Wrists bound with satin cords, they wed in June.
Till death or an affair, he said in June.
Moon-fuelled, she keeps each man a month, shows her
faces to Caleb in May, Ted in June.
Nocturne for Washington Square
As a resident of Greenwich Village, my local park is Washington Square. I can’t account for what goes on there late at night. According to the media, there’s a riot going on after dark, with bottles being thrown at cops, brawls and even stabbings. There are those in the neighborhood who want to see a curfew in the park, as well as a skateboard ban and restrictions on how many people can be there. These Good Citizens are aiming at the one source of disturbance they can control: the young. But the atmosphere of frantic abandon is too widespread in the city to be controlled. Many people have emerged from lockdown with intense pent-up feelings, and challenges to the police make law enforcement a tricky task. Last week, a deranged man smashed the windows of my favorite diner and decked the 73-year-old cook. Hundreds of dirt bikes have roared up the avenue under my window at 1 a.m. Bursts of impromptu fireworks pierce the slats of my blinds, and I often hear cries of unleashed rage. In the wee hours, I don’t go out wearing flowers in my hair.
There’s a racial subtext to this issue, since the crowd in the Square includes many people of color, and they bring the culture of their neighborhoods, including music. Race and class have always been the flashpoint of disputes over urban turf, but in the streets of Greenwich Village the rules are lightly applied, even if the mixing doesn’t extend to the high-rent apartments. It’s no surprise that Washington Square is now a site of that diversity, since it has a storied history of free expression. The mood may be hard-edged after midnight, but at twilight, when the sunset is golden in the windows of innumerable buildings, it’s mellow yellow. I have seen no violence, but lots of casual toking and flirting—yes, there is plenty of cruising among people of all races, genders, sexualities, and hair colors that defy the human genome.
Nuts in May
Last Thursday night, in dueling sound bites, Paul Ryan and the tag team of Gaetz/Greene presented starkly different visions of the future of the Republican party.
New Directions: Aram Saroyan’s Q&A with Gerald Hausman
After meeting Gerald Hausman as a fellow poet and colleague in the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Massachusetts in the early 1970s, I soon admired his poetry. The work seemed to me a fresh incarnation of a tradition I identified with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. Uniquely, looking into those early chapbooks today, the work continues to hold its charge. Over the years, while we stayed in touch and exchanged books, it was only recently, with the publication of two new books, Little Miracles and Mystic Times with Noel Coward in Jamaica, both of which might be characterized as nonfiction novels, that I recognized he’d in the meantime emerged in a way I never could have imagined. In his prose the same ease and accuracy remain, and a deceptive modesty in the tone, but the explorations have expanded and magnified in all directions. I haven’t read anything that has affected me so powerfully in years. A.S.
Little Miracles: Excerpts from Gerald Hausman’s Memoir
Gerald Hausman arranges stories of his life under four headings–“Starting Out,” “Writing,” “People & Places,” “Traveling.” What follows are chapters from each of those sequences in Little Miracles…
First In, Last Out: A Year of Retail Mask Mandates
In mid-May, the CDC revised its guidelines on masks. Vaccinated individuals could go maskless both indoors and out. The news came on the tail end of a long shift at my retail job. We’d strictly enforced the mandate since last May. It felt like, mid-fight, the enemy combatants had called out from their opposing trench that the war was over. Maskless customers filtered in throughout the evening. Without word from On High, the battle was over. And that battle had been about more than just public health.
Notes from the Underground
The author–a columnist at Inside Higher Ed–thought this piece belonged in First in the Month. Your editor was glad to take him up on his proposal to reprint it…
In the sort of coincidence that makes a columnist’s work much easier, the Library of America published Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel on April 20 — the same day, as it turned out, that a jury in Minneapolis convicted a police officer of murdering George Floyd last year.
If Bob Dylan Says “Home”
Out our front door, Marin is so steep the mountain goats need crampons. But the Hispanic fellow, early 40s, GE Appliance truck, curbed his wheels and popped out. Adele had the garage door open and he’d spotted the Mustang. “Can I take a look?” .
He walked around it. Twice. “I’ll give you thirty-five, Cash.”
“Let me get my husband. He’s the one who drives it.”
Two Faces of the Sinophile
Les fous sont rois et moi je bois Mao Mao
Towards Giving It the Olde College Try
— for Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
I buried it outside the Hall of Languages, at the top of the hill. Took a shovel, dug a hole in the pristine lawn at the end of the walkway and buried it. No one seemed bothered by it: not the campus police nor the associate prof looking for tenure. No one seemed to care.
That was forty years ago.
Act of Imagination (& Larceny)
The groove in the Rolling Stones’ classic cover of “Just My Imagination” (1978) comes straight out of Waylon Jennings’ “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” (1975). No plaints here. Geniuses steal. Follow the echoes below…
Driving While Brown: Stories from the Struggle Against Sherriff Joe Arpaio
Journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block spent years chronicling the human consequences of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s lawless approach to immigration enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona. In Driving While Brown, they tell the tale of two opposing movements that redefined Arizona’s political landscape—the restrictionist cause embraced by Arpaio and the Latino-led resistance that rose up against it.
What follows is a Q&A with the authors of Driving While Brown.
Act Locally!
First of the Month‘s correspondent Leslie Lopez has another outlet for her reportage from the Pueblo. Here’s a local labor story with national resonance that she published last month in La Cucaracha…
Roller Skating Tuesday
Lana Del Rey is set to release a new CD in July. Last time around she didn’t seem intent on “making the next great American record.” The will to go pop (without compromising) that made her Norman Fucking Rockwell undeniable in 2019 was missing from Chem Trails over the Country Club, which she put out earlier this year. The absence of f-words on Chem Trails may be a sign LDR sensed someone like Olivia Rodrigo would render slack style sub-urban (and all sold-out), but it also hints LDR’s rock ‘n’ roll attitude was on hiatus. OTOH, Chem’s Trails‘ “White Dress” came through, with a little help from the video. That, in turn, sent me back to a roller-skating video posted here last summer. Compare and contrast, or just roll on…B.D.
“The Dream of a Burning Child”
Click the link below to get closer to Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s epic painting of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, Don’t You See That I Am Burning.
https://www.miergallery.com/exhibitions/celeste-dupuy-spencer3/videos
The V Bottom of American Politics
It’s what we hoped for.