The Front Porch
The great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature back when such prizes were awarded for actual literary merit, was the first artist to publicly defect from a Communist bloc country after World War II. By then, the horrors of Nazi death camps and Stalinist gulags were known to whoever cared to see them. Books like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, and Whittaker Chambers’s Witness made it clear that Stalin was every bit as much of a monster as Hitler.
What Miłosz exposed in his 1953 book The Captive Mind was something else: How totalitarian thought defaced the insides of people’s heads, particularly the heads of artists and intellectuals who agreed, out of cowardice, cynicism, or belief, to serve the Party rather than their own perceptions of reality.
Ordinary people, Miłosz wrote, dealt with the false …
The Cracker Smacker
Fight night in Harlem, where black celebrities bay for white blood in a reversal of the famous scene from Richard Wright’s ‘Black Boy’
Poop in the shower of Mrs. Greenfield’s boarding house
A visit with the Bleeder of Bayonne
Sammy was in his late sixties and he worked the door at Gleason's Gym, which was on 30th Street in Manhattan. That was in the mid 1970s, before the home of great boxing champions like Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali, and Roberto Durán migrated to Brooklyn to begin its third life in a new borough, on Water Street.
In the 70s, in Manhattan, Sammy ruled Gleason’s door. Strangers, media representatives, and anyone Sammy didn’t like paid a buck and a half; girlfriends, managers, trainers, fighters, and wingmen were admitted free.
Very few girlfriends applied to Sammy for admittance, though. Gleason’s was a business-like place. Boxers worked out, matchmakers came and went; trainers, occasionally, and managers, inevitably, (still) smoked cigars at ringside. Boxers would train and get out. No one lingered longer than was necessary to decide on somewhere else to meet. The smell of boxers’ hand wraps was that …
The Fugitive Road
Invisible ink, invisible maps, lead you to the Valley of the Moon.
Hunter Thompson, M.F.K. Fisher, and Jack London’s ghost all dwell herein.
Harvesting flowers with Jesus leads a man to marry a farm.
M.F.K. Fisher, known to friends and family members as Mary Frances, boasted that she wrote her books in “invisible ink” and that she had “invisible maps” of places where she had made her home, like Aix-en-Provence. I didn’t catch up with her until she settled in Glen Ellen, California, an invisible town, until folks like Jack London and, much later, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson found that it suited their fugitive ways. Mary Frances wasn’t a fugitive from the law, but she maintained a very low profile in Glen Ellen, where she hosted intimate gatherings where she served champagne, real champagne from France, and oysters from Hog Island on the Sonoma Coast, an hour’s drive away.
I’ve long loved the idea of writing in invisible ink and consulting invisible maps; they appeal to my underground self, the self that wants to be in hiding and only surface on rare occasions. Mary Frances might have written her …
