Whitman: the "grandfather of literary Booklyn": an excerpt from the book by Evan Hughes

(Bellemeade Books is running a series of gift suggestions from this year's posts.)

Evan Hughes' new book Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life surveys the writers' landscape of the borough, home at times over the years to authors as varied as Hart Crane, Richard Wright, Thomas Wolfe, and Henry Miller. Walt Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle during his years there before the Civil War and was uncertain of the future for the American experiment. Here is an excerpt from Hughes' chapter "The Grandfather of Literary Brooklyn":

... Around him Whitman increasingly saw corruption and “a general laxity of morals” that “pervades all classes.” His empathy for the masses was being stretched to the limit by the increasingly chaotic nature of urban life. The political battles in the metropolitan area were fierce enough to explode into physical violence, as they did in Manhattan in 1857 when the Dead Rabbits, a gang allied with the Democratic Party, clashed with the nativist Bowery Boys, leaving eight dead and thirty wounded.

Later that year, Whitman would write, “Mobs and murderers appear to rule the hour.” Whitman sought, in Leaves of Grass, to channel all voices, to encompass all things — “I am large, I contain multitudes” — and thus, as biographer David Reynolds has suggested, to apply a kind of unity and a healing balm to the republic. If Whitman could say, “I am all people,” implicit was that we were all one people. It was a belief and hope that would be put to the most severe test within a decade of the first Leaves of Grass.

The social ills of the city echoed a looming national crisis. In the late 1850s, Whitman, in a gloomy period, wrote the elegiac poems “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” both of which he added to the 1860 edition of Leaves. In that year, Whitman, ever a self-appointed “seer” and often a very good one, also wrote this line in a poem called “Year of Meteors (1859–60)”: “O year all mottled with evil and good — year of forebodings!” New York was divided over slavery and over Abraham Lincoln, but when the Civil War finally broke out, many Brooklynites, New Yorkers, and northerners generally, including Whitman, welcomed what they saw as a coming cleansing of the nation.

At the outset, Whitman watched exultant, blue-clad troops marching through Brooklyn, near where he and his family now lived, on Portland Avenue. The men had ropes tied to their muskets, in his words, “with which to bring back each man a prisoner from the audacious South, to be led in a noose, on our men’s early and triumphant return!” Walt’s brother George went off to war at once.

In 1863, writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, his old paper, Walt wrote an article about George’s regiment called “Our Brooklyn Boys in the War.” Full of local pride, it said that in fourteen months the regiment had been in seven pitched battles, “some of them as important as any in American history.” Vague word of George’s injury at Fredericksburg in 1863 drew Walt to the front to find him. The wound was minor, but the sight of the war dead left a strong impression.

Soon after, Whitman moved to Washington and, while serving in government jobs, tended to the wounded as a hospital volunteer. Although he envisioned a short stay, he would remain in Washington for ten years. Over the course of the war, Whitman, who had been opposed to Lincoln’s candidacy in the Illinois Senate race of 1858, emerged as a devout convert. Lincoln became his political hero and probably his utmost hero of all. Whitman felt that Lincoln supplanted George Washington as the true democratic father of the country.

Whitman in 1848

Whitman rejoiced at the rise of a man who embodied, he felt, “the commonest average of life—a rail splitter and a flat-boatsman!” Whitman devoted four poems to the president and called him “the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality” in American life. Whitman’s two most famous Lincoln poems are the celebratory “O Captain! My Captain!” and the grave “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” both published after the president’s death, and added to late editions of Leaves of Grass.

Each is bold and emotionally raw, perhaps too much so, moving away from the incantatory hymns of his earlier verses into a tone of exaltation and almost rapturous grief — “But O heart! heart! heart! / O the bleeding drops of red.” David Reynolds has suggested that Whitman saw not only something of himself in Lincoln but something of the healing “I” that Whitman created in Leaves of Grass, a man who absorbed all and brought union.

What Whitman also found captivating was that Lincoln was “essentially non-conventional,” that he embodied the American spirit by taking unpopular positions. He didn’t care if he was the underdog. Often he liked it.

And so, too, did Whitman. After his time in Washington, during which he visited Brooklyn only for short periods, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his brother George had settled, taking a room in his house. Now distant both physically and temporally from his farmhouse roots and his father’s working-class struggles in Brooklyn, Whitman became in a certain sense more conservative, as some do in old age.

At times he granted that the raffish youth pictured in the lithograph from Leaves of Grass — a thirtysomething firebrand who wrote, “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” — was no longer the same man. As his work slowly gained some acceptance and acclaim, he enjoyed the fruits of his work, giving speeches, granting audiences, and generally curating his legacy.

Back home in Brooklyn, the workings of the American republic, though often crooked and halting, were bringing more and more newcomers and an ever-greater frenzy of activity. A bridge was being built, not only a grand bridge across the East River but a bridge to modernity. The Brooklyn Whitman knew as a child was long gone, and the Brooklyn of his pre–Civil War adulthood was fading from memory, too. Yet the democratic spirit Whitman had given voice to and the urge to capture the whole of America would echo down through the decades, continuing to breathe life into the place and its literary tradition.

More about Whitman's life in Brooklyn and the era's architecture and history is at the Whitman's Brooklyn site, curated by Russell Granger. Literary Brooklyn is published by Henry Holt & Co.

"WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency:" Julien Assange, Robin Hood or boogeyman?

(Bellemeade Books is publishing some gift suggestions from this year's posts.)

Some books you hate, some books you love. Do you know why?

Beyond the simplicity of "I know what I like" there is the active principle of thought and consideration. And that's what makes Amazon's book reviews so utterly fascinating. Moby Dick? Snow Crash? Eat Pray Love? C'mon, reading reviews at Amazon is a guilty pleasure for many readers with lit'ry inclinations. Or for fanboys. Or for moms looking for love with gilded foil covers. Takes all kinds to make the publishing business survive, same as it ever was.

Add a gloss of contemporary topic with strong opinions, publish a book, and stand back while partisan readers have at it. One star or five? Some books preach at the choir, other books screech at them. Personally, I find Sean Hannity's books (for one) funny, entertaining -- and a slab of unfried bacon thrown in a hungry pen of pit bulls: his fans gobble up the morsels of incorrect and grossly-distorted facts and spin them back out on social media sites. And 2012 promises to bring the heat.

But politics is such an easy target for choosing sides. How about the more complex topic of national security? WikiLeaks .... now there's a topic. Judging by America's national media Julien Assange is the best security boogeyman to come along since Osama bin Laden. And yet ...

What, exactly, has WikiLeaks put in jeopardy?

Julien would make an excellent CNN host, a counterweight to Anderson Cooper. Give him the 8 pm Monday-through-Friday slot and people would .... tune out after a day. His (admirable) dead-on earnestness would be a ratings killer and the entire security-threat of his WikiLeaks activity would be neutralized within a month. Even if WikiLeaks documents disclosed that Barack Obama was a cross-dressing paramour of Sarah Palin, who would care? Except Sean Hannity, of course.

Julien Assange, dashing scary foreigner

But still, as a dashing Robin Hood figure of the information age, Assange makes good copy in a way that poor Bradley Manning, who provided the State Department documents to WikiLeaks, does not. That's the difference between swashbuckling on your own and being on the U.S. Army payroll.

Even reviews of books about WikiLeaks can only bring half-hearted condemnation from most quarters. National security as threatened by a man in a bespoke suit seems less dangerous, apparently, than Michael Moore with a CAT hat and a bullhorn. Here's a three-star Amazon review that, in total, sums up the general attitude toward that slim fellow being hounded around the globe for disclosing the facts: Berlisconi likes to party. Sarkozy, ditto.

Nothing by WikiLeaks about Rupert Murdoch yet, darn it. (We're waiting, WikiLeaks.) Here's the Amazon three-star, by mirasreview, of WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, by Micah Sifry. The reviewer lives in McLaean, Virgina -- the home base of the CIA, no less.

"Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency" is an introduction to the transparency or information activist movement by Micah Sifry, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) and the Sunlight Foundation, with a forward by PdF's co-founder Andrew Rasiej. It is not a treatise on Wikileaks but an overview of the political successes, failures, and the author's hopes for the new transparency and connectivity afforded by the internet.

There is a teaser regarding Sifry's first encounter with Julian Assange in Chapter 1, but Wikileaks is not discussed again until Chapter 7. Then Chapter 8 is dedicated entirely to Sifry's opinion of the organization.

Sifry is a transparency activist in the cause of "open source politics" or "collaborative government" specifically. Democracy-with-a-small-d. He views the emerging role of the citizen as an "active player" rather than a "passive consumer" of political information, enabled by the internet, and he cites some impressive examples of crowd-sourced projects that have had political impact. He goes on to criticize the Obama administration in the US and the Cameron administration in the UK for spewing empty rhetoric about transparency, though there are individual politicians in both countries who have embraced two-way communication with their constituents.

It's important to understand that Micah Sifry views transparency, whistleblowing, and the like as a means to collaborative government, not to anything else. This explains the narrow scope of this book, his comments about Wikileaks, and a certain naïveté. ...

I knew before I read "WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency" that Micah Sifry was a supporter of WikiLeaks but a critic of Julian Assange. Now I understand why. Sifry offers the usual criticisms of Assange's "autocratic" management style. Ironically, Sifry's own comments make a strong case against a more democratic structure for Wikileaks. Julian Assange has been very successful at uniting an ideologically diverse group of people to work toward a common goal --without agreeing on what that goal is -- a feat for which he does not get enough credit. It only occasionally backfires, as in Daniel Domscheit-Berg's acrimonious split from the organization.

Micah Sifry

Sifry says that "it's far from clear that Assange is just interested in exposing oppressive and unethical behavior." I should hope not. Exposing corruption is well and good, but it doesn't scale, and it's hardly revolutionary. I'm bewildered by people like Sifry who think WikiLeaks should adopt their values rather than Assange's. It makes me grateful for Assange's iron grip on strategy. But that isn't why I give this book a mediocre rating. It is, at times, little more than a list of transparency's successes and failures, without analysis. It's superficial and simplistic. It might serve adequately as an introduction to one version of information activism, but I suspect the book is preaching to the choir.

Woah, that is indeed scary stuff for national security: a condemnation of, basically, a typically uptight corporate manager. If Assange would make WikiLeaks public, give the organization an initial public offering, and let that mysterious free hand of capitalism work its wonder, there would go its threat to national security. It's time to move on and investigate real threats to American safety -- like Sean Hannity's publishing contract.

Otto Soglow's "The Little King" receives his royal due

The Little King, 1946

(This week, Bellemeade Books publishes gift suggestions from this year's reviews.)

The Little King would be surprised at the size of the new book dedicated to his simple cartoon antics.

Cartoonist Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was born in New York City. In his own words, his first art job was "painting forget-me-nots on baby rattles." He studied with John Sloane at the Art Students League, and sold his first drawings to pulp magazines. In the late 1920s, his social-realist drawings were appearing in such radical publications as The New Masses and The Liberator, as well as the Life and Collier's.

In 1931 he created The Little King while at The New Yorker, and three years later, the strip moved to the Sunday comics pages of King Features Syndicate. He illustrated about twenty-five books and continued drawing The Little King until his death.

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King features 432 pages of Soglow's The Little King, plus the complete run of The Ambassador, the strip that preceded the King in the comics pages, as well as copious examples of his other artwork. Here's more from the Library of American Comics site:

The Little King is a monarch who sits stiffly on the throne but bursts into life at the sight of a hotdog stand or at the approach of a rowdy mob. He is a man of the people who has somehow found himself on the wrong side of the palace steps, but he makes the most of it, trying to do right by his office and find what pleasures he can at the absurd outer reaches of his daily rituals.

It was often said that Otto Soglow resembled his creation, and he did nothing to disabuse people of that notion as he regularly performed in character throughout his career. As is explored in this volume, the resemblance was more than merely physical: like his most famous creation, Soglow was a man whose origins and political sensibilities were always with the working man on the street—and even the angry mob.

Above: Soglow in 1933, from an animated short.

Yet while he began his career as a radical artist publishing in The New Masses and The Liberator, a decade later he was working for William Randolph Hearst and creating advertisements for Pepsi Cola and oil companies. The Little King is born out of the tension between his political idealism and his professional ambitions.

... Much of the humor in The Little King is aimed at puncturing pomposity and, as Ivan Brunetti points out in his Foreword, Soglow accomplishes it with drawings that are tightly composed, exquisitely timed, carefully structured pieces of machinery. "His process of streamlining is at the root of why his cartoons have a timeless sophistication and elegance," writes Brunetti, "and continue to entice new readers and cartoonists." ....

The Little King art from (top) Independent Online Booksellers Association and (middle) The Ephemerist. Video clip from Mike Lynch Cartoons.

"Fug You:" Ed Sanders, the lion in winter, still howling

(BellemeadeBooks is posting a selection of holiday gift suggestions from this year's reviews.)


Calling Ed Sanders a "lion in winter" these days (he's 72 now) would probably solicit more a laugh than a growl from the one-time publisher of a review called "Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts." But then he liked to add a gleam of mischief to his creative mix of ideas even in the heady 1960s. 

Musician, writer, bookstore-owner, publisher -- and, occasionally, all at the same time -- Ed's still out swinging the hammer as the online publisher of The Woodstock Journal: "working for an organic food supply, safe air, nonpolluted water, a total end to poverty, national health care, personal freedom and fun." America needs his voice as much as ever (and maybe more: his recorded projects include Thirsting for Peace, 2005, and Poems for New Orleans, 2007). These days boutiques, high-rises, chain caffeine and furniture stores have replaced the storefront mimeograph-revolution barricades. Ed's 1991 self-produced "Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side" is a poetic retelling of an even older East Side history -- New York isn't what it used to be, either. 

His new memoir Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, The Fugs, and the Counterculture in the Lower East Side (DaCapo Press) is a freewheeling history of a creative era that has pretty much disappeared into legend and myth. Here's an excerpt.

The Founding of My Magazine

I founded Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts in February 1962 after a bunch of us, mostly friends from the Catholic Worker, went to see Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees at the Charles Theater on Avenue B. I was there mainly because the ad for the film in the Village Voice stated that my hero Allen Ginsberg was in it. For years I had avidly read Jonas Mekas’s weekly Voice column, “Movie Journal,” which mainly focused on the struggles and delights of the world of underground films.

I sensed from reading Mekas’s weekly columns that he was a person of great generosity and communality of spirit. That is, it wasn’t all Me! Me! Me! as in so much of the avant-garde. I thought he had a genuine will to help other filmmakers thrive and survive. I later learned that Mekas had paid for the printing of Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures.

Mekas had just founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and lived nearby on Twelfth Street, although I didn’t know that while I was watching Guns of the Trees. The Lower East Side in those years was a Do-It-Now zone, and you knew maybe only a snippet of someone’s history or scene, if anything at all. All I knew is that the first thing I read each week in the Voice was “Movie Journal.”

I was particularly fascinated by the appearance of Allen Ginsberg as a narrator in the film. I had not yet met Ginsberg, although I had memorized “Howl” when I was still in Missouri in 1957, and I had seen him at Beat/New York School readings, such as one in November 1959 where he read at the Living Theater with Frank O’Hara. Wow. As I sat fascinated in the Charles Theater that February night with my pals, I never could have dreamed that the author of “Howl” and “Kaddish” would become a close friend.

At one point in Guns of the Trees Ginsberg chanted one of his poems with the sentence “I dreamt that J. Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hall of the Capitol.” It was a fragment that opened up such huge vistas of possibility in my mind! I transformed the fragment into the dedication for my soon-to-be-published magazine.

Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Just as Allen Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926 (and not near the Dniester River in Russia) because the pogroms in the Russian Pale, first in the 1880s and later around the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1904, drove his mother’s and father’s families to the American Dream, so, too, were Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, driven from Lithuania to the United States, this time in their case by the Nazis. In the early 1940s Jonas and Adolfas put out a mimeographed anti-Nazi newspaper, cutting stencils on a typewriter in a woodshed behind their house in Semeniskiai in Lithuania. Later they escaped from a German slave labor camp.

In 1949 they arrived in the United States, where both of them became filmmakers. In 1955 Jonas founded the magazine Film Culture. In the fall of 1958 he began his very influential weekly column, “Movie Journal,” in the Village Voice. In the summer of 1960 the Mekas brothers purchased some out-of-date film stock and began their feature-length film Guns of the Trees. Jonas wrote the script.

Mekas formed the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in early 1962 after another film distribution operation refused to screen a film by Stan Brakhage, Anticipation of the Night. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative practiced no censorship at all, and 75 percent of the rental fees for showing a film went directly to the filmmaker. And so in early 1962 the Charles Theater on Avenue B near Twelfth Street began showing underground films. Some of us from nearby streets eagerly attended.

Across the street was Stanley’s, a packed bar frequented by poets, civil rights activists, filmmakers, painters, and oodles of others from the nearby rent-controlled buildings. After Guns of the Trees my friends and I adjourned to Stanley’s for conversation and fun. Inspired by the film, I announced that evening that I was beginning a magazine and I solicited manuscripts. The name I tossed out among the revelers made them laugh. It had been in my mind a number of years.

Excerpted from "Chapter 1: The Glories of the Early ‘60s" in Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side, by Ed Sanders. The book is published by DaCapo Press.

Cheers, Keith! (born 18 December 1943)

(Bellemeade Books is posting a series of holiday gift ideas from this year's posts.)

"I'm gonna booglarize you baby ... "

(Captain Beefheart, 1972)

As difficult as it is to believe in the 21st century, rock music was once a dangerous and provocative force in the booglarizing of America. The age from Elvis through the Rolling Stones were years and years of sheer terror for parents and politicians throughout the land, and even if the floor-shaking noises coming from the upstairs bedrooms of America were the sounds of a consumer-driven teenage market finding its voice (and its feet), the music was definitely something most of its listeners had never heard before.

And that was just the threat in the pounding, amplified beat -- the words were a whole new scare. The Beatles may have wanted to hold your hand, after all, when they could be understood above all that racket, but before that Jerry Lee Lewis was shouting about great balls of fire, and not necessarily about getting burned in the hellfire of damnation. And the Rolling Stones! Prancing about like ... like ... well, who knows like what, exactly, parents weren't sure, but inexplicably, obviously, bad-for-you, do you understand?

As it turns out, for the Rolling Stones time really is on their side after all. Determined to grow older -- if increasingly wrinkled -- with some dignity intact, Keith Richards has been wandering around the bookstores and TV talk shows with a new book in tow, disarmingly titled Life, filled with stories that somehow amaze with how different the world seemed back then. Now, when the only parental outrage Katy Perry can generate is her outfit on Sesame Street, tales of the Stones in America seem positively other-worldly.

Why did we stop at the 4-Dice Restaurant in Fordyce, Arkansas, for lunch on Independence Day weekend? On any day? Despite everything I know from ten years of driving through the Bible Belt. Tiny town of Fordyce. Rolling Stones on the police menu across the United States. Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and patriotically rid America of these little fairy Englishmen.

It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation. Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of '72, known as the STP. The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States. All the fault of us, mere minstrels. We had been inciting youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again.

It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter. He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election. We, in turn, they told our lawyer officially, were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.

As much grief as aging boomers get about their increasingly passe memories, rock music remains, if not exactly a threat, at least a thread of connection between generations. The music of the not-quite-greatest generation can still thrill, even if the cultural meaning doesn't quite grab as it once did. The lessons are learned, and age has its privileges: every few years, there's talk of another tour, and the Stones rock machine gears up for another assault on the wallet -- and still (still!) remains the biggest rock show on earth.

The Stones, gentlemen all, are grandfathers these days, but they are attempting to go old gracefully without the albatross of a young man's "hope I die before I get old" lyric in their book. (As far back as 1978 Keith contemplated the wisdom in the words "I'm going to walk before they make me run.") Mick Jagger has always played at the continental charmer, and even Keith seems content to retire most of he bad-boy stories, at least for this (book) tour. Will Mick and Keith play on stage again? As long as there is a five-pound note in The Bank of England's vaults.

Keith-the-estate-gardener may have retired most of his well-told war stories, and in the book de-fuses many of the more outlandish tales, but not all of them. And then there's this, which should give hope to bookworms everywhere: "When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer."

The rock star who played the Pirate King to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow must maintain some wickedness, certainly, if even for press junkets: it seems he did actually snort some of the old man's cremated ashes that had fallen out on the coffee-table. Then again, Keith has given up drinking now, at the age of 66, and a man must surely be allowed at least one vice.