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 […]
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Poetry And Miss Esmonds Tho’ poetry is one of the cheapest and profitable speculations of the literary world, we find not a few aspiring to be poets rather than be orators. This is a fact which goes to strongly prove that poetry has more charms than is generally supposed. It is the language of nature, […]
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It was with a faint hope that, after all, our ardent desires might be realized, when we were informed that Rev. Henry Ward Beecher had gone to Washington to intercede for the acceptance of the regiment, and although we could not understand how he could expect President Lincoln or the Secretary of War to order […]
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Posted in Bay Ridge, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn Heights, Brownsville, Canarsie, Coffee, Crime, Downtown, Drugs, East New York, Flatbush, Fort Greene, Fort Hamilton, Greenpoint, Jazz, Literature, Navy Yard, Park Slope, politics, Red Hook, Sex, South Brooklyn, Williamsburg on Jul 31st, 2010
I don’t think Faulkner is worth the antebellum South, and I would rather not have had Kafka at the proce of twentieth-century European carnage. But in trying to locate contemporary American writing I look at the thirties, that supposedly meager decade if misfired artistic energy and of duped intellectuals and bad proletarian novels, and I […]
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Posted in Bushwick, Civil War, Downtown, Flatbush, Flatlands, Fort Hamilton, Irish, Literature, Music, Navy Yard, New Utrecht, politics, Red Hook, Sex, Williamsburg on Jul 22nd, 2010
As a man in the 12th Alabama wrote, “we were into it hot and heavy. I thought I had been in hot places before— I thought I had heard Minnie ball; but that day capped the climax.” Once in position the Alabamians stubbornly kept up a steady fire of their own, but they could not advance […]
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Posted in Bay Ridge, Bed-Stuy, Carroll Gardens, Coney Island, Crime, Downtown, Flicks, hip-hop, Irish, Jazz, labor, Latino, Literature, Manhattan, Midwood, Music, Ocean Hill, Park Slope, Poetry, politics, Queens, Red Hook, Religion, Rockaways, Sex, Transportation, West Indian, Williamsburg on Jun 29th, 2010
Ignorant of the ways of publicity and chance alike, I’m unsure how these things happen but HiLoBrow.com has just been named by Time magazine’s Best Blogs of the Year . I could make up some things but not that! We’ve been meaning to catch up with WWIB’s recently elusive publisher, Brian Berger, who doesn’t answer the phone, […]
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Posted in Africa Talks, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Navy Yard, politics, Red Hook, Religion, South Brooklyn, Southern Thing, Transportation, Vinegar Hill on May 29th, 2010
Douglass’ advocacy of slave revolt was a view shared much more widely among black than among white abolitionists. In 1856, Lewis Tappan became alarmed at Douglass’ “vengeance is mine” attitude toward slaveholders. “In your speeches and in your paper,” Tappan complained, “you advocate the slaughter of slaveholders. I cannot go with you.” He accused the […]
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Posted in All-City, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Crime, Downtown, Gowanus, Industrial, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Poetry, Red Hook, Sex, Subways, Transportation on Apr 9th, 2010
Yugoslav Steward knocks on my door, says “You stay on the ship? Okay?” and goes off into Brooklyn to get drunk with the crew— Alyce and I are waking up, at one A.M., arm in arm in a dreadsome ship, agh— Only one watchman alone on the walk— Everybody drinking in bars of New York. […]
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Posted in All-City, Boerum Hill, Brighton Beach, Bronx, Brooklyn Heights, Brownsville, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Coney Island, Crime, Crown Heights, Downtown, Drugs, East Flatbush, Gowanus, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Park Slope, Red Hook, Sex, South Brooklyn, Subways, Transportation on Nov 16th, 2009
“What Richard Abneg had carried forward, always, anyhow, was a certain sense of his own crucial place in the island’s life. He’d never copped out. And the beard, that too was uncompromised, continuous. He grew it when he was fifteen and reading Howard Zinn and Charles Bukowski and Emmett Grogan. I soaked up Harriet’s description […]
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Posted in All-City, Brooklyn Heights, Canarsie, Carroll Gardens, Coffee, Crime, Downtown, Drugs, Dumbo, Flicks, Gowanus, Kensington, labor, Literature, Manhattan, Music, Park Slope, Poetry, politics, Red Hook on Nov 10th, 2009
In honor of the great contributions Brooklyn’s mostly proud blind people have made to our Armed Forces over the years, I’m delighted to reintroduce this interview between a monocle-wearing historian, Brian Berger, and the nearly sightless novelist Jim Knipfel. As for Woodrow Wilson, the Staunton, Virginia native who presided over the first Armistice Day, he […]
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