Peace, Love and Understranding

Along with the unseasonably hot weather in New York City, there have been a few strange sitings: the coyote treading water like a dog in the East River... the dolphins, putting on a small show for the Upper East Side... and then the usual fires, suicides, shootings... a woman brutally attacked near the Central Park Reservoir. It's enough to make me nostalgic for the 1970's when a parallel April heat wave ushered in the unforgettable Summer of Sam.  

I can remember browsing the stacks of the un-airconditioned Strand bookstore while my guitar-player boyfriend was setting up at Broadway Charly's across the street. Sometimes I'd leave my shoes at the club and sit barefoot on the old wood basement floor reading proofs and review copies which sold for less than $1.  People hung out there--- the piles of books were intimidating... one by one the dedicated staff browsed and perused and classified and logged.  If you were looking for something, you could call in... if they didn't call you back within 48 hours you'd assume the search was unsuccessful. But they were dedicated.  The place was dusty and musty, as were the books... mice ran in and out of shelves; once or twice I witnessed some unsavory behavior but for the most part it was a haven for us book-people.  We met and talked... we exchanged.  Tom Verlaine was often there Friday nights, checking the review stacks.  Ben McFall came a bit later.

So I have a new book out-- my fifth.  The Strand has been a sort of platform for me; as a student I longed to be among their indie writers and seeing my first book on the New Poetry table was like winning a Pulitzer.  Granted, the pandemic affected everyone... but this time, instead of delivering happily and being greeted or congratulated by the incomparable Ben, he has left the world... the Strand no longer takes telephone calls and their online search is punishing for small presses like mine.  In fact, they managed to mis-read the title and post it incorrectly.  Who is this author?  I don't know, but it take some effort to even locate my name.  Not so the major labels, the merchandise, the best-sellers... it feels remarkably like a slightly more dense version of Barnes and Noble.  

No barefoot hippies, no intellectual clerks anxious to discuss and learn and find... it's a pressurized department store, the brands books instead of hoodies and sneakers.  Actually, you can get your hoodies there, too.  Surely they sell better than local urban poets who publish carefully and slowly without press or publicity machines. The cream no longer rises to the surface but paddles hopelessly like the coyote in the east river.  

In the Summer of Sam I found a stray dog.  When I moved further downriver, he leaped off the boardwalk at 59th Street and half-swam north while I yelled frantically, running uptown, until at the 96th Street pier a man with a boat helped me retrieve my wet animal from the swift current.  No news media, no photos... but today's news resonated.  

Tonight hoping for a dolphin-siting, I walked along the river... at the 111th St crossover, two boys were throwing rocks at the cars-- a dangerous pastime, but a sort of rite-of-passage for kids.  Something about these moving targets-- and it's not as though they are trying to cause injury-- it's just the act.  I remember doing the same as a girl, hitting someone in the eye and having to get scolded and shaken by the girl's father who warned me I was going to city court where they would put me in jail.  I was terrified.  I was nine.  But there was just something so timeless and 'boy-mischievous' about these two tonight- on the cusp of adolescence... here I am this old white lady brushing by, asking them to spare me-- I'm someone's Grandma, and they let me pass, unthreatened.  It was as though their life was sped up by the early summer-- their already-racing biological clocks were being pushed forward by the weather.  

Three shootings last night.  Jesus.  The heat is always an incendiary. Summer is on... all bets are off.  In my world the illnesses and deaths continue, like a relentless accelerating wheel.  I look at my Facebook page and it is filled with sad notifications and griefs. News. We look at the obituaries daily with trepidation.  In the rock and roll world so many people of my generation have disappeared-- it's as though each loss is somewhat diluted by the next... two on one day, three on the next... we have barely time to grieve.

Last night on the corner of 86th Street someone had left a few piles of books.  A youngish man and his girlfriend were looking through. Good stuff. Biographies.  Classics.  On the sidewalk.  I feel a certain simpatico with these piles of books; in some sense I am my own work-- the books which are increasingly disrespected by the corporate machine, the instagram world of branding which sends me poetry memes from people who have no sense of rhythm or lyricism... but unlike me have huge consumer audiences. 

Yesterday I browsed the kiosk on Fifth Avenue by the Park... the classics are still considered best-sellers-- but the new titles... who am I, I thought, like one of those children's books?  I felt like a misplaced coyote.  There was a time when I'd visit friends and there on the shelves would be familiar things-- great things, like old comfort.  If I had to wait for someone, I could take down a Faulkner or a Baldwin or an Anne Sexton... we all had these things-- Shakespeare, Proust. Now everyone sits everywhere consulting their phone like a God. People buy books like merchandise-- like souvenirs... many of them will end up on sidewalks, or on the Strand outdoor displays, unread, waiting to be rescued by the next owner like a stray dog, hoping, as I do, to be read.  

As though they read my mind, The Paris Review today published a piece about Larry Campbell, one of those guys who had a used-book table on Sixth Avenue for decades.  The interview had been conducted pre-pandemic across from the Strand which, over the years,  sorted through his wares and picked out the valuable things. Where did he get them?  Dead people, he used to say.  There was a quotation in the Review: "The best books I've found are from people who died.  Older people have the best shit." Larry is now 72.  Amen.