September 7, 2016 Our Correspondents Summer Hours, Part 4 By Vanessa Davis Catch up with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of Vanessa Davis’s column. Read More
September 6, 2016 Our Correspondents Socially Displaced By Matthew St. Ville Hunte Photo: Gene93k. I had been out of college for a couple years when a friend got me a gig studying the “socially displaced.” This wasn’t as lofty as it sounds; what I really did was spend a couple months going around asking bums about their problems. The arrangement was fairly straightforward: they’d give me their stories and I’d give them a dollar. So I spent a few days roaming Castries—the capital of Saint Lucia—with a cheap recorder and a heavy bag of coins, tracking the street people and hoping a few would talk to me. I’ve never been great at interviews, mainly because I don’t like bothering people, including vagrants. I felt like I was invading their private space, which I sort of was. But surprisingly some of them were willing to tell me their life stories even without the promise of money. They had nothing better to do—and clearly neither did I. Read More
September 1, 2016 Our Correspondents Dating History By Wei Tchou How a book about Chinatown made me remember my first New York date. Mott Street at night. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve spent much of the summer totally captivated by Tong Wars, Scott Seligman’s comprehensive account of Manhattan’s Chinatown at the turn of the twentieth century. The book narrates the half century of history that followed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which made it illegal for Chinese, known at the time as “Celestials,” to immigrate and become naturalized American citizens. Those who traveled to New York from the American West (the New York Herald described them as an “army of almond-eyed exiles”) often found jobs as laundry workers and, according to Seligman, not a few of them spent their evenings gambling illegally in low-lit basements or nursing serious opium addictions. In Tammany Hall–era Manhattan, Chinatown covered the area between Mott Street, Pell Street, and the Bowery. The neighborhood was the site of violent battles between the Hip Sings and the On Leongs, gangs that fought each other using everything from hatchets to bombs. Doyers Street, the dramatic alley off Pell Street, saw so much violence that it became known as the Bloody Angle. (“More people have died violently at Bloody Angle,” the Times reported in 1994, “than at any other intersection in America.”) Read More
August 31, 2016 Our Correspondents I Was Somebody Else By Lucy Sante Its authorship mistakenly attributed to its copy editor and issued in a single edition of five hundred by a suburban publisher of quickie romances, the posthumous memoirs of the celebrated French poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1933) must count among the more obscure byways of literary marginalia. Having faked his death in 1891 to escape mounting debts and increasingly credible threats of violence from rival traders in the Gulf of Aden, Rimbaud lay low for more than four decades. While his former friends and colleagues were elevating his poetic works and mysterious youth into a cult, he kept his distance. He stayed busy, variously occupied as a beachcomber on the Côte d’Azur, a croupier at Monte Carlo, a phony “fakir” in a traveling carnival, a roving photographer with donkey on the Belgian coast, a promoter of spurious miracle sites in the Borinage, and finally twenty years as “Beauraind,” an intermittently successful music-hall ventriloquist. Read More
August 30, 2016 Our Correspondents Godspeed, Sweet Intent By Anthony Madrid Hunting the sound stack in the rondels of D’Orléans. Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair (detail), oil on canvas, 1852–55. In the March 1915 issue of Poetry magazine (page 254), the following poem appeared for the first time in print: IMAGE FROM D’ORLEANS Young men riding in the street In the bright new season Spur without reason, Causing their steeds to leap. And at the pace they keep Their horses’ armored feet Strike sparks from the cobbled street In the bright new season. I first encountered it, seventy or seventy-five years later, in Personæ: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. I did not know at that time whether d’Orléans was a person or a place, nor did I look into it. I was charmed by the poem—more than I knew—but there were many pieces in Personæ that interested me more. By the time I turned thirty, I could recite at least two dozen of Pound’s shorter poems from memory. “Image from D’Orleans” was not one of them. Read More
August 29, 2016 Our Correspondents Father Daniel Berrigan: Poet, Priest, Prophet By Nathan Gelgud Read More