Posted Friday morning, March 23, 2018.
Couple weeks ago I joked that Denis Johnson had sneaked a birthday card to me into his short story “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”. I could have added he sneaked a winter post card from New York City into it too, but I wouldn’t have been joking and he didn’t sneak it. The story includes a number of post cards from the City to the point that’s almost the reason to read the story. Almost. But it is a reason. A good reason.
The narrator is a California advertising executive nearing the end of his career returning to accept an award in the city where he’d started that career decades before:
It was I think around 1 a.m. Snow six inches deep had fallen. Park Avenue looked smooth and soft---not one vehicle had disturbed its surface. The city was almost completely stopped, its very few sounds muffled yet perfectly distinct from one another: a rumbling snow plow somewhere, a car’s horn, a man on another street shouting several fain syllables. I tried counting up the years since I’d seen snow. Eleven or twelve---Denver, and it had been exactly the same, exactly like this. One lone taxis glided up Park Avenue through the virgin white and I hailed it and asked the driver to find any restaurant open for business. I looked out the back window at the brilliant silences falling from the streetlamps, and our fresh black tracks disappearing into the infinite---the only proof of Park Avenue; I’m not sure how the cabbie kept to the road. He took me to a small diner off Union Square, where I had a wonderful breakfast among a handful of miscellaneous wanderers like myself, New Yorkers with their large, historic faces, every one of whom delivered her without an explanation, seemed invaluable. I paid and left and set out walking back toward midtown. I’d bought a pair of weatherproof dress shoes before I leaving San Diego, and I was glad. I looked for places where I was the first to walk and kicked at the powdery snow. A piano playing a Latin tune drew me through a doorway into an atmosphere of sadness: a dim tavern, a stale smell, the piano’s weary melody, and a single customer, an ample attractive woman with abundant blond hair. She wore an evening gown. A light shawl covered her shoulders. She seemed poised and self-possessed, though it was possible, also, that she was weeping.
---from the title story in the collection “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson.
Posted Tuesday morning, March 20, 2018.
“Winter dusk on the Battery.” Photo by Joseph Dolman. March 15, 2018. Copyrighted.
For more beautiful photos of New York City, visit Dolman’s webpage, CityEdition and follow him on Twitter.
Posted Saturday morning, February 24, 2018.
This is objectively, scientifically fascinating, until the end, when it gets subjectively, scientifically scary…
By luck or superior adaptation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while…Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environments as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. The drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.
When I lived in New York City, zebra mussels invaded the lower Hudson River, the western boundary of Manhattan island. An inch or two long with wriggly bands of brown and white, zebra mussels are capable of spitting out a million eggs a year apiece. The species originated in the Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas on Europe’s Russian- and Turkic-speaking periphery. Globalization has been good to it. Escaping their native waters, zebra mussels hitchhiked around the world in ship bilges and ballastwater. They have been recorded in Europe since the eighteenth century. The Hudson first saw them in 1991. Within a year zebra mussels constituted half the mass of living creatures in the river. In some places tens of thousands carpeted every square foot. They covered boat bottoms, blocked intake tubes, literally smothered other species of shellfish with a blanket of striped shell…
Bust followed boom; the population collapsed. In 2011, two decades after the mussel was first sighted in the Hudson, its survival rates were [according to one long-range study] “1% or less of those in the early years of the invasion…They [exhausted] their food supply, but they were also attacked by a local predator, the blue crab, which had learned to eat the newcomers…Fifteen years ago, when I went to a park at the edge of the Hudson, I couldn’t step into the river---the sharp edges of open mussel shells were too thick underfoot. Nowdays at the park the creatures are mostly gone. Children splash happily in the shallows. Crumbled shells lie in the sediment, testament to the mussel’s collapse.
Humans are no different [microbiologist Lynn Margulis believed]. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one species among many, no different at base than [zebra mussels]. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate…Homo sapiens, in Margulis’s eyes was just another briefly successful species.
---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.
Posted Thursday night, June 8, 2017.
"So I says to myself, I says, self, you better obstruct this justice."---DrLearnaLot on Twitter, illustrating how they talk in New York City.
Chris Christie, wildly unpopular Governor of New Jersey, Trump flunky, top level apologist, occasional gofer, and walking indictment waiting to happen says that what sure sounds like efforts by the president to obstruct justice in conversations with then FBI director James Comey were just so much talk. New York City talk. It's the way people normally converse in the president's hometown where folks just say what's on their minds and don’t really mean any harm or offense by it.
From the New York Daily News:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said that President Trump’s woes with the intelligence community stem from the fact that he prefers “normal, New York City conversation.”
The controversial Republican governor was asked why Trump’s behavior upset officials such as former FBI Director James Comey, set to testify on the Russian meddling investigation on Thursday.
“What people don't understand is that they elected an outsider president,” Christie told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Wednesday afternoon, adding that Trump didn’t have political experience beyond the local level.
Lots of people do understand that. It's one of the many reasons they didn't want him to be president.
“What you're seeing is a president who is now very publicly learning about the way people react to what he considers to be normal New York City conversation,” the governor continued.
Christie said this like he thinks it's a defense that gets Trump off the hook.
This is a type of New York City conversation Christie seems to mean: A small number of parties---often no more than a couple of people---who know each other and have done business together in the past, talking in a private office, or on the shop or factory or warehouse floor, or over lunch, or just walking down the street on their way to separate subway stops, give their word and shake hands in agreement over the delivery of specific goods and services for a certain amount of money---Twenty cases of widgets at fifty bucks a case by Tuesday, say---with neither one thinking about how their New York City talk might sound to outside parties because what's it to those outside parties, and neither worrying that what they're hashing out might be improper or illegal because it's just routine, the way they've always done business, the way everybody does business.
Might happen, conversation veers away from the business at hand and one of the parties says to the other, Maybe you can do me a favor? And that can lead to trouble. Usually doesn't. Usually things are fine. But that's usually because the favor involves only the few parties concerned. If it works out, it works out. If it doesn't, it doesn’t, but nobody's really hurt except the parties concerned. No major laws have been broken, and no one's the wiser. It's just the way things are done, and everybody knows that's how it is.
The thing is, all the deal-making and exchanging of favors, even when it's innocent is done for the personal advantage and gain of the parties concerned. Their mutual advantage is the hope and intent, but mutual is only a hopeful adjective, the intended noun phrase is personal advantage.
Presidents don't---can't---talk to the director of the FBI, not to mention United States Senators, foreign heads of state, and the American people the way New York real estate developers talk to contractors, potential investors, and employees. Presidents can’t make deals and exchange favors for their personal gain and advantage. They're not supposed to, at any rate. The lives and livelihoods of millions depend on the president making decisions without considering his personal advantage and gain. That's why there are laws governing his behavior in office and where laws are absent or the ones in place ambiguous there are protocols and traditions that constrain him.
Even if Donald Trump had been the most scrupulous and honest businessman in New York, if he'd always been on the up and up in all his normal New York City conversations, the fact that he'd thought he could continue having conversations like those once he got to Washington as President of the United States would have been a signal of his unfitness for the job, because only a solipsistic moron would think there's no difference between putting together a real estate deal and leading a nation of 300 million people living and working in a global economy with the fate of that nation and the world depending on your leadership.
Trump has never been on the up and up. His New York City conversations might have been normal, but in a different way, as in normally crooked if not outright normally criminal. You shouldn't need to have had political experience to know that the way a shady real estate developer talks to a mark he's trying to bilk in another of his real estate scams isn't the way a president talks to one of the nation's top law enforcement officials. But Trump is a solipsistic moron. He sees no difference between being president and being a shady real estate developer. Trump thought that as president he could just go on being Donald Trump.
This was nuts.
Like I said.
But his response to finding out that it's not the case is even nuttier. His response has been to be even more himself.
Getting back to what Christie said…
“What you're seeing is a president who is now very publicly learning about the way people react to what he considers to be normal New York City conversation…”
Learning?
Donald Trump has never shown a capacity to learn anything, let alone learn from his mistakes beyond “Next time find a more gullible mark, lead with a better lie, and cut your losses sooner and run away faster.” But if he's learned anything new and different from this, all it's done is made him mad and more determined to do whatever he wants to do.
Christie may think he's excused the president. What he's done is call attention to why he never should have been elected in the first place and why he needs to be removed from office in less than a New York minute.
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To read all of Christopher Brennan’s story at the Daily News, follow the link to Chris Christie says Trump exchanges with Comey 'normal, New York conversation'
Revised Friday evening to include more quotes from Breslin, because what was I thinking leaving all that good stuff out?
Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday night, March 22, 2017.
Breslin’s gone, as you probably heard.
I didn’t get to know of Breslin as a columnist. To me he was a book writer. Can’t recall for certain what was the first book of his I read. You’d think, Mets fan that I am, it’d have been Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? But I have no memory of it. Just about every book I bought or was given when I was a post-Hardy Boy reading kid lives on the bookshelf at the Old Mannion Homestead, but that’s not among them. Maybe I read Pop Mannion’s copy, if he had one. If he did, it’s lost. But if it wasn’t Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, it was surely The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
I still have that one. I remember feeling very grown up when I bought it with my allowance money. I also remember Mom Mannion’s frown of disapproval when she saw what book instead of the latest Allistair MacLean I’d bought. I don’t know how it was on her radar that she knew it was something I probably shouldn’t be reading at my age. Come to think of it, it was probably the movie she was aware of and she’d read a disapproving review in The Evangelist, our diocese’s weekly newspaper. I don’t know why she didn’t make me hand the book over. I’m guessing the reason she didn’t was the Catholic magazine she subscribed to, St Anthony’s Messenger, which I remember as being a little more hip than The Evangelist, was less censorious.
Breslin would have appreciated Mom’s quandary.
The next of his books I read was How the Good Guys Finally Won which I remember as being one of the best books on Watergate going. Charles Pierce remembers it that way too:
Pierce, getting ready to quote Breslin:
And his Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won, an account of the downfall of Richard Nixon as seen from the office of then-Speaker Tip O'Neill, is one of the most underrated studies of those events, and certainly the most entertaining, but with gleaming edge to it when it was needed.
Consider, for example, Breslin's description of the hiring of John Doar, a hero of the Kennedy Justice Department when civil rights workers were being killed in the South, as lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee's investigation of Nixon's crimes. Breslin was sharp enough to see what Doar's hiring would mean. You can hear the bell tolling away in the background.
Breslin, quoted:
And so John Doar came to Washington. Melvin Laird assured people in the White House that Doar was a fine choice. "He will not find anything if there is nothing to find," Laird said. "We couldn't ask for anything more." Which was a proper determination, providing that Richard Nixon was more or less innocent, as Laird at the time believed. The one who knew differently, Nixon, said nothing. He should have. For John Doar believes in everything Richard Nixon does not. And John Doar is a fearsome opponent.
Breslin as a columnist I got to know later, like I said. But again it was through a book. The collection called The World According to Breslin. I did read some of his work in its natural environment, newsprint. Our local paper ran his columns occasionally. This started after Son of Sam made Breslin more famous or infamous by association. I remember one he wrote in the summer of 1979 particularly, and I remember it best for a single sentence. Skylab’s orbit was deteriorating and it was coming back to earth, in pieces as it broke up and burned up re-entering the atmosphere 945 years ahead of schedule. People down below began to wonder where those pieces would land and worried it might be on top of them. Breslin hoped so. Well, he hoped pieces would come down on New York City and make hash out of certain people. He made a list he thought the world---the part of it where he lived and worked, at any rate--- would be better off without. He put himself at the top of the list. He felt he deserved to be hash.
“I’m no good and I can prove it,” he wrote.
That line has been cracking me up for almost thirty-eight years. I use it seriously about myself. Most people don’t believe me, if you can believe it. But it’s a fact. In fact, I’m thinking of making it the new tagline for the blog.
Breslin’s list includes people who were notorious in the day but I’m guessing only the names of Billy Martin and Truman Capote resonate today. If Skylab had waited just a couple more years to begin its descent and Breslin made his list sometime in the 1980s there’s a name would've made the list that resonates today, although I wonder if at the time Breslin would have foreseen lasting fame for the bearer of it. Actually, first time Breslin mentioned the guy he didn't use his name. He referred to him as "a young builder named Junior with a Big Ego."
Breslin despised Donald Trump from the get-go.
At any rate, I was thinking I should re-read one of Breslin’s books in his honor. Not The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Table Money. It’s another novel. A fine one. About Irish working class types in New York City. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful. It’s down in a box in the basement and I don’t know which box and don’t feel like searching for it at the moment and beside, I should read something new, new to me, something of his I haven’t read. That’s what I decided the other night upon hearing the news he was gone. I put The Good Rat on reserve at the library. It arrived today. I started it tonight. It’s about the trial of a pair of cops who'd been moonlighting as hitmen for the mob. Breslin wasn't looking forward to covering it. He didn't think there'd be much in the way of material for a column. He didn't foresee a book coming out of it.
I was hesitant about this trail from the start. These criminals held their secret meetings at a bar next to a golf course. If you look at how mobsters live today, you would say middle class and be right. The late, great Queens defense attorney Klein the Lawyer once said on behalf of some beast, "How could he commit a crime? He lives in a house." Middle class drowns excitement wherever you run into it. And the idea of cops who use their badges to murder depresses me. It it dreary and charmless and lacks finesse. It promises no opportunity to marvel, much less laugh.
Then he heard the chief witness for the prosecution, the good rat of the title, begin his testimony.
Then the trial starts and I am pulled out of my gloom. An unknown name on the prosecution witness list, an old drug peddler, a lifelong fence, steals the show and turns the proceeding into something that thrills: the autobiography of Burton Kaplan, criminal. Right away I think, Fuck these cops. I have found my book.
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At this time we point out that Kaplan required no help from mobsters in any of his business ventures, legal or not. He made millions selling marijuana, for example, and virtually none of it went to to gangsters. He was a big earner for the Lucchese Mafia family in many businesses, though, and everybody was afraid of bothering him. Some associates believed he could have them killed. Mafia danger is the illusion of Mafia danger. Also, mob families couldn't move in on him because they didn't know how to do what he was doing. He was in crime as a business, not an underworld dodge played on street corners and alleys. Gangsters can't do what he did because it requires effort and thought. Kaplan ran legal garment businesses that made great money and let implied threats do the heavy lifting. Gangsters can manage private sanitation pickups or union organizing with violence, but Burt's schemes required actual work.
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...Now, after doing so much evil, he is at last committing what he believes is an atrocious, unforgivable act.
Throughout the trial Kaplan refers to himself by various street names for an informer. He is asked what he means when he says this.
"A stool pigeon is a rat. Just like me."
Burt Kaplan's voice looses eagles that swoop and scream and slap against walls. He carried his loyalty to the Mafia almost to the end, until he believed there were leopards about to pounce. At the last stroke of midnight he turned in his claws.
Judd Burstein, one of Kaplan's lawyers, says, "He is probably the last true believer in the code of the Mafia, the omerta." He is about to become what he despises.
The trial took place in 2006, but Breslin reaches back in time from time to time to reminisce about tough guys he covered in his youth. In the process, he writes about the earliest days of his own career as a columnist, which began when he was assigned to cover the sentencing of a mobbed up union boss named Tony “The Pro” Provenzano. Maybe you heard of him. If you did, it might be because Breslin turned him into words other people have been unconsciously quoting and paraphrasing ever since, thinking they’re just saying what things are when they’re really relating the world according to Breslin:
Because I came from Queens, which nobody in the history of New York newspapers ever wrote about or even saw, I was reputed to be streetwise and tough. Which was untrue. I didn’t fight. I chased stories, not beatings. But knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best, and so editors clung to the illusion. At the old Herald Tribune, they asked me one Thursday night if I could cover the sentencing the next day of Tony Provenzano in federal court in Newark. He was the Teamsters’ second to Jimmy Hoffa and had been convicted of extortion. They really wanted to get Tony Pro for pushing somebody down an elevator shaft, which he sure did. The reporter who’d been covering the trial had written about Tony’s two wives, who in unison called for him to be injured.
Breslin went. A number of things about Tony the Pro riveted his attention, one of which was his pinky ring. Provenzano was proud of it and liked to show it off while pretending he was doing anything else but.
I wrote about it all, including the ring. At the newspaper this was regarded as exceptional. Reporters had written about tough guys before, but not about their jewelry. There was a sudden new respect for me. I knew exactly how to take it. I announced I was great. Big JB Number One. It happened you needed no extra ability to do such a story. It was all there, like an order in a store being placed on the counter in front of you. A moron can pick it up and go home. Just write down what they do and say. But I declared that it took tremendous courage and talent to do the story. I had to contend with murderers. Why shouldn’t I boast? I wasn’t out of some Harvard or Princeton that gets people jobs on their school name. I attended John Adams High School, Ozone Park, Queens, the full five years. Was I nervous about the mobsters? You want to be afraid of something, be afraid of being broke.I remember John O’Hara wrote me a letter. I made sure everyone was looking when I threw it on the floor. “I don’t need him.” Garson Kanin also wrote. “Who is he?” I flipped that one away too. I then went out into the night for a thousand drinks. I went everywhere. I walked into the Copa like a heavyweight contender…
Later, when David Berkowitz sent me a letter that became famous, I was asked why the dangerous fruitcake wrote to me.
I said, “What are you, crazy? Who else would he write to?”
Exactly, the point. Who else? Who else could tell the dangerous fruitcake’s story? Who else could tell any New Yorker’s story? Who else would you want to?
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Pierce’s appreciation of Breslin includes appreciation for another of Breslin’s novels, World Without End, Amen. Story of a disgraced New York cop who travels to Ireland to forget and winds up drawn into the Troubles by his estranged father, a gunman for the IRA, a fantasy set in an alternative universe because, as you know in our universe, only Muslims can be terrorists.
Pierce’s post is a dual eulogy. He writes in praise of Chuck Berry too. Not Chuck Berry the guitarist. Not Chuck Berry the pioneer rock and roller. Chuck Berry the wordsmith, the near-poet Pierce credits along with Breslin with re-inventing American English. To use a Berry-ism, motorvate on over to Esquire to read the whole piece.
Posted Sunday morning, February 12, 2017.
Our longtime comrade in blogging, one of the smartiest of the smartypantses at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Professor Erik Loomis has been in New York City over the weekend and tweeted this post card from lower Manhattan. Saturday afternoon around three, February 11, 2017. Copyright Erik Loomis 2017.
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