New York Paddy: Author Peter Quinn's blog

The Bard of Albany

pquinn47 — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:33:51 +0000

PREFACE: I was invited by Don Faulkner of the NYS Writers Institute to introduce William Kennedy at the official Albany launch of his latest novel. The event was held at the Page Theater on October 3rd. The place was packed. Bill’s reading was electric. We retired to the Paradiso Café, where part of “Ironweed’ was filmed, and the real fun began.

While it’s a singular honor for me to introduce this city’s, this state’s, this country’s greatest living writer, let’s be honest. My role here tonight–like Donald Trump’s recent presidential campaign–falls somewhere between the superfluous and the ridiculous. Bill Kennedy needs an introduction in Albany about as much as the Pope needs an introduction in the Vatican.
Maybe the best way to understand my real function is in terms of the opening act in one of those old-style Vaudeville shows that used to be featured down at the Palace Theater. The opener was usually a dog act or a trained seal. Its primary function was to allow the audience to settle in and get ready for the big act.
Since I can’t balance a ball on my nose and since–at least most days–walking on my hind legs is no big deal, I’ll do my best to get the show underway by saying a few painfully obvious things about Bill Kennedy. If I go on a bit too long, forgive me.
There are some things I tend to bring to a climax too quickly. (Just ask my wife.)
Talking about Bill Kennedy isn’t one of them.
To begin, I think I speak for the entire community of American writers when I sum up our reaction to his latest masterpiece, Chango’s Beads and Two-Toned Shoes, in two words:
Enough already…
enough already reminding us of our inadequacies…
enough already raising the bar for literary excellence to impossible heights…
enough already intimidating writers young and old with the majesty of your prose and the profundity of your imaginative genius.
In fact, on finishing Chango’s Beads, I was reminded of Lady Bracknell’s horrified reaction in “The Importance of Being Ernest” on learning that her daughter’s suitor is an orphan. “Losing one parent,” Lady Bracknell announces, “is a tragedy…Losing two is pure carelessness.”
Well, Bill, producing one masterpiece is a triumph. Producing an octo-opus (yes, the pun is intended) is an act of wanton cruelty inflicted on every practicing and aspiring novelist I know. Yet as cowed as I am by Bill’s work, I also feel blessed to have had him as a friend for more than a quarter of a century.
I originally made his acquaintance in 1984, as part of the First Friday Club, a cabal of wanna-be writer, mostly guilt-crippled Irish and Israelites with the odd Italian spiced in, who gathered for a largely liquid lunch in a saloon on Second Avenue on the first Friday of every month. Our routine was based on a devotion popular in the pre-Vatican II era that promised those who attended Mass nine first Fridays in a row would be blessed by the presence of a priest in their final moments.
According to our secular equivalent, the putative benefaction for those attending nine consecutive lunches was to be accompanied in their final moments by a bartender. As it turned out our lunches became increasingly taken up with discussions of the work of one William Kennedy, and since I was a part-time resident of Albany–a galley slave/speechwriter on the ship of state under captains Carey and Cuomo the First–I was assigned to invite him to a First Friday Collation at a time and place of his choosing.
Bill wrote back that, yes, he would meet with us in Albany on January 6th–the feast of the Epiphany–at Lombardo’s, on Madison Avenue, which as any Kennedy fan knows is where Billy Phelan takes Francis, his father, after bailing him out of the cooler when the state police collared him for registering to vote a mere twenty-one times.
Twelve of us–an appropriately apostolic number—made the trek to Lombardo’s that day, a contingent that included the brothers McCourt, Malachy and Frank, the latter still teaching and brooding upon the literary egg that would one day hatch his masterpiece, Angela’s Ashes.
Bill later told me that he thought the First Friday Club was some sort of genteel literary group that would query him for an hour or two about religious symbolism in Ironweed. As it turned out, Bill barely got a chance to talk. He laughed mostly, as we all did, and enjoyed the drink and dueling soliloquies that prevented us from noticing the afternoon of the Epiphany slip into the pinched, pink glint of the frozen Albany twilight.
With Bill presiding, we went on strike against our serious workday selves and enlisted in the frolicsome one-upmanship of storytelling–salacious, slanderous, scatological, theological–an endless melee of poems, jokes and songs. The McCourt brothers put their not-inconsiderable stage skills on display, Ironweed style: “an antisyllable lyric they sang, like the sibilance of the wren’s softest whistle, or the tree frog’s tonsillar wheeze.”
We never ate lunch. I can’t remember if we even ordered it. To the best of my recollection, we wiped out the joint’s supply of Irish whisky. What I do recall with absolute certainty is a mix of fact and subconscious projection, a melding of the corporeal and fictional: living people mingling with the creations born out of Bill’s imagination, imbibing together, dilating and digressing, whistling and wheezing, and discovering once again how, in the hands of a great artist, the line between fact and fiction, myth and reality, can grow thin and disappear.
The word became flesh. And dwelt amongst us.
Marcus Gorman, Albany’s noted communion-breakfast intellectual and mouthpiece for Legs Diamond, sat with us and offered observations with his trademark detachment.
Martin Daugherty, son of Edward and Katrina (she of the flaming corsage) regaled us with stories of his old man, the playwright.
Roscoe Owen Conway descended from the eleventh floor of the State Bank building and handed out absentee ballots–five per customer.
“Does the fact I never really existed disqualify me,” asked Francis Phelan.
“If our Republic is to continue,” Roscoe replied, “then it must include everyone, fictional as well as real. On such principles does our great democracy endure.”
The immediacy of Bill Kennedy’s world–that powerful, irresistible cycle made real in his novels–is an experience shared by all his readers. The cast of characters he has fabled into flesh is so vividly imagined that I, for one, have always found it impossible to believe they live and die only on the page. I don’t believe I’m alone in this. I know others who come to Albany half-expecting to find themselves sitting next to a Phelan or a Quinn.
Finally, let me offer two observations.
First, there’s no single secret to the Kennedy magic. If there were, it would have been distilled and bottled years ago, placed on the shelf between the Jameson’s and Bushmill’s, and writers like myself would be drunk on it every day. Yet, in the several times that I’ve read Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, I’ve come to gain one insight into the mastery of Bill’s prose.
Billy Phelan’s greatness lies not just in the skill with which he plays, nor the intensity, but in how he plays…in his style. Style is the signature of the soul. It distinguishes great players from mere winners. Winners can only win. The great can win or lose, but always, always with style.
The central importance of style is correctly (if with a tinge of Teutonic arrogance) summarized in Legs by “a young, half-drunk playwright named Weissberg” who is introduced to the eponymous gangster during his brief visit to Weimar Germany to score drugs. Weissberg speaks of his desire to travel to America and study’s Legs’s life, dissect it, and use it as the raw material of his art.
“I want only the opportunity to write what I believe,” Weissberg tells Legs, “which is that there are similarities among the great artist, the great whore, and the great criminal…In all these professions is the willingness to withhold nothing from one’s work. All these, when they achieve greatness, have also an undeniable high style which separates them from the pedestrian mob. For how could we all tell a great criminal from a thug in the alley, or a great whore from a street slut, if it were not for style?”
Legs’s response is to draw his chair close to Weissberg’s, until their knees touch, and fire his pistol in the small space between the playwright’s feet. Weissberg wets his pants. Whether in art or in life, coming face-to-face with a great stylist can do that to you: It can intimidate as well as inspire.
As awed as I’ve been by Bill Kennedy’s style–as moved to tears and laughter and astonishment–I’m proud to say I’ve never wet my pants.
Not yet.
But as John Sayles pointed out in the rave he gave Chango’s Beads in the Times Book Review, you never know what Bill’s next novel will bring…
Here is an artist who can, quote, “play with both hands and improvise…a writer we hope to hear more from.”
Without waiting for the next installment, however, I know enough about the sweep, intensity, vitality, and originality of Bill’s novels to end with this second observation, which is perhaps best phrased as a question.
Very shortly, the Swedish Academy will announce its selection of the 2011 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Academy makes its decision with an opacity that would be justice to the inner workings of the Albany County Democratic Committee in the days of Dan O’Connell. But–with some notable exceptions–if the past is any guide, the edge is with some Moldavian poet whose hundred-thousand-line epic verse on the history of animal husbandry in Herzegovina has earned him an audience of Balkan goat herders in the high single digits.

I ask the committee, then:
–Isn’t it time to honor an artist whose fearless eloquence, penetrating humor, and luminous insights infuse every page of his timeless novels?…
–Isn’t it time to recognize a lifetime of literary achievement by a writer whose works plumb and penetrate the particularity of people and place to reveal the truths of our common humanity…a writer whose work has been translated into a score of different languages and transcends borders of region and race?…
–Hasn’t the hour come round at last for the Pooh-Bahs of the Academy to stop their shucking and jiving and present the Nobel Prize for Literature to a writer who’s already regarded in the same category as his countrymen, Eugene O’Neill and Ernest Hemingway?…
the husband of the lovely Dana…
the Bard of Albany…
Ecce homo…
Behold the man…
Guillermo Jose–“Bill”–Kennedy.

EPILOGUE: Two days after this event, the Nobel Prize for Literature Prize was awarded to Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet who, according to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, writes about “death, history, memory and nature. A lot about nature.” He has “never been a full-time writer as such” and is not a prolific poet: “You could fit all of [his work] into a not-too-large pocket book.”
Sigh.
Kennedy in 2012, sez I.

Dispatches from the War on Marriage

pquinn47 — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 03:05:41 +0000

“Marriage is under siege like no other time in recent history.” Michele Bachmann
“(Gay marriage) threatens my marriage. It threatens all marriages.” Rick Santorum
“If a bill legalizing same sex marriage came to my desk, I would veto it.” Gov. Chris Christie

Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., Friday, 11:00 P.M. The call jolts my wife and me from sleep. Three rings–the agreed-upon signal–send us to the basement. We tune into the emergency frequency of our local DMR (Defense of Marriage Radio) affiliate. The State Senate has passed–and Governor Cuomo signed–a bill to legalize gay marriage. The siege of marriage has become a blitzkrieg.

11:15 P.M. The sound of gunfire signals that gays are taking control of the town. We grab the dog and bolt the basement door. The nightmare has come true. The occupation has begun. By the light of a single candle, we renew our heterosexual marriage vows.

Saturday, 9:00 A.M. Turns out it wasn’t gunfire we heard last night but our gay neighbors down the block popping champagne corks. According to DMR, gays have seized control of the key strategic points in the village: patisserie, wine shop, and gourmet food store.

10:06 A.M. Gay neighbors bang on our door, as they usually do on Saturday mornings, to see if we want anything from the local farmer’s market. We pretend not to be home.
.
3:48 P.M. My wife abruptly rouses me from my nap. The dog has overheard reports on DMR that the State Senate is now considering a bill to require pets to marry their owners. He snarls and snaps at us. We are forced to put him down. The occupation has claimed its first casualty: a canine.

9:57 P.M. DMR alert: Led by Michelle Bachmann, a Dunkirk-style flotilla is reportedly on its way to ferry stranded heterosexuals across the Hudson to New Jersey. Evacuees will be temporarily quartered in Xanadu, the unfinished billion-dollar mall in the Meadowlands. Food will be provided by Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition Caterers of Secaucus. We unbolt the door, and after tripping over the bag of fresh vegetables left at our door by our gay neighbors, flee to the river. We wait until midnight. No boats appear. We make our way home, dejectedly.

Sunday, 8:00 A.M. We sneak off to the church in a nearby village. We are surprised to find it opened. The priest who says Mass skillfully avoids any mention of gay marriage. “God is love,” he sermonizes, “and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” A weak-kneed, liberal-leaning, Vatican II type, he’s obviously completely intimidated by the occupation.

9:07 A.M. Our gay neighbors wave to us as they leave services in the church across the street. They are taking their two adopted HIV-positive children to the Gay Pride parade in Manhattan. They ask if we’d like to stop by at a barbeque they’re having later that evening. We hurriedly invent an excuse.

9:19 A.M. We stop at the patisserie on the way home. Same predominantly heterosexual crowd as usual. For the sake of their children, they carry on bravely, as if the foundations of Western Culture weren’t crumbling beneath their feet.

12:12 P.M. Our son and daughter call from the city. They won’t be home for Sunday dinner. Instead, they’ll be going to cheer on friends who are marching in the Gay Pride parade. Our own children are collaborators! It’s a bitter pill to swallow.

Monday, 7:12 A.M. Bulletin on DMR: Worst fears realized. The Pink Terror is in full swing. The Rainbow flag has replaced Old Glory over the village hall. The gay Gestapo–cross-dressing couples in pink helmets–are rounding up heterosexual commuters at the train station and forcing them into same-sex unions. The men are required to wear frocks from Alexander McQueen’s “Savage Beauty” exhibit at the Met. All women must dress like plumbers and sport lesbian hairstyles.

Tuesday, 9:45 P.M. A ray of hope! We listen to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s broadcast on DMR from atop the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City: “We shall fight on the shore, we shall fight on the Turnpike, we shall fight in the Short Hills Mall and in the Pine Barrens, we shall never surrender (to same-sex marriage).”

Wednesday, 4:00 P.M. The news on DMR is grim. In the wake of New York’s legalization of gay marriage, ex-Senator Rick Santorum’s prediction is coming true: Heterosexuals nationwide are abandoning their spouses en masse. The last heterosexual couple in San Francisco officially split this afternoon. Philadelphia and Boston are close behind. Only New Jersey, it seems, is resisting the onslaught.

Friday, 8:00 P.M. A knock on the door. We freeze. Fear grips us by the throat as my wife opens it a crack. No one is there. But there’s a basket with chicken, homemade coleslaw, and a cold bottle of Chardonnay. A note from our gay neighbors says they haven’t seen us in a few days and hope everything is all right. “Enjoy the enclosed,” they write.

8:05 P.M. We aren’t fooled. God knows what kind of homoerotic ingredients have been mixed in. We put the food in the trash and pour the wine into the sink.

Saturday, 10:00 P.M. DMR signs off with an address by an Governor Christie from the command bunker beneath MAFIOSO (Marriage and Family for Straights Only) headquarters (formerly the Bada Bing Club): “Whatever comes, however long it lasts, we will brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that a thousand-years hence–when men have returned to their senses–your normal, tax-averse, non-Civil Service, God-fearing heterosexual will say of us, This was their finest hour.”

10:15 P.M. Inspired, we turn out the lights and stare into the darkness. A long, twilight struggle lies ahead.

10:16 P.M. A final thought before falling asleep: New Jersey as the last bastion of Judeo-Christian civilization. Truly, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Changed, Changed Gradually

pquinn47 — Thu, 26 May 2011 20:28:21 +0000

I promised myself not to add to the glut of commentary/bloggography that’s already been spewed about the recent visits of Queen Elizabeth and President Obama to Ireland. But that promise—like so many before it—is now broken. Those of you who’ve had the misfortune of knowing me know that my interest in things irish can border on the obsessional. (okay, okay, it crossed the border a long time ago.) In this vein, it seems to me that, though the word is overused, historic best describes the back-to-back visits to Ireland by an American president and a British monarch. Each in its own way was a reminder that the ties among Britain, Ireland, and the United States, rocky as they have sometimes been, are profound, complex, and abiding.
The United States and Ireland were colonies of Britain and, in theory if not in fact, Ireland was integrated for over a century into the United Kingdom. The United States and Ireland both fought bitter and prolonged wars of independence, which were followed by civil war and, for Ireland, partition. During World War II, when the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain was cemented in the Atlantic alliance against Nazi Germany, Irish memories of its struggle against Britain rule were still raw, and it chose to stay neutral.
Profundity and complexity, mixed with irony, were on display in the tributes Queen Elizabeth and President Obama paid to figures from the Irish past. The Queen visited Croke Park, site of a bloody reprisal carried out by the British army in 1920. At Garden of Remembrance, she placed a wreath in honor of the Irishmen executed for their attempt to overthrow British rule in Ireland and immortalized in William Butler Yeats’s much-quoted poem, “Easter, 1916”: “MacDonagh and MacBride/ And Connolly and Pearse/ Now and in a time to be,/ Wherever green is worn,/ Are changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.”
The Queen arrived in Dublin bedecked in emerald green, but the beauty born was humble rather than terrible. Her gracious gesture acknowledging the heroism of Irish patriots executed as British traitors during her grandfather’s reign was a small but significant step in building a new relationship between Ireland and Britain. Amid the divisions generated by the current economic crisis, it also served as a reminder of the enduring need to move Europe away from a history scarred by brutally destructive wars, ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution toward a community willing to confront long-standing grievances in pursuit of continental unity.

Barack Obama, America’s first president of color, visited Moneygall, the small town in County Offlay from which his Irish ancestors emigrated. There, he paid tribute to the impact that millions of such immigrants–Protestants and Catholics alike–have had on every aspect of American life. In Dublin, he invoked the memory of Daniel O’Connell, the 19th-century Irish leader who, in pursuit of full civil right for Catholics, mounted the first mass political movement in European history.Unlike the Irish revolutionaries of 1916, O’Connell was an opponent of violence as a means of political change. After his successful campaign in the 1820s for Catholic emancipation, he mounted a hugely popular effort to return a measure of self-government to Ireland while at the same time encouraging the Irish to abandon their traditional culture and language and adapt to modern–i.e., British–ways. He was also, as President Obama pointed out, an outspoken supporter of abolitionism who befriended Frederick Douglass, the escaped American slave, during the time he spent in Ireland.

O’Connell’s public embrace of Douglas occurred in 1845, just as the potato blight pushed Ireland over the cliff into mass starvation that was exacerbated by the callousness and malign neglect of the imperial parliament in Westminster. Two years later, O’Connell died a broken, disillusioned man.
More than any other event in modern history, the famine changed Ireland utterly. A million people perished. A quarter of the population–2.1 million Irish–left. The majority arrived in the United States as unwelcomed newcomers, slum dwellers in the country’s burgeoning cities, and participants in an unfolding maelstrom of religious, racial, and class-driven antagonisms.
History is a haunted woods. The hobgoblins who inhabit it can’t be instantly dismissed. If they hovered only dimly during the visits of President Obama and Queen Elizabeth, they know all too well when to hide and when to reappear. Yet, for now, what stands center stage are the possibilities for gradually coming to terms with the past, transcending its sins and stupidities, and finding common ground. What is done is done. What is to come, whether terrible or beautiful, remains ours to decide.

Birther Madness

pquinn47 — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:45:09 +0000

News item: “Trump has been aggressive in his questioning of Obama’s legitimacy as President, sending staffers to Hawaii to investigate Obama’s birth certificate.”

No need to hunt for Mr. Trump’s birth certificate.

The sublimely, divinely bovine Mr. Trump wasn’t birthed.

He was calved.

An udder bag of gas from day one.

Welcome to the World of Criminogenics

pquinn47 — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:12:05 +0000

I’ve pretty much abandoned blogging because the whole undertaking seems like a drip/blip in the endless digital deluge of opinionating/bloviating/expatiating that flows in/across/through the web. Suddenly, it’s as if everybody has his/her own printing press, which can be a good thing. (A lot of people have opinions/ideas worth printing; on the other hand, a lot don’t.) But the sheer volume of material being spewed out turns the notion of mass communication on its head. It used to be we had a relatively small number of producers and a mass number of consumers; now we have a mass number of producers and (in the case of the vast majority of blogs) a small number of consumers. That’s a long way of getting round to why I’m taking up this blog again, which is because this Thursday I read a most-astounding quote in the New York Times that I feel compelled to share, even if it’s only with myself. It was in an investigative, long-form article, the kind that the Times is one of the few vehicles of print communication still around with the resources/resolve to do. The headline was “After Reckless Banking, A Dearth of Prosecutions and Not Much Guilt” (a tepid headline, in true Times style.) The quote was from William K. Black, a law professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City. He served as federal director of litigation during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and had this to say about the government response to the far-larger/far-graver real estate-speculating/ banking/Wall Street knavery that, since the bubble burst in 2008, has plunged the world economy into the worst slump since the 1930s: “…their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.” CRIMINOGENIC ENVIRONMENT: What a wonderful neologism! What an indictment of the whole vile, self-serving, interlocking directorate of political/financial elites that has harnessed the apparatus of government to its own self-interest! Professor Black’s assessment was reinforced by a piece on the front page of the Times’s Sunday Business Section, in which Elizabeth Magner, a bankruptcy court judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana, placed her finger on the cause of the current mortgage debacle: “The deference afforded the lending community has resulted in an abuse of trust.” The Judge went on: “One too may times, this court has been witness to the shoddy practices and sloppy accountings of the mortgage service industry. With each revelation, one hopes the bottom of the barrel has been reached and the industry will self correct. Sadly, this does not appear to be reality.” Yet, instead of cracking down on this countrywide (sic) efflorescence of our blooming criminogenic environment (the one environment the Republican/Tea Party seems intent on protecting) Paul Ryan—like Alan Greenspan before him—continues to reject the idea of regulation and spout the clichés of Ayn Rand, a fourth-rate novelist (I’m being generous), and push the notion that, if government only got out of the way, all would be right with the economy. Well, guess what? Government did get out of the way, and we got a real estate bubble, the worst Wall Street crisis since ’29, the Great Recession and the Troubled Asset Rescue Program (TARP—also known as STAGSB, Save the Asses of Greedy, Stupid Bankers—under which the people got the shaft and the bankers got the gold). Welcome to the wild world of criminogenic economics and corporate fiefdom/thiefdom. And the best/worst is yet to come. If John Boehner—the Speaker makes no secret of his ties to Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and R.J.Reynolds—and his fellow subalterns of the plutocracy wrest full control of the federal government, the fun has just begun.

On the Bow’ry! The Bow’ry!

pquinn47 — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 04:28:10 +0000

At the end of 2010, at the invitation of David Mulkins, I had the privilege to be part of an wonderful evening at Dixon Place hosted by the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors and the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council. The lineup included, among others, poet Bob Holman, historians Eric Ferrara and Kerri Culhane, performer Poor Baby Bree, and urbanologist Tony Tung. It was a night full of fun, passion. and wisdom. Several people have asked me for a copy of the brief remarks that represented my small contribution to the event. Instead of sending out separate emails (or snail mails), I decided (as usual) to seek the laziest, least labor-intensive way of response, so I’m posting them as a blog. (Is this in violation of blog protocol? Do I care? Yo, I grew up in the Bronx. Sue me.) Here they are:

This evening is appropriately titled “Bowery History: A Celebration.” I won’t mar the festivities with a useless and predictable lecture on the Bowery as the real heart of America, which is heartless to some and to others so big hearted, no single place can’t claim it. And I won’t go on about the Bowery as the soul of America, which to some is soulless and to others carnival-rich with soul.

For me the Bowery is essential to everything we are as a city, a nation, a people, our carotid artery, deep-seated, medial margin, conveyer of oxygen, blood, integral since Stuyvesant and his Dutchmen dispossessed and displaced the innocent Lenape who were robbed of their lands, and saw their footpaths and trails turned into thoroughfares, streets and alleyways, and the road made clear for the El and the paddy wagons and Dutch Schultz and The Ramones.

In the beginning was the Bowery. As much here as Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. Immigrants of all shades settled here, freedom-less Africans, landless Irish, luckless Jews, women-less Chinese, a plentitude of penniless Italians.

Here Stephen Foster shifted in his unbeautiful dreams, and he and Dreiser’s Hurstwood slept in single beds, waking hung-over in the lonely, unholy dark to ask, “What’s the use?”

America was forged here, as much here as in Valley Forge, or Constitution Hall. Fun was invented here, freedom practiced, the free lunch pioneered.

Those women who died in the Shirtwaist fire–they played here…danced perhaps a last dance to Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

The unwashed and unfettered, those who despaired of the American Dream, or reveled in it, or were defeated by it, they howled with Ginsberg here, “walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium…ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery …”

The Bowery Boys–the boyo’s–swaggered here, the progenitors of urban attitude, they turned the street into a stage, strutted as much as walked, half-dance, half-defiance, a mix of musicality and menace they bequeathed to Jimmy Cagney and gangsta rap.

Here strayed our gray, gay, great poet…“Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, a kosmos/ Disorderly fleshy and sensual… eating drinking and breeding…” a friend to shoeless newsies, footloose floozies…all the same to Walt.

Skid Row skidded to delirious conclusion here. Souls were lost here and souls were saved here. Sunset Boulevard and Route 66 began here. Las Vegas was here before it was in Las Vegas. Minstrelsy. The Variety Show.

They say such things and they do strange things, on the Bow’ry! The Bow’ry!

Born here were the kinetic, boogie-woogie ambitions which, try as they might, puritans, prohibitionists and moralizers have never been able to undo.And I started here, too, in a fashion…

by commodius vicus of recirculation…

when Margaret Manning, a seamstress, the daughter of parents who fled the Irish famine, went with her girlfriends to a dance run by Tammany honcho Big Tim Sullivan–he, too, a child of famine immigrants–and was spotted across a crowded room by Patrick Quinn, a laborer in the East River shipyards, who asked her to trip the light fantastic and married her in St. Brigid’s, in the last year of the nineteenth century, which made it possible for me to be here tonight.

The Bowery is who I am, and who you are, and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans. After all this time, we can’t allow it to be pasteurized, homogenized, and high-rised in the gilded playground of the over-privileged; bled white, embalmed and entombed as yet another unmovable feast to be served up for the members-only enjoyment of the uber-rich.

If we lose the Bowery, we lose the future as well as the past.

If the National Register of Historic Places has no place for the Bowery then it has no right to be called the National Register of Historic Places.

The Bowery helped make it possible for us to be who we are.

Now, in turn, we must see to it that the Bowery remains a place for all of us, whoever we are.

The Play’s the Thing

pquinn47 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 01:48:44 +0000

On October 24th, the Irish Repertory officially debuted the staged version of “Banished Children of Eve,” which it commissioned playwright Kelly Younger to write. Back in 1994, when the novel was first published, several people whose opinion I respect said that it had real cinemagraphic possibilities. They suggested I take a crack at turning it into a screenplay. Though I’d never attempted to write a screenplay, I was working at Time Warner at that point and asked a friend at Warner Bros. Studios to send me a shooting script a recent film. She sent me the script for “The Fugitive.” It took me about five minutes to come to the conclusion that I was a novelist, not a scriptwriter. (My involvement with Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” will have to wait some future blog.) I’d started out wanting to a poet. But the form was so constricted and required such compression that I turned to short stories. Over the course of two years, I wrote two short stories. Here again, I felt boxed in, confined to a narrow space. When it comes to writing, I decided, I’m a prodigal and a profligate. I’m like the character from the Dixie Chick’s song who “needs wide open spaces/Room to make her big mistakes.” I found my wide open spaces and room to make big mistakes in the novel. It took me ten years to research and write “Banished Children of Eve.” There were plenty of frustrations and tortured moments. But I never felt confined or closed in. For me, novel writing was to poems and short stories what Jackson Pollack’s riotous, bucket-splashed, supersized canvases were to George Seurat’s pointillism, with its precise and careful accumulation of small, distinct dots. When Ciarán O’Reilly and Charlotte Moore first approached me about making “Banished Children of Eve” into a play, I was (no surprise) thrilled. I also never entertained for a moment the illusion I could write it myself. The notion of wrestling a six-hundred-page novel into a ninety-minute stage production struck me as akin to fitting a zeppelin into a zip-lock sandwich bag. Fortunately, in Kelly Younger, Ciarán and Charlotte found a talented writer who understood the limits and possibilities in staying true to the substance of the novel without trying to replicate the form. We had a brief conversation in L.A. about what was at the heart of the book and agreed it was two love stories—one between two Irish people, which could succeed, and the other a black-white relationship that American society at that time wouldn’t permit. Thanks to Ciarán and Charlotte, and a grant from the NEA, Kelly went off and wrote the play. I went my way and wrote another novel. In the spring of 2009, I was invited to an initial stage reading at the Irish Repertory Theatre. I was aware that Kelly and Ciarán and Charlotte had been back and forth with several revisions but beyond that I didn’t know what to expect. The moment the actors stepped on stage, I was stunned. Even before they spoke a line, I recognized each one of them—Eliza, Jack, Euphemia Blanchard, Stephen Foster. Characters who’d first come alive in my head two decades before, were standing there, skin and bone and hair, alive, and I didn’t need a program to identify them. They were as I imagined them. I fought back tears. It was the closest I’d come to experiencing a sense of awe since my children were born. I know there are novelists who are also playwrights and scriptwriters. (Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy who’s also written plays and screenplays springs immediately to mind.) But I’m not among them. The play that Kelly Younger has written is different from my novel. It’s an adaptation, not a reproduction. But it gets to the heart of the matter. Watching the transformation of novel into play and the labor-intensive interaction of playwright, actors and director—so very different from the isolation and solitude of novel writing—has been a revelation. I asked William Kennedy to come with me to see the play because I know that as well as incapable of adding water or sugar to his opinions on any/all pieces of writing, he’s a big fan of the stage. He said that he couldn’t imagine it getting panned—which didn’t mean it wouldn’t —but that if writers depend on reviews to keep then writing, they won’t be in the business very long. He reiterated a phrase he’d used with me many years ago, when I met him in Albany while I was laboring in the salt mines of speechwriting and he was an obscure (soon-to-be-famous) novelist. “The trick is,” he said, “to renew your vulnerability.” You can be a critic, he said, and most of them are voyeurs and eunuchs—they observe, supervise, commentate, but are incapable of participating or creating—or you can be an working artist. All creative works are crapshoots, he insisted. (He included our conversation in his collection of nonfiction pieces, “Riding the Yellow Trolley Car.”) There are no sure things. But it seems to me, when it comes to effort, collectivity, concentration, coordination, and sheer guts, theater is the biggest crapshoot of all. (Cliché though it has become, the old Irving Berlin lyric is sometimes gloriously/sometimes painfully true: “There’s no business like show business.”) I am indebted beyond words to director Ciarán O’Reilly for this leap of faith in believing my long novel could be adapted to the stage, to Kelly Younger for his skill as a playwright in carrying it off, to choreographic genius Barry McNabb, to set designer Charlie Corcoran for his miraculous ingenuity, and to the wonderful troupe of players for turning words into flesh and blood. There’s no people like show people.

How Low Can We Go?

pquinn47 — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 03:33:29 +0000

I really don’t want to write about the controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque”/Park51 Islamic center. I worked in 2 World Trade Center from 1982 to 1985. I knew at least five people who died in the 9/11 attacks. I have a good friend who lost his son. But it’s become impossible not to take note of the Olympic scale of gutter-level P.R. whoring that’s going on around the issue, with (of course) politicians at the head of the line. Rick “How Low Can You Go” Lazio trying to find an issue on which to run for governor. A true two-dollar whore, Rick, that’s what you are. Newt Gingrich, you flatulent fraud, the whores who used to work the Port Authority Bus Terminal had/have more class/ decency/integrity than you on your very best day–ever. The Reverend (ha, ha) Terry Jones, head of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla. It’s incredible that the media has given this nut job/loser/publicity whore such attention. “World Outreach Center” my ass. He puts the Reverend Al Sharpton’s record-setting P.R. whoring in the Tawana Brawley fiasco of two decades (or is it three?) ago in the shade. (Al, you’re a pathetic piker forever exiled to the distant precincts of respectability.) And, since no parade—especially a P.R.-whore parade—could proceed without a grand marshal, who else should appear (surprise, surprise!) but the inimitable/inevitable whore of whores, the Von Hindenburg of self-inflation, Donald Trump? Get a load (sic) of the P.R. b.s. that the lap-dog/lackeys who work for the whore-in-chief dumped on the media today: “…real estate mogul [mongrel] Donald Trump said he had offered $6 million to buy out a major investor” in the planned mosque—“25 percent over the $4.8 million purchase price of the location.” The self-trumpeting, gas-filled P.R. Whores’ Hall of Famer went on in a letter released by his publicist (aka pimp), “I am making this offer as a resident of New York and citizen of the United States, not because I think the location is a spectacular one (because it is not), but because it will end a very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse.” In a quick response, the investor spurned the offer. “‘This is just a cheap attempt to get publicity and get in the limelight,’ said his attorney, according to The Associated Press.” Imagine that: Donald Trump making a “cheap attempt to get publicity”–even at the expense of the tragedy of 9/11 and at the risk of exacerbating the growing level of nativist hysteria that is beginning to encircle Muslim Americans. Shocking! But wait! We can’t let it rest there. Let’s hear from Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, Ryan Seacrest, et al. Shouldn’t Jerry Springer host a special edition of “American Idol” where we can put this whole issue to a vote?

In Defense of Marriage

pquinn47 — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:35:26 +0000

I keep reading fervent defense-of-marriage arguments. (Several by divorced heterosexuals.) I’m not unsympathetic. I’ve been married, once and only, for 28 years to the same woman. I pursued her for 14 years (sic) before she agreed (reluctantly) to marry me. I’m so lucky she did. Her companionship (yes, in the most basic meaning of the word, “with bread”) has made/makes all the difference, not least of all in the two extraordinary children who grace our existence. Like all the most wonderful/painful/enjoyable parts of life, marriage is a mystery. Why, despite all the obstacles/difficulties, do some relationships last and others don’t? Why do some “perfect” couples turn out to be utterly imperfect and some “utterly incompatible” couples end up perfect for each other? Go figure. Experience has taught me humility (which is why I hate experience). As with every important lesson in my life, I’ve resisted learning it. I’ve tried to ride the high horse of a superior (heterosexual) understanding of love/marriage, but the damn bronco keeps throwing me. As the closet doors have been (and, thank God, keep being) thrown open, I’ve seen over and again how homosexual couples can match (and often surpass) the best aspects of heterosexual parents. Yeah, let’s “defend“ marriage. Let’s support/encourage the commitment of two people to stay together for a lifetime, to survive the strains of constant contact, to endure and understand one another, to overcome the miseries/inanities/ inadequacies of the everyday and experience the purpose/contentment/fulfillment that can only be found in sharing a lifelong commitment. As ignorant/ arrogant/self-satisfied/self-righteous as I remain, I know this much: love endures all crosses, forgives all trespasses, seeks no victory. And the love that matters–the love that teaches children, redeems our lives from insignificance, survives everything, even death–has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with us.

Ask the Rose

pquinn47 — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:27:17 +0000

Bloom its own

each bud possess.

A poem, too,

wrote or read:

A solitary act.

The rose could tell you that.