Lost New York

I like walking the streets of New York. I can feel the presence of the past, and now the New York that has disappeared into Time seems even more vivid. I think I was first inspired by Stuyvesant Street, a little street that lingers from the days when Peter Stuyvesant was governor and located his estate there. St Mark's Place and Church were part of this estate, and Stuyvesant Street is still there--- the only remaining street running true east and west. To get to his estate you took the Bouwrie road which a few miles later became the road to Boston as you entered the wilderness that then began below 14th street.

Beneath my feet as I walk the streets of lower Manhattan, the past has been buried in the debris of time. Looking at the devastation of the World Trade Center area, I reflect that this exact same ground was the scene of the Great Fire of 1776 (the work of arsonists sympathetic to the revolution) and later the Great Fire of 1835 with almost the same area of destruction. During the first 40-50 years of the colony New Amsterdam, the city stopped at Wall Street, named for the wall that protected the city from the northern wilderness. That was where the settlement ended. Beyond lay forests, ponds, and lakes and a few farms near the North River (Hudson River).

When early settlers approached the shore, they remarked about the fresh sweet air that was unlike any they could remember. It was a magical wilderness, full of excitement and promise. I walk around Centre Street and look for the remnants of Five Points (just to the southeast of the current courthouses), a melting pot where five streets converged (Baxter, Worth, Park, Mulberry and the now non-existent Little Water Street). Little Water ran into a little cul de sac bay for the Collect Pond, which was a 48 acre fresh water lake, and the source of city drinking water until it became so fouled with pollution that it had to be drained through a canal emptying into the Hudson River, establishing Canal Street. In about a century and a half, the fragrant wilderness was inundated with a flood of immigrants who lived in competitive squalor while the city struggled with the northward advance of slums and dynamic economic neighborhoods populated by the influx of gifted tradesmen and entrepreneurs. Embedded in this erupting chaos was the vision and energy of a world of new opportunities and hope for the future. It became a city of motion and luminous lights, a new constellation swirling and whirling through the universe drawing the dreams of an entire world into the vortex of its irresistible force.

Now as I walk the city, I feel the energy gleaming like a perpetual motion dynamo, and I feel the past humming all around me and under my feet. Above me is the glowing parameter of the future that stretches past the sun... beyond the galaxy, a filament of the cosmos formed of the stuff that dreams are made of.

Book Making

In this day of eBooks and Audio Books many have argued that the book of paper and covers will eventually disappear. This was predicted with the advent of the computer. But I have noticed that books have continued to multiply and pile up on tables, forests continue to be decimated, and book emporiums like Borders and Barnes and Noble, to name just two, have evolved into friendly environments compatible with the Web 2.0 philosophy of sharing, and you can sit leisurely browsing for hours over a cup of coffee while also scouring the "interverse" with your laptop.

Once, long ago, in a dimension now confined to memory, I was taught by a shop teacher how make a book. It was a technical process, one of choosing cover material, paper, sewing the paper in sections and connecting them to the spine. All books have a spine, and a gutter, which secures the paper to the cover. Sewing and gluing are the principal techniques in creating a book. Book Makers are often called Binderies, and most libraries either operate a bindery or secure the services of a bindery. Manuscripts of dissertations are transformed into books, and books destroyed by the age of Time are reborn in the bindery.

In shop, we learned to make a hardcover or case binding, the classic cover that preserves books and gives them long lives no matter how often you flip through their pages. That is the true appeal of the bound book of paper: it is flippable and provides random and immediate access to any page or line in the book. There is also something durable about a book; it is picturesque, a great home decorating tool that also lets your visitors know who you are by what you read (or usually what you hope to read sometime when you can get around to it!). My first book was of blank pages, a diary, if you will. Then, inspired by This Is My Beloved, I bound a book of my poems for a distant, clandestined beloved.

Father had a severe love affair with books. In fact he built a little house in the backyard that was just for books. He loved to buy up books of estates, series of books, especially histories, for history was one of his passions. He would disappear in the evening back to his little house where he lay on a bed surrounded by books, devouring them like a starving man feeding a voracious appetite. He was really a man for today, for a Barnes and Noble with its piles of books and easy chairs where one could while away the afternoon or evening with tea or coffee, and legions of books. The likes of him and those who follow populating these book spas are the real book makers... books made for those who discover worlds waiting in words.

In my new-found love of fiction, I relish reading in the environment created by these new book sellers. A certain spirit of the printed word, a reverence that borders on religiosity pervades the space. In the silence there are many readers, and the energy of so many converting words to consciousness is exhilarating. It is quiet, but there are inner detonations of imagination transforming silence into a vivid universe of unfolding experiences. It is more exciting than going to the movies, and the price of admission is your imagination.

Father Knew Best

I have just discovered a new art form: fiction.

I know that fiction, per se, is really old hat, but for some reason my reading has centered around two domains: poetry and non-fiction. The fiction that I read was usually in the context of assigned reading in school, hardly an inspired context. For me, poetry was always the rich domain of imagery that explosively erupted as insightful discovery.

In addition, from very early on, my main outlet for creative consumption and creative output was music. This really flew in the face of a love affair with journalism that began around the third grade and shaped much of what I did for at least a decade. My father introduced me to publishing the printed word. I started writing a paper for my elementary school, and my father had an hectograph at work, in which you placed a prepared master on a gelatin bed and then put a blank sheet of paper on this sticky goo and after smoothing it out, pulled up the transferred print or image to the page. With luck we could print about 50 copies. You prepared a blue master and printed blue copies of typed text or hand-drawn images.

This publishing venture, small-time as it was, hooked me on the power of the printed word. After my near-death bout with an illness, my father bought me a used mimeograph. Now I had no limit to the number of copies (except expenses) I could print, since this machine printed copies from ink in a drum that had a stencil made of wax-like paper attached. The typewriter cut type images through the stencil and special styli could be used to draw all manner of lines, including images that were the forerunner of clip art. My first major paper was The Weekly Laff, with more than 1000 subscribers, and almost simultaneously The 205 Home Rumour and a newspaper for my scout troop whose name I can't remember (the paper, not the troop). The Weekly Laff's front page was filled with jokes. The news began on the second page and focused on the Korean "hot war," and local neighborhood news.

Such a long aside from my discovery of fiction! My adventure began a few months ago when I decided I was interested in writing styles. So I started visiting Borders or Barnes and Noble to find the new fiction table, where I would systematically read about ten pages from one book, and then ten from another, and so on until I had read about 70-80 pages. Everything at first was about style, but after a few months I've fallen in love with the substance of the unfolding narrative, the very stuff of life.

I suppose this love goes back to my father, since before I could speak, my father had decided that I should be a writer. After going through his things when he died, I discovered he had many snatches of writings that trailed off unfinished, more than likely because he had to put food on the table through very difficult times. Yet. his support of my journalistic career was a gentle nudge along the path he would have liked to follow. Journalism seemed to flow through me like an elixir. After printing my own publications, I was named editor for our newspaper in Junior High and graduated to the offset printing process, but had to prepare copy and dummies for the printer just like the big boys. In High School I started as the sports writer, then editor, and then went on to be the editor-in chief of the newspaper and the yearbook. One additional perk came with my high school profession as an editor: I learned to be a printer. I ran the high school print shop which boasted a hand-fed printer in which a roller went over an ink platen and then inked the hard handset type that was locked into a frame. One could use all kinds of paper stock, and I loved to print greeting cards, especially Christmas cards. Operating the printer required a bit of courage and dexterity since the paper had to be manually placed in the right position instantly and the hand withdrawn before the inked type frame slammed down on the paper.

All during that time, I was composing music and shows, and the lure of music was just too great and won out in college, even though I had won the Columbia University Award for excellence in journalism and editorial writing while in high school.

Throughout it all, my father kept insisting that one day I would return to the written word. In many ways, I never left it. I have continued to write poetry throughout my life. But suddenly I have discovered fiction. Something happens to the brain when you read fiction, and it is more than just the mind creating imagery from the prose. It is difficult to explain, but for me it is positively electric. It also underscores an idea my Father instilled in me...that the laboratory for writers is life itself...nothing is trivial...everything has meaning and will emerge in your story, which in some ways is the narrative of yourself reconstructed from your personal journey.