a blind flaneur

NUPTIAL SLEEP
At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:
And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on […]

The Siren, by John William Waterhouse (circa 1900) [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
I worked on a small literary magazine in the 1970s with a graphic designer who was smitten with the intricate book illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. I should rummage around in the boxes of geologically stratified ephemera that constitute my literary archive to find a […]

After a taste of Coleman Hawkins last week, I hankered for some Lester Young. I found a feast. Both clips embedded here feature Hawk and Prez along with a pantheon of 50s all-stars. Contrary to prevailing myth, the decade’s verve wasn’t buttoned down by Eisenhower, Ozzie, and Harriet. Jazz giants strode the earth, and impresarios […]

The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning […]

[Photo by gillesklein]

In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo’s characters do not exchange  dialog. They declaim at one another, often histrionically.  The novel was written immediately after the tempestuous debut in 1829 of Hugo’s play, Hernani. Dramaturgy in one guise or another was paying the bills, and it sustained the young novelist as he scrambled to satisfy a […]

I continue to marvel at the rogue Gavroche and see in him the prototype for Huck Finn. After explaining how he “borrowed” his bedroom furnishings from the beasts at the Jardin des Plantes, Gavroche adds insouciantly, “You crawl over the walls and you don’t care a straw for the government.” Victor Hugo pauses in telling […]

[Photo by gillesklein]

Gavroche climbed nimbly up the leg of the Elephant in Place de la Bastille, entering its cavernous belly through a breach so narrow “only cats and homeless children” could pass through it. He dropped a rope so the little boys could join him. Then Gavroche lit a bit of wax-coated string called a […]

Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
The first time I came up from underground at the Bastille Metro stop, I imagined hearing the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio as they sang “Luft und Leit.” On some rational level I knew what awaited me above ground, but on a deeper, more archetypal plane, I […]