​A Household of Minor Things: The Collections of Robert Duncan and Jess

 

“Jess and Robert Duncan pursued separate artistic paths—the former as a visual artist, the latter as a poet, though each experimented with the other’s chosen medium. Jess, who had a lifelong interest in the play inherent in language, wrote poetry and prose, and Duncan, who was drawn to the open form and movement he perceived in abstract expressionism, painted and drew. Yet neither approached the facility with which the other engaged his own field, and the benefits of these excursions into the other’s territory lay more in the insights brought back than in any contribution made on foreign ground. ...”

LitHub

Jess Collins

BOOKFORUM: Very Fine House

Brooklyn Rail: Tara McDowell’s The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess

The Householders | Oh what a fortress our art makes, and oh what an armoire our love

SF MoMA: Salvage and Recuperation

amazon

2008 March: Robert Duncan, 1919-1988, 2011 May: Robert Duncan: May 18, 1959, 2012 January: Ten Poems, 1940 to 1980, 2013 May: An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, 2017 January: Robert Duncan's notes on Ron Silliman's 'Opening'

JESS’S STUDIO (DETAIL) WITH CARAVAGGIO ON THE WALL IN THE BACKGROUND

Auditions: Field Recordings as Otherly Zones of Entanglement

 

Rudy Deceliere – Various Ends of the World

“In recent decades, field recording has come into sharp focus as a rapidly evolving creative practice within the canon of sound arts. Its proliferation heralds an opening up to notions of place, environment, non-anthropic listening, divergent cultural traditions, bio-acoustics, and a curiosity towards the act of being present to our audition in time and in space. ...”

Various Artists (Video/Audio)

​20 NYC subway stations with show-stopping tile art

South Ferry

“Subway stations don’t need colorful mosaics or installations by famous artists to have a distinctive style—but those things do give commuters something lovely to look at while waiting for a train to show up. And New York’s transit system doesn’t disappoint, particularly if you’re the sort of person who pays attention to the intricacies of tile station markers, or the individual pieces of a mosaic mural. In fact, the city’s subway stations are an excellent showcase for that sort of craftsmanship, whether it’s a 110-year-old bas-relief of a beaver, or a brand-new mosaic made up of ceramic tile. ...”

Curbed

W - New York City Subway tiles

[PDF] The Preservation of the Original Tiles in the New York City Subway System

​Jim Jarmusch’s Collages

 

“Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces. And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into ‘Andy Warhol.’ ...”

The Paris Review

Anthology

2014 October: Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, 2015 December: Broken Flowers - Jim Jarmusch (2005).,2016 October: An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch, 2016 July: The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona, 2016 December: Jim Jarmusch Lists His Favorite Poets: Dante, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery & More, 2017 December: Paterson (2016)

​Algonquin Round Table

 

Members and associates of the Algonquin Round Table: (standing, left to right) Art Samuels and Harpo Marx; (sitting) Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott

“The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of ‘The Vicious Circle’, as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country. Daily association with each other, both at the luncheons and outside of them, inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. ... Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution. ...”

Wikipedia, YouTube: The Round Table's Legacy

NY Times: The Vicious Fun of America’s Most Famous Literary Circle

W - Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle - Alan Rudolph (1994)

NY Times: MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE; So Witty, So Sophisticated (1994)

Guardian - Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle: does it get under Dorothy's skin?

Criterion (Video)

YouTube: Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle

2014 August: Dorothy Parker

Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation

 

“In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country. Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. ...”

Harpers

The Sibley Guide to Birds

 

“... The Sibley Guide to Birds represents more than 12 years of work by David Allen Sibley. The final draft of the artwork and text took over six years to complete, and the finished book was published in October 2000. Before painting and writing the final draft David spent over 6 years working on the problems of layout and design. The challenge was to meet the goal of illustrating every species and every significant plumage variation; illustrating every species in flight from above and below; describing the complete range of vocalizations for each species; showing all significant subspecies variations; and doing it all in a format that is logical and easy to understand so that even beginners would not be overwhelmed by the amount of information. The solution was a new and unique design arranging each species in a vertical column on the page. ...”

Sibley Guides: About

Sibley Guides: Bird Info

First look: David Sibley describes changes to look for in his revised Guide to Birdsttps

W - David Allen Sibley

amazon

 

Pages 144-45 of the second edition are above.

2008 September: Birds, 2008 June: Bird Songs, 2017 April: Of a Feather, 2017 June: Bird Sounds, 2017 July: Beautifully Designed Tiny Houses… For Birds, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 March: She Invented a Board Game With Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off., 2019 June: Where Birds Meet Art … After Dark, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 October: A Quest to Protect the World’s Last Silent Places, 2020 June: Making a Garden That Welcomes the Birds, 2020 July: New Bird Song That ‘Went Viral’ Across This Species of Sparrow Was Tracked by Scientists For the First Time, 2020 August: How to Use Binoculars - Jason Ward, 2020 October: Get the Birds To Come To You, 2020 June: BirdNET, 2021 April: Birds by the Billions: A Guide to Spring’s Avian Parade, 2021 June: Leave This Wondrous Island to the Birds

​A case of the Palestinian blues

 

Untitled, from the series 'Islam Played the Blues' by Toufic Beyhum.

“For Kareem Samara, a British-Palestinian multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sound artist, it was naseeb — meant to be. One day in 2020, American-Palestinian filmmaker and music producer Sama’an Ashrawi messaged asking him to play ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go,’ an American blues standard, on the oud. Ashrawi was curious what the blues would sound like in the quarter tones of the Middle Eastern instrument. Minutes later, Samara sent him a recording of the tune. ...”

+972 (Video/Audio)

A painting by Nour Bazzari, a teenage Palestinian abstract artist, inspired by Azraq’s rendition of ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go.’

Eluvium - Virga II (2021), Virga I (2019)

 

“The great American writer Frederick Buechner once described vocation as ‘where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.’ A difficult concept simply described, it’s an ideal those privileged enough to pursue often find unattainable. Matthew Cooper is one of the few who could claim to come close. The ambient and classical works he releases as Eluvium are an obvious joy to him in all their painstaking humility, born of the type of industry that comes from hours lost to the world absorbed in a calling. The musical worlds he has built have been a source of comfort to a great many. Enchanting portals to reflect and withdraw, and often ultimately heal. It’s curious, the unexpected places we find our joys meet the needs of the world, and in Cooper’s case his most recent work felt like providence. ...”

TREBLE

Bandcamp: Virga I (Audio) , Virga II (Audio)

YouTube: Virga I, Virga II

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson (1999)

“Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Click Here (May 1999)

Complete Review

amazon, Audible

Bill Evans - Live in Switzerland (1975)

 

“... Over to Switzerland this week for a concert by the legendary Bill Evans, with his trio consisting of Eddie Gomez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums. Considered by many to be one of the most influential Jazz Pianists of the post-World War 2 era, Evans was an innovative pianist, taking an impressionistic approach to traditional Jazz pieces which became his trademark over the years. He was also a gifted composer, with his signature tune Waltz For Debby a standard in most Jazz musicians repertoire.Despite a tumultuous and tragic personal life, Evans was one of the most popular Jazz musicians of the 50s, 60s and 70s. His early death in 1980 from a decades-long abuse of drugs and alcohol robbed the music world of one of its most eloquent and visionary voices. ...”

Past Daily (Audio)

Discogs

YouTube: Live in Switzerland 1:18:00

2019 June: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 - Bill Evan (2005), 2019 November: Some Other Time (2016), 2020 November: Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (1968), 2021 February: Bill Evans Live in Munch Museum, Oslo (1966)

The Names Heard Long Ago – Jonathan Wilson

 

“Jonathan Wilson’s eleventh book, The Names Heard Long Ago: How The Golden Age of Hungarian Football Shaped The Modern Game, once again sees the celebrated journalist and author delving into a fascinating part of football history, meticulously detailed, thoroughly researched, as one would expect from the architect of the football fanatic’s Bible, Inverting The Pyramid. The Names Heard Long Ago explores the revolutionary concepts found in early 20th Century Hungarian football and the subsequent spread of ideas, tactics and characters around the globe, often granting unprecedented success in the far-reaching countries in which they were adopted, and still found in the game today. …”

How 20th Century Hungarian Football Influenced The Game We Love Today, amazon

Scissors Kick - How Vienna coffee houses gave rise to a new era of intellectualism in football

Scissors Kick - Wunderteam: Hungarian soccer team 1930s (Video)

Scissors Kick - Golden Team (Video)

New York Stories: King of New York - Abel Ferrara (1990)

“King of New York is a 1990 American neo-noir crime thriller film starring Christopher Walken, David Caruso, Laurence Fishburne, Victor Argo, Wesley Snipes, and Giancarlo Esposito. It was directed by independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara and written by Nicholas St. John. Frank White, a drug lord, is riding into New York City in a limousine after being released from Sing Sing. Emilio El Zapa, a Colombian drug dealer, is shot dead and the killers leave a newspaper headline announcing Frank's release. Zapa's partner, King Tito, is in a hotel room with Jimmy Jump, who is Frank's trigger happy right-hand man and Test Tube, who are negotiating the purchase of cocaine. Jimmy and Test Tube shoot Tito and his bodyguards and steal the cocaine. ...”

Wikipedia

Abel Ferrara’s ‘King of New York’ gained a true, cult reputation of a legitimate gangster classic (Video)

Criterion: Trailer (Video), amazon

YouTube:  King Of New York by Abel Ferrara - Trailer

Ray Harryhausen | Titan of Cinema

 

“Film special effects superstar Ray Harryhausen helped elevate stop motion animation to an art. His innovative and inspiring films, from the 1950s onwards, changed the face of modern movie making forever. This is the largest and widest-ranging exhibition of Ray Harryhausen’s work ever seen, with newly restored and previously unseen material from his incredible archive. Ray Harryhausen's work included the films Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad films of the 1950s and 1970s, One Million Years B.C. and Mighty Joe Young. He inspired a generation of filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Aardman Animations, Tim Burton, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, and his influence on blockbuster cinema can be felt to this day. ...”

National Galleries (Video)

The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation (Video)

W - Ray Harryhausen

YouTube: The Ray Harryhausen Creature List

​The Alexandria Quartet: 'Love is every sort of conspiracy'

 

Alexandria Castle, Egypt

"Lawrence Durrell claimed that the four books of The Alexandria Quartet were 'an investigation of modern love'. It's possible to take that idea at face value. Some have even used it as a stick with which to beat him. Notably, his Guardian obituarist (writing in 1990, at a time when Durrell's reputation was possibly at its lowest ebb) said 'a harsh judgment' of his masterpiece might be that it was 'a four-volume romantic novel written by a poet steeped in Freud and on nodding terms with Einstein'. ...”

Guardian

The New Criterion: Alexandria, Durrell & the “Quartet”

'Justine' at 60: Revisiting Lawrence Durrell's Great Love Novel

2011 December: The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell, 2013 September: Villa that inspired Lawrence Durrell faces demolition, as Egypt allows heritage to crumble, 2014 August: Prospero’s Cell (1945), 2015 April: Bitter Lemons (1953–1956), 2015 May: Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence, 2016 July: Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), 2016 September: The Greek Islands, 2016 October: Justine (1957), 2017 February: Balthazar (1958), 2017 April: Mountolive (1958), 2017 May: Clea (1960), 2017 October: The Alexandria Quartet: 'Love is every sort of conspiracy', 2018 February: Pied Piper of Lovers (1935), Panic Spring (1937), 2020 April: The Alexandria Quartet: Mirrors and telescopes

Lawrence Durrell’s passport, with stamps for entry into Alexandria.

Faster Than Birds Can Fly | John Ashbery, Trevor Winkfield

 

“Trevor Winkfield has a small but intensely devoted following, and much has been written about this English painter who moved to New York City from London in 1969.As the editor of an important mimeograph magazine, Juillard, in the late 1960s, he became associated with poets and writers such as John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Harry Matthews, Ron Padgett, Larry Fagin, Charles North, Kenward Elmslie, and others connected to the New York School. In addition to collaborating with many of these writers, as well as providing inimitable designs for their books, he is the author of two marvelous  collections, George Braque & Others: The Selected Writings of Trevor Winkfield, 1990-2009 (2014) and The Scissors’ Courtyard: Selected Writings, 1967-75 (1994), and the translator of a cornerstone text, How I Wrote Certain of My Books by Raymond Roussel, with an Introduction by John Ashbery, which was first published in 1977. ...”

Trevor Winkfield’s Undomesticated Imagination

BOMB: Trevor Winkfield by Maggie Paley

melt

W - Trevor Winkfield

Lee "Scratch" Perry

 

“Lee 'Scratch' Perry OD (born Rainford Hugh Perry; 20 March 1936 – 29 August 2021) was a Jamaican record producer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks. ... In 1973, Perry built a studio in his back yard, the Black Ark, to have more control over his productions and continued to produce notable musicians such as Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Byles, Junior Murvin, the Heptones, the Congos, and Max Romeo. He also started the Black Art label, on which many of the productions from the studio appeared. With his own studio at his disposal, Perry's productions became more lavish, as the energetic producer was able to spend as much time as he wanted on the music he produced. Virtually everything Perry recorded in The Black Ark was done using basic recording equipment; through sonic sleight-of-hand, Perry made it sound unique. ...”

Wikipedia

Guardian: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry obituary

NY Times: Lee (Scratch) Perry, Bob Marley Mentor and Reggae Innovator, Dies at 85

Spotify (Audio), amazon (Audio)

YouTube: DuB those crazy Baldheads [HD] Summerjam 2011, Sun Is Shining | Live 2019

YouTube: Lee Scratch Perry at work (Live)

YouTube: Disco Devil - 12" Version, Soul Rebel, Super Ape, Mash Down etc.

YouTube: Megaton Dub 1 (Full Album), Skanking With The Upsetter Rare Dubs 1971-1974, KUNG FU MEETS THE DRAGON  (Full Album) etc.

​MoMA’s Online Courses Let You Study Modern & Contemporary Art and Earn a Certificate

 

“The labels ‘modern art’ and ‘contemporary art’ don’t easily pull apart from one another. In a strictly historical sense, the former refers to art produced in the era we call modernity, beginning in the mid-19th century. And according to its etymology, the latter refers to art produced at the same time as something else: there is art ‘contemporary’ with, say, the Italian Renaissance, but also art ‘contemporary’ with our own lives. You’ll have a much clearer idea of this distinction — and of what people mean when they use the relevant terms today — if you take the Modern and Contemporary Art and Design Specialization, a set of courses from the Museum of Modern Art (aka MoMA) in New York. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

Porch Memories

 

“In the final stanza of his remarkable poem ‘Sunday Morning’ (1923), Wallace Stevens refers to Jerusalem (and more specifically the tomb of Christ) as, possibly, ‘the porch of spirits lingering’. It is such a strange formula that it has endured: the ‘porch of spirits’, the place where they ‘linger’ — this is any portal or threshold linking (and also separating) human beings from whatever gods or angels there might be. A lovely notion. But why did Stevens choose that homely word, and that most quotidian of sites: the porch? A ‘portico’ (whence the word derives) is something grand. But a ‘porch’? It is the postage-stamp façade of a temple (or is it a tomb?) pasted in miniature upon our domestic architecture. In a secular age, as Stevens understood so well, this is where our spirits, whatever they may be, are left to linger. Federica Soletta sits with them awhile in the affecting photo-essay that follows. ...”

The Public Domain Review

​The History of the New York License Plate

 

“There are more than eleven million vehicles registered in New York State, and New York City has about 12% of those (as of August 2021). Until 1901, these vehicles went unregistered, only identified by traits like their make, color and quality. New York Governor Benjamin Odell, Jr. crafted a bill that required vehicle registration and the initials of the vehicle’s owner to be posted on the back of the vehicle. This bill, passed in 1901, would lead to the birth of the license plate. ...”

untapped cities

W - Vehicle registration plates of New York

‘This is our final’: the team who led athletes’ escape from Afghanistan

Khalida Popal, former captain of the Afghanistan women’s team 

“‘We have been working like fingers on one hand, with different roles, and we came together as a big strong punch,’ says the former captain and one of the founders of the Afghanistan women’s national football team, Khalida Popal. She is talking about the small team that pulled off the mission to evacuate 100-200 Afghan athletes and a number of individuals connected to them from the Hamid Karzai international airport in Kabul. Across a two-week period those fingers worked tirelessly around the clock and across numerous time zones, tracking the real-time movements of the Taliban and military personnel on the ground to pull off what seemed completely impossible: to get a group of female football players, many teenagers, and a host of others, including family members, into the airport and on to planes. Who is this motley, but multitalented, crew and how did they manage to get so many out where many more failed? This is their story. …”

Guardian

​What John Sloan painted after “loafing about Madison Square”

 

“Ashcan painter John Sloan is the master of the city scene, infusing seemingly uneventful interactions with dense imagery and narration that presents a deeper story. ‘Recruiting in Union Square,’ from 1909, is a haunting example of this. But it took some lounging around another New York City park for Sloan to get the inspiration to capture the scene. ...”

Ephemeral New York

2009 August: John Sloan, 2011  November: American realism, 2012 December: Old New York, 2015 May: Spectator of Life, 2015 October: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917, 2015 October: Tenderloin, 2015 October: McSorley's Bar - John Sloan (1912), 2015 December: "Red Kimono on the Roof," 1912, 2016 January: “The Hell Hole,” 1917, 2016 February: Gloucester Days, 2016 March: “Hanging Clothes,” 1920, 2016 May: "Roof, Summer Night," 1906, 2016 October: "Spring Rain," 1912, 2016 October: "The Lafayette" (1927), 2016 December: The Old House at Home by Joseph Mitchell (April 1940), 2020 September: Elevated rails, rooftops, and McSorley’s: How painter John Sloan captured 20th-century Manhattan, 2021 February: A snowstorm on Broadway in the Theater District

Take The Power Back: Black Artist-Owned Labels

 

The Impressions perform on the NBC TV music show Hullabaloo in April 1965

“... After years of working in a profession that regularly ripped off artists for song rights, publishing, licensing and other monies, Cooke was the first major black artist to start his own independent record label. Cooke’s power move wasn’t only bold; it was a revolutionary DIY act. While artist-run record companies would later be called ‘vanity labels,’ for Sam Cooke and those he inspired – including Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, George Clinton and Prince – having a label was less about ego and more about controlling their music. ...”

Red Bull Music Academy (Video)

 

Prince

​Reissue Of The Week: Kling Klang's The Esthetik Of Destruction

 

“... Setting aside issues of legacy and redundancy, the one thing that unites all the disparate writers of manifestos is simply the desire to write a manifesto - that is, to attempt to impose your will on the future and render order, or a reordering, from chaos, tyranny or stagnation. Yet, as time passes, you begin to realise that the intention behind a manifesto is not just to gain future ground but also to recover something that has been lost or stolen, to go back to a path that was mistakenly abandoned. Often this comes as a return to childhood, to regain the curiosity, simplicity, hunger, and liberating possibility that is lost at some point during the 10,000 hours spent gaining expertise and the slow deadening creep that comes with it. The aim is to absorb then subvert; learning enough to know what to unlearn, as Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay of Can did with their former teacher the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Arthur Rimbaud did with the rules and forms of French poetry before he dismantled them. ...”

The Quietus (Video/Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

YouTube:  "Heavydale" (full)- awesome synth drone +drums

Russian Ark - Alexander Sokurov (2002)

 

“Russian Ark is a 2002 experimental historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. In Russian Ark, an unnamed narrator wanders through the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, and implies that he died in some horrible accident and is a ghost drifting through the palace. In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various periods in the city's 300-year history. He is accompanied by ‘the European’, who represents the Marquis de Custine, a 19th-century French traveler. The film was recorded entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum on 23 December 2001 using a one-take single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: FILM IN REVIEW; 'Russian Ark'

senses of cinema

amazon

YouTube: The Russian Ark Trailer, In One Breath | Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (Making of) 45:12

YouTube: Russian Ark 1:39:28

2009 March: Aleksandr Sokurov

Sturgeon Moon by Nina MacLaughlin

 

“August, the year in its ripeness, when the shadows shift and the trees ache with green. It brings the Sturgeon Moon. Sturgeon, ancient bony-plated creature of lakes, rivers, and seas. A fish without scales, a fish without teeth, a fish that’s been swimming the depths of this earth for more than two hundred million years.A shark-finned rolling pin, dinosaurian, the type of specimen displayed in a case in a museum of natural history, this murk-dweller lives fifty to sixty years and can grow up to twelve feet long. The largest on record was twenty-four feet, the length of more than three queen-size beds head to toe. Though they swim down where it’s dim, they’re also known for flinging their big bodies up out of the water and splashing back down. No one knows why. Joy, I bet. ...”

The Paris Review

2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon

New York’s Legendary Literary Hangouts

 

Simone de Beauvoi

“You might think of them as solitary creatures, furiously scribbling or typing alone, but as long as there have been writers in New York City, they have socialized together in an assortment of bars, restaurants, apartments and clubs. The Times began writing about these places in its very first issues. In 1910, it published an article lamenting ‘the passing of the literary haunts of New York,’ noting that many once-famous gathering spots were being razed as the city grew and modernized. ‘Number 19 West 24th is gone,’ the piece began. ‘At least the old 19 is gone,  and … no account has been made of the fact that it at one time housed the Author’s Club, and that its rakish stairs were somewhat worn away by the feet of Matthew Arnold, Whittier, Lowell and Field.’ ...”

NY Times

White Horse Tavern Established in 1880, this West Village bar was a prime literary hotspot in the 1950s.