Amazingly Very Clean!

That’s what the poster says at my local dry cleaner: “Platinum Shirt Service, Amazingly Very Clean!”

Specimen Days

Last month I went on a Walt Whitman walking tour that began in Fort Greene Park and proceeded to 99 Ryerson Street, the only surviving building of the dozen or so where Whitman lived at various times in Brooklyn. (The frame building, wedged into a row of similar houses, is one story higher now than when it was built, and is covered in yellow siding.) Greg Trupiano, who led the tour, spoke highly of Whitman’s memoir Specimen Days, so I read it later in my Library of America Whitman, along with the original edition of Leaves of Grass.

Specimen Days is a hodgepodge, but with interesting bits. It begins with reminiscences of growing up on Long Island, continues with an account of the wounded soldiers Whitman visited during the Civil War (some of the best material in the book), moves on to nature writing from then-bucolic Camden, New Jersey (maddening in its vague effusiveness if you compare it to the sharp-eyed observations of Thoreau), then concludes with thoughts on old age and some literary gossip, including visits to Emerson and Longfellow toward the end of their lives.

Whitman had a nodding acquaintance with President Lincoln, and a brief item called “No Good Portrait of Lincoln” reflects on his face.

Probably the reader has seen physiognomies (often old farmers, sea-captains, and such) that, behind their homeliness, or even ugliness, held superior points so subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as a wild perfume or fruit-taste, or a passionate tone of the living voice — and such was Lincoln’s face, the peculiar color, the lines of it, the eyes, mouth, expression. Of technical beauty it had nothing — but to the eye of a great artist it furnished a rare study, a feast and fascination. The current portraits are all failures — most of them caricatures.

On the same page is a description of the wasted prisoners just released from Andersonville and other Confederate POW camps. “The dead there are not to be pitied as much as some of the living that come from there — if they can be call’d living — many of them are mentally imbecile, and will never recuperate.”

Tom Otterness

My life revolves around the C line, and one of the highlights of that line are the rotund little bronze people that populate the 14th Street station. Little capitalists shaped like money bags (a more benign version of Thomas Nast’s Boss Tweed) perch contentedly on the benches, or play tug of war with giant pennies, or fall victim to toothy crocodiles that emerge from manhole covers.

On my first visit to Roosevelt Island I was pleased to see Otterness’s Marriage of Real Estate and Money: a several-part morality tale perched on pilings in the shallow water. More recently, I was tickled to see Large Covered Wagon installed near the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge. When you walk to the back of the wagon, you see the heads of a pioneer couple who are getting the maximum enjoyment out of their bouncy ride.

The Brooklyn Literary 100

The New York Sun recently published a list (and map) detailing the Brooklyn Literary 100. In addition to the places, many of which I’m familiar with — Fort Greene Park, Prospect Park, Ozzie’s, the Brooklyn Lyceum, Community Bookstore, Heights Books, and the Brooklyn Book Fest — there were lists of prominent writers and editors, broken down by neighborhood.

As silly as it is, and Colson Whitehead pointed out just how silly, to attribute special literary qualities to the borough of Brooklyn or any of its neighborhoods, I was surprised to see that Park Slope didn’t dominate as thoroughly as I expected. It has 19 names, including Paul Auster and Jonathan Safran Foer, but so does Fort Greene, which has Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Colson Whitehead himself. (Though didn’t I read somewhere that he had moved to somewhere like Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens?)

If you throw in my own neighborhood, Clinton Hill, which many consider an extension of Fort Greene, you get 9 more names, including James Surowiecki of The New Yorker. Prospect Heights, just down the street, has 12 names, including heavy hitters like Rick Moody, Philip Gourevitch, and George Packer.