From before I learned to read until I was in high school, the New York City I knew best was that of the mid-1800’s, a city full of bootblacks and baggage smashers, where Christopher Street was way uptown and the wealthiest lived on Park Avenue—between Union Square and maybe the mid thirties. Central Park was “ a rough tract of land” with “no houses of good appearance near it.” You got to Brooklyn on the Fulton Street Ferry (two cents), and uptown on the Sixth Avenue [horse-drawn] cars (three cents). The Old Bowery and Tony Pastor’s were good for a night’s amusement, and Delmonico’s was the finest restaurant in town. (Alger made it clear that the Old Bowery and Tony Pastor's weren't quite high-class amusements, and that saving one's money was better than frittering it away on such fleeting pleasures, but it wasn't until more recently that I got the vaudville connection.) Barnum’s was a good place to take your kid brother, and if you were wealthy you would stay at the Astor House or the St. Nicholas hotel when you visited town. Poor people, especially the Irish, lived near Five Points, on Mott Street or Mulberry, or maybe on Leonard, where Tattered Tom lived in “one of the most wretched tenement houses to be found in that not very choice locality.”
My dad collected the novels of Horatio Alger, and his “rags to riches” stories written for teenage boys in the late 1800’s were my bedtime reading, and then, in grade school, they were the books I brought for silent reading in school. I also read on the bus and at recess, and under my desk in class. I didn’t just read Alger’s novels—I know the intimate details of the worlds of Laura Ingalls, Nancy Drew, the Pevensies (that would be Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter) and Anastasia Krupnik just as well. I read everything. But Alger wrote nearly a hundred novels for boys, with many more published under his name after he died, and I have probably read my favorites ten times or more. One of my favorites is his first, Ragged Dick, and since Dick spends the first eleven chapters showing visiting country boy Frank Whitney around the city, it’s a great introduction to their New York. The bit about Central Park above is from Dick’s tour, and Frank is disappointed: “’If this is Central Park,’ said Frank, ‘I don’t think much of it. My father’s got a large pasture that is much nicer.’” I just reread Tattered Tom, one of my favorites since childhood. More on that to follow.
Ragged Dick can be read online here, & there are also several contemporary reprinted editions available.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Life Philosophies and Language
Related in disparate and not so disparate ways.
From a student's observation of a photograph and her answer to question 6 (What would your life be like if you lived here? For example, what language or languages might you speak? How would you dress? What kinds of jobs would people have? Why?): "My life would be alot of boring in it and just about farming and no shopping and I would speak country alot."
From Mavis Gallant's fabulous preface to her collected stories, 1996: "Journalism was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted."
- - -
Mavis Gallant also talks about Quebec, culture, language, learning the alphabet, her relationships to French and English and what they mean to her when it comes to reading and writing and speaking and memory--all of which ties in to a novel I recently finished, Amy Bloom's Away, the story of a young woman moving from Russia to New York in the 1920's, so much about place and identity and language [AND the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue which has been a recent fascination!]. Someone suggests that our heroine, Lillian, get herself not only a dictionary but a thesaurus, which becomes an important minor character in the story. In an early scene, Lillian describes the wedding she doesn't want, "...all of it costing serious money that Lillian can imagine much better spent on things a person really needs (requires, demands, claims, and also covets, craves, desires; Lillian's thesaurus is now her constant companion). The bookman sold her Webster's dictionary, fine and useful for what it is, and Roget's thesaurus, which has a little story for every word. This is like this, Roget tells her; this is related to this other; people on the street might say this like so; and then there is the antonym, introduced in 1867 by Mr. C.J. Smith, which is, sharply, exactly, and also completely not anything like that first word. Comfort: gladden, brighten, relieve, refresh, renew; idiomatically: to give a lift to. On the other hand: distress, perturb, bother, agitate, grieve."
The thesaurus and its clues about subtleties of language are also essential elements of Lillian's Americanization: "She'd told herself, A young woman in America would have breakfast now. She would have tea. A young woman hoping to see her boyfriend (her swain, her young man, and also her sheik, her crush) would wear this, would say that, would put her lipstick on like so. Lillian's life in Turov hadn't been a performance. She was a daughter, she was a wife, she was a mother. She was not acting like an anything then."
All wrapping back to my sixth graders, now in Brooklyn but not born here and not of here in any way that they've chosen for themselves (and at fourteen, they're an age to start fighting to make some kind of choices for themselves) with their two languages and their jarring connections to so much that is Nueva York, and what we are confronted with is the alphabet. There's an alphabet in Spanish and an alphabet in English, and maybe neither is all 26 letters to these guys because different letters are pronounced the same in different languages so how are you supposed to know which letter? Not like they ever learned the alphabet all that well in either language. And it's one more thing to make you different: you don't speak English and the words you say you don't say right, and the books mean something to them that they don't mean to you. And it's all them and you, in both directions: them and us.
Another experience my students don't have that means so much to me: I love when suddenly in a book is something about something you've been living with and watching up close, and you never ever saw it in a book before (except maybe you did but it wouldn't have stood out before now, because now is when it's foregrounded for you). Again, Gallant's preface:
"I was taught the alphabet three times. The first . . . I remember nothing about. The second time, the letters were written in lacy capitals on a blackboard--pretty-looking, decorative; nuns' handwriting of the time. Rows of little girls in black, hands folded on a desk, feet together, sang the letters and then, in a rising scale, the five vowels. The third time was at the Protestant school, in Chateauguay. The schoolhouse had only two rooms, four grades to each. I was eight: It had been noticed that I was beginning to pronounce English proper nouns with French vowel sounds. (I do it to this day, thinking "Neek' for 'Nike,' 'Raybok' for 'Reebok.' The first time I saw Ribena, a fruit drink, advertised in the London Underground, I said, 'What is Reebayna?' It is the only trace of that lacy, pretty, sung alphabet.) At my new school it was taken for granted that French and Catholic teaching had left me enslaved to superstition and wholly ignorant. I was placed with the six-year-olds and told to recite the alphabet. I pronounced G with its French vowel sound, something like an English J. Our teacher pulled down over the blackboard a large, illustrated alphabet, like a wide window blind. I stood in front of the blind and was shown the letter G. Above it a large painted hand held a tipped water jug, to which clung, suspended, a single drop. The sound of G was the noise the drop would make in a water glass: it would say gug.
"'The sound of G is gug. Say it after me. Gug.'
"'Gug.'
"'Everyone, now. Gug, gug, gug.'
"'Gug, gug, gug.'
"'What letter is it?'
"'G.'
"'What does it say?'
"'Gug.'
"'Don't forget it, now.'
"Whatever it was, it could never be sung."
From a student's observation of a photograph and her answer to question 6 (What would your life be like if you lived here? For example, what language or languages might you speak? How would you dress? What kinds of jobs would people have? Why?): "My life would be alot of boring in it and just about farming and no shopping and I would speak country alot."
From Mavis Gallant's fabulous preface to her collected stories, 1996: "Journalism was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted."
- - -
Mavis Gallant also talks about Quebec, culture, language, learning the alphabet, her relationships to French and English and what they mean to her when it comes to reading and writing and speaking and memory--all of which ties in to a novel I recently finished, Amy Bloom's Away, the story of a young woman moving from Russia to New York in the 1920's, so much about place and identity and language [AND the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue which has been a recent fascination!]. Someone suggests that our heroine, Lillian, get herself not only a dictionary but a thesaurus, which becomes an important minor character in the story. In an early scene, Lillian describes the wedding she doesn't want, "...all of it costing serious money that Lillian can imagine much better spent on things a person really needs (requires, demands, claims, and also covets, craves, desires; Lillian's thesaurus is now her constant companion). The bookman sold her Webster's dictionary, fine and useful for what it is, and Roget's thesaurus, which has a little story for every word. This is like this, Roget tells her; this is related to this other; people on the street might say this like so; and then there is the antonym, introduced in 1867 by Mr. C.J. Smith, which is, sharply, exactly, and also completely not anything like that first word. Comfort: gladden, brighten, relieve, refresh, renew; idiomatically: to give a lift to. On the other hand: distress, perturb, bother, agitate, grieve."
The thesaurus and its clues about subtleties of language are also essential elements of Lillian's Americanization: "She'd told herself, A young woman in America would have breakfast now. She would have tea. A young woman hoping to see her boyfriend (her swain, her young man, and also her sheik, her crush) would wear this, would say that, would put her lipstick on like so. Lillian's life in Turov hadn't been a performance. She was a daughter, she was a wife, she was a mother. She was not acting like an anything then."
All wrapping back to my sixth graders, now in Brooklyn but not born here and not of here in any way that they've chosen for themselves (and at fourteen, they're an age to start fighting to make some kind of choices for themselves) with their two languages and their jarring connections to so much that is Nueva York, and what we are confronted with is the alphabet. There's an alphabet in Spanish and an alphabet in English, and maybe neither is all 26 letters to these guys because different letters are pronounced the same in different languages so how are you supposed to know which letter? Not like they ever learned the alphabet all that well in either language. And it's one more thing to make you different: you don't speak English and the words you say you don't say right, and the books mean something to them that they don't mean to you. And it's all them and you, in both directions: them and us.
Another experience my students don't have that means so much to me: I love when suddenly in a book is something about something you've been living with and watching up close, and you never ever saw it in a book before (except maybe you did but it wouldn't have stood out before now, because now is when it's foregrounded for you). Again, Gallant's preface:
"I was taught the alphabet three times. The first . . . I remember nothing about. The second time, the letters were written in lacy capitals on a blackboard--pretty-looking, decorative; nuns' handwriting of the time. Rows of little girls in black, hands folded on a desk, feet together, sang the letters and then, in a rising scale, the five vowels. The third time was at the Protestant school, in Chateauguay. The schoolhouse had only two rooms, four grades to each. I was eight: It had been noticed that I was beginning to pronounce English proper nouns with French vowel sounds. (I do it to this day, thinking "Neek' for 'Nike,' 'Raybok' for 'Reebok.' The first time I saw Ribena, a fruit drink, advertised in the London Underground, I said, 'What is Reebayna?' It is the only trace of that lacy, pretty, sung alphabet.) At my new school it was taken for granted that French and Catholic teaching had left me enslaved to superstition and wholly ignorant. I was placed with the six-year-olds and told to recite the alphabet. I pronounced G with its French vowel sound, something like an English J. Our teacher pulled down over the blackboard a large, illustrated alphabet, like a wide window blind. I stood in front of the blind and was shown the letter G. Above it a large painted hand held a tipped water jug, to which clung, suspended, a single drop. The sound of G was the noise the drop would make in a water glass: it would say gug.
"'The sound of G is gug. Say it after me. Gug.'
"'Gug.'
"'Everyone, now. Gug, gug, gug.'
"'Gug, gug, gug.'
"'What letter is it?'
"'G.'
"'What does it say?'
"'Gug.'
"'Don't forget it, now.'
"Whatever it was, it could never be sung."
Saturday, March 22, 2008
More eavesdropping on Gay People.
At the Strand, two very blond, theatrical (in all senses), very young men--boys?--are looking through the carts near the film and theater section. One says to the other, theatrically, of course, “Danny, what are you seeking?”
Corner of 7th Ave/W 4th right at the Christopher St. stop on the 1, he's on his cell phone and he says loudly, “You know what Oscar Wilde says...”
Corner of 7th Ave/W 4th right at the Christopher St. stop on the 1, he's on his cell phone and he says loudly, “You know what Oscar Wilde says...”
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Eavesdropping by way of looking over his shoulder
The guy next to me in this coffee shop is looking through the contents of a manila envelope: a bunch of index cards with ads for male escort services taped onto them. He's maybe early 40's, looks like he's done some serious drinking in his time, is not Williamsburg hip nor terribly gayish, though now [not surreptitiously enough at all] studying him in the context of the index cards, who knows, who can tell anything. All the cues shift so much. He's sort of middle-aged beer-bellied Abercrombie & Fitch, with that preppy almost military haircut, which could be lots of things.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Tourists
On the 6 train downtown yesterday (so many tourists everywhere! spring break meets St. Patrick's Day, I guess?), a teenage girl with her mom and her aunt were standing, talking about how pole dancing is supposed to be the best exercise, and suddenly they are performing their own impromptu renditions of that fabulous pole-dancing-on-the-train YouTube video. Oh, dancing on the train. In all its manifestations, one of my favorite things ever.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
"It's American art. You should like it."
Went to a Whitney Biennial member viewing hours event this morning, on a gray Sunday morning from nine to eleven--too early for a Sunday morning, especially after outer-borough food adventures last night (excellent Thai in Elmhurst, in honor of Adri and Jason). But I liked the idea of seeing the Biennial at a less insanely crowded time, plus they promised continental breakfast! Keight and I joked about lemon poppyseed mini-muffins and Lipton tea bags with tepid water--it actually wasn't too far off from that: coffee and tea (decent coffee and the tea wasn't Lipton), mediocre bagels quartered with single servings of Philadelphia cream cheese, butter, and jam. That's all. Keight, Constance and I waited nearly half an hour to get ours. Then we wandered a little, and it was decently uncrowded. I'm looking forward to going back on Wednesday to the event for teachers about strategies for bringing kids to see the show.
Favorite pieces on a first walk-through included a fabulous room by Eduardo Sarabia and another room with an installation by Lisa Segal (the Whitney site features a great page with bios of all the artists, but I couldn't find a list of the titles of the works included ANYWHERE, nor pictures of the works in the show).
I spent a long time looking at a piece by Ry Rocklen, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, trying to decide why I was so bothered by how flat-out ugly it was. If the museum guard standing near Rocklen's work was not a deliberate part of Rocklen's submission, he should have been. He was the best part. He watched me looking at the piece. I couldn't read the expression on his face, except that it wasn't the expression of the museum guard who thinks you're standing too close. I finally said to him, "Do you like this?" He shrugged. He said, "I work here." I said, "I know that." He said, "Art. American art. It is wonderful." He was Latino, with a strong accent, maybe in his fifties. I also think he was part of the show because he was not a Whitney guard, he had some sort of security badge on that was not Whitney-issued. "It's American art. You should like it," he told me. I shrugged and kept wandering.
On the Whitney site, Trinie Dalton says, "Ry Rocklen’s sculptures paradoxically reflect at once a respect for the Duchampian sculptural tradition and an anarchic rebellion against art historical constraints. Collecting cast-off objects from the streets, dumps, or thrift stores, he doctors and assembles them into readymade sculptures charged with an eccentric delicacy that gives them a second, more 'poetic' life." Keight especially liked one of his pieces, one we were referring to as "the bed of nails." But this one that irritated me, a big ugly presentation of a bunch of cheap discount-store art, faded from display in a store window (this is what I remember from the wall description)--I couldn't figure out what was interesting about it (besides the guard), or why I should want to look at it. & I have a special place in my heart for discount-store art--my contribution to Donna's mail art show was just that. & I can like art that could be considered ugly, just not art that doesn't seem to say or do enough, even when you read the label. American or not.
Favorite pieces on a first walk-through included a fabulous room by Eduardo Sarabia and another room with an installation by Lisa Segal (the Whitney site features a great page with bios of all the artists, but I couldn't find a list of the titles of the works included ANYWHERE, nor pictures of the works in the show).
I spent a long time looking at a piece by Ry Rocklen, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, trying to decide why I was so bothered by how flat-out ugly it was. If the museum guard standing near Rocklen's work was not a deliberate part of Rocklen's submission, he should have been. He was the best part. He watched me looking at the piece. I couldn't read the expression on his face, except that it wasn't the expression of the museum guard who thinks you're standing too close. I finally said to him, "Do you like this?" He shrugged. He said, "I work here." I said, "I know that." He said, "Art. American art. It is wonderful." He was Latino, with a strong accent, maybe in his fifties. I also think he was part of the show because he was not a Whitney guard, he had some sort of security badge on that was not Whitney-issued. "It's American art. You should like it," he told me. I shrugged and kept wandering.
On the Whitney site, Trinie Dalton says, "Ry Rocklen’s sculptures paradoxically reflect at once a respect for the Duchampian sculptural tradition and an anarchic rebellion against art historical constraints. Collecting cast-off objects from the streets, dumps, or thrift stores, he doctors and assembles them into readymade sculptures charged with an eccentric delicacy that gives them a second, more 'poetic' life." Keight especially liked one of his pieces, one we were referring to as "the bed of nails." But this one that irritated me, a big ugly presentation of a bunch of cheap discount-store art, faded from display in a store window (this is what I remember from the wall description)--I couldn't figure out what was interesting about it (besides the guard), or why I should want to look at it. & I have a special place in my heart for discount-store art--my contribution to Donna's mail art show was just that. & I can like art that could be considered ugly, just not art that doesn't seem to say or do enough, even when you read the label. American or not.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Obama's Pastor, Reverend Wright
According to an AP story, "Obama Denounces Pastor's 9/11 Comments":
"In a sermon on the Sunday after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Wright suggested the United States brought on the attacks.
"'We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,' Wright said. 'We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.'
"In a 2003 sermon, he said blacks should condemn the United States.
"'The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing "God Bless America." No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.'"
Too bad Obama has to say he disagrees with these statements, just because he wants to be president. Sounds to me like Rev. Jeremiah Wright is just talking about some hard truths.
[on a somewhat related note, I think it's time for me to take this quote by Tupac Shakur off my "favorite quotes" list on my facebook page--I still think he's so smart and it still makes so much sense to me but every time I see it up there it seems like more and more of a weird thing for a whitegirl to post as a favorite quote, and more and more easy to misinterpret why I'd like it: "Procreation is so much about ego. Everybody wants to have a junior. But I could care less about having a junior to tell 'I got fucked by America and you're about to get fucked, too.' Until we get a world where I feel like a first-class citizen, I can't have a child. 'Cause my child has to be a first-class citizen, and I'm not having no white babies." -Tupac Shakur from http://www.veronicachambers.com/tupac.html ]
"In a sermon on the Sunday after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Wright suggested the United States brought on the attacks.
"'We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,' Wright said. 'We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.'
"In a 2003 sermon, he said blacks should condemn the United States.
"'The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing "God Bless America." No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.'"
Too bad Obama has to say he disagrees with these statements, just because he wants to be president. Sounds to me like Rev. Jeremiah Wright is just talking about some hard truths.
[on a somewhat related note, I think it's time for me to take this quote by Tupac Shakur off my "favorite quotes" list on my facebook page--I still think he's so smart and it still makes so much sense to me but every time I see it up there it seems like more and more of a weird thing for a whitegirl to post as a favorite quote, and more and more easy to misinterpret why I'd like it: "Procreation is so much about ego. Everybody wants to have a junior. But I could care less about having a junior to tell 'I got fucked by America and you're about to get fucked, too.' Until we get a world where I feel like a first-class citizen, I can't have a child. 'Cause my child has to be a first-class citizen, and I'm not having no white babies." -Tupac Shakur from http://www.veronicachambers.com/tupac.html ]
Monday, March 10, 2008
Leonard between Ainslie and Devoe
I continue to be...overwhelmed? weirded out? by working in Williamsburg. I continue to be baffled by Williamsburg. Code switching is always fascinating--though I am never sure how much I do switch. I imagine I am seen either as slightly dorky young urban white teacher at my school, or, three blocks away, as slightly dorky aspiring/declining older hipster who now occasionally shops at the Gap (and blogs instead of making zines [?!?!]). Lots of tangents here. The age you are vs. the age you appear, & how the age you appear to be shifts depending on context. Anyway. This is not unrelated to how a grimy not very attractive nearly always working class neighborhood as long as it's been a neighborhood is now a grimy not very attractive somewhat working class and simultaneously grimy not very attractive extremely overpriced hipster neighborhood especially beloved by recent college graduates.
From a section of James Agee's 1939 essay "Brooklyn Is" (more on this fabulous essay to follow) that begins "All the neighborhoods that make up this city; those well known, and those which are indicated on no official map:
"Or Greenpoint and Williamsburg and Bushwick, the wood tenements, bare lots and broken vistas, the balanced weights and images of production and poverty . . . where from many mileages of the jungle of voided land, small factories, smokestacks, tenements, homes of irregular height and spacing, the foci are returned upon the eye, the blown dome and trebled crossage Greek church, and those massive gasoline reservoirs which seem to have more size than any building can: the hard trade avenues, intense with merchandisings of which none is above the taking of the working class: the bridal suites in modernistics veneers and hotcolored plushes, the dark little drugstores with smell like medicine spilled in a phone-booth mouth-piece: the ineffable baroques of gossamer in which little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven are clothed: Here and still strongly in Bushwick and persistent too in East New York and Brownsville, there is an enormous number of tall-windowed three- and four-floor wood houses of the fullblown nineteenth century, a style indigenous to Brooklyn, the facades as handsome as anything in the history of American architecture: of these, few have been painted within a decade or more, none are above the rooming house level, most are tenements, all are death-traps to fire: their face is of that half divine nobility which is absorptive of every humiliation, and is increased in each: many more of the tenements are those pallid or yellow bricks which are so much used all over Brooklyn as a mark of poverty: mixed among these many small houses of weathered wood, stucco, roofing: the stucco fronts are often Italian and usually uncolored, suggest nevertheless the rich Italianate washes; some are washed brick red, the joints drawn in white: or the golden oak doors of these neater homes, or the manifold and beautiful frontages of asphaltic shingles...."
He goes on and on. I love "intense with merchandisings"--I picture the dollar stores, the Korean fruit markets, the bodegas with all the candy in the windows that my kids bring in paper bags and eat for breakfast. Swedish fish, individually wrapped, mostly. There are also still plenty of cheap garish furniture stores, though there are fewer little drugstores, and hardly any with counters. But there will probably always be ineffable baroques of gossamer, for little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven (cherish and celebrate the graduations you will get to celebrate), also for Quinceañeras. A fabulous ineffable baroque of gossamer on the corner near my school, and a related one up on Grand--with the creepiest vintage mannequins in the window that I do not think have any intended irony to them.
I wonder what Agee would think of the garish plastic siding on so many of the two story buildings that must have replaced the death-traps to fire, with the ugly awnings often over their front door and sometimes over the windows too. But the ugly makes the pretty buildings look prettier, too, of course.
It's so weird to me that this hipster neighborhood is not even bordering but sort of mashed into the neighborhood where I teach, at a school surrounded by projects including the Williamsburg Houses, described by the WPA in 1939 as "the largest slum-clearance and low-rent housing project completed under the Federal Housing program (1939)."
But I started all of this to observe that this afternoon, as I walked up Leonard, from school to Fortunato's Bakery for biscotti, I passed some very small fake flowers carefully set in around a tree growing between sidewalk and street. It's spring. I am generally not a fan of fake flowers in general, but Brooklyn and Queens have brought me to a certain appreciation. I am nearly always opposed when they are enormous and out-of-season, or when it seems like there could be real ones for not a whole lot more work. But tiny fake flower buds in early March are sort of endearing, especially when you know they were probably "planted" by a little old Italian lady.
Footnote: Here's a link to a fascinating typo-ridden article I found when googling Williamsburg projects trying to figure out when they were built, about the "decades-long struggle between the Chasidim and the Hispanics of Williamsburg over access to low-cost public housing." No date on the article. Especially interesting after reading the Agee essay, though, which talks a lot about the huge Jewish population in Brooklyn (according to Agee, one sixteenth of the world's Jews lived in Brooklyn in 1939), but contains maybe just two references to black people (three if you count "the negroid breath of a molasses factory"--is there something to that metaphor that I don't get? A reference of some kind? Or is it just awful?), both concerning white concern over "'the infiltration of Negroes.'"
From a section of James Agee's 1939 essay "Brooklyn Is" (more on this fabulous essay to follow) that begins "All the neighborhoods that make up this city; those well known, and those which are indicated on no official map:
"Or Greenpoint and Williamsburg and Bushwick, the wood tenements, bare lots and broken vistas, the balanced weights and images of production and poverty . . . where from many mileages of the jungle of voided land, small factories, smokestacks, tenements, homes of irregular height and spacing, the foci are returned upon the eye, the blown dome and trebled crossage Greek church, and those massive gasoline reservoirs which seem to have more size than any building can: the hard trade avenues, intense with merchandisings of which none is above the taking of the working class: the bridal suites in modernistics veneers and hotcolored plushes, the dark little drugstores with smell like medicine spilled in a phone-booth mouth-piece: the ineffable baroques of gossamer in which little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven are clothed: Here and still strongly in Bushwick and persistent too in East New York and Brownsville, there is an enormous number of tall-windowed three- and four-floor wood houses of the fullblown nineteenth century, a style indigenous to Brooklyn, the facades as handsome as anything in the history of American architecture: of these, few have been painted within a decade or more, none are above the rooming house level, most are tenements, all are death-traps to fire: their face is of that half divine nobility which is absorptive of every humiliation, and is increased in each: many more of the tenements are those pallid or yellow bricks which are so much used all over Brooklyn as a mark of poverty: mixed among these many small houses of weathered wood, stucco, roofing: the stucco fronts are often Italian and usually uncolored, suggest nevertheless the rich Italianate washes; some are washed brick red, the joints drawn in white: or the golden oak doors of these neater homes, or the manifold and beautiful frontages of asphaltic shingles...."
He goes on and on. I love "intense with merchandisings"--I picture the dollar stores, the Korean fruit markets, the bodegas with all the candy in the windows that my kids bring in paper bags and eat for breakfast. Swedish fish, individually wrapped, mostly. There are also still plenty of cheap garish furniture stores, though there are fewer little drugstores, and hardly any with counters. But there will probably always be ineffable baroques of gossamer, for little-girl-graduates and Brides of Heaven (cherish and celebrate the graduations you will get to celebrate), also for Quinceañeras. A fabulous ineffable baroque of gossamer on the corner near my school, and a related one up on Grand--with the creepiest vintage mannequins in the window that I do not think have any intended irony to them.
I wonder what Agee would think of the garish plastic siding on so many of the two story buildings that must have replaced the death-traps to fire, with the ugly awnings often over their front door and sometimes over the windows too. But the ugly makes the pretty buildings look prettier, too, of course.
It's so weird to me that this hipster neighborhood is not even bordering but sort of mashed into the neighborhood where I teach, at a school surrounded by projects including the Williamsburg Houses, described by the WPA in 1939 as "the largest slum-clearance and low-rent housing project completed under the Federal Housing program (1939)."
But I started all of this to observe that this afternoon, as I walked up Leonard, from school to Fortunato's Bakery for biscotti, I passed some very small fake flowers carefully set in around a tree growing between sidewalk and street. It's spring. I am generally not a fan of fake flowers in general, but Brooklyn and Queens have brought me to a certain appreciation. I am nearly always opposed when they are enormous and out-of-season, or when it seems like there could be real ones for not a whole lot more work. But tiny fake flower buds in early March are sort of endearing, especially when you know they were probably "planted" by a little old Italian lady.
Footnote: Here's a link to a fascinating typo-ridden article I found when googling Williamsburg projects trying to figure out when they were built, about the "decades-long struggle between the Chasidim and the Hispanics of Williamsburg over access to low-cost public housing." No date on the article. Especially interesting after reading the Agee essay, though, which talks a lot about the huge Jewish population in Brooklyn (according to Agee, one sixteenth of the world's Jews lived in Brooklyn in 1939), but contains maybe just two references to black people (three if you count "the negroid breath of a molasses factory"--is there something to that metaphor that I don't get? A reference of some kind? Or is it just awful?), both concerning white concern over "'the infiltration of Negroes.'"
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Approaching Literacy? (This entry will fit perfectly into my "White Teacher Saves Poor Children of Color in the Inner City" memoir.)
D. kept following me around today, just being near me, and when I finally got to take him into a quiet room and sit with him, we spent an hour focused on lining up the plastic glow-in-the-dark letters I bought at a dollar store, saying each letter and the sound it made, then putting them in order, doing it again with a second set (gotta love the dollar store!), then thinking of words that began with each letter. He made it up to G on his own, and we did H through Z together. Sometimes he could say the name of the letter but not the shape, sometimes he knew the name of the letter but not the sound it made. Sometimes he knew the name of it in Spanish, or the sound it made in Spanish. When we listed words that started with each letter, he asked, "Okay Spanish?" and of course I said of course.
agua apple ano also aunt bebe baby boyfriend casa cat church car child catorce dinero Dominicana Dominican Republic escuela familia family father fourteen gold gato gatico grandmother grandfather girlfriend house hora home hola hundred iglesia junto job Justino justicio justice Katherine Kathy kitten luck lottery loteria loto money momento minute moment manana nina nino nana novio novia oro old older paper papel papa padre queen quince raza race Republica republic school suerte somos son sun sol tia tio tambien trece today thousand two hundred uncle uno vida vivir viven water x-ray xou years you younger young zero
He does want to learn to read. Of course he does. But who could admit that, at fourteen? You're admitting so much if you admit that.
agua apple ano also aunt bebe baby boyfriend casa cat church car child catorce dinero Dominicana Dominican Republic escuela familia family father fourteen gold gato gatico grandmother grandfather girlfriend house hora home hola hundred iglesia junto job Justino justicio justice Katherine Kathy kitten luck lottery loteria loto money momento minute moment manana nina nino nana novio novia oro old older paper papel papa padre queen quince raza race Republica republic school suerte somos son sun sol tia tio tambien trece today thousand two hundred uncle uno vida vivir viven water x-ray xou years you younger young zero
He does want to learn to read. Of course he does. But who could admit that, at fourteen? You're admitting so much if you admit that.
More books. Too much emotion. No warning labels.
Reading The Mother Garden by Robin Romm at home and When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers at school because I really have to figure out what to DO--okay, reading both in both places, really--not doing a good job these days of drawing any kind of clean line between teaching and the rest of my life. I feel like it's a school of nun teachers except we don't live together--we just all work and talk about work and email about work ALL THE TIME. But anyway. Slightly cranky lately--though not in the kids' direction, and had a conversation with a student yesterday about how "it's not fair" to be cranky towards the people who aren't the ones who made you cranky, whether you're a teacher or a student or a mom or a boss or a sister or a brother... I am hugely appreciating the kids lately. & that's something, a huge something.
But--crying over both my books.
Yesterday sitting in my classroom during homework help, after school, I read this to myself: "I can think of nothing that I do 186 days out of the year, in front of my peers, that I know I will consistently do poorly. Can you think of anything you do that qualifies? I gave up tennis because it was too embarrassing to constantly run to that adjacent court and retrieve my errant ball. I stopped aerobics class, for I never could understand that grapevine-turn-around-dip thing, and I got tired of the instructor standing directly in front of me, shouting, 'Cross-over now.'" I had a student in my classroom doing her math, so I cried that small way. I'd just finished working with one boy who wants to learn to read, and two others who wouldn't stay in the room, who kept running out and being brought back by other teachers and staff members, laughing at everything I asked them to do: Write your name, write down the title of this story. At the end of the day during a quiet private moment, I said to one of them, "Do you want to learn how to read?" He laughed. I said, "D., I'm serious. It's an honest question. Do you want to learn how? Please just think about it tonight." I've spent a lot of time since then wondering if I should have said that to him--but it is an honest question, though oversimplifying everything, and I don't know what the hell else to say.
This morning I read Romm's story "The Tilt," from the point of view of a young woman whose mother is sick and dying, and the young woman is sitting with her boyfriend's stepmom, Anna, thinking about how Anna is mourning her dead son by trying to hold on to him, spending her time trying to commune with the dead. The son, Milo, shot himself. "I want to ask her what she hears when Milo comes to her, when he materializes out of wind and light. Does he simply sit near her? Is it like she's pregnant with him again? Does he get lonely? Does he tell her why he did it? How the gun felt? What that moment was like when his finger tightened around the trigger? Did he think about Anna, the powdery smell of her neck, the drugged feeling of sleeping near her when he was small? Was it brilliant, that smash of pain? Did he see colors? Did he feel love and sorrow surge up in his throat and go soaring out of him? Was that what death was? No longer needing to contain these feelings in your body? When suddenly, all the splitting song inside you is you. You are--finally--no longer a container--you are the things that once were contained?"
In another of Romm's stories, a daughter apologizes to her dying mother for choosing the movie she'd rented, saying something like, "We checked on the box, it didn't say anything about a woman dying of cancer."
But--crying over both my books.
Yesterday sitting in my classroom during homework help, after school, I read this to myself: "I can think of nothing that I do 186 days out of the year, in front of my peers, that I know I will consistently do poorly. Can you think of anything you do that qualifies? I gave up tennis because it was too embarrassing to constantly run to that adjacent court and retrieve my errant ball. I stopped aerobics class, for I never could understand that grapevine-turn-around-dip thing, and I got tired of the instructor standing directly in front of me, shouting, 'Cross-over now.'" I had a student in my classroom doing her math, so I cried that small way. I'd just finished working with one boy who wants to learn to read, and two others who wouldn't stay in the room, who kept running out and being brought back by other teachers and staff members, laughing at everything I asked them to do: Write your name, write down the title of this story. At the end of the day during a quiet private moment, I said to one of them, "Do you want to learn how to read?" He laughed. I said, "D., I'm serious. It's an honest question. Do you want to learn how? Please just think about it tonight." I've spent a lot of time since then wondering if I should have said that to him--but it is an honest question, though oversimplifying everything, and I don't know what the hell else to say.
This morning I read Romm's story "The Tilt," from the point of view of a young woman whose mother is sick and dying, and the young woman is sitting with her boyfriend's stepmom, Anna, thinking about how Anna is mourning her dead son by trying to hold on to him, spending her time trying to commune with the dead. The son, Milo, shot himself. "I want to ask her what she hears when Milo comes to her, when he materializes out of wind and light. Does he simply sit near her? Is it like she's pregnant with him again? Does he get lonely? Does he tell her why he did it? How the gun felt? What that moment was like when his finger tightened around the trigger? Did he think about Anna, the powdery smell of her neck, the drugged feeling of sleeping near her when he was small? Was it brilliant, that smash of pain? Did he see colors? Did he feel love and sorrow surge up in his throat and go soaring out of him? Was that what death was? No longer needing to contain these feelings in your body? When suddenly, all the splitting song inside you is you. You are--finally--no longer a container--you are the things that once were contained?"
In another of Romm's stories, a daughter apologizes to her dying mother for choosing the movie she'd rented, saying something like, "We checked on the box, it didn't say anything about a woman dying of cancer."
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Grief Lessons
Just finished Anne Carson's translations of Euripides--I wish there were more than these four. Such a fabulous combination of good stories tied perfectly to form, characters I know well but not quite in this setting (all of Greek mythology is like an enormous epic soap opera with recurring characters, with endless episodes told from every different point of view--you're like, "Oh, Herakles again, except this time he's just making a guest appearance in someone else's drama!" like if the Pirates of the Caribbean stopped off at Gilligan's Island [sort of]), and translations using language so well. The prefaces to each play are also fabulous--I don't remember ever savoring a preface like this. For example, who knew that aidos, the Greek word for shame, "is a vast word in Greek"? She talks about the different meanings and implications, saying in part that in Greek, "Shame vibrates with honor and also with disgrace, with what is chaste and what is erotic, with coldness and also with blushing. Shame is felt before the eyes of others and also in facing oneself" (163-164). Also, I continue to savor reading books that I will NOT be using (at least directly) in the classroom.
Amphitryon observes in Herakles:
Time does not know how to keep our hopes safe,
but flutters off on its own business. (lines 487-8)
Herakles ranting in his play:
I don't believe gods commit adultery.
I don't believe gods throw gods in chains
or tyrannize one another.
Never did believe it, never shall.
God must, if God is truly God,
lack nothing.
All the rest is miserable poets' lies. (1316-22)
A servant's wisdom in Hippolytos:
If someone who is stretched tight inside himself
talks reckless talk, best not to listen. (150-1)
Theseus in Hippolytos:
What human beings need is some clear index
of who is a friend and who is not--
a diagnostic of soul--
and every man should have two voices,
one righteous and the other however it happens to be,
so that the righteous voice could refute the unrighteous
and we would not be duped. (1009-15)
Amphitryon observes in Herakles:
Time does not know how to keep our hopes safe,
but flutters off on its own business. (lines 487-8)
Herakles ranting in his play:
I don't believe gods commit adultery.
I don't believe gods throw gods in chains
or tyrannize one another.
Never did believe it, never shall.
God must, if God is truly God,
lack nothing.
All the rest is miserable poets' lies. (1316-22)
A servant's wisdom in Hippolytos:
If someone who is stretched tight inside himself
talks reckless talk, best not to listen. (150-1)
Theseus in Hippolytos:
What human beings need is some clear index
of who is a friend and who is not--
a diagnostic of soul--
and every man should have two voices,
one righteous and the other however it happens to be,
so that the righteous voice could refute the unrighteous
and we would not be duped. (1009-15)
Mrs. Sheehan update
Mrs. Sheehan is out on million dollar bail. Man, it's hard for me to think of her spending ANY time at Rikers Island.
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