down. Putting the audience at ease with his first poem, which explained that his Parkinson's disease has not affected his performance in the bedroom, he also proved that his dry delivery in that trademark Brooklyn/Queens accent, still makes his poems funny, even if you've heard them a dozen times before, as we have. His "Mother Said," "Father Said," and "My Therapist" poems are justly famous but basically all of his poems are not just wryly amusing but are a special species of Jewish wisdom literature:
Quincy Troupe, up next, read some of his newer work (he has lots to choose from, having authored 17 books) like "Switchin in the Kitchen," which employs fast-footwork wordplay and "rapology" to segue from "the sick war, invented by chicken hawk cheney-bush wags" to "pigology" and "filo-plumes."
Most exciting was the last part of his long poem, "My Solo," which preaches the gospel of neo-hoodoo from the point of view of a contemporary griot who invokes historical figures from Miles Davis (whom Troupe has written three books about) to Marie Laveau. Amiri Baraka was the last poet of the day, reading some of his "Poems for Newark" such as "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)" with its fierce concern for social justice and its cultural commentary: Remember Steppen Fetchit how we laughed An all your Sunday school images giving flesh and giggling With the ice pick high off his head Made ya laugh anyway I can see something in the way of our selves I can see something in the way of our selves That's why I say the things I do, you know it
Fiercer still was his attack on "peanut-head yellow Negroes" who talk as if they have a hundred pickles in their mouth in "Local Peanuts." It never mentions Newark Mayor Cory Booker's name, but it's pretty devastating and provocative.
Baraka said his last poem would be "Somebody Blew Up America," the controversial poem that caused him to be removed as poet laureate of New Jersey. We started to get up, not wanting to be offended and trying to get a head start on everyone else leaving, but stopped on the side to listen to him as the poem gathered force.
Baraka's performance was masterly and masterful; we think, whatever its questionable assumptions, the poem stands as a tour de force which indicts of much of the powers who've controlled the West over the past few centuries, but you can judge for yourself via this performance on YouTube:
After that, Laurie Cumbo said she wasn't going to try to follow up except to thank everyone for coming and that books and other info were available at the Akashic Books and Brooklyn Public Library tables. For us, this was the best Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival yet.
Dr. Bob Wolk, the psychologist whose office in Concord Village we used to go to every week in our late teens, once told us he'd appeared on a TV talk show with someone he described as "a fine young man" - at least that's what we wrote in our 1970 diary.
One of the first stories we ever wrote that got published (in Transatlantic Review) begins with these four words: "Somebody like Pete Hamill. . ."
Pete Hamill is still a fine young man, as well as an amazing writer whose early career was a touchstone for us growing up. We devoured his newspaper columns, magazine articles and everything else we could find by him. Pete Hamill provided proof to us that, yeah, you could grow up in Brooklyn and be a writer someday. Last night we were lucky enough to have enough sense to go out in the rain to see Pete Hamill at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble. He's promoting the paperback of his Depression-era novel North River, which we already read in hardcover. We didn't buy it but got it at the library, and we think that probably would be okay with Pete, who began by saying how great it was to be back in "the neighborhood that shaped me" and talking about the local libraries which had nourished him.
Hamill said that around the country, people will ask him what it was like to grow up poor in Brooklyn during hard times, and he sometimes will answer that he wasn't poor, because he had companions like Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo and Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. And he got them from the public library. Discussing the Prospect branch library on 9th Street (its name gentrified in 1975 to the Park Slope branch), Hamill said he still saw lots of kids in there, reading, getting tutored, and making the kind of discoveries he did as a boy. At Grand Army Plaza's central library, there are "immigrant kids at every table, reading their way into America."
Hamill said that Andrew Carnegie is his favorite American millionaire, because he created 1,600 libraries across America (and we love them all, from our Leonard branch library two blocks away to the Carnegie library in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which we visited every day when we lived there in 2001). As an immigrant kid from Scotland, Hamill said, Carnegie went into the only library in Pittsburgh, a private library, and they looked at his clothes and heard his funny accent and told him to go home, it wasn't a place for him. The Brooklyn public libraries were definitely a place for the young Pete Hamill.
Last night he talked about recently passing by the corner of 11th Street at Seventh Avenue, where he recalled reading The Count of Monte Cristo, borrowed from the library, perched on a cellarboard. And he talked with passion about reading, about making sense out of symbols on a page, a more active form of entertainment than the TV that would come later.
Hamill discussed New York in general and Park Slope in particular in the bygone eras he writes about in North River and other novels. On V-J Day in August 1945, he said, Seventh Avenue in the Slope erupted in pure joy and confidence as people poured out into the street to celebrate, to the sounds of foghorns and church bells, the end not just of the long war but of 15 years of sacrifice and hard times, starting with the Great Depression. He read an excerpt from the novel, a story about a World War I (Great War then, of course) field doctor, James Delaney, now a West Village GP with an office hard by the North River, which is what New Yorkers still called the Hudson back then. When Delaney's 3-year-old grandson Carlito is left on his doorstep, Delaney has to deal with his internal depression, his frustrations toward his daughter, and the loss of his wife, who'd run off after he returned from Europe. Delaney hires Rosa, a Sicilian immigrant, to care for Carlito when he's at work. As a doctor, Delaney has connections to all the neighborhood, including the Mafia.
As the story unfolds, Delaney and Rosa grow closer, and the passage Hamill read has him taking her first to Times Square and then for her long-hoped-for night of dancing at Roseland, where a skinny Italian-American singer [Hamill explained that the ethnic slur wop came from "without papers," though we've heard other possible origins] performs such classic 30s songs - meaningful to people going through such hard times - as "You Made Me Love You," "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" and the melancholy anthem "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Hamill reads well, and his evocation of the period, from the movie marquees and billboards in nighttime Times Square and the two-cent-apple lady singing "Mother McCree" to the skee-ball parlors and framed photos of FDR by newsstands awaiting the bulldog editions of the Mirror and Daily News are well-crafted.
It's all nostalgia, of course - something Hamill later said New York City is particularly prone to - and it skirts sentimentality, but we bought it when we read it and we bought it listening to the words last night. Hamill patiently took lots of questions and told lots of good stories, like about whiling away rainy or wintry Saturday mornings at the Minerva theater on Seventh Avenue and 14th Street, when admission was 12 cents before noon, and how the time a local street gang, the Tigers, surreptitiously used screwdrivers to unscrew a bunch of seats and walked out of the movies with the whole row attached.
The crowd at the bookstore was so large we spent most of the reading unable to see Hamill as the only space was behind a row of biology and physics books. As you might expect for a book that recalls S. Klein on the Square (Union Square for you hipsters) and the fox trot, a lot of the crowd were older, but there were people of all ages, including some twentysomethings standing in the row of books with us. Eventually we found an open space where we could see Mr. Hamill in his signature black t-shirt under a sport jacket. In response to one of maybe twenty questions people asked, Hamill recalled his famous New York Magazine cover story from July 1969 about growing up in Brooklyn and touting the borough's charms in a time when few tastemakers were looking at Brooklyn with anything but contempt and amusement. We remember getting that issue in the mail and nodding our head as we read it on our bedroom floor.
So, Hamill joked, maybe he's responsible for the current Brooklyn boom and all its attendant pleasures and pains: "the incredible velocity of change." Maybe he is. He may lament the loss of community feeling engendered by the Depression and WWII - how Tammany bosses and neighbors would come to the aid of families struggling with particular hard times - but he celebrates the loss of that sense of menace from rougher days and he sees immigrant Dominicans, Chinese and Mexicans following the same paths as earlier Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, "making us feel better about ourselves as a people." Hamill said a lot more - about his writing habits (he starts every book in longhand for that tactile connection), about comic books and comic strips being great training for creating narratives, about music and New York and education and journalism (he teaches it at NYU).
And Hamill was much more interesting than what we can convey here, but there's one story he told that stuck with us, which related to how he approached being a newspaperman and particularly a columnist writing about ordinary New Yorkers:
He was about 8 and his brother Tommy about 6 and they were going to Pier 88 to watch the wreck of the Normandie as it continued to sink during the final years of World War II. There was a homeless bum begging on the corner, and the boys started making fun of him. Their mom got very angry and yelled at them for ridiculing the man, finally telling her sons, "Don't ever look down on anyone!"
Pete Hamill said those words resonated with him his whole life. He thought of them when he wrote one of his first newspaper stories, about a guy and his family being evicted from their apartment because he'd lost his job and couldn't pay the rent. The day his story appeared in the paper, people called in with job offers and ways to save the furniture on the street from getting wet or ruined. That sense that the lives of "ordinary" people are worth caring about and writing about is what makes Pete Hamill a terrific writer in North River and his other books.
