Freebird Books and Goods

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David Hajdu and His Famous Flames

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:01:00 +0000

On Sunday evening, Geoff and Lynette from Jalopy kindly lent us their stage for a reading and music performance. David Hajdu spoke about Billy Eckstine (from an essay included in his recent collection, Heroes and Villains), and then picked up a guitar to a perform a few songs related to the book with his impromptu band of Seth Fahey, James Marcus, and David's wife, acclaimed jazz-pop vocalist Karen Oberlin.

Above, James Marcus solos on guitar to the tune of Dream a Little Dream of Me. Cass Elliott, eat your heart out. If not that ham sandwich.
--Peter

"Free"bird concert at Jalopy--this Sunday at 6 pm

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:48:00 +0000

Photo by Tom Stoelker

Just a reminder that the gang above--David Hajdu (center), Karen Oberlin, James Marcus, and Seth Fahey (not pictured)--perform Sunday night at Jalopy Theatre. David will also be talking about his new book, Heroes and Villains, a collection of his culture pieces for The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and other outlets.

David Hajdu and Karen Oberlin at Jalopy Theatre

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:06:00 +0000

Special event at Jalopy Theatre (315 Columbia Street)

Sunday, April 25, 6 pm

Music performance and book discussion with David Hajdu and Karen Oberlin

In conjunction with the release of his new collection of essays, Heroes and Villains, David Hajdu dishes about the music biz and performs with his wife, jazz-pop vocalist Karen Oberlin. James Marcus joins them on electric guitar and lap-steel guitar, along with Seth Fahey on stand-up bass and clarinet.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008). Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture was recently published by Da Capo Press.

Karen Oberlin is an acclaimed vocalist with a deep background in classical music, jazz, cabaret, theater and musical theater who has performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Town Hall, Iridium Jazz Club, Feinstein's, Merkin Hall and The Metropolitan Room. The recipient of the Bistro and MAC awards, her albums include "My Standards" (Miranda Music), “Secret Love: The Music of Doris Day” (Miranda Music), and the forthcoming "A Wish" (Miranda Music).

Basement Follies

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:23:00 +0000

March 6, 2010
With enormous cheer, Tigran shouted to the party of sidewalk scavengers: "We're going to make America a book-loving country!" No one lifted their heads in acknowledgment.

They didn't want to take their eyes off the prize. Boxes and boxes of rodent-chewed, mildewed, water-stained books from Freebird's basement. After two years of procrastination and denial (and one week after getting engaged), I finally faced the mountain of junk lurking beneath the surface.

At the recommendation of Henry and Zack Zook at Book Court, I hired a local contractor named Tigran to tackle the salvage project. If you walked by the store this afternoon you would have seen him hauling up one cardboard box after another, depositing them on the curb where his friend Lincoln awaited with his empty van.

Initially Tigran was shocked by my request. "You want to dispose of all this?" he asked, sweeping his hand across the shambled vista. "In Russia, where I grew up, books were so treasured. You would never think of throwing them out."

It was a good point, and one that gave me pause for these last couple of years. But I was tired of providing a rent free habitrail for waterfront creatures, where paperbacks were miniature mattresses, if you catch my drift. I could live without their potential income. It was time to release them from their dungeon. Time to rid the special "odor" that occasionally wafted upwards and made customers ask to my embarrassment "what is it about used books that makes them smell so wonderful?" Finally, Tigran relented.

In between Lincoln's curbside pick-ups, passersby sorted through the books and haggled good-naturedly about the the value of the leftovers. Tigran, whose energy never flagged, conducted this scene with turbo-charged verve, peddling editions of The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn to the skeptical crowd. One would have thought he was a booster for the NEA. "Hey guys! Change your life. Read a Book!" In response, a woman thought it was all a joke: "Ha ha! He said 'read a book.'"

Tigran: "Here. You want a book on laughter?"
Pedestrian: "I like to laugh, but I don't want no book on laughter. Do YOU want to read a book about laughter?"
Tigran: "Of course! Who doesn't love laughter?"

I'm with Tigran. But in case you feel that Freebird is somehow making too much light of the situation and not preserving the sanctity of the operation, fear not. Books we got, and more are on the way. The purpose of clearing out all the literary debris in the basement is to make way for new neighbors. The charity Books Through Bars (a nonprofit which helps prisoners get access to literature) will occupy part of the cellar and use it as their base of operations by the end of this month.
--Peter Miller

A Modest Marriage Proposal

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:38:00 +0000

March 1, 2010
Freebird would like to apologize to the borough of Brooklyn for the improper use of the Columbia Street road salt pile. What appears to be a caricature of the borough president Marty Markowitz in repose being fed grapes by Mayor Bloomberg, is in FACT an outline of myself dressed as Cupid shooting arrows at my girlfriend Casey Baltes.

We did not intend to impugn the right honorable gentleman from borough hall. The original illustration had been painstakingly drawn with colored sand by the famed Buddhist artist Jeruptor Swashili, who traveled specially from Dharamsala to create the mandala-like valentine.

However, around 3 a.m. American Stevedoring dump trucks transporting additional salt obscured Swashili's design with their treads. Countervailing gusts from the Van Brunt wind tunnel distorted the image further into the final shape seen at sunrise.

The alteration ruined a planned celebration at the base of the salt pile from which Celine Dion (who turned down the Vancouver closing ceremonies to be here) would emerge on a pedestal built from salvaged Harlequin romances out of Freebird's basement. To the tune of "Be the Man," a banner was scheduled to unfurl from a nearby loading crane, stating "Casey, will you marry me?!!"

At the conclusion of her serenade, Ms. Dion was to turn to Casey and say "So Cay-see, weel you marree heem?" I would be hiding in a chartered NY Water Taxi idling dockside for the immediate getaway.

It is our sincerest regrets that residents along Columbia Street between Kane and Degraw were awoken to the Grammy-award winner screaming into the microphone "What zee sheet ees thees?!" However we do not take responsibility for the damaged eardrums of any Ikea customers passing by in complimentary buses.

Though we had a hitch, I am proud to say that, in the end, Casey accepted my proposal and we sped off not in the expensive water chariot but a speedy B71 bus.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I love you Casey!
--Peter Miller

Bodenheim post-script of the day

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:36:00 +0000

February 27, 2010
"Kill me, kill me," he shouted incoherently. "Nobody say anything in this court. I do all the talking." Pointing at his lawyer, he said, "He killed Maxwell Bodenheim. I saw him. Send him to Matteawan for the rest of his life."
(Harold Weinberg, on the verge of being released from an insane asylum after being incarcerated for thirteen years for the murder of Maxwell Bodenheim. However, at the hearing he would be declared unrehabilitated and sent back to the notorious mental hospital, Matteawan. Quoted from Time magazine, November 16, 1967)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Banana oil

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:33:00 +0000

February 26, 2010
Banana oil: Insincere flattery; nonsensical exaggeration.

Ruth made up her mind to try him out. What was the use of living unless she allowed a dog to bite her sometimes; found out whether it hurt, whether it made her feel vomity? All of this self-esteem and purity that people were forever making speeches about--what was it except sleeping, or suffering, in a classy hotel-room and paying for it with your blood-drops because you were afraid to open the door, because you imagined that the payment established your superiority over other people? The old banana oil!

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim etiquette of the day: Diner courtesy circa 1930

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:34:00 +0000

February 24, 2010

Shovelling the food without intermission and with the nose two inches from the plate was permissible. Drinking soup from the bowl--an equal shudder to dear Mrs. Post--would have brought the plaster down. If a woman was alone and occupied one of the stools beside the counter, she was treated familiarly. If she seated herself at one of the white-slabbed tables, extending vertically to the left of the counter, she was not molested. If a man cursed, or used the common notion of smut, in the proximity of women, he was reprimanded. If he persisted, he was thrown out on his ear. On the other hand, profanities and alleged dirt were roborant signs of manhood...when "ladies" were absent. In this regard it did not matter whether the woman was a well-known harridan, baggage, or spotless housewife. The rule went in all cases.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim insult of the day: Peter De Vries

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:55:00 +0000

February 23, 2010
"He once walked into the office [of Poetry magazine] and accused me of having a face unmarked by sorrow. I didn't know what to do. I just took the day off and went home."
(Peter De Vries, quoted on Maxwell Bodenheim, Time Magazine, July 20, 1959)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Hamburger down

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:20:00 +0000

February 22, 2010
Hamburger down: Take it easy (according to the glossary of Naked on Roller Skates)

Terry drank his cornwash straight and remained undisturbed. Colored-white quartette still too interested in the next cancan to pay attention to her bark. If they did, he'd soap his way through....Convulsions to the left.
"Come on, Black Bill. Get up. Start something."
"Hamburger down, boy."
"You heard my lip. Get up. Start something."
"Ha-amburger down, boy."
"You gonna wind up a mess, boy."
"What for?"
"You know why."
"Aw, take it slow. I ain' gon' lift your chippy."
"You're damn right you ain'."

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim insult of the day: Greenwich Village

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:14:00 +0000

February 21, 2010
"The Village used to have a spirit of Bohemia, gaiety, sadness, beauty, poetry . . . Now it's just a geographical location."
(Maxwell Bodenheim, quoted in an article about his destitution, Time magazine, February 18, 1952)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Scissorbill

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:21:00 +0000

February 20, 2010
Scissorbill: Someone considered contemptible or foolish.

Rones was jocular to salve down the inopportune connivance without discouraging Ruth, but his eyes never departed from Terry--probing, smoothly casual. Wish this old scissorbill would open up. White men who talked freely were easy to handle, big or little. White men who glued their traps were another matter, unless they were shivery or plastered sleepy, and this old duck wasn't either...seemed not.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim sex scene of the day

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:09:00 +0000

February 19, 2010

While Jim was washing up, Terry went out to the barn for a drink of water. The well was on the ground floor of the barn. In the darkness of the structure he collided with Roberta returning from the chicken coop. She pawed at his shoulders to escape from falling, and then strained against him, her head digging into his upper chest: her breath exuding into him, like a spasmodic fan-blast of heat.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Four-flusher

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:04:00 +0000

February 16, 2010
Four-flusher: An unreliable person; a boaster; a welcher; a piker; one who poses for effect; one who pretends to have and has not; a bluffer; a braggart. (From Criminal Slang: The Vernacular of the Underworld Lingo, 1949)

"Well, I'm not going to be here all my life," he said. "I'm just waiting for a better chance to come along. You know I've always treated you decent, Sel, you know that, and if you stick to me you'll never be sorry about it. I can't make a break with Pete now, not until I get another prospect, but when I do I'll tell him to go to hell. You're too good a girl to be taking orders from that four-flusher, and you know it as well as I do."

(From Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1924, Harcourt, Brace)

Bodenheim demimonde of the day: Book browsers

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:32:00 +0000

February 15, 2010

Tables stood in front of their windows on the sidewalk and spread the silent, hieroglyphic appeal of books to the sordidly marching unconcern of men and women. Worn, and with half of their color slain, the books perched together on the tables, like dead symbols waiting for the rare resurrections--symbols of stupidity, love, hatred, and fancy, begging some mind to seize them and elevate them once more to an illusionary importance. Sometimes men and women stepped out of the heedless procession and lingered at the tables, as though they were reprehensible deserters, fleeing from their ranks in the commonplace army. They picked up the books and dropped them, with an idle and defrauded air. Sometimes one of these people selected a book and hurried into the shop, with the elation of one whose prejudices had shaken hands with their reflections.

(From Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1924, Harcourt, Brace)

Bodenheim love poem of the day

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:40:00 +0000

February 14, 2010

BOARDING-HOUSE EPISODE

Apples race into appetites:
The unswerving mechanism of the table
Hurries through the last dish of supper.
Then an undulating interlude
From people who have spent one pleasure,
Distractedly juggling its aftermath
And peering at new desires.
One woman gazes at another
While twitching murder shimmers in her eyes
And skims across her face.
Violets in a madman's scene.
Suspended in the air.
Are the eyes of her neighbour.
And in between them sits the nervous man
With face like pouting gargoyle,
Whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot
say:
Explosive evasions;
Fears too tired to shriek;
Renunciations groaning from their dungeons.
He eyes each woman, like a man
Solemnly trying to walk on mysterious ice.
Crisp inanities ripple back and forth
Among these three, like ghostly parrots
Visiting each other's cages.
She with crazy, violet eyes,
Plays with her fork, as though its clink
Rhymed with secret, chained thoughts;
She with murder in her eyes,
And curtly voluminous body,
Evenly plays her child-role.
Cringing on the rim of middle age.
With broken shields piled at her feet.
She has made this man a haunted palace
And she stands before the door
She dare not open, with a dagger
For the woman standing at her side.

They sit, afterwards, upon the veranda.
Meekly greeting the velvet swagger of evening:
Woman with twisted, violet eyes.
Woman with hidden murder on her lips,
And man like a pouting gargoyle.
Then, like tired children,
Their words grow cool and lazy.
They draw closer to each other
And, with a trembling curiosity.
Look at each other's hands.

(from Advice: A Book of Poems by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1920, Alfred A. Knopf)

Bodenheim ode of the day: Typing pools

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:14:00 +0000

February 13, 2010

NONDESCRIPT TYPIST
Within an office whose exterior
Resembles an ultra-conservative mind
You battle with the avaricious words
Of a meager, petrified man.
Your face is brown stagnation
Sometimes astounded by a thrust
Of chattering wistfulness.
Bravery is fear
Effectively sneering at itself,
And you are forever wavering
Upon the edge of this condition.
Yet your obscurity
Is an important atom
In the mysterious march of time.

(from The Sardonic Arm by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1923, Covici-McGee)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Cake-eater

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:17:00 +0000

February 12, 2010
Cake-eater: An effeminate fellow; sissy; (specif.) an effete young man who attends tea parties or the like (as defined by the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

A small table to their left was graced by two cake-eaters and the girl whom they were trying to make. Dapper loafers through the early twenties, who would soon be swinging first over a girl indifferent to both of them. She nodded her head slightly, in the direction of a hard-faced buck sitting with Diana. Hard-face was an old flame who had previously turned her down but was willing to make her happy for another night. When she had rid herself of the other two, outside, she would return to Diana's and meet him.

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim slang word of the day: Cake-slashing

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:52:00 +0000

February 11, 2010
Cake-slashing: Assault and mayhem (according to glossary in Naked on Roller Skates)

The chippy kept silent. The man she craved was on Blackwell's Island, doing a stretch for cake-slashing, and either of the present contestants was bearable to hotsprat* the intermission. Rones walked up. Rones was always propitiatory until the contumacies of his patrons dived in his direction. In the latter case he was an unstirred bouncer doing his job, or a viscid mongoose, according to the magnitude of the offence--whether it was rabies induced by too much of his diluted formaldehyde, or a studied menace. A man of untold honeys and rapacities. An unregenerate man with a self-unknown heart--Moby Dick's cannibal transplanted to Harlem and educated to more devious ritual and procedure, yet capable of atavistic transgressions.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

*Hotsprat: Trivial but agreeable entertainment

Bodenheim insult of the day: Fellow poets

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:49:00 +0000

February 9, 2010

The poetic situation in America is, indeed, a blustering and verbose invitation to boredom and a slight, reviling headache. When not engaged in scrubbing the window pane ten times over, lest it prove opaque to an astigmatic public, American poets are discovering, with great glee, the perspiring habits and routines of sex, or naively deifying the local mannerisms of a blithely juvenile country--a lurching, colloquial, fist-swinging melee of milkmen depositing bottles on doorsteps and acquiring dignity in the process; chorus-girls and farmhands telling their troubles in a stilted slang; factory-owners falling in love with their female employees, to the tune of delicate and novel symbolism concerning "a longing to enter the house of her being"; ravings over the strength and poignancy of corn-fields and country-roads--"O, the corn, how it aches!" and "What is better than the patient and sturdy road?"--; much roaring about the importance and hard beauty of mills and factories--crudely smoky boxes of avarice faced by little, kneeling poets....Ah, the list, when extended, defies amusement. You must leave the theater unless you desire the thankless experience of vomiting.

(From the foreword to The Sardonic Arm by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1923, Covici-McGee)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Chivvy

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:05:00 +0000

February 8, 2010
Chivvy: Unpleasant odor

"Don' come back here, chippy. You barred from this flat. You ain' selling nothing here. We don' want your chivvy."

Terry opened the door: pushed Ruth into the hallway: slammed the self-locking door against her: and then turned and struck Jackson in the face. In a trice, the flat became an infuriation of kicks, fists, chairswingings, tackles, with Sprad and Terry battling the other three.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim Curriculum Vitae of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:10:00 +0000

February 7, 2010
Rest in peace, Bogie. Fifty six years ago today Maxwell Bodenheim was discovered in a Third Avenue apartment lying in a pool of blood alongside his equally lifeless wife Ruth Fagan. It was the end of his four-decade long somersault down the boho-lit ant-heap.

As the angry young man in Chicago he was heralded by critics as the next Rimbaud. As the bitter old drunk in Greenwich Village he was pitied by the Beats, who, seated at the San Remo bar (where Bodenheim was known derisively as "Moscowitz"), pondered whether Bodenheim was the right role model for their anti-establishmentarianism.

So we give an abbreviated timeline of his success and fame and failure and oblivion told through contemporary eyes. Hard to tell where the decade of the 1940s went, but rumor is he was posing as a pimp to unsuspecting servicemen. Is it a career path or a cautionary tale? You be the judge.

1922: "His is an acrobatic mind that juggles a dozen mixed or mad metaphors in curious congruity, balancing itself upon the points of emotion with a mordant grimace. Bodenheim, for all his macabre experiments, is sure of his footing, and his agility, because of the very precariousness of his position is fascinating. He is sometimes garrulous, grotesque, narcistic, verbally dandified, frequently irritating, seldom unintelligible."
(Louis Untermeyer reviewing Introducing Irony in the August 1922 issue of The Bookman)

1923: "Brittle, penetrating, filled with dry humor and biting satire...He is wispish in appearance, with sharp features and sandy hair. His conversation is as biting as his poetry. A keen analytical mind and a contempt for the unintelligent make his reactions and expressions fearless and rather terrifying...I have never known him to hesitate to criticize a man's work because that man was his friend. Both in his work and in his person he seems afraid of friendliness. This is, in a sense, his strength...Bodenheim is a sort of poetic Jonathan Swift, a twentieth century Pope turned democrat."
(The Bookman, July 1923)

1925: "Eccentric, erratic, is Mr. Bodenheim, careless of a world's criticism outside of his work, but there is an air of sincerity about him, cynical sincerity, a brittle sparkle to his conversation, that fascination of exotic, social lawlessness."
(The New Yorker, July 25, 1925)

1935-1939: "Bodenheim's career as a steady and fairly sober employee [of the Federal Writers' Project] came to an abrupt end when he (along with a few other writers of established reputations) was unofficially permitted to do his own work at home...For Bodenheim, who until then had managed to report to work punctually every day, the once-a-week trip to the office became a prodigious ordeal. He would arrive in front of the office building in a self-inebriated state; then, unable to summon enough will power to enter, would go to a bar across the street to continue his drinking. Eventually, it would take two of his Project friends to escort him, protesting and staggering, from the bar to the office."
(Jerre Mangione from The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project)

1952: "A tall, glum, scraggly, hawk-nosed, long-haired, itchy-looking, no doubt pickled, fuming and oozing, Bowery-type specimen; and yet, for a' that, something austere and even classic about his ruins--Old Roman, not just any ordinary human junk heap."
(Milton Klonsky recalling Bodenheim during the Winter of 1952, from his 1963 Esquire article "Maxwell Bodenheim as Culture Hero")

1954: "In last nine days, front pages have honored two writers. Hemingway crashed, reported dead, found again. Then, at the opposite extreme, Max Bodenheim murdered in a Third Avenue rooming house, all proving that violent deaths are the only thing that can give writers now any immortality. What a pair--one who never missed a bet, knew the right people, dropped the wrong ones as he went along, played it rich and social and for publicity. The other played the dunghill and his dunghills hot lower and lower. Both quarreled with all old friends. Max killed with The Sea Around Us on his chest--a sea that engulfed him."
(Dawn Powell from The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page)

1963: "I don't mean to preach a risen and exalted Bodenheim, which would be ridiculous; nor do I mean to "revive" him as a poet. Actually, he was a lousy poet. What I mean is that for us, now, Bodenheim has come into his own as a kind of bohemian culture hero, an Urbeatnik, so to speak, though his beatification has been long overdue."
(Milton Klonsky from the 1963 Esquire article "Maxwell Bodenheim as Culture Hero")

2002: "Bodenheim is no longer read. The work of the writer considered by his contemporaries the exemplar of the bohemian spirit consists almost entirely of borrowed ideas, conventional novels, and pedantic poetry. Its only astonishing quality is its quantity...The poems, while just as hackneyed in theme, are as rigorous and stylized as the novels are flaccid and shapeless."
(Ross Wetzsteon from Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960)

Bodenheim ode of the day: Subway sweat

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:40:00 +0000

February 6, 2010

SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY-STATION

PERSPIRING violence derides
The pathetic collapse of dirt.
An effervescence of noises
Depends upon cement for its madness.
Electric light is taut and dull,
Like a nauseated suspense.
This kind of heat is the recollection
Of an orgy in a swamp.
Soiled caskets joined together
Slide to rasping stand-stills.
People savagely tamper
With each other's bodies,
Scampering in and out of doorways.
Weighted with apathetic bales of people
The soiled caskets rattle on.
The scene consists of mosaics
Jerkily pieced together and blown apart.
A symbol of billowing torment,
This sturdy girl leans against an iron girder.
Weariness has loosened her face
With its shining cruelty.
Round and poverty-stricken
Her face renounces life.
Her white cotton waist is a wet skin on her breast:
Her black hat, crisp and delicate,
Does not understand her head.
An old man stoops beside her,
Sweat and wrinkles errupting
Upon the blunt remnants of his face.
A little black pot of a hat
Corrupts his grey-haired head.

Two figures on a subway-platform,
Pieced together by an old complaint.

(From Introducing Irony by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1922, Boni & Liveright)

Bodenheim demimonde of the day: Taxi dancers

noreply@blogger.com (freebird) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:02:00 +0000

February 5, 2010

"The Academy" hired thirty girls and they were supposed to fill the role of dancing instructors, but this was merely a pretext, and the lure of the place was that it furnished young women who could be danced with and spoken to without the formality of an introduction. The price of each dance was twelve cents, out of which the girls received five, and the dances were limited to one and a half minutes and continued without a pause until the closing hour. On a thriving night it was possible for the girls to dance at least a hundred and twenty times, and their weekly earnings, supplemented by a variety of tips, amounted to fairly neat sums. They danced like painted, flexible, unemotional dolls, and held weariness at arm's length with the tropical indifference of youth, although afterward as they straggled from the hall the penalty became evident in their dragging, gaudily slippered feet and the rounded complaint of their shoulders. They made no pretense of instructing the men who could not dance, but simply walked with them around the floor, in a halting or scampering fashion, with a look of pouting martyrdom on their faces.

(from Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, Harcourt, Brace, 1924)