Living in America

♪Take it to the bridge.♪ Take it from the bridge . . . Brooklyn Bridge, I hardly knew ye.

10 years to the day. Wow!

I never did find a decent Cornish Pasty in 9 years 11 months of living in Brooklyn. Will Indianapolis also break my heart? It's not an occasion for such maudlin thoughts.

Have a classic from Brooklyn's finest, Neil Diamond, instead:

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (Vintage Contemporaries 2008)

We traveled the length of Coney Island Avenue, that low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto-body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistan-run lumberyard. This miscellany was initially undetectable by me. It was Chuck, over the course of subsequent instructional drives, who pointed everything out to me and made me see something of the real Brooklyn, as he called it.

Snow Day

On the QT Q train

File under 'Good to Know'.

The episode of Futurama dates from March 2001 and, of course, the series itself is set in the 31st century but at either end of the dateline, the message of the grabbed screenshot below is loud and clear: the renovation of our local subway station is never going to be completed.

God bless you Matt Groenig and Rupert Murdoch.

I wonder if our local neighborhood blog will accept this post as breaking news?

To An Early Grave by Wallace Markfield (Dalkey Archive Press 1964)

And then off, off to the boardwalk, to hang around and watch the kids. Honest, you never saw such kids. Brown and round and mother-loved, fed on dove's milk and Good Humors. At night they pair off under the pavilions - Milton and Sharon, Seymour and Sandra, Heshie and Deborah. They sing stupid songs, an original word doesn't leave their lips and, clearly, not one will ever stand up for beauty or truth or goodness. Yet - do me something! I could stay and watch them for hours. I feel such love, I chuckle and I beam, and if it was in my power I'd walk in their midst, pat their heads and bless them, each and every one. So they don't join YPSL and they never heard of Hound and Horn and they'll end up in garden apartments, with wall-to-wall carpeting. What does it matter? Let them be happy, only be happy. And such is my state that I will remit all sins . . .

Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005)

The wolf was at the door

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 137

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 137th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1565 friends!

Recent blogs:

The market versus cooperation

Who needs money?

Who bailed out the bankers?

Coming Events:

Discussion on the Labour Party

Monday 22 February, 8.30pm

Unicorn, Church Street, Manchester City Centre

Sunday Evening Film Programme
6pm at 52 Clapham High St, SW4, London

14 February - Why We Fight

28 February - Comrades (part 1)

14 March - Comrades (part 2)

Norwich Radical Film Forum

2pm at The Workshop,

53 Earlham Road, Norwich NR1 3SP

27 February - The Story of Stuff + Manufacturing Consent

20 March - Zeitgeist III

Quote for the week:

"The rich require an abundant supply of the poor."

Voltaire.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

'You woke up my neighborhood'

'Bad hipster art' (is there any other kind?) or sinister political vandalism? Whatever the case, there are strange goings on in our neighbourhood at the moment

Here's the background to the story, and Ditmas Park blog has heaps more on the incident.

Brooklyn, Georgia

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (94)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 94th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1487 friends!

Recent blogs:

Food: commodity or need?

The Grimethorpe Miners

Do We Need Money?

Quote for the week:

"In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself - a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others." William Morris, Useful Work vs Useless Toil, 1884.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

In Ditmas (2009)

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (93)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 93rd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1484 friends!

Recent blogs:

Capitalismís reserve army of labour

The health of wage slaves

Guess who's not getting that rose garden?

Quote for the week:

"This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser." Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Hungry in Midwood

Gourmet Peasant Maddy recounts her recent visit to the world famous Di Fara Pizza in Midwood, Brooklyn with Kara.

Yes, you really do have to wait two to three hours for your pizza but if it tastes half as good hot out the oven as it did when I ate the left overs the next day, then it's worth the wait.

And for those of you who click on the link and read the post, yes, Kara is pregnant. She's at the twenty weeks stage and we're both very happy.

I wasn't going to mention the matter on the blog until little Henry or Henrietta started community college.

"I've been expecting you."

Winter grows in Brooklyn.

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

The New York Times reports on the impact of the murder of Benazir Bhutto on the Pakistani population in Brooklyn.

I just want to clarify one thing

According to the Manchester Guardian, there's a 'Brooklyn Scene'.

Not round our way, there isn't

Funniest Comment of the Day

Why I still I check out the comment box of the Kensingston (Brooklyn) blog daily:

still-working-for-a-living-and-drinking-instant said...

"these guys are getting their shovels into the ground just as the overheated real estate bubble is about to burst. apparently they're not concerned with the subprime mortgage meltdown, the banks' sharply tightening credit, and the rising mortgage rate. have they looked at the number of same co-op and condo listings on craigslist that are there repeatedly from week-to-week and clearly are not moving? in fact, if you count the listings available weekly in Kensington, the inventory backlog is increasing even as some listers are dropping their prices.

what we need now is more condos?

duh?!

wake up and smell the coffee. oh yeah, we also need a coffee shop."

October 11, 2007 1:21 PM

From this post.

A Local Blog For Local People

I've been meaning to signpost the Kensington (Brooklyn) blog for a while now. It's a blog that covers the part of Brooklyn that Kara and I live in.

Sandwiched between better known neighbourhoods such as Borough Park, Ditmas and Windsor Terrace/Park Slope, for some reason not a lot of people know about Kensington, which may explain why it is one of last affordable places in Central Brooklyn, but the blog (or at least the anonymous comments it generates) reflects the gradual change in the area.

The area is predominately made up of Bangladeshi, Albanian, Hispanic, Polish, Russian and East Asian communities - historically it was Irish and Italian - but in the last year and a bit Kensington has experienced an influx of twentysomethings who have been priced out of renting in parts of Brooklyn such as Park Slope or Williamsburg, and have plumped for Kensington because of its centrality, relative affordibility and easy access to Manhattan (F Train).

The blog is good at covering local events in the area - Kara and I attended the bazaar on Church Avenue on Sunday - and, by default probably, it also reflects the contrasting differences and expectations of people both old and new in the area.

Sometimes that can be hysterically funny in the comments box, with it's anonymous commentators more often than not in push-me/pull-me denial mode about the fact that what they really want more than anything in the world is a coffee shop with wi-fi. If they and the coffee shop also happened to be situated in Park Slope, that would be an added extra. (I'm not fussy. I just want a 24-hour diner/radical bookshop within thirty feet of the apartment.) However, those same comment threads can sometimes veer too much over into territory which borders on the UN maybe having to send in a peace-keeping force in to police the comment box. For such a diverse area, we are all in our own wee boxes a bit too much, unfortunately.

In short, Kensington is akin to Stoke Newington but with decent slices of pizza, and this post is proof that I can occasionally blog about Brooklyn.

I Can't See The Street For The Trees

What is it about Kensington and natural disasters?

First, this bundle of energy hit our local Post Office a few months back and now, this morning, a tornado hit our street about 6.30am. Pics are available here and here via the Kensington (Brooklyn) blog. The Pizzeria across the road from our apartment block lost its awning and we did what we could to help our retail neighbours in the circumstances: we ordered a Pizza Pie out of solidarity.

Memo to self in future: however much you want a morning cuppa - Tetley British Blend - don't go out at 5.30 in the morning to get a carton of skimmed milk from the local 24/7 Fruit and Veg store when there is thunder and lightning in the sky . . . New York 1's Pat Kiernan's is predicting a tornado in your area . . . and you were just looking at John White's wiki page a few days before.

TV Dinners

Picture the scene: a cold windswept garret in Brooklyn, trying to negotiate ever-increasing lukewarm mouthfuls of Chef Boyarde* on toast whilst watching re-runs of Murder She Wrote on TNT.

But that's enough about my Saturday night last week: check out the latest post from the Gourmet Peasant blog, for a course by course report of Kara and her friend Maddy gorging themselves at the fanch schmancy restaurant, Aliseo Osteria del Borgo, in Brooklyn, on the self-same Saturday night.

You can scroll down the post for a picture of Kara enjoying the banquet feast. She's so happy in the picture 'cos she'd just taken a phone call from me where I informed her that I'd just tivo'ed an episode of Murder She Wrote that she hadn't seen before.

*For my British readers, 'Chef Boyarde' is the American equivalent of Spaghetti Hoops.

What's My Name

Quick one.

One of the best political novels I've read in recent years is 'Standing Fast' by Harvey Swados. I write in 'recent years' only in the sense that it's one of the best political novels I've read in recent years, but the novel itself was published way back in 1970 and has unfortunately long been out of print and, sadly, Swados has long been out of literary fashion*, with only this book of his currently in print.

I could crank out a few hundred words of sawdust prose in praise of the book, and why you should seek out a second hand copy for yourself, but it's easier all round if I just point you in the direction of Steve Cohen's excellent article on the novel**, which originally appeared in the AWL's paper, Solidarity, and which prompted me to seek the novel out for myself.

As is my fashion when I stumble across a writer I like, I've since went on a treasure hunt to locate his or her others writings, and recently bought a second hand copy of Swados's debut novel, 'Out Went the Candle', from a bookseller in Washington. Nice hardback edition with a dust jacket that is just about still in one piece. Thing is, is just me or does the young Harvey Swados in the dustjacket picture below remind you of someone? Christ, it's the same haircut and everything.

The clue is in the title of the post.

* I wrote: "Swados has long been out of literary fashion . . ", but sadly it appears that was always the case: "Harvey was an unfashionable novelist yet his career has been an exemplary one. He is a writer free of public postures, indifferent to literary fads, and totally devoted to perfection of his craft." [Irving Howe]

**As a sidenote; one night coming home from work I was reading the novel on the F train when a bloke came up to me to talk about the book. He hadn't seen a copy in years, but it was a book he knew from his childhood days as it had been on his parents bookshelf. His way of telling me that they were political was to say that they had been in the 'movement'. I thought that was sweet.