I Celebrate Myself...and Whitman

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

One of the most problematic aspects of New York is the tyranny of choice: there is just too damn much to do, and you can’t expect to do it all.  There’s even too much to do for your particular nerd group: music nerd, sports nerd, technology nerd, art nerd, etc. It’s not a bad problem to have, to be sure, but it’s not a fun problem when you’re - shall we say - financially challenged.

But if you’re a literature nerd, sometimes you’ll luck out on free events that are wonderful in content and concept and whose excellence is only augmented by the New York setting.

And by a Brooklyn setting, in particular, where poetic clout rests largely in Walt Whitman.  In early May, I attended a concert/small festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) titled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” after Whitman’s famous poem describing the pre-bridge ferry crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn. (My friend Monica and I attended for one night, where we saw the bands Ava Luna, the Antlers, Buke and Gass, and St. Vincent.  Good times, indeed.) 

On Sunday, June 3, in between a million events and errands on my agenda, I found time to walk past the old home of the Brooklyn Eagle (which Whitman edited), down to Brooklyn Bridge Park.  On Pier 1, an NYU professor was hosting the annual marathon reading of Song of Myself.  As clouds and wind moved in, building gray waves on the East River beneath the skyline of the Financial District and the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, poets and volunteers stood to recite their favorite sections from the 1855 version.  Even when the rain fell in a quick and thorough summer shower, drenching Walt Whitman look-a-likes  through their big white beards, the reading lost no momentum.  The small but hearty audience followed along as raindrops splattered their diverse copies of the poem.

Although I could only stay for a few minutes, the literature nerd in me was pleased.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir58X7WiCqg

Click to hear the current Poet-in-Residence of the Walt Whitman Birthplace - Martin Espada - read Part II of Song of Myself (and also glimpse what seems like an anachronistic car drive through the back of the shot).

My souvenir

Strand Bookstore, Literary Landmark No. 8

January 17, 2012

The Strand in Greenwich Village is a twofer: both a literary landmark and an epic bookstore, and “epic” is an understatement.

I didn’t want to love the Strand, which is why I didn’t immediately rush to it when people (everybody) suggested it. “Have you been to The Strand yet? You have to go!”  I avoided it with the same guilty pride we use when we don’t want to admit that we actually enjoyed a common blockbuster film that “the masses” prize – you know, a James Cameron or Michael Bay flick. Or, for a better example, even though going to the top of the Empire State Building is cliché, no one can deny that it’s a phenomenal vantage point that acquaints you with New York and preserves some of the movie magic that we associate with the city.  So although The Strand is undoubtedly local and couldn’t be anywhere but New York, the last remaining used bookseller on the once-abundant Book Row, I nearly considered it too well-known and almost too “touristy” for my search.

Well, that was just stupid.

When I arrived at The Strand (very conveniently located close to the subway and all its connections at Union Square, thus easily accessible…), I probably didn’t enter the store for a good twenty minutes.  The temperature was in the 20s and I was wearing a skirt and thin tights, so my legs felt every whip of that wind.  But how could they (I) pay any attention when there were carts and carts of used books for sale outside?  Even before customers enter the store, they have entered a browsing paradise.

“Browsing Paradise”- [brouz-ing par-uh-dahys] – noun.  Origin: 2012 AD, United States

1. Of or depicting the heavenly realms of bibliophilia.
2. A place of extreme beauty, delight, or happiness wrought by the presence of rare books and titles, gorgeous spines and covers, and the tangible accessibility to so many pages of wonder.
3. The occasion upon which bookstore patrons may happen upon random finds near one another.  Multiple genres cohabitate on carts and in bins: Look at those editions of Thoreau and Michael J. Fox next to each other on the $2 cart; this must be a browser’s paradise.
4. The slightly overwhelming circumstances in which one is confronted with 18 miles of books and, after spending an hour simply walking some of the aisles, realizes that one has not even made a dent in all of the possibilities.  Thus, one resolves to return.

"Hi, I'm a 19th century edition, just hanging out on the $2 cart."

Look what I found!  Yes,ladies and gents, my name is on the shelves at the Strand, compliments of UT creative writing.

Founded in 1927, the Strand features plenty of new but also used books.  Seriously, it makes McKay in Knoxville look like a joke. If I were so bold as to make an analogy…

McKay : Strand :: a child’s fingerpainting on the fridge : the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Literally, books are shoved into every nook and cranny of its four floors, and it has astounding sections of not only standards like literature, history, and philosophy but fashion, art, and photography.  It boasts (on plenty of attractive merchandise – and totes!) that it has 18 miles of books, and I believe it.  Apparently, Steven Spielberg ordered a 30,000 title library from the Strand; it probably didn’t make much of a dent.

It has so many of the ideal bookstore features that meet my criteria: charming and intriguing displays (even a featured author gets to curate his/her own display table to fill with their goodies of choice), good discounts, a great selection in clearly marked sections, used books, community involvement and events, and a unique character.  The displays are often humorous, and despite the sheer size of its shelves and inventory, it avoids feeling like a warehouse or too commercial.

New books that look old so you can build that impressive library display.

Way to keep up with the times.

Interesting neighbors.

My next journal?

 The Strand is incomparable.  Literally. I don’t think that I can compare it to my other finds because it’s created its own breed of bookstore; the smaller stores I’ve found can’t offer the same discounts or displays because they have neither the size nor the consumer base…nor the budget,  I’m sure. At Strand,  the sheer size and prospect of finding hidden treasures makes it impossible not to browse (I don’t think I’ll ever be able to enter without purchasing something), but it’s also impossible to browse because you quickly get overwhelmed by the sheer size and prospect of leafing through so many volumes.  Sensory overload and overstimulation makes visiting Strand a guaranteed time commitment. 

Unlike some of my other local bookstore finds, the atmosphere is alive with energy, which is both a blessing and curse.  A famous writer or celebrity could brush your shoulder or stand directly across from you at the display table, but you wouldn’t notice because you are so inundated with the books in front of you and the activity of staff and customers around you.  To accommodate so many volumes, the aisles are narrow, and it’s not difficult to get trapped while someone pulls a book off the shelf – but not one on the top; those are some tall and nearly inaccessible stacks in such a hubbub.  Strand is by no means so heavily trafficked that you can’t enjoy looking at some titles and leafing through a few, but it certainly lacks the leisurely coziness of other stores. 

A Conversation between Two Bookstores:

Small, cozy, independent store: “Hey man, we have some good reads.  Roger suggests this theological treatise, and Beth suggests this book on vegetarianism.  But, you know, read a few pages, see if you like it.  That cracked leather chair is pretty comfy.  Take your time, whatevs.  I’m just going to play you some Duke Ellington while you check it out, maybe switch to some indie band that nobody’s heard of yet.  Cool.”

The Strand:  “We have books.  We have totes.  We have gifts. We have rare books, collectible books, artsy books, picture books, word books.  Books, BOOKS, BOOKS!

(So many books, so little time for that panic attack you’re about to have….)

Of course I will return, and of course I will end up buying more books that I don’t need, but I will also find more small stores that I can “own.”  The Strand may be “a great bookstore to visit” and “a favorite store of mine,” but it lacks the intimacy that may compel someone to gush, “it’s my favorite place.” It’s a New York City favorite, not a neighborhood favorite.

Literary Landmark No. 6 & No. 7

I thought I’d combine a couple landmarks on a theme: “Hotels.”

Hotel des Artistes

“The most famous building on a block originally filled with artists’ studios,” this site was home to artists of the painting, literary, and entertainment worlds. Its most famous inhabitants of these respective artistic spheres were probably Howard Chandler Christy and Norman Rockwell; Fannie Hurst and Noël Coward; and Rudolph Valentino, Isadora Duncan, and Gary Oldman.

The most sensational event associated with the building occurred on December 10, 1929.  Harry Crosby, nephew of J.P. Morgan, poet and publisher of the Black Sun Press, was found dead with his lover Josephine Bigelow in a murder-suicide that e.e. Cummings immortalized in verse:

            2 boston

Dolls; found with

Holes in each other

‘s lullaby.

The Algonquin Hotel

In 1919, the Round Table was formed, and the Algonquin was the place for this incredible group of writers to rendezvous in first the Pergola (Oak) Room and then the Rose Room: F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, and so many more.  The group was known for its sophisticated wit and sharp, conversational humor, especially one-liners.  Dorothy Parker once reviewed actress Katharine Hepburn: “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

Later writers attracted to the Algonquin include Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Art Buchwald, Graham Greene, and William Faulkner, who wrote his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the hotel stationery.   My Fair Lady was written in Room 908.

*These landmark reports are beginning to sound more and more like Wikipedia articles.  Oh, well; I still enjoy it.

Literary Landmark No. 5

Richard Wright's House - Fort Greene, Brooklyn

In this house, amidst harassment from the FBI and CIA for being a communist in the 1930s, Richard Wright wrote his greatest work, Native Son. He routinely awoke at 5:30AM and wrote on the top of the hill in nearby Fort Greene.  In this house, Bigger Thomas was born.  Important happenings behind nondescript doors.

Literary Landmark No. 4

Last week, I found myself on the Upper East Side, headed toward a bookstore (what else?), so I decided to take a slight detour to find John Steinbeck's House.

 

Kind of unimpressive.  Seriously, go check out pictures of his houses in California and Sag Harbor, where he wrote his great works like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.  Apparently, he wrote East of Eden in New York, but in a house that no longer exists.  The only events of note that happened at this address are Steinbeck's fall from a second-story window that resulted in a year walking with a cane and a divorce from his second wife, Gwyn (whose son wrote Jaws). 

However, Steinbeck did have some interesting, conflicting thoughts on New York, which he published in "The Making of  a New Yorker":

"Every once in a while [Gwyn and I] go away for several months and we always come back with a 'Thank God I'm home' feeling. For New York is the world with every vice and blemish and beauty and there's privacy thrown in. What more could you ask?"

"New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it-once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theatre, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else…"

But while living at this address, he wrote in a letter, "New York is a wonderful city.  I'm glad to be putting down some kind of roots here.  It is going to be the capital of the world.  It isn't like the rest of the country--it's like a nation itself--more tolerant than the rest in a curious way...neither good nor bad but unique."

Literary Landmark No. 3

The two self-created New York adventures that I have discussed, finding literary landmarks of New York and finding the best independent bookstore, obviously converge.  After all, great authors inspire, frequent, and support bookstores, both as writers and as patrons.  Even if they’re not listed as a historical literary landmark, great indie bookstores are obviously pretty foundational to sharing books and ideas. 

So when historical independent bookstores cease to exist, the blow is extra strong.

In pursuit of another Midtown literary landmark listed in my book, I walked back and forth on West 47^th Street, the Diamond District, avoiding jewelry peddlers and scammers, trying to find the famous Gotham Book Mart.

A true institution, the Gotham Book Mart was founded by Frances Steloff in 1920 on W. 45^th Street and moved to W. 47^th in 1923 and to another location on the same street in 1946. 

Apparently, it had an upstairs gallery for publication parties; some of its famous parties were given for Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka, who, like Ginsberg, worked at the shop…for only a few days each), Anaïs Nin, Dylan Thomas, and William Carlos Williams.  Obviously, the store was deeply committed to modern poetry. In 1939, Gotham hosted a “wake” “with clay pipes and Irish whiskey…to honor the publication of James Joyce’s masterpiece [debatable; I disagree] Finnegan’s Wake,” and T.S. Eliot became the first member of the James Joyce Society here in 1947. Other notable clientele: W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and more. Oh, I wish I could visit!

It no longer exists. It closed in 2007 (which, incidentally, is five years after the book I’m using was published; it now occurs to me that I may run into similar difficulties with other landmarks. That just makes it more interesting.)The building is now just a diamond store, indistinguishable from the fifty stores like it on the street.

Shame on you, city and materialistic culture.  Shame on you.

Literary Landmark No. 2

Without consciously realizing that it was in the book of literary landmarks that I’m pursuing, I found myself at Columbia University on Sunday.  I had been perusing an independent bookstore, Book Culture, primarily because I saw an interesting-looking fellow with a tote bag sporting the store’s logo.  Far be it from me to miss the chance to find a great bookstore.  As it turns out, the store had a great selection of books, including some great literary criticism that I forced myself not to buy.  Well, of course it did: it’s a bookstore that carries coursebooks from nearby Columbia. That explained why the bookstore carried the interesting aroma of new and used books mixed with a balance of affectation and inspiration.

Since I was there, so close, I had to explore Columbia in all its Ivy League glory.  I’ll never be intelligent enough (not to mention wealthy enough) to traverse its halls as a legitimate student, but that day, I was content just to walk the grounds, to soak in the intellectual history and incredible ideas espoused in its buildings and libraries.  And I had fun imagining myself as a student there, if only for a brief moment. 

According to my trusty literary landmark guide, Bill Morgan, Columbia “is one of the oldest, largest, and richest colleges in the country.”  Well, I knew that already.  What I didn’t know was how incredible its Butler Library is, especially its rare book rooms that hold early editions of Aristotle and Euclid, Milton and Washington Irving, as well as manuscripts of “Annabel Lee,” A Streetcar Named Desire, and “Howl.”  Speaking of, it was at Columbia that the Beats were born, including its students Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (and Ginsberg’s famous publisher Ferlinghetti).  Other notable literary students: Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, J. D. Salinger, and more.  And that’s not even mentioning the insane quality of professors who have taught there…Sometimes, academia is cool, kids.  (Actually, a girl just sat next to me in the coffee shop who is getting her Ph.D., and she’s explaining how she’s researching the material culture of fashion in the 70s in hopes of being both in academia and a museum curator.  Cool.)

Butler Library. (A wee bit crooked.)

Literary Landmark No. 1

As a result of my current unemployed state, as well as my desire to occupy myself in economically sound ways (read: free), I have decided to embark on a quest.  Now, if you know me, you can probably attest to the fact that I’m devoted and loyal to people and goals alike.  You might also know that I am a huge literary nerd.  After all, one doesn’t earn two English degrees without

• Getting excited at Shakespeare references in contemporary music (“Stars, hide your fires”).
• Initiating catchphrases made solely out of authors’ names (“Achebe, Achebe”; that’s for you, Cliner).
• Creating scales on which to judge others’ intellectual prowess and attention to aesthetics by their reaction to Lolita.
• Forming jokes beginning along these lines: “A priest, a rabbi, and Žižek walk into a bar…”.  And then finding them funny.
• Et cetera.

As a going-away gift, I received a book that appealed to the literary nerd in me, titled Literary Landmarks of New York: The Book Lover’s Guide to the Homes and Haunts of World-Famous Writers by Bill Morgan.  As a result, I plan to visit all of the places and document any literary experiences that I have there, too.  Or just take a picture to say I did it.

Thus, I begin with my favorite building in New York, not only because it’s fascinating but because it’s beautiful: The New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42^nd Street.

The Stephen A. Shwarzman Building

 You’re so shocked right now that I would love the library, I can tell.

I’ve already been there four days out of the six that I’ve been here.  The building is iconic, yes, but the mechanics of the innovative system are just fascinating, too.  I would love to be one of the people to walk along these forty miles of glorious shelf space under Bryant Park, finding and delivering books to feed intellectual inquiry. To spare more details for those who are actually interested, I suggest reading about the delivery system here.

Just a few quantitative facts that charm me as well: about 50 million items in its collection and 18 million books.  Be still, my heart.

There’s an ongoing display of several of the library’s special items that give my heart a little trill to see: an original copy of Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner,” recognizable because of the misspelling “pariotic,” an original Gutenberg bible, George Washington’s handwritten farewell speech to his troops, manuscripts from Eliot’s The Waste Land to Kerouac’s On the Road scroll, and the diary of Virginia Woolf, opened to her last entry, dated four days before her suicide, displayed right next to her cane that Leonard found washed up downriver. Among other things.

More than the objective facts, though, is the beautiful Rose Reading Room, “one of the largest public reading rooms in the city.”* The towering carved ceilings and paint details are nothing short of spectacular, and they rise with such grandeur that the room almost gives the impression of a cathedral, nearly sacred in its aspirations.  The wood beneath patrons’ feet creaks with age and the accumulated history of both the ideas held within the library’s books and the readers who seek them.  Books (and literary fiction, no less) line the walls.

But more wonderful to me than the building details, than the beautiful design and marble everything, is the feeling of being in the reading room.  It’s full of people reading, researching, studying, editing, sitting.  Some may just charge their phones or play on Facebook, but there’s still a respectful quiet to the proceedings, which is shocking yet welcoming in the midst of such a loud, honking, shouting, bustling city outside.  Nevertheless, there’s a discernible hum of activity: the rhythmic tapping on keyboards (sometimes paused as the typist glances upward, looking for inspiration or better syntax), muted coughs, scraping chairs**, creaking floorboard, the nearly imperceptible turning of an aged page…I love it.  That’s my background music.

*Anytime I include a quotation when remarking about sights I visit on my “quest,” they will be quotes from the aforementioned book.  No plagiarism here, kids.

**Interesting fact: when I’m sitting upright (properly) and all the way back in the chairs of the reading room, my feet don’t quite touch the floor.  Although I could curse genetics (damn you Rangs and your short legs; oh, wait, I just did it), I think it adds to the childlike wonder I have in the building.