April 7, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mediums, Midtown Hotels, McGoorty By The Paris Review Still from Mediums. After our Spring Revel this week, I woke up feeling like garbage’s garbage. To ease the pain, I reached for Robert Byrne’s McGoorty: A Pool Room Hustler, a biography as greasy as a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich and just as good for my hangover. First published in 1972, this profane picaresque does a nice little cradle-to-grave number on Danny McGoorty, a real live Chicago pool shark, earthy and sly and often in extremis. In the twenties, he went from billiard room to billiard room, conning and swindling his way to a small fortune; in the thirties, he was a boxcar hobo; in the forties, he went pro and sobered up long enough to win a pool championship. What else do you need to know? Luc Sante reissued McGoorty some years back as part of his Library of Larceny series, but it seems to have fallen out of print again. Won’t someone please rescue McGoorty? He is unrepentantly ripe. As early as page three, he begins his prurient boasting about “broads”: “I was seventeen years old before I was able to get my finger damp enough to turn a page. Once I got started, though, I became quite the little cocksman.” No doubt, McGoorty. No doubt. —Dan Piepenbring I’ve been reading Sarah Gerard’s new collection, Sunshine State, and trying to figure out why I’m so intrigued by the way she writes about the confident naïveté of youth. There’s little to admire in, say, a blissed-out appreciation of a dubious guy in parachute pants, but Gerard, writing in the essay “Records” about her senior year of high school, sets sections about pursuing vocal performance at her arts magnet school, with an eye toward a professional singing career, against drugged-out nights doing next to nothing. The contrast feels both irreconcilable and credible. Gerard’s prose is unlabored, flatly observational, and the interwoven mini stories are at once tender and cold, exhilarating and regrettable—each undermining the one that precedes it. In the best of these sections, almost a stand-alone story, Gerard travels to New York, from Florida, with her parents to visit colleges. She sneaks out of their midtown hotel at night and falls immediately prey to a pair of questionable older men. Seeing her camera, they tell her they shoot for National Geographic. It’s clear to the reader they do not; Gerard, at seventeen, is wide-eyed. They coerce her into taking a photograph of a couple arguing outside a bar. When she develops the photo home, she feels “afraid and ashamed looking at it, knowing this is not a picture I wanted to take; that I took it only because I was told to.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
April 7, 2017 The Revel Photos from Our 2017 Spring Revel By Dan Piepenbring Richard Howard, the recipient of this year’s Hadada Award. Our Spring Revel was Tuesday. Did you miss it? Don’t worry: we had the foresight to bring a photographer. Read More
April 7, 2017 On the Shelf This Bridge Is for Saxophonists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge in the sixties. The Williamsburg Bridge is a fine name for a bridge, especially when one half of that bridge ends in Williamsburg. But not every Williamsburg Bridge has given a safe harbor to one of the greatest jazz musicians in history—and say one had? Shouldn’t we name it after the saxophonist, and not the neighborhood? The neighborhood has had a good run; it’s time for a change. Amanda Petrusich has the story of Sonny Rollins’s secret tenure on the bridge, where the tenor player loved to practice, hiding in plain sight: “In 1961, a story by Ralph Berton appeared in Metronome, a trade rag … Berton had come across Rollins playing atop the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River and connects North Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He filed a short dispatch about the encounter. In an effort to keep Rollins’s practice space private, Berton changed the location to the Brooklyn Bridge, and gave Rollins the somewhat ridiculous sobriquet ‘Buster Jones’ … Almost every day between the summer of 1959 and the end of 1961, Rollins—who was born in Harlem, and at the time lived in an apartment at 400 Grand Street, just a few blocks from the entrance to the bridge—walked out and stationed himself adjacent to the subway tracks, playing as cars full of commuters rattled past.” Michael Hofmann reminds us that Elizabeth Bishop is essentially a fugitive figure, unstuck in time: “At Vassar, she was ‘the Bish,’ had an early, nay, prophetic taste for tweed, was recorded in the 1930 yearbook as ‘Bishop of the barbarous hair.’ There was something out of place or out of time about her, or both; attributable perhaps, partly, to spending her earliest years in Nova Scotia, and having three grandparents who were Canadian. A singer of hymns and a student of the harpsichord, her favorite poets George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Baudelaire—was she more seventeenth-century, or nineteenth? … Since her death in 1979, Bishop has been so universally and I think often falsely or sentimentally championed by us, we don’t see the contrariness or the heroic effort of living against her time and culture; we like to think of her in San Francisco, blithely passing a joint to Thom Gunn or accepting one from him, and generally letting it hang out after all, all or some.” Read More
April 6, 2017 From the Archive Getting Out Alive By Elaine Blair Rethinking the end of Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” What is “Goodbye, Columbus”? A story of a summer romance, a satirical sketch of suburban arriviste Jews in the fifties—sure. But when I stumbled on Philip Roth’s first book on the shelf of my high school library, “Goodbye, Columbus” seemed to me above all a brief against marriage. The story’s point—or so I thought of it—unsettled me. I had no intention of heeding it. I was for marriage, a born ball and chain. In the story, Neil Klugman, recently out of Rutgers and the army, works behind the desk at the Newark Library. His summer girlfriend is Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe student from tony Short Hills, New Jersey. “We lived in Newark when I was a baby,” she tells Neil—that is, before the Patimkins’ social climb. For Neil, Brenda’s allure is tangled up with his fascination of her prosperous world, and the closer the two of them get, the closer Neil comes to signing up for the whole Patimkin package: a fancy wedding, a lifetime management job at her father’s factory (Patimkin Kitchen and Bathroom Sinks), a country-club membership, a house in Short Hills, and, inevitably, babies. It’s cushy, but Neil isn’t sure he wants that life, while Brenda seems to consider no other. Read More
April 6, 2017 Look Stung By Dan Piepenbring “A Self-Portrait,” an exhibition of paintings by Lamar Peterson, is at Fredericks & Freiser gallery for just a few more days, through April 8. Peterson intends the works to serve, in aggregate, as a metaphor for contemporary black male identity. He’s credited his predilection for bright landscapes to none other than PBS’s Bob Ross: “When I was a kid, I used to paint along with him, and he always painted a mountain scene. I imagine that as being the perfect scene … that most people can relate to. In a sense, people see that mountain scene as being an ideal kind of thing, so I keep coming up with images like that.” Lamar Peterson, The Conversation, 2016, oil on canvas, 77″ x 72″. Read More
April 6, 2017 On the Shelf Technology Is Telepathy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring A man fixes telegraph wires during the U.S. Civil War, ca. 1863. Image via Public Domain Review. In the nineteenth century, as communications technologies proliferated and spiritualism spread across the U.S., people began to wonder, not unreasonably, if telepathy was real, and if our dreams could be used to predict the future. It’s an idea that retains a certain currency even today. For instance, last night I dreamed I lost my thirty-day unlimited MetroCard on an escalator; I spent two hours looking for it, riding the escalator again and again all hunched over. I experienced this search in real time. Now all I have to do is lose my MetroCard in real life and whammo, I can claim to be a telepath. But wait, back to the nineteenth century: Alicia Puglionesi writes, “Despite skepticism from some scientists, people took the idea of spontaneous, unconscious mental transmission quite seriously, as a possibility and as a danger, in an age when powerful ideas crisscrossed the nation through new and mysterious channels. From mass print to the telegraph to the railroad, burgeoning communication systems collapsed time and space through increasingly rapid connections. They brought unprecedented economic growth, creating new forms of investment and trading that depended as much on information flow as they did on the movement of commodities. Such precipitous connectedness also posed a threat to the socioeconomic order: it allowed laborers to organize, abolitionists and suffragists to rally. Dangerous ideas could spread uncontrollably, and many worried that hardware might not limit their range. The line between technology and telepathy blurred, with medical men like William Carpenter explaining the nervous system as a telegraph and extending its reach beyond the individual body; he believed that ‘nerve-force,’ as a form of electricity, could ‘exert itself from a distance, so as to bring the Brain of one person into direct dynamical communication with that of another.’ ” Family vacation idea: take a guided tour of America’s nuclear facilities. Peggy Weil did it, and she discovered vast subterranean networks of apocalyptic weaponry that most Americans never truly contemplate. Also, there were cartoons: “The Minuteman III Launch Control Centers are located deep underground in remote areas of North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Montana; these facilities support the approximately 450 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that now comprise our land-based nuclear arsenal … Operational from 1965 until 1997, Oscar-Zero was one of fifteen Missile Alert Facilities run by the 321st Strategic Missile Wing, its crew responsible for ten of the 150 Minuteman missiles then housed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, about eighty miles to the northeast … But Oscar-Zero is not all gunmetal grim. One corner melts into an azure photomural depicting a lush tropical seascape. In another mural, two missileers stride proudly under the slogan WHO YA GONNA CALL? … The commanding officer is depicted as an American eagle and his deputy commander is the Muppet character Oscar the Grouch, who declares: ‘Hey! This is a job for the BEST of the BEST!’ Both officers are wearing patches that read: KREMLIN KRUSHERS. On one cabinet there’s a picture of Donald Duck lazing against a palm tree.” Read More