Monday, August 23, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
In Their Own Words:
"In the recurrent dream I had of the little street {I used to dream so frequently while in Paris} the scene always faded at the moment when I came upon the bridge that crossed the little canal, neither the bridge nor the canal having any existence actually.
"This evening, after passing beyond the frontier of my childhood explorations, I suddenly came upon the very street I had been longing to find for so many years...I remember distinctly the premonition I had of approaching {an}other world when, passing a certain house, I caught sight of a young girl, obviously of foreign descent, poring over a book at the dining room table.
"There is nothing unique, to be sure, in such a sight. Yet the moment my eyes fell upon the girl I felt a thrill beyond description, a premonition, to be more accurate, that important revelations were to follow. It was as if the girl, her pose, the glow of the room falling upon the book she was reading, the impressive silence in which the whole neighborhood was enveloped, combined to produce a moment of such acuity that for an incalculably brief, almost meteoric flash I had the deep and quiet conviction that everything had been ordained, that there was justice in the world, and that the image which I caught and vainly tried to hold was the expression of the splendor and the holiness of life as it would always reveal itself to be in moments of utter stillness.
"I realized as I pushed ecstatically forward that the joy and bliss we experience in the profound depths of the dream---a joy and bliss which surpasses anything known in waking life---comes indubitably from the miraculous accord between desire and reality.
"As I walked past the rows of tiny houses sunk deep in the earth, I saw what man is seldom given to see---the reality of his vision. To me it was the most beautiful street in the world....As I passed slowly from door to door I saw that they were breaking bread. On each table there was a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, some cheese and olives and a bowl of fruit. In each house it was the same; the shades were up, the lamp was lit, the table spread for a humble repast. And always the occupants were gathered in a circle, smiling good-naturedly as they conversed with one another, their bodies relaxed, their spirit open and expansive.
"Truly, I thought to myself, this is the only life I have ever desired. For the briefest intervals only I have known it and then it has been rudely shattered. And the cause? Myself undoubtedly, my inability to realize the true nature of Paradise. What else can explain the tenacity with which I have clung for forty years to the remembrance of a certain neighborhood, a certain wholly inconspicuous spot on this great earth?"
---Henry Miller, Reunion in Brooklyn
"This evening, after passing beyond the frontier of my childhood explorations, I suddenly came upon the very street I had been longing to find for so many years...I remember distinctly the premonition I had of approaching {an}other world when, passing a certain house, I caught sight of a young girl, obviously of foreign descent, poring over a book at the dining room table.
"There is nothing unique, to be sure, in such a sight. Yet the moment my eyes fell upon the girl I felt a thrill beyond description, a premonition, to be more accurate, that important revelations were to follow. It was as if the girl, her pose, the glow of the room falling upon the book she was reading, the impressive silence in which the whole neighborhood was enveloped, combined to produce a moment of such acuity that for an incalculably brief, almost meteoric flash I had the deep and quiet conviction that everything had been ordained, that there was justice in the world, and that the image which I caught and vainly tried to hold was the expression of the splendor and the holiness of life as it would always reveal itself to be in moments of utter stillness.
"I realized as I pushed ecstatically forward that the joy and bliss we experience in the profound depths of the dream---a joy and bliss which surpasses anything known in waking life---comes indubitably from the miraculous accord between desire and reality.
"As I walked past the rows of tiny houses sunk deep in the earth, I saw what man is seldom given to see---the reality of his vision. To me it was the most beautiful street in the world....As I passed slowly from door to door I saw that they were breaking bread. On each table there was a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, some cheese and olives and a bowl of fruit. In each house it was the same; the shades were up, the lamp was lit, the table spread for a humble repast. And always the occupants were gathered in a circle, smiling good-naturedly as they conversed with one another, their bodies relaxed, their spirit open and expansive.
"Truly, I thought to myself, this is the only life I have ever desired. For the briefest intervals only I have known it and then it has been rudely shattered. And the cause? Myself undoubtedly, my inability to realize the true nature of Paradise. What else can explain the tenacity with which I have clung for forty years to the remembrance of a certain neighborhood, a certain wholly inconspicuous spot on this great earth?"
---Henry Miller, Reunion in Brooklyn
Friday, August 20, 2010
Yesterday's Papers
Growing up in the early sixties, the daily newspaper was an indelible part of our everyday lives. In our house we read the Brooklyn edition of the Daily News ("New York's Picture Newspaper) and the Daily Mirror (equally photocentric). My father brought 'the papers' home from work at night and we kept them on the kitchen table so anyone could read them whenever they had a free moment. The News and the Mirror were New York's two great 'tabloid' papers, which meant that they were to be found mostly in working-class households. The New York Post was also a sort of tabloid, but back then it was considered a 'communist' paper on account of its invariable liberal/left agenda. And the New York Times, which labored under the twin handicaps (as we saw it) of having few pictures and NO comics was just too intellectual and high-falutin' for us. There were other papers as well-the Herald Tribune and the Journal American-but for some reason we didn't much read these. Saturday mornings I would go down to the newsstand on the corner and asked for copies of the News and the Mirror. The papers cost five cents each on weekdays and Saturdays, and fifteen cents on Sunday when they were both thick with color-comics and the magazine section and the TV supplement for the week. The Mirror went out of business sometime in the mid-sixties, and thereafter the Daily News stood unchallenged as our family newspaper. My father read it every morning of his life, almost to the morning he died.
In those days my father came home in the evening after everyone had already eaten, placed the papers on the table, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and sat down to supper. My older brother was the first to pounce on the papers.
"Those Mets..." he would shake his head after cursory glance at the back page told him what he already knew. It was one thing to hear it on the radio; it wasn't really real until you saw it in the News.
Oh, yes...The Back Page. That was the way you read the paper in my neighborhood. You started on the back page which gave the baseball scores, then opened to the second-from-last page, where they printed the racing results. On the racing page you found the 'total mutual handle'...which meant all the money that was bet at all the state tracks on the previous day...and the last three digits of which comprised...The Number...yes, The Number.
In the days before legal lotteries and off-track betting, every neighborhood bar came replete with its own house bookie. Falco's bar, where my father used to hoist a few lazy Saturday afternoon beers, was somewhat upscale in that it had two bookies on hand; there was Charlie the Bookie for betting horses (more respectable) and an individual I knew only as Apples for The Number (less respectable, but cheaper and more popular).
The Number: The way it worked was you gave your bookie fifty cents or a dollar and picked three digits---your house number, telephone exchange, the first three numbers of the licence plate on the taxicab that ran over and killed your Uncle Herman on his way to church last Sunday morning; superstition on this head was inexhaustible and often ran to the bizarre and the esoteric---and if those three digits 'came out' that week, then you Hit the Number and your bookie paid you a pile of money. Exactly how much he paid I never knew because I was too young to play the number. I knew where to find it, though.
Having ascertained that his team had lost and his number hadn't hit, my brother settled down across the table from my father and the two discussed the next day's racing schedule.
My father and my brother held opposing points-of-view on life, or at least that portion of life which concerned itself with rising from bed in the morning and going out to earn one's way in the world. Briefly stated, my father favored this course and practiced it faithfully and unselfishly every day of his working life. My brother, who had long dropped out of school and was more than old enough to hold down a full-time job, avoided work as if he were in possession of irrefutable scientific evidence that it the chief cause of leprosy in the civilized world. But one point they did have in common was a love of horse racing.
"Says this filly Escapade goes good on a wet track." my brother reported the handicappers line. "Supposed to rain tomorrow."
I didn't know much about rain and tracks and fillies, but it didn't matter anyway. Between the two of them my father and my brother could not have picked the winning horse in a field of ten if you shot the other nine horses before the race began. Charlie the Bookie was always happy to see them coming. But they were nothing if not stoics:
"What do you think of this Spicy Bones in the third at Belmont," my brother asked.
On and on it went.
On Saturday mornings my father would spread open the paper and explain the world to us. My sisters and I would dig into a traditional Brooklyn breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, bagels and cream cheese, and other delicacies, But we were always listening.
"China has a billion people. What do they care about a war? China could lose a couple of million and never know they were gone."
And there were questions of the Soviet Union overrunning Western Europe, the role of NATO, the presence of Fidel Castro ninety miles from our American shores, the battle for civil rights. I learned more about the contemporary state of the world while chomping down on a Kaiser role stacked high with liverwurst and onion slices topped with Guldens spicy brown mustard, then I ever did from the nuns at St. Mary's School.
The Sunday paper was an event in itself. It cost fifteen cents and must have weighed five pounds. There was the regular section, the movie and entertainment section, the color magazine and of course the comics. Sometimes we bought the 'early edition' on Saturday night, and it was still hot from the presses when we got it upstairs. The ink was still wet enough to stain your hands when you opened it it up and the smell was delicious and beyond description; better then the bakery or even the pizzeria, though not quite as good (to me) as the used bookstore over on Grand Street. Of course I went for the comics first. Those were the days of the great adventure serial strips with story lines that ran for months at a time. My favorites were Steve Canyon and Smilin' Jack. I used to clip them from the paper and paste them into 81/2 x 11 notebooks which I kept stacked under my bed. My mother liked to clip stuff too: coupons, recipes, and anything having to do with the Pope or the Vatican. But recipes mostly. I can still remember mouth-watering glossy photos of great orange-glazed ducks and deserts so rich and chocolate and satiny, lemon-colored creams it made your teeth hurt just to look at them.
"Are you ever going to make any of this stuff?" I would occasionally ask.
"Someday," was all she'd say.
But she never did. My mother excelled at her native Italian dishes and such American staples as fresh ham, roast turkey, and Yankee pot roast. Perhaps her nerve failed her on this point. And in any event she had no need to stray beyond her tried and true repertoire. In a way that draw full or recipes represented a glittering walled kingdom she could never dare to enter but only gaze upon from afar. And yet I am certain that if she would have remained to become its Queen.
When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, my mother wrapped the papers from that week in plastic food wrap and saved them for many years. I still have the Daily News for Saturday, November 23rd: President is Slain; Johnson Sworn In on Plane; Suspect Kills Cop, Seized.
When I first read that headline an idea occured to me. I picked the paper from the day before off of the pile of old papers next to the stove and found a small item in the back pages: President Kennedy to be in Dallas Friday.
I placed the two papers side-by-side. I was beginning to understand something: Here was yesterday's paper, and within it's pages 'yesterday'---the time before anyone had even considered the possibility of the President being shot down like a dog on a Dallas street---still existed. And next to it was today's paper where Kennedy's death was an established and accepted fact, already a matter of history. In a few hours the early edition of tomorrow's paper would hit the stands, bringing more news that no one could guess at now but soon would be settled fact and common knowledge. I was beginning to understand something: all points of time exist simultaneously. Past, Present, and Future are not separate entities, but instead are woven of one lacy fabric spread out over the table of eternity before time even began. All Time is One Time. And I learned it from the newspapers.
These days I don't read the newspapers. I don't even buy a newspaper. Lots of people still read their morning paper, but they way I feel, who's got the time? Besides, the pages are getting thinner and the comics ain't what they used to be. At work, we have the Cable News Network going full-blast all day, and if anything happens I'm the first to know it. And there's the Internet. Still, I feel bad about it. For the thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who lined up outside the newspaper plants during the seventeen day driver's strike in 1944, the paper was an indelible part of their lives. For my father it was a constant, a given. A day that started without the paper---and there weren't many---was a day that never really began at all, a day that somehow wasn't 'official.' And if my some miracle he were to suddenly return to us today, I have no doubt that the first thing he'd do, even before he gulped down his coffee, would be to look around for his copy of the New York Daily News so he could catch up with how the world had been going while he was away.
In those days my father came home in the evening after everyone had already eaten, placed the papers on the table, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and sat down to supper. My older brother was the first to pounce on the papers.
"Those Mets..." he would shake his head after cursory glance at the back page told him what he already knew. It was one thing to hear it on the radio; it wasn't really real until you saw it in the News.
Oh, yes...The Back Page. That was the way you read the paper in my neighborhood. You started on the back page which gave the baseball scores, then opened to the second-from-last page, where they printed the racing results. On the racing page you found the 'total mutual handle'...which meant all the money that was bet at all the state tracks on the previous day...and the last three digits of which comprised...The Number...yes, The Number.
In the days before legal lotteries and off-track betting, every neighborhood bar came replete with its own house bookie. Falco's bar, where my father used to hoist a few lazy Saturday afternoon beers, was somewhat upscale in that it had two bookies on hand; there was Charlie the Bookie for betting horses (more respectable) and an individual I knew only as Apples for The Number (less respectable, but cheaper and more popular).
The Number: The way it worked was you gave your bookie fifty cents or a dollar and picked three digits---your house number, telephone exchange, the first three numbers of the licence plate on the taxicab that ran over and killed your Uncle Herman on his way to church last Sunday morning; superstition on this head was inexhaustible and often ran to the bizarre and the esoteric---and if those three digits 'came out' that week, then you Hit the Number and your bookie paid you a pile of money. Exactly how much he paid I never knew because I was too young to play the number. I knew where to find it, though.
Having ascertained that his team had lost and his number hadn't hit, my brother settled down across the table from my father and the two discussed the next day's racing schedule.
My father and my brother held opposing points-of-view on life, or at least that portion of life which concerned itself with rising from bed in the morning and going out to earn one's way in the world. Briefly stated, my father favored this course and practiced it faithfully and unselfishly every day of his working life. My brother, who had long dropped out of school and was more than old enough to hold down a full-time job, avoided work as if he were in possession of irrefutable scientific evidence that it the chief cause of leprosy in the civilized world. But one point they did have in common was a love of horse racing.
"Says this filly Escapade goes good on a wet track." my brother reported the handicappers line. "Supposed to rain tomorrow."
I didn't know much about rain and tracks and fillies, but it didn't matter anyway. Between the two of them my father and my brother could not have picked the winning horse in a field of ten if you shot the other nine horses before the race began. Charlie the Bookie was always happy to see them coming. But they were nothing if not stoics:
"What do you think of this Spicy Bones in the third at Belmont," my brother asked.
On and on it went.
On Saturday mornings my father would spread open the paper and explain the world to us. My sisters and I would dig into a traditional Brooklyn breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, bagels and cream cheese, and other delicacies, But we were always listening.
"China has a billion people. What do they care about a war? China could lose a couple of million and never know they were gone."
And there were questions of the Soviet Union overrunning Western Europe, the role of NATO, the presence of Fidel Castro ninety miles from our American shores, the battle for civil rights. I learned more about the contemporary state of the world while chomping down on a Kaiser role stacked high with liverwurst and onion slices topped with Guldens spicy brown mustard, then I ever did from the nuns at St. Mary's School.
The Sunday paper was an event in itself. It cost fifteen cents and must have weighed five pounds. There was the regular section, the movie and entertainment section, the color magazine and of course the comics. Sometimes we bought the 'early edition' on Saturday night, and it was still hot from the presses when we got it upstairs. The ink was still wet enough to stain your hands when you opened it it up and the smell was delicious and beyond description; better then the bakery or even the pizzeria, though not quite as good (to me) as the used bookstore over on Grand Street. Of course I went for the comics first. Those were the days of the great adventure serial strips with story lines that ran for months at a time. My favorites were Steve Canyon and Smilin' Jack. I used to clip them from the paper and paste them into 81/2 x 11 notebooks which I kept stacked under my bed. My mother liked to clip stuff too: coupons, recipes, and anything having to do with the Pope or the Vatican. But recipes mostly. I can still remember mouth-watering glossy photos of great orange-glazed ducks and deserts so rich and chocolate and satiny, lemon-colored creams it made your teeth hurt just to look at them.
"Are you ever going to make any of this stuff?" I would occasionally ask.
"Someday," was all she'd say.
But she never did. My mother excelled at her native Italian dishes and such American staples as fresh ham, roast turkey, and Yankee pot roast. Perhaps her nerve failed her on this point. And in any event she had no need to stray beyond her tried and true repertoire. In a way that draw full or recipes represented a glittering walled kingdom she could never dare to enter but only gaze upon from afar. And yet I am certain that if she would have remained to become its Queen.
When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, my mother wrapped the papers from that week in plastic food wrap and saved them for many years. I still have the Daily News for Saturday, November 23rd: President is Slain; Johnson Sworn In on Plane; Suspect Kills Cop, Seized.
When I first read that headline an idea occured to me. I picked the paper from the day before off of the pile of old papers next to the stove and found a small item in the back pages: President Kennedy to be in Dallas Friday.
I placed the two papers side-by-side. I was beginning to understand something: Here was yesterday's paper, and within it's pages 'yesterday'---the time before anyone had even considered the possibility of the President being shot down like a dog on a Dallas street---still existed. And next to it was today's paper where Kennedy's death was an established and accepted fact, already a matter of history. In a few hours the early edition of tomorrow's paper would hit the stands, bringing more news that no one could guess at now but soon would be settled fact and common knowledge. I was beginning to understand something: all points of time exist simultaneously. Past, Present, and Future are not separate entities, but instead are woven of one lacy fabric spread out over the table of eternity before time even began. All Time is One Time. And I learned it from the newspapers.
These days I don't read the newspapers. I don't even buy a newspaper. Lots of people still read their morning paper, but they way I feel, who's got the time? Besides, the pages are getting thinner and the comics ain't what they used to be. At work, we have the Cable News Network going full-blast all day, and if anything happens I'm the first to know it. And there's the Internet. Still, I feel bad about it. For the thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who lined up outside the newspaper plants during the seventeen day driver's strike in 1944, the paper was an indelible part of their lives. For my father it was a constant, a given. A day that started without the paper---and there weren't many---was a day that never really began at all, a day that somehow wasn't 'official.' And if my some miracle he were to suddenly return to us today, I have no doubt that the first thing he'd do, even before he gulped down his coffee, would be to look around for his copy of the New York Daily News so he could catch up with how the world had been going while he was away.
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