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I Let A Kazoo Go Out Of My Heart

Apr 26th, 2012 by

Out at sea a single clarinet begins to play, a droll melody joined in on after a few bars by guitars and mandolins. Birds huddle bright-eyed on the beach. Katje’s heart lightens, a little, at the sound. Slothrop doesn’t yet have the European reflexes to clarinets, he still thinks of Benny Goodman and not of clowns or circuses— but wait. . .  aren’t these kazoos coming? Yeah, a lotta kazoos! A Kazoo band!

— Thomas Pynchon, from Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Jayne Mansfield did, on occasion, also sing sing sing.

Posted in Dial J For Jewish, Flicks, Jazz, Literature, Sex | No Comments »

Robert Penn Warren’s New Orleans

Mar 30th, 2012 by

I suppose that I owed it all to General Butler— Beast Butler, as they used to call him in New Orleans, and as far away as London, after his notorious General Order Number 28, that any woman showing contempt for any officer or man of the Federal forces should be treated like a woman of the town plying her vocation. Or to go back a step before, I may have owed it to the New Orleans lady, whoever she was, who got on the horse car– they were really mule cars— one fine spring morning with her little girl. Or back another step, I  may have owed it to Flag-Officer Farragut’s fine gold braid, which was an invitation to a little girl’s fingers, when he sat down beside her. She stroked the braid, and said to her mother, “Look, pretty.” At which, the conqueror patted her on the head and called her a dear little child. So the patriot mother spat in his face, and Butler issued the order.

And then one day I came walking down the street…

— Robert Penn Warren, from Band of Angels (1955).

Also: Raoul Walsh looking pretty, according to HiLoBrow.com.

 

Posted in Civil War, Flicks, Literature, Poetry | No Comments »

Frisco Gal I Don’t Know Why

Mar 14th, 2012 by

Frisco Gal by Clarkson Crane is, if not the worst book, ever written, published, sorta semi-skimmed looking for even one half-worthwhile passage, it’s certainly in the running. If I was Naomi Martin, as Frisco Gal once was, I’d have changed my name too. I wish I could at least say Clarkson Crane was borrachón filling the page for money but with Angie Dickinson as my witness, I can find no evidence to support that thesis. Forewarned is forearmed.

— Kenny Wisdom, Fiction Editor

Posted in labor, Literature, Sex | No Comments »

Levitation For The Hell Of It

Feb 6th, 2012 by

Well, let us move on to hear the music. It was being played by the Fugs, or rather— to be scrupulously phenomenological— Mailer heard the music first, then noticed the musicians and their costumes, then recognized two of them as Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg and knew it was the Fugs. Great joy! The were much better than last time he had heard them in a grind-it-out theater on Macdougal Street. Now they were dressed in orange and yellow and rose colored capes and looked at once like Hindu gurus, French musketeers, and Southern cavalry captains, and the girls watching them, indeed sharing the platform with them were wearing love beads and leather bells— sandals, blossoms, and little steel-rimmed spectacles abounded, and the music, no rather the play, had begun, almost Shakespearean in its sinister announcement of great pleasures to come. Now the Participant recognized that this was the beginning of the exorcism of the Pentagon, yes the papers had made much of the permit requested by a hippie leader named Abbie Hoffman to encircle the Pentagon with twelve hundred men in order to form a ring of exorcism sufficiently powerful to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet. In the air the Pentagon would then, went the presumption, turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point, the war in Vietnam would end.

— from Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night  (1968)

* For more on the on the poet Charles Olson— author of “We drink/ or break open/ our veins solely/ to know”— see the recent Hilobrow.com tribute to Earl Hooker.

Posted in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn Heights, Crown Heights, Dial J For Jewish, Music, Poetry, politics, Sex | No Comments »

John Dos Passos in Brooklyn

Jan 5th, 2012 by

Joe was reeling himself. He stuck his head in a bucket of water and cleaned up the cabin and threw the bottles overboard and started working on the claxon regularly. To hell with ‘em, he kept saying to himself, he wouldn’t be a plaster saint for anybody. He was feeling fine, he had something more to do than spin that damn claxon.

Old man Gaskin came on board about day. Joe could see  he’d gotten wind of something because after that he never would speak to him except to give orders and wouldn’t let  his boy speak to him; so that when theyd unloaded the granite blocks in East New York, Joe asked for his pay and said he was through. Old man Gashin growwled out it was a good ridddance and that he wouldn’t have no boozin; and whorin on his barge. So there was Joe with fortyfive dollars in his pocket walking through Red Hook looking for a boarding house.
— John Dos Passos, from 1919 (1932)

Posted in East New York, Industrial, Literature, Red Hook, Sex, Transportation | No Comments »

Theodore Dreiser In Brooklyn, Part IV

Dec 13th, 2011 by

Friday, April 25- 1913

My peaches sweet:

Wednesday night I went to dine Laura Jean Libbey. She didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox and all the while (I went with a newspaper friend) called me Mr. Caeser, which I refused to correct or allow to be corrected. Short, stout, red headed (brick red), genial, skittish, 53,— that is Laura Jean. She lives in Brooklyn. Her house is a fright— stuffed with all the old dull stuff for which Brooklyn is noted. There is two billion dollars worth of junk masquerading as furniture and art in Brooklyn. I expected to see a landscape with a mother-of-pearl moon set in the sky (real mother of pearl) but I escaped that. Yet they had Champagne, $7,50 Victorola records, a library of dictionary sized volumes of history. Police!

— from Letters to Women: New Letters, Volume 2, edited by Thomas P. Riggio  (University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Posted in Crime, Downtown, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Music, Sex | No Comments »

Theodore Dreiser in Brooklyn, Part III

Nov 26th, 2011 by

My appointment was for the evening. Dreiser, who is finishing a book, “An American Tragedy,” in a specially rented New York office, lives in Brooklyn, which is also the base of my visits to Gotham. Accordingly, I show up at this place, ready for the regular chat about books and people. Drawing up alongside the curb I caught sight of an ungainly figure bent over an automobile. A charming lady was giving the car a drink. I had seen that powerful masculine face before in pictures, and wondered what Dreiser (if it were really he) could be doing out there, preparing for a spin, when he had arranged to see me at that very hour. Perhaps he was trying to escape me. If so, I couldn’t well blame him. Talking books to a man after he has stuck all day in an office writing them is hardly his proper notion of relaxation, especially when there is a pretty driver at the wheel.

“Pardon me,” I ventured. “Is this Mr. Dreiser?”

It was, and a heavy hand was extended to meet my own. But what about that automobile? Had I broken up a party? On the contrary, as it soon appeared, I was to make one of it. There was to be no evening of book chat in an apartment. This was to be a flying interview, open-airy, informal, with Dreiser and I seated in the rear and the fair charioteer guiding us through the open spaces of Brooklyn’s seemingly endless thoroughfares.

— from “A Visit With Theodore Dreiser” by Isaac Goldberg, Haldeman-Julius Monthly 5 (October 1925), reproduced in Theodore Dreiser Interviews, Frederic E. Rusch and Donald Pizer, eds. (U of Illinois Press, 2004)

Caz Dolowicz remembers Alexander Berkman too.

Posted in Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, East New York, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Williamsburg | No Comments »

Theodore Dreiser in Brooklyn, Part II

Nov 9th, 2011 by

The least wrinkle crept into his brow as he remembered that this was February 2d, the time the man always called. He fished in his pocket for his purse, getting the first taste of paying out when nothing is coming in. He looked at the fat, green roll as a sick man looks at the one possible saving cure. Then he counted off twenty-eight dollars.

“Here you are,” he said to Carrie, when she came through again.
He buried himself in his papers and read. Oh, the rest of it— the relief from walking and thinking! What Lethean waters were these floods of telegrapher intelligence! He forgot his troubles, in part. Here was a young, handsome woman, if you might believe the newspaper drawing, suing a rich, fat candy-making husband in Brooklyn for divorce. Here was another item detailing the wrecking of a vessel in ice and snow off Prince’s Bay on Staten Island. A long, bright column told of the doings in the theatrical world— the plays produced, the actors appearing, the managers making announcements. Fannie Davenport was just opening at the Fifth Avenue. Daly was producing “King Lear.” He read of the early departure for the season of a party of Vanderbilts and their friends for Florida. An interesting shooting affray was on in the mountains of Kentucky. So he read, read, read, rocking in the warm room near the radiator and waiting for dinner to be served.
—  from Sister Carrie (1900)
Caz Dolowicz, twice divorced, never made candy.

Posted in Gowanus, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Sex, Staten Island | No Comments »

Theodore Dreiser in Brooklyn: Part I of a series

Nov 4th, 2011 by

At the time Eugene met him, he was planning Minetta Water on the shores of Gravesend Bay, which was the most ambitious of all his projects so far. He was being followed financially, by a certain number of Brooklyn politicians and financiers who had seen him succeed in small things, taking a profit of from three to four hundred per cent, out of ten, twenty and thirty acre flats, but for all his brilliance it had been slow work. He was now worth between three and four hundred thousand dollars and, for the first time in his life, was beginning to feel that freedom in financial matters which made him think that he could do almost anything. He had met all sorts of people, lawyers, bankers, doctors, merchants, the “easy classes” he called them, all with a little money to invest, ad he had succeeded in luring hundreds of worth-while people into his projects. His great dreams had never really been realized, however, for he saw visions of a great warehouse and shipping system to be established on Jamaica Bay, out of which he was to make millions, if it ever came to pass, and also a magnificent summer resort of some kind, somewhere, which was not yet clearly evolved in his mind. His ads were scattered freely through the newspapers: his signs, or rather the signs of his towns, scattered broadcast over Long Island.

— from The ‘Genius’ (1915)

Posted in Gravesend, Industrial, politics, Queens, Rockaways, Sheepshead Bay | No Comments »

My Friend Edward Dalhberg

Oct 5th, 2011 by

He [Sherwood Anderson] was very unsure of himself; that is why he was never in a hurry with anybody, for it takes a long time to understand– or to misunderstand– people. He never had the American “busy” malady. Nor had Dreiser; if you wanted to see him, he always asked you to come over right away. Marsden Hartley was not fancy or affected either until Paul Rosenberg, the art dealer, had sold thirty thousand dollars’ worth of his work one year. Hartley told me the following story: At a literary party a Broadway theater magnate rushed into Hartley’s arms, crying out with rapture: “Oh, Marsden, we have not seen each other for twenty years; when shall we have dinner together?” To which Hartley replied: “Well, when?” That dumbfounded the Broadway impresario: “You know, Hartley, I have so many appointments, and by the weekend I must go to Connecticut to restore my flagging energies. This coming week is quite full, really overflowing; let me see about the next week after that; there’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then, O God, another Connecticut weekend; what about three weeks from next Thursday?” Hartley, the flinty Maine artist, retorted: “Nothing doing; nobody is that busy.” After which the theater man said rather sheepishly: “Would you please have dinner with me tonight?” Once I asked Alfred Steiglitz about Waldo Frank, and he answered “Waldo’s busy being great.” Sherwood Anderson was never the great or the quick, and neither was Dreiser. I deeply wish that Sherwood Anderson were alive just to know that someone in America still has time to drink a bottle of wine and and to to talk, for until we have some good, slow people again we won’t have books that enlarge our affections and trust.”

— Edward Dahlberg, from “My Friends Steiglitz, Anderson and Dreiser” (collected in Alms For Oblivion, 1968)

Caz Dolowicz doesn’t have to brag. Caz Dolowicz never met Ranolph Bourne. Caz Dolowicz hears Oistrakh everywhere!

Posted in Bensonhurst, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Music, Navy Yard | No Comments »

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