An open letter to Cooper Union on the fate of St. Mark's Bookshop

St. Mark's Bookshop in New York is a landmark that has been the literary and spiritual home to a generation of young writers since it opened in 1977. In the current economic climate it was perhaps inevitable that the bookshop's future would become a question of rent receipts and other business considerations. The rising cost of city real estate has forced Cooper Union to consider raising the Bookshop's rent to current rates -- when the current rent is difficult enough to maintain.

The New York Daily News reported that the shop's owners have done "as much belt-tightening as we can do": Since last year, the owners have laid off most of their part-time staff, dramatically slashed the hours of their full-time workers and taken a 50% pay-cut.

The last time the two sides met, in early 2010, Cooper Union was unwilling to budge on the rent, which is currently $20,000 a month.

The website Jeremiah's Vanishing New York reports this week on the continuing fiscal threat to St. Mark's. A decision was expected to be announced Friday, but apparently has been delayed: the St. Mark's Books rent decision won't come today. The owners tell me that Cooper is giving the request "serious consideration," have referred the matter to Finance, "and we should expect to hear back from them by the end of October." That means there's still time to buy lots of books and boost the shop's sales and spirits.

In an earlier post the blog's curator, Jeremiah Moss, noted the change in municipal and university attitudes:

What has changed in this city since 1997 that Cooper Union could permit St. Mark's Bookshop to fail in hard times? What has changed that Cooper Union, where people who ostensibly value "matters of the mind," would not value its neighboring bookstore enough to keep it alive and thriving? What has changed that the East Village could become a university neighborhood (Cooper, NYU, SVA) without its own high-quality bookstore?

In 1997, Columbia's provost stated: "It is especially important, it seems to me, that universities offer some form of support to keep this kind of bookstore in existence."

So what has changed in this city between 1997 and today? (And it's not just about Apple and Amazon.)

Terry McCoy and Bob Contant,

owners of St. Mark's

Here is an open letter Moss recently posted to Cooper Union that outlines the current situation. In a subsequent post Moss indicated the petition to maintain St. Marks has now been endorsed with 34,000 signatures.

Dear Cooper Union:

Today you are meeting with the owners of the St. Mark's Bookshop to discuss a rent reduction that would keep this invaluable business afloat. So far, the owners say, you have not been "particularly sympathetic" to the situation.

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 1994 when you leased a gas station to the Bowery Bar, helping to set in motion a tsunami of hyper-gentrification. Bowery Bar's neighbor (gone now) put a lighted sign in his window saying, "Cooper Union: How could you do this to us?" More protesters responded, "Don't Party on the Poor." But the party raged on.

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 2000 when you leased the Astor Place parking lot for a luxury hotel that turned into a luxury condo tower--one that opened the door for more massive development in the East Village. One of your own faculty members at the time told the Observer, "[Peter Cooper] would die again if he knew what was going on. For him to find out what his legacy turned out to be, he would be appalled. He was never one for pure mercenary gain. It’s all about money, money, money."

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 2001 when you tried to demap Taras Shevchenko Place and the Ukrainians of the East Village fought back.

You weren't particularly sympathetic in 2004 when you painted over a popular 9/11 mural to make space for advertising on 35 Cooper Square. That little building was later sold to developers and demolished against more protests.

You aren't being particularly sympathetic now in your current plans to turn Astor Place into a corporate office park. The neighborhood has been fighting those plans for the past decade to no avail.

Even though, as we understand it, you make a mint on the Chrysler Building, which stands on your property and reportedly costs the city $8 million every year, you keep finding ways to make more money from the East Village. As New York Magazine put it, you have "helped to corporatize a once raffish and still artistically fertile area." People are angry. We have lost too much. We cannot lose one of the best bookstores in the city--a place that fuels the soul in an increasingly soulless neighborhood.

As of this writing, more than 24,000 people have signed the petition to save St. Mark's Bookshop. Will you be sympathetic to that enormous outcry? I hope you will surprise us and grant their request, but your track record does not inspire optimism.

A few years ago, I was inspired by a story in the documentary film Twilight Becomes Night. A group of Upper West Siders saved their local pharmacy from eviction by calling the bank that planned to move into the space, and telling them, "We will not use your services." The bank backed off. Suba Pharmacy still stands. So here's an idea: If St. Mark's Books is forced to close due to unyielding rent, whatever business moves into their space at 31 Third Avenue will be boycotted and protested by the thousands of people who read this blog and all the blogs connected to it. Nothing will thrive there --no bank, no cupcake shop, no kitten adoption center.

I'm sorry, but I can't be more sympathetic.

Sincerely,
Vanishing New York

(file photo of McCoy and Contant from The New York Daily News)

Burroughs: "the only important function for people is to feed their cats"

That unlikely cat-fancier William Burroughs found in their feline company an antidote to depression and suicide, and at the very least wondered what might happen to his companions when he was no longer able to care for them. Such tender mercies he extended to few in the human condition.

Online at Exquisite Corpse, Simone Ellis presents an interview with Burroughs that was done in 1989. As ever WSB strikes his favorite pose of irascible sage, which became his favorite guise to interviewers as he grew older. The author ofThe Cat Inside -- who was host to a succession of cat-familiars and other hangers-on -- found despair the unforgivable sin and worked on multiple projects to keep himself from peering into the inevitable abyss.

Here's Burroughs, worrying about the future welfare of his cats, amid the far-ranging chat from Egyptian hieroglyphics to spotting alien spacecraft:

WSB: Do you know that famous story about the Zen Master who appeared before the Emperor with his paintings? He bowed three times and disappeared into his paintings.

SE: ah ya. (laughs) do you think that will ever happen to you? Or does it often happen to you?

WSB: I hope. I hope. Yeah. (long pause) You know… I think the only really important function for people is to feed their … cats.

SE: (slightly uneasy laugh)

WSB: That would bother me more than anything else... when I pass. If I should die? That’s what would deter me from suicide… My cats … my cats … what would happen to my cats?

SE (an audible sigh, and then quickly …) Not that you’re gonna…. (Simultaneous with his reply…)

WSB: Not that I ever … everyone looks at me reeel funny when I say that I have never considered suicide.

SE: Never considered it?

WSB: Never considered it.

SE: … huh.

WSB: Never considered it.

SE: But you’ve haven’t always had cats, William?

WSB: uh… oh….no… well… I ...

SE: …but you had other reasons?

WSB: Well humm, I never considered suicide. Well whether you consider that there is a life after death or whether you don’t, I don’t see how suicide could be other than deleterious to your ummmm … chances.

SE: Deleterious?

WSB: Yes! I mean say you believe in life after death and you’ve committed suicide, what you’ve done is you have admitted the unforgivable sin of despair…

SE: (chuckles)

WSB: … that is you have not tried to come to grips with whatever problems that you’ve had. ...

"Poem to be Sung" (Donald Harris Jr., 1938-2011)

Donald Harris, Jr.

"Poem to be Sung"

(Donald Harris Jr.)

I've got those weary worn out run down blues, which comes from walking too long in the same damn shoes. Well, I might blame my mama, but she done gone insane, or I might blame my daddy, but he done put a bullet through his brain. So I may as well thump and bump and jump the stump; but why does I always come out feeling like a donkey's rump? Maybe you think I should be eating worms and flies and maggots, until worms and flies and maggots are eating all on me. Well, let me tell you, lady, I ain't nowhere near the fool I used to be. Oh in frightening dreams I see Ezekial's wheel a whirling down on me, and like the harpist of Israel said I shed tears upon my bed, tears of bread to eat, tears in the withering heat. How many tears are shed for many men done gone where the turbid Mississippi flows? Oh who can hear the wail of weeping in the wind, the splashing of rain, the plashing of tears, the dull thudding of a grieving heart? Oh my little darlin' has a mighty fine oven that can bake my loaf of bread, but if she ain't in the mood for cookin', she can leave my weenie hangin' limp instead. Oh how terrible to be a lonesome me. But I loves to see her do her waggle dance, when she wants to show the way to the honey in her hive.

Athens poet and unique wordsmith Donald Harris Jr. died on September 20th at the age of 73. "Poem to be Sung" was performed at the September 7th Word of Mouth reading at The Globe in Athens, with Donald -- as the title indicates -- singing in a warm and wobbly tenor that surprised everyone, perhaps Donald most of all. Audio of Donald's poems, along with other poems and performances, is available at the Word of Mouth website.

Anyone who knew Donald would tell you his shy introspective character and unassuming onstage delivery hid a sharp wit and incredible attachment to all forms of the human condition. For those who are in the Athens area, the funeral plans are as follows: There is a visitation on Friday the 23rd from 6-8 pm at Bernstein Funeral home at 3195 Atlanta Highway in Athens. The funeral is the next day, Saturday the 24th at 11 am at the same funeral home and the burial is at 2 pm at Shiloh Baptist Church at 9595 Hwy 142 in Newborn GA.

Tom McCarthy and "C": cyphers, cocaine, and cryptic plots

C, by Tom McCarthy -- just out in paperback -- was nominated for the 2010 Man Booker prize. McCarthy's third novel is a roller-coaster fiction of history, technology, drugs, and the occult that manages to be equally confounding and funny in a detached, distant writing style readers find variously frustrating, flat, or provocative. In short, the book is in danger of becoming worthy of the "experimental fiction" tag McCarthy earned from the slow-building success of his first novel, Remainder (2007).

An admiring Guardian UK reviewer called C "a 1960's-style anti-novel," one that reflects the word-play and idea-layering techniques of Beckett, Burroughs, and Joyce. Those are comparisons that can swing in multiple directions: Michiko Kakutani, in a New York Times review, called these same reference points disappointing, derivative, and contrived.

McCarthy recently said of the novel's shattered plot and near-Edwardian prose settings that the four-year writing process was a difficult start:

Once you get past that point of critical velocity or whatever, the whole project flies ... I was thinking about death and mourning, and researching the history of wireless, i.e., thinking about crypts and encryption, and the idea for the novel came to me reading about first world war pilots and early radio buffs and 1920s drug-fiends. C is absolutely not a "historical novel" (it's about new media and empire -- i.e., about now), but all the same it's set during that period and the research was real fun.

In simplest outline, Serge Carrefax is born in 1898 on an estate named Versoie in southern England. In World War I, he's a wireless operator in spotter planes over the front -- an experience he enjoys, in a Futurist kind of way.

Having acquired a taste for cocaine and heroin, he turns up next in London after the war, studying architecture and tangling with flappers and fraudulent spiritualists. At novel's end, in 1922, he's sent to Egypt to help set up a world-spanning imperial communications network. It's a task that takes him to an archaeological dig in Cairo. Christopher Tayler, The Guardian UK reviewer, describes this modernist, mysterioso interlude as a point "where McCarthy dispenses a few of the keys to what is, by this stage, an immense symbolic superstructure."

Admittedly the story -- and its conflicted, cocaine-sniffing hero -- isn't intended as a chart-topping Dan Brown style potboiler, and the author is pointed in saying so. McCarthy's writing has a sort of backward-glancing, almost leisurely charm about it that makes C more about the telling than the tale -- an early 20th-century story where the secure and horse-drawn past is about to collide with an unexpected and twisted future.

Here's a short excerpt from the novel's first chapter; C has just been published in paperback by Vintage Books.

Dr. Learmont, newly appointed general practitioner for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, rocks and jolts on the front seat of a trap as it descends the lightly sloping path of Versoie House. He has sore buttocks: the seat's hard and uncushioned. His companion, Mr. Dean of Hudson and Dean Deliveries (Lydium and Environs Since 1868), doesn't seem to feel any discomfort. His glazed eyes stare vaguely ahead; his leathery hands, reins woven through their fingers, hover just above his knees.

The rattle of glass bottles and the fricative rasp of copper wire against more copper wire rise from the trap's back and, mixing with the click and shuffle of the horse's hooves on gravel, hang undisturbed about the still September air. Above the vehicle tall conifers rise straight and inert as columns. Higher, much further out, black birds whirr silently beneath a concave vault of sky. Between the doctor's legs are wedged a brown case and a black inhaling apparatus. In his hand he holds a yellow piece of paper. He's scrutinising this, perplexed, as best he can.

From time to time he glances up from it to peer through the curtain of conifers, which reveal, then quickly conceal again, glimpses of mown grass and rows of smaller trees with white fruit and green and red foliage. There's movement around these: small limbs reaching, touching and separating in a semi-regular pattern, as though practising a butterfly or breaststroke. The trap rolls through a hanging pall of wood smoke, then turns, clearing the conifers.

Now Learmont can see that the limbs belong to children, four or five of them, playing some kind of game. They stand in a loose circle, raising their arms and patting their hands together. Their lips are moving, but no sound's emerging from them. Occasionally a squawk of laughter ricochets around the orchard, but it's hard to tell which child it's coming from. Besides, the laughter doesn't sound quite right. It sounds distorted, slightly warped—ventriloquised almost, as though piped in from somewhere else. None of the children seem to notice his arrival; none of them, in fact, seem to be aware of their own individual presence outside and beyond that of the moving circle, their separateness given over to its fleshy choreography of multiplied, entwining bodies.

Without jerking the reins or speaking to the horse, Mr. Dean pulls the trap to a halt. Beside it, to its right, a narrow, still stream lies in front of a tall garden wall over which, from the far side, ferns and wisteria are spilling. To the trap's left, a veined set of rose-bush stems and branches, flowers gone, clings to another wall. The wood-smoke pall comes from beyond this. So, too, does an old man with a rake, emerging from a doorway in the wall to shunt a wheelbarrow across the gravel.

"Hello!" Learmont calls out to him. "Hello?"

The old man stops, sets down his wheelbarrow and looks back at Learmont. "Can you tell me where to find the main house? The entrance?"

The old man gestures with his free hand: over there. Then, taking up the handle of his wheelbarrow once more, he shuffles past the trap towards the orchard. Learmont listens as his footsteps die away. Eventually he turns to Mr. Dean and says: "Silent as a tomb."

Mr. Dean shrugs. Dr. Learmont climbs down onto the gravel, shakes his legs and looks around. The old man seemed to be pointing beyond the overspilling garden wall. This, too, has a small doorway in it.

"Why don't you wait here?" Learmont suggests to Mr. Dean. "I'll go and find—" he holds his yellow paper up and scrutinises it again—"this Mr. Carrefax."

Mr. Dean nods. Dr. Learmont takes his case and inhaler, steps onto a strip of grass and crosses a small wooden bridge above the moat-like stream. Then, lowering his head beneath wisteria that manage to brush it nonetheless, he walks through the doorway.

Inside the garden are chrysanthemums, irises, tulips and anemones, all stacked and tumbling over one another on both sides of a path of uneven mosaic paving stones. Learmont follows the path towards a passageway formed by hedges and a roof of trellis strung with poisonberries and some kind of wiry, light-brown vine whose strands lead off to what look like stables. As he nears the passageway, he can hear a buzzing sound.

"An Investigation of the Stone and the Shadow," Giorgio Aramben (1968)

"An Investigation of the Stone and the Shadow"

(Giorgio Aramben)

The Lion dreams
and dreams the Rose.
The Rose dreams
and dreams the King.
The King dreams
and dreams the law.
The law dreams
and dreams grace.
Grace dreams
and dreams the circle.
The circle dreams
and dreams the line.
The line dreams
and dreams pain.
Pain dreams
and dreams the scale.
The scale dreams
and dreams the shadow.
The shadow dreams
and dreams Gold.
Gold dreams
and dreams the stone.
The stone dreams
and dreams the serpent.
The serpent dreams
and dreams poison.
Poison dreams
and dreams death.
Death dreams
and dreams destiny.
Destiny dreams
and dreams life.
Life dreams
and dreams the mask.
The mask dreams
and dreams god.
God dreams
and dreams the word.
The word dreams
and dreams the Rose.
The Rose dreams
and dreams man.

Man dreams
and dreams the stone.

"An Investigation of the Stone and the Shadow," written in 1968 by Giorgio Aramben, originally appeared in Nuovi Argomenti (no. 11) and was posted in Notes for the Coming Community, curated by David Kishik, in 2008.

An excerpt from "Crowded by Beauty," a new biography of Philip Whalen

Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen

Here is an excerpt from Crowded by Beauty: A Biography of Poet and Zen Teacher Philip Whalen, by David Schneider, forthcoming from University of California Press. A longer extract is published in the current issue of Trticycle magazine.

Whalen, along with Gary Snyder, was integral in the San Francisco group of poets who read at the Six Gallery in 1955. They were introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, a San Francisco poet of an older generation, who was a kind of literary father-figure for the younger poets and had helped to establish their burgeoning community through personal introductions at his weekly poetry readings. That night, Snyder read "A Berry Feast", and Whalen,"Plus Ca Change."

This excerpt describes Whalen's experience living as Snyder's roommate in 1952. Whalen eventually followed Snyder to become a Forest Service lookout, although as Schneider notes, Whalen "was much given, even then, to the sedentary life."

...Philip might never have found work in the mountains: sitting in that same Telegraph Hill apartment in the hot summer of 1952, Whalen read one of Gary’s regular letters, this one from a Forest Service lookout on Crater Mountain in the North Cascades of Washington State. Provoked by it, and by working (“bad anytime, but especially nasty in summer in the city”), Whalen wrote back to declare, “By God, next summer, I’m going to have a mountain of my own!”

This he did; then got another mountain the following year, and spent a third summer as a forest lookout the year after that, making this by far his steadiest, most satisfying job until many years later, when he became a “professional” man of the cloth—that is, a Zen priest. Whalen would never have read in the historic Six Gallery reading had not Snyder put Philip’s name and poems literally in front of Allen Ginsberg’s face. Philip certainly would have floundered longer with unemployment and flirted more dangerously with outright homelessness had Gary not taken care of him whenever the two were in the same town at the same time.

They roomed together in San Francisco off and on from 1952 to 1954 in a flat on Montgomery Street, above the city’s North Beach district, to which they descended together nearly nightly for beer at Vesuvio and other drinking establishments. Thus Philip and Gary came to know the writers, players, merchants, philosophers, painters, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars circling around the Bay Area in the gestation phase of the San Francisco Renaissance.

During this same period, Snyder and Whalen began going together to the American Academy of Asian Studies (now the California Institute of Integral Studies), where they heard and met Alan Watts, and later also D. T. Suzuki. From among the audiences there, they got to know Claude (Ananda) Dahlenberg, who cofounded the East-West House and later became an ordained Zen priest under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. And from connections there, they began attending the regular Friday evening literary gatherings held at his home by the poet Kenneth Rexroth.

Snyder, Whalen and Lew Welch

Other Friday evenings found Whalen and Snyder in Berkeley for the study group with Rev. Kanmo Imamura and Jane Imamura at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. Together the Imamuras were descended from the most important old families of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, yet they welcomed the young men, going so far in the subsequent years as to turn their little church publication—theBerkeley Bussei—over to the artist Will Petersen for a time. Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all published early poems in its pages. The benevolent Imamura family gave both Snyder and Whalen their first contact with people actually practicing Buddhism instead of purely discussing its philosophies and traditions.

Whalen might have made his way out to the Academy or over to the study group without Snyder’s impetus, but Philip was much given, even then, to the sedentary life. As long as he could, he spent hours each day reading, writing, drawing, playing music, doodling, staring into space—wondering from time to time where and how he could find a job that wouldn’t drive him crazy. He ventured out when he needed to—for cigarettes or food or for fresh air—but he had nothing like the get-up-and-go Gary had. It is, in fact, difficult to think of anyone with the drive and sense of adventure the young Snyder had.

These qualities propelled him up mountains, up trees, down the hole of tankers, out into deserts, back into libraries, into universities, into monasteries, across the country, out of the country, across oceans; they armored him against the many outer and inner obstacles an un-moneyed young man might encounter in such travels; they sustained him as he went where he needed to go, saw what he wanted to see, studied what, and with whom, he needed to study, worked as he had to, and cut loose when he could. ...

Photos: (top) Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen sit outside a temple above the village of Shimoyama in Japan(Brancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). (bottom) Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch before a poerty reading at Longshoreman's Hall (Photograph by Jim Hatch).

From the notebooks of Philip Whalen, in Big Bridge magazine

Here are excerpts from a collection featuring the art and transcriptions of Philip Whalen, with an introduction by Brian Unger, appearing in the current online journal Big Bridge. As Unger is careful to point out, "no subsequent edition of any original work is ever final or complete. And no new edition is ever a substitute for the original. The textual history of a worthwhile literary work necessarily continues, and continues, and continues." This is especially true when dealing with a hand-written and illustrated manuscript in what Unger refers to as Whalen's "arrighi calligraphy style." For more of Whalen's work, there is Michael Rothenberg's large volume The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, published by Wesleyan University Press (2007). Most of these poems appearing at Big Bridgehave not been previously available.

From Brian Unger's introduction: The following excerpts and images from the journals of Philip Whalen have been transcribed and reproduced from the poet's archive in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. For the material featured here in Big Bridge, I selected a brief but fascinating section from one of the 'Kyoto Notebooks' found in the Notebooks, 1957 – arrighi 1990, Box 1, folder 10. Physically, this particular object is rather typical for Whalen, one of those small writing tablets with a faux marble cover, 8" by 10", common in elementary and secondary school classrooms in the 1950s and 60s.

If you are a fan of Philip Whalen's work the journals are a profound joy to peruse, and if you are a student of the Beat Generation or of American Buddhist literature, these journals are an indispensable lens into the life of a late 20th century American Zen monk-poet and his circle. Whalen's journals embody a literary project far removed from, for example, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, written around the same time. In retrospect, Merton's ruminations and meditations seem to reflect the positivist, ecumenical optimism of the period in American Zen dominated by Columbia University lecturer D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966). ...

OM VAGĪŚVARI MŪM

8 : IX : 67

ran lunatic in the midst of our canoeing trip, had to tie him

up & sit on him in the bottom of the canoe in the daytime, tie

him to a tree at night and he kept talking and laughing and cussing

the whole time we put a gag on him one night so we could get some rest

from his noise but pretty soon he had eaten and swallowed it all some way

or other we were afraid to try that again because he might get all fouled

up with all the cloth inside then he had to get loose a couple times and

we almost lost him completely hunting for him through the brush and timber

we never would have found him except for his talking and we never did catch

him asleep from the time he first started acting funny

Philip Whalen

10 : IX : 67

Dreams of all my family at the cabin

in the woods, from the time the car turns

off the highway the clay bank hillside and

ferns appear as in passing lighthouse beam

then down sloping fir tree tunnel and

so to the house. Who was driving the

car? Dick Anderson, Clarence Thompson—

a friend of mine they never saw, or

some friend from earlier school days

we arrive, my grandmother is delighted,

all the rest jostling and roaring per

usual

Just now I read my mother's

Name in a poem by the Earl of Rochester,

Pepsicola in Japan.

TRIBUTE

to Wallace Stevens. I never should

have left the U.S.A. without copies of

all his poems.