Feed on
Posts
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 »

Brooklyn Queens Book Festschrift: Edward Dahlberg Edition

Sep 18th, 2011 by

There are five trash towns in greater New York, five garbage heaps of Tofeth. A foul, thick wafter of iron and cement covers primeval America, beneath which cry the ghosts of the crane, the mallard, the gray and white brants, the elk and the fallow deer. A broken obelisk at Crocodopolis has stood in one position for thousands of years, but the United States is a transient Golgotha.

In 1926, my mother had decided to join me in Astoria, a cheap German borough with grum and gritty delicatessen and hardware stores and the dead bricks of tenements. But after a year in Astoria we moved to Bensonhurst, then a rheumy marshland. A low, squab mist hovers over the bay which damps the job-lot stucco houses. Many months later I found an apartment in a block about ten minutes by elevated train from Queens Plaza. Queens is an immense warehouse for New York cadavers, and I had taken the greatest care to find rooms that were remote from the graveyards. But after I had signed the lease and was standing at the window overlooking high, shaggy-iodine-colored bushes, I found they concealed the cut-rate Virgin Marys and Christs of Calvary Cemetery.

— Edward Dahlberg, from Because I Was Flesh (1959)

Brooklyn-native Kenny Wisdom is the author of the forthcoming Frau Im Astoria (LTV Press), a spy novel.

Posted in Bensonhurst, Literature, Poetry, Queens | No Comments »

In The Zone: Scarlatti versus the Gowanus Hurricane

Aug 27th, 2011 by

Yes, many’s the night I attended a recital in one of these hallowed musical morgues and each time I walked out I thought not of the music I had heard but of one of my foundlings, one of the bleeding cosmococcic crew I had hired or fired that day and the memory of whom neither Haydn, Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Beelzebub, Schubert, Paganini or any of the wind, string, horn of cymblal clan of musikers could dispel. I could see him, poor devil, leaving the office with his messenger suit wrapped in  brown parcel, heading for the elevated line at the Brooklyn Bridge, where he would board a train for Fresh Pond Road or Pitkin Avenue , or maybe Kosciusko Street, there to descend into the swarm, grab a sour pickle, dodge a kick in the ass, peel the potatoes, clean the lice out of the beddng and say a prayer for his great grandfather who had died at the hand of a drunken Pole because the sigh of a beard floating in the wind was anathema to him. I could also see myelf walking Pitkin Avenue, or Kosciusko Street, searching for a certain hovel, or was it a kennel, and thinking to myself how lucky to be born a Gentile an speak English so well. (Is this still Brooklyn? Where am I?)
—Henry Miller, from Nexus (Paris, Obelisk Press: 1960)

Brooklyn-native Kenny Wisdom stacks sandbags in front of his Michelangeli albums

Posted in Brownsville, Bushwick, East New York, Greenpoint, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Music, Williamsburg | No Comments »

Remembering Bird(s): Benton Barracks Bossa

Jul 21st, 2011 by

The Southerners have fortified Columbus, Hickman Chalk bluff, and New Madrid so that the Gun boats at Cairo could not even attempt, or if allowed to pass could not return. To carry these Forts a large a large land force is indispensable, and where is it— Halleck now could not detach from Missouri 10,000 men— and from the garrison of Paducah, Cairo & Birds Point might collect another 10,000, but we know in Columbus alone they have 22,000 besides the garrison of Chalk Bluff & Hickman.

— William Sherman to “My Dear Brother,” John Sherman; written from Benton Barracks, January 8, 1862. From Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865 (University of North Carolina Press).

Hank Mobley recalled Charlie Parker too.

Posted in Civil War, Drugs, Jazz, politics, Transportation | No Comments »

Remembering Bird: Cherokee Ain’t Canarsie

Jul 6th, 2011 by

Follow? Red, the Negro shoeshine boy, waits by his dusty leather seat. The Negroes all over wasted Roxbury wait. Follow? “Cherokee” comes wailing up from the dance floor below, over the hi-hat, the string bass, the thousand sets of feet where the moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song playing is one more lie about white crimes. But more musicians have floundered in the channel to “Cherokee” than have got through from end to end. All those long notes, long notes. . . what’re they up to, all that time do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot? Down in New York, drive fast, maybe get there for the last set– on 7th Ave., between 139th and 140th, tonight, “Yardbird” Parker is finding out how he can use the notes at the higher ends of these very chords to break up the melody and have mercy what is it a fucking machine gun or something man he must be out of his mind 32nd notes demisemiquavers say it very (demisemiquaver) fast in a Munchkin voice if you can dig that coming out of Dan Wall’s Chili House and down the street— shit, out in all kinds of streets (his trip, by ’39, well begun: down inside his most affirmative solos honks already the idle, amused dum-de-dumming of old Mister fucking Death he self) out over the airwaves, into the society gigs, someday as far as what seeps out hidden speakers in the city’s elevators and in all the markets, his bird’s singing, to gainsay the Man’s lullabies, to subvert the groggy wash of the endlessly, gutlessly overdubbed strings. . . . So that prophecy, even up here on rainy Massachusetts Avenue, is beginning these days to work itself out in “Cherokee,” the saxes downstairs getting now into some, oh really weird shit. . . .

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Kenny “Ko-Ko” Wisdom, one-eighth Cherokee, has been to Kansas City— Missouri and Kansas!

Posted in Canarsie, Jazz, Literature, Manhattan, Music | No Comments »

Older Posts »