Another Methodist Church in Mariner's Harbor

All I know is that the picture claims to be of a Methodist Episcopal Church on Harbor Road at Journeay Street. Now there's a Pentecostal Tabernacle next door and the building's been changed so much on the outside that it took me an extra second or two to recognize it. One more example of the changing of the guard on Staten Island's working class streets.


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More Writers

E.R. Eddison - The Worm Ourboros and the Zimiamvia Trilogy

A writer I know a bit about but I haven't been able to read yet. Meaning I haven't been able to wade through his pseudo-archaic dialogue as of yet. Still, he was important to writers as diverse as Lovecraft and Tolkien. It really seems the first book is the most important to the later development of Sword and Sorcery. Perhaps he's a little more trying for highbrow than pulp but his importance seems clear.


Second Coming

Andre Norton - Witch World

border="0" alt="" />This is someone I've never read anything by but her following is still huge and her output is legendary. I'm including her without much knowledge of her stuff because she was a member of Lin Carter's SAGA group back in the seventies.

Rebirthed

Richard Kirk - Raven, Swordmistress of Chaos

Actually the award winning writer Robert Holdstock and Angus Wells switching off titles in this five book series. I got 'em but haven't read 'em. They look luridly over-the-top. I first became aware of them in the old "Giants in the Earth" feature in the old "Dragon Magazine" back in the early eighties. They'd do write ups and give you stats for various fictional characters.



Newest Stuff


Glen Cook - The Dread Empire, the Black Company, numerous other series and single books

So I've read a ton of his stuff and it's pretty amazing. It's grim, exciting and pretty well (mostly) plotted and often utterly insane. I see it as somewhere
between the D&D style epic stuff like Steve Erikson and the outright S&S stuff of someone like Robert E. Howard.

Mysterious Methodist Episcopal Church

For some time I've wondered at the history of the small church on Willowbrook Road near Forest Avenue just by the Burger King. Now it houses a Spanish language evangelical congregation but its apparent age and the old cemetery ringing it clearly indicates an old, lost heritage.


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Doing one of my period searches through the NYPL Digital Archive I found this picture. A quick look at googlemaps confirmed my suspicions - it's the same building.



The two outer windows in the staircase have been removed and the steeple is long gone. There are added awnings and other minor changes but the original building still comes through.


I still don't know anything about the church and its history. I guess I can add it to the list of Methodist church closings and consolidations in the late sixties but I have no way at present of knowing for sure. I've never actually knowingly known anyone who belonged to any of the Island's Methodist congregations.

The Paved Wonders of Staten Island

Once there was a beautiful building designed to house down at their heels actors who'd reached the latter stages of their lives. Now it's the Staten Island Zoo parking lot.


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Once German immigrants sought to create a prestige private school in St. George. They founded the Staten Island Academy. It burned down in the seventies and was replaced with...a parking lot.


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Vanderbilt Family Mansion - Swedish Home for the Aged

Originally this mansion (one of the few remaining from Staten Island's "Golden Age") was built for one of the Vanderbilt Family daughters. At some point it was given over to charity and the Swedish Home for the Aged was opened. Only this past spring did it finally close due to failing revenues. Still, the gorgeous Victorian mansion remains hidden away in the woods between Victory Boulevard and the Staten Island Expressway.


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Summerfield Methodist Church

When the Methodist Church seemed to collapse on Staten Island's North Shore in the late sixties, Summerfield Methodist Church survived. At present it's still an active congregation but it's a small remnant of what it once was.

Comparing the old photo to the Google Map view you can see the houses on the church's right are still there. The one to its left is the church parking lot.


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Mariner's Harbor Dutch Reformed Church

I don't know much, in fact nothing, about the history of this church. I guess it flourished in the days when the street names of Mariner's Harbor (Walloon, Van Name, Brabant, Confederation) reflected the heritage of their inhabitants. I think it closed up in the sixties.

Presently it's the Fellowship Baptist Church, an independent Baptist congregation run by the Rev. Williams. Except for the color and the front steps the church looks pretty much the same. I was inside it several times years back for an old job and it was well maintained and comfortable seeming.


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Mariner's Harbor Baptist Church

Nestled away near the Lawgiver's home, this beautiful old red brick church was initially built as the Mariner's Harbor Baptist Church. It closed down when the congregation merged with other congregations and formed the Willowbrook Baptist Church back in the late sixties. At present it's a Seventh Day Adventist Church. It's been changed a little with some decorative touches and the peak on the steeple lost to time and wear but it's still a striking church.


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First Presbyterian - Stapleton

Tucked away in the back streets of Stapleton is the beautiful old First Presbyterian Church. It clearly was once an active and wealthy congregation. The Pouch family (wealthy Islanders) were members and somebody shelled out for Tiffany stained glass windows (picture later).

As Stapleton changed and the old families and white folks ran away the congregation dwindled and finally closed in the early nineties. A Spanish evangelical church occupied the building for a time but they too pulled out. Recently it was bought by Mount Sinai Baptist Church and they've been renovating the buildings and restoring them for active use.


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The church is hidden away in one of the most beautiful and secret places on Staten Island. Lining its narrow streets are numerous large and well kept homes. My mother's friend, Helen Pose lived in a large house on Harrison Street and even as a little kid I knew it was beautiful.


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Canal Street - Stapleton

Even when I was little Stapleton was still a major commercial hub. The decay triggered by the Stapleton Houses and the methadone clinic weren't obviously terminal yet. Store ran along Broad Street from Van Duzer Street all the way to Tappen Park and Wright Street. The only exception was the towering remnants of the Piels Brewery.
Around Tappen Park on Water Street and Canal Street were tons of stores and some restaurants. It was beautiful.

Well that was over thirty years ago. People like my mom and the equally late Helen Pose struggled against the tide of crime, apathy and the cheapness of the merchants and had as much luck as King Canute.

I went to the NY Parks sponsored Oktoberfest today and it was barely a pale shade of the street fairs and flea markets held there through the early eighties. Sure there's development going on today and few builders are cleaning up some of the decayed buildings but it's not the same and I imagine never will be. I wish them luck but it's just not the same.


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That's the Meadow Brook Dairy building, second from the left behind the scaffolding.

Tompkins Department Store

I remember my mom talking about going to Tompkins when she was a kid. It was one of the first real department stores on the island and supposedly one of the finest. By the time I came around it was just a memory. Here's some pictures.


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Levi Stubbs - RIP

Levi Stubbs died yesterday. He'd been sick for some time and hadn't toured in eight years. I obviously didn't know the man but I'm still sad.

I can't think of a more powerful pop song right now than "Reach Out I'll Be There." There might be but I don't care.

S&S - updated

I've added links were possible and changed some of the art.

Swords and Sorcery - More

In 1961, Michael Moorcock wrote a letter published in the magazine Amra asking for a name for the sort of story written by Robert E. Howard. Fritz Leiber responded with the following:

"I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too!"

That's as good a definition as any I could need. It covers a wide gamut of authors and styles but they're all alike in tending to the grittier side of things and a melancholic tone. I just want to put out a list of who and what I consider important or foundational to the genre and make a view comments where possible.

This is a preview of something I'd like to do in the near future. I'd plan to make (once I master Wordpress) a site about S&S with links, pictures, maps and everything. We'll see how that goes.


The Foundations - The Creators and their Characters/Milieus
Robert E. Howard - Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, etc.
Clifford Ball - Duar the Accursed
Henry Kuttner - Elak of Atlantis, Prince Raynor
C. L. Moore - Jirel of Joiry
Clark Ashton Smith - Hyperborea, Averoigne, and Zothique




The Second Generation
Fritz Leiber - Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Jack Vance - The Dying Earth
L. Sprague de Camp - Pusadian Tales
Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword, etc.

The Rebirth - Following the publication of the Conan books by Lancer in the sixties there was a market for new books. De Camp and Lin Carter led much of the way with their editing of these editions of Howard, their "completion" of his story fragments and their pastiches to fill in "gaps" in Conan's timeline. While more often mediocre or bad rather than good, these paved the way for the boom in S&S publishing that took place over the next decades.


For over ten years there was great new stuff by older authors as well as great new things by new authors. There were numerous story collections and even an association of S&S authors; SAGA

Michael Moorcock - Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon, Prince Corum, Erekose, etc., etc.
Fritz Leiber - A glorious return to the abandoned Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser saga
Lin Carter - numerous collections (Ballantine Adult Fantasy, Flashing Swords, Year's Best Fantasy), Thongor, etc. - Carter's novels tend to be poor pastiches of Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs. His greatness lies solely with his enthusiasm for the genre and his tremendous editing efforts
John Jakes - Brak the Barbarian - unrepentant homage to Robert E. Howard
Andrew Offutt - editor (Swords Against Darkness) and numerous Howard pastiches
Karl Edward Wagner - Kane and several Howard pastiches - With Moorcock, the best of the newcomers. Succumbed to booze far too young and after having not written much for a decade prior to his death in 1994.
Charles Saunders - Imaro
Jessica Amanda Salmonson - editor (Amazons)



Newest Stuff - There's plenty of stuff that falls into the S&S genre being written nowadays. More often than not they like to call it "heroic fantasy". It's like science fiction being called speculative fiction in order to try and market it more upscale. It's all a little disingenuous and condescending. If you're already writing or reading about imaginary worlds with low levels of technology, wizards, dragons and treacherous viziers then you should be able to handle the words "Swords and Sorcery" (Note - I haven't read a lot of the newer stuff yet, but I'm working on it)

P.C. Hodgell - Jame
David Gemmell - Druss the Axe, etc.
Robert Jordan - Conan pastiches galore - I read one and it made me long for the duller works of Lin Carter
Brian Ruckley - Godless World

As I discover more I'll add them. Needless to say, there's plenty more authors to add to each of the sections above and I hope to do that on the full S&S site someday.

The Old Family Manse as It Appears Today

The House (Obviously) - Not taken from the exact same vantage spot as the house is fronted by a large hedge and there's a great big pine tree blocking the view.

The Garage - Taken from a similar spot as the 1939 picture, you can see that the doors and the driveway have been changed. The woods behind the building have grown and grown and grown. Since my friends and I stopped playing in them over 20 years ago they've grown wild and the paths trodden on by dozens of kids feet are fading away.

Whitewashing the Basement

Yesterday I emptied and cleaned the basement. Then, using a formula my wife found online, with lime purchased at Reiman's Hardware, I mixed up several gallons of old fashioned whitewash.

The results are crappy looking up close but the basement seems cleaner and it is brighter and it was very easy. I can't wait to see how much of the garbage I pulled out of the basement was actually taken by the garbagemen this morning. I know it was a lot but aren't they called New York's Strongest?

My Aunt's House Today

This is my aunt's house today. It's been vinyl sided and the lawn's been done and the trees have grown. You can't see in the present day photo but the house next door has been sided and modified in all sorts of uncomplimentary ways.

The House My Mother Lived In, My Aunt Lives In, and I Will Live In (Maybe)

This is the house (on the right) my grandparents bought after living in an apartment for the first year after they'd moved to Staten Island from the Scandinavian wonderland that was 1930s downtown Brooklyn. My grandfather had the desire to own a home, Staten Island was cheap and he had a contact who was able to get him jobs. Eventually he ended up a carpenter for the Erie Lackawanna Railway repairing barges at the foot of Pelton Avenue. (Later he cut off his thumb, got fired, went into business for himself scraping and finishing floors and made a bundle of money off the Todt and Emerson Hill crowds.)

From this house he and my poor, deeply neurotic grandmother successfully raised four girls. They taught all four to work hard, look out for each other and always extend a hand to whomever they encountered (Apparently my grandmother was always opening the house to wandering relatives, Swedes, Norwegians and the occasional hobo. My mother claimed there were actual hobo signs scratched on the sidewalk, but then my late mother was given to false and fanciful memories at times).

One of my aunts still lives in the house and someday, God willing, in the far future, it will pass to me and I might live in it. The street it's on is a little too busy but it's a quiet neighborhood with a good deli nearby.

The House That Was My Home

This is a 1939 picture of the house that I grew up in and spent most of my life until six years ago living in. The photo was taken by the WPA sometime between 1939 and 1941. They took pictures of every single piece of property. You can head down to the St. George Library and make copies of any of them if you know which block and lot you're looking for. It's a great resource for seeing what Staten Island looked like in its pre-bridge heyday.

My family bought the house in 1969 for a song and it's still in my family to this day. It's not a great shot but I like it. I remember when I was three and we moved in. Not a lot of clear, linear memories but plenty of distinct moments and sights.




The backyard seemed huge when I stood in it. I looked up at the immensity of the unpainted stucco house with brick red window frames and then at the woods rising up on the hill behind the garage. Then there were the men from Post Exterminators spraying for wasps in the attic and sinking holes in the foundation to make sure termites didn't show up.
It was beautiful and it still is even if the neighborhood around it's changed and the woods across the street from it have been murdered and filled crappy (I mean structurally) townhouses.

Rock 'n' Roll to me

For some reason this picture is worth all the thousands of words I could or ever would want to say about rock 'n' roll. And the album's sort of okay too.

The Basement Pictures

This is the suit of protection. Coupled with dishwashing gloves and heavy work boots I stood protected against the dirt and disease and unease caused by the nearness of bugs.


This is the dark and dank space we call the basement. It's actually an amped up crawlspace with room to stand in the front. It is dark and foreboding.


And this was the task set before me. Pump expanding insulation into all the open spaces I could find and reach. Below gives a sense of what I faced.



I'm still not done. Tomorrow I will finish the unfinished portion and revisit all that I've already done. There are bound to be spaces hidden in dark places that still need to be treated with the power of the "Big Gap Filler".

Bronx Zoo - A Preview in Video

So my wife, the luminous Hallie V., and I went to the Bronx Zoo this past week. The day was beautiful with gentle breezes and a bright azure sky. The crowds were not too bad and only a few groups of obnoxious teenagers felt the need to be annoying.

I have several pictures I intend to put up, but for now I've got a short video clip of a sea lion and her keeper (off camera) playing together.

Swords & Sorcery

UPDATE: Since posting this some long time ago, I've created a separate blog dedicated to the genre: Swords & Sorcery.  Check it out, read the old posts and make some comments and ask some question.


   I like Swords & Sorcery. I can't help it but swords, armor, mighty armed warriors, evil wizards, and ruined temples work for me. I mean I like the elfs and talking trees as much as the next fanboy but they can get pretty stale. Good Sword & Sorcery is like car battery jacked straight to the adrenal glands. Unfortunately, like with everything, most Swords & Sorcery stinks, and I mean really stinks. The bad books are really, really bad and the movies are even worse.

   There's great stuff that's as good as anything else out there between two disposable cardboard covers. The best, such as that by Karl Edward Wagner, Glen Cook, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber, is dirty and messy and there's very few poems or cute little hobbit folk. The good stuff is also scattered far and wide between on shelves and shelves of rotten stuff. It's a long distance between The movies in the stinky wake of Schwarzenegger's "Conan the Barbarian" and its Nietzschean trappings are even worse. I dare you to watch Marc Singer in "The Beastmaster".

   I can definitely understand not liking the stuff. Robert E. Howard  had some definite ideas about the what important traits they saw as lost to civilized man: physical courage and endurance, honor. It's not quite the Rousseauean noble savage nonsense. Howard wrote that he knew "barbaric" life was short, bloody and miserable. He just believed it was preferable to the deadening comforts of civilization. That's part of the reason I get a kick out of his stuff - I know the philosophy underlying it is sometimes stupid, but I can't help but be carried along by the sword swinging sturm und drang of it all.  I don't think there's any contest in barbarism vs. civilization.  Still, there's a deep appeal to some atavistic element in me that still longs for some mythical, glorious and epic past.

   And I like the exotic locales. I like the stink of rotting jungles hiding cursed ruins inhabited by lost tribes and crumbling city slums teeming with thieves and cutthroats. There's a real sense of deep, buried past events still manipulating the present and dark forces moving their hands against civilization. Even the most lighthearted S&S (much of Leiber) is still infused with a deep melancholy. Conan rarely keeps the treasure or the girl and Wagner's Kane is essentially the Biblical Cain and nothing goes right for him ever. Perhaps the strongest theme running in the best S&S is about a man's effort to make meaning and take excitement out of life before it all crumbles down under the weight of time and decay.

   Of course it's also about the monsters. And the battles, and the damsels in distress and the great treasures to be gotten (often illy) and kingdoms to be seized.

   I can add all the deep thinking gloss to Swords & Sorcery that I want but if it's missing the excitement then what's the point of reading it? I don't want to know what Conan really thinks about the state of man in nature. If Fafhrd starts philosophizing about natural law and it's not supposed to be funny I'm not going to want to keep reading.

   The best Swords & Sorcery, or Heroic Fantasy if you prefer, combines hair raising adventure and excitement with enough character and setting to leave the reader satisfied. It avoids the cookie cutter stuff spawned following the Conan boomed sparked by Sprague deCamp and Lin Carter's compilations in the sixties and the repugnant sexism and sadism of authors like John Norman. Sometimes even the best goes over the top but its SWORDS AND SORCERY. Like Meatloaf, that's pretty much the whole point.

UPDATE: http://swordssorcery.blogspot.com/  Now I have a fully dedicated S&S site.  Check it out, follow it and join in the conversations.

{This is a reworking and condensation of a e-mail conversation with Evan D. about Robert E. Howard, pulps and S&S)

Greatest Invention Possibly Ever

The holy grail of gizmos in my book - the comfortable and easy to use e-text reader. They make it look so alluring - flexible, easy on the eye, and all the functions of reading on your computer (searchable, compact, etc.). Imagine having all of Dickens or Terry Pratchett in something no bigger than a pad of paper. It would make publishing on demand truly feasible. You'd be able to read the things on Project Gutenberg. Think of the shelf space you could save. I want it now.

The Bugs in the Dark (with picture to follow)

As a new homeowner and the man of the house it is my duty to fight the bug invasions. There have been occasional spiders and lately the tiniest and blackest of ants. But way beyond either of those two critters on the scale of general creepiness are the low slung and quick footed house centipedes. For the sake of the squeamish I will not post a picture. Suffice it to say that they are disturbing beyond mortal ken and with their multiple and multi-use legs they are the small things of big nightmares.

My old apartment suffered from them and I dealt with them by spraying poisons into the gaps and cracks and sealing off any entrance points I could find. Since my new home was a gut job I asked my contractor to make sure all such centipede ingress points were sealed before the walls were put up. He assured me they would be.

Little did we know that that was not the whole case. Where baseboard heaters were installed there were large gaps in the walls. Where pipes came through the floors there were large gaps. Within the first week in the house my wife and I began seeing the evil little beasts.

So I broke out the poison again. Despite my insane fear of all heights I climbed a ladder to spray around the dryer vent on the second floor. Soon we were unscrewing the heaters from the baseboard and spraying sealant into the cracks. And it was not enough. They still appeared on a semi-regular basis.

They seem to gravitate to the high walls and ceilings. With their evil little multi-faceted eyes they can see you coming from across the room armed with bug squashing tissue in hand and then, running at speeds of up to ten miles and hour, they high tail it towards their sanctuaries behind furniture and large appliances. They are swift and clever and we weren't sufficiently killing or driving them out.

This lost battle was followed by several days of regrouping and research. I learned more things than I wish to recall about our little monstrous intruders (for the nightmares they already generated were amplified). More importantly, I learned how to kill them. With impunity and ferocity.

Dressed in paper suit and armed with many cans of sealant and boric acid I ventured into our "basement". Once past the first six feet and the knee wall there's the crawlspace. it is littered with the debris of present and past construction, bits of coal and all sorts of reminders of past inhabitants of the house. Stringing up lights along the way, I climbed the wall and crouched and crawled my way into the dark and filth.

On my back and with arms upraised I set about sealing any holes I encountered. Around every pipe and drain and in the black spaces where the floor failed to meet the foundation I sprayed ounces and ounces of Great Stuff's "Big Gap Filler". Sometimes I had to battle great cascading sheets of debris and carcass filled spiderwebs or broken bottles hidden in the earth under my knees. My house is only 20' by 30' and it took me an hour and a half to make my way around the perimeter (and truth be told I rand out of Big Gap Filler before I quite finished). Then I made my way back around and laced the earth and debris with boric acid (a nasty little substance that damages their exoskeleton and causes them to dehydrate and DIE). Later I'm coming back with diatomaceous earth and spreading that around like Agent Orange on a Vietnamese jungle.

I don't know if I'll prevail. I'm only human and the centipedes are some sort of Perdition raised monstrosity. But I'm only human so I won't give up, ever.

A Most Depressing Thing

More than the large book collection of my dad and his encouragement, it was Norma Herz, children's librarian of the NYPL Stapleton Branch that turned me on to reading and books. Starting when I was little (4 or so) my mother would take me and my sister into Stapleton to go shopping and we'd spend several hours in the library.

Ms. Herz did so much to encourage me to read and fall in love with books. If she read a story aloud and I said I liked it she'd put two or three books she thought I'd like in my own hands. From then until I was 14 I took out hundreds of books and participated in programs at the library. There was the Military History of World War II by Trevor Dupuy and collections of myths and fairy tales. I played with my first VCR and video camera at Stapleton Library in 1979.





When I turned 14 and got my working papers I went to work at Stapleton as a page. That meant I shelved returned books, straightened the shelves, put covers on newly arrived books and ran the movie projector. I was in heaven. I discovered and read more books that I might never have picked up if I hadn't worked there. Stapleton actually had all the sixties run of Arkahm House's Lovecraft hardcovers with the crazy covers by Lee Brown Coye. And there were so many other things. It was book heaven.




Then in 1984 things changed. For several months the branch was shut down for renovations. It was going to be turned into a "commuter branch" geared towards people coming in quick after work. Tall wooden shelves would be replaced with spinning shelves and there'd be a shift in emphasis from a deep collection of new as well as older books to just newer ones and a few classics. It didn't bode well.

For most of the period of the remodeling I was sent to work in the St. George Branch. At the time it was the crown of Staten Island's library system as well as the main branch. The entire second floor was dedicated to children's books and the main floor to adult books and the reference section. Records and cassette tapes were kept in a smaller section on the top floor. It was a beautiful library with endless books surprises hidden on its shelves.

I first read the Finnish myths when I worked there and I listened to Lenny Bruce (hated him) and Bert Lahr in "Waiting for Godot" (like it). There were mysteries and histories and all sorts of thing in between.

Then I went back to Stapleton and it was shameful. There were several booksales and large chunks of the branch's collection were sold off at tables on the sidewalk. Whole shelves had been ripped out. Shelves with hundreds of books had been replaced with spinners with dozens. The heart of Stapleton Library's collection had be ripped out. When I stopped working there in August of 1984 to start college at Baruch I stopped going there.

Since then I've only been in Staten Island libraries a few times. St. George was destroyed soon after by the same wise folks who'd desecrated Stapleton. All the lending books were shoehorned into the second floor and the main floor was given over entirely to research. Again, thousands of books were replaced with hundreds. It was despicable. What little bit of a collection they maintained was thing and shallow. Most of the classics of history had been displaced by topical bestsellers and celebrity biographies.

I've only been in a few other libraries since the early nineties and it's mostly been abysmal. I've done some research in the NYPL and that's good but as a lending institution it's just sad.

So this past Wednesday I went into the Stapleton Library and almost cried. I was unable to stay beyond a few minutes. The outside's the same but the inside is dead.

As I walked up the steps of the library and between the two columns I was amazed at how familiar it all was. I was transported back twenty five years to when I went there four times a week. The green doors and smoothed brass handles seemed unchanged. I could see the place where my mother's group, "Friends of Stapleton Library" installed an old mailbox for book dropoffs (a failure due to the people tossing junk inside with the boooks). I felt like I was on the edge of reentering a n important part of my past.

Then I passed through the doors and abandoned hope. Where there had been eighteen shelves or so in the children's section there were five. All the sections had been gutted equally. They hadn't even been replaced with the DVD's and CD's that have displaced books in so much of today's cultural wasteland. There's just nothing but empty space and a few extra tables and chairs. Even the large painting of Andrew Carnegie, the provider of the funding for the creation of Stapleton and so many other NYPL facilities, is gone. In it's place is an undistinguished painting of little beauty and no significance to the very wall it occupies.

I love libraries and the idea of them. When I lived in Albany one of the first things I did was get a library card. I spent many hours in the Albany Main Branch Library and read dozens of books. It was the first place I came across Manly Wade Wellman's John Thunstone novels and Chirstopher Hill's "The World Turned Upside Down". It was great.

When I came back to Staten Island I found the St. George Library turning into the poor thing it is today and I stopped going to the library. In recent years I've gone back and last year I got a NYPL card for the first time in over a decade. I went to Staten Island's West Brighton Branch and Port Richmond Branch. Both were small, community libraries and neither was that good. Housed in beautiful early 20th Century buildings with columns and beautiful interior woodwork they were empty things with only the barest of book collections.

So I'm saddened that Staten Island's libraries aren't about books. They're about bestsellers and multimedia. Since they don't concentrate on either exclusively the result is junk for both. So I buy books for a buck through dealers on Amazon and I abandon the place that served me and millions of New Yorkers so magnificently over the past century. Welcome to the new millennium.

Halloween Poems - updated

I've added some captions that aren't that funny and don't provide any new insight into their composition.

Litarachoor

I stand by the hardy defense I've made for genre fiction in the past but even I've got to admit that the close up of the books in the first photo of "I'm back(ish)" is pretty geeky.

Sure there's Goncharov and Gardner as well as Hawthorne and Hoffman. But then there's even bigger collections of Glen Cook, Terry Brooks and, above all, my vast collection of Robert E. Howard. Maybe it's just the geekiest section of my collection but it's sure noticeable.

What I've Read

Chabon, Michael Maps and Legends - Fun essays on literature, comics and writing. It has the best book cover I've ever seen.
Williams, Tad Shadowplay Second tome of a fun but unoriginal series
Rothfuss, Patrick The Name of the Wind Debut novel and up there with "Godstalk" for turning old tropes around
Keyes, Greg The Briar King A quartet - Interesting, but ultimately familiar, fantasy series.
Keyes, Greg The Charnel Prince
Keyes, Greg The Blood Knight
Keyes, Greg The Born Queen
O'Flynn, Catherine What Was Lost Excellent mystery and study of boredom, consumerism and deadening employment
Ketchum, Jack Red OK book about about the confrontation between an old man and the family of the teenager who kills his dog.
Blaylock, James The Elfin Ship Debut novel by one of the best. Homage to Kenneth Grahame, RL Stevenson and a dozen other good, comfortable storytellers.
Blaylock, James The Disappearing Dwarf - Sequel to above
Stark, Richard The Hunter The best hardboiled crime thriller. Everything is drilled down to their essences - Parker, the man of the title, cuts through everything standing in the way of his revenge like a buzzsaw.

Halloween Poems

When I was in the fourth grade at Trinity Lutheran School back in 1975 I wrote a series of Halloween themed poems. With my mother's prompting (because it was an art project and she always wanted to instigate things like that) I illustrated the poems and made a little booklet. I was so proud I took it to school and my teacher, Ms. Smith put it into the class bookshelf.

Twelve years later I was working at Trinity as the assistant sexton when I came across the book still sitting on the shelf. I promptly took it home and put it in a box.

Moving out of my apartment last month I came across the book in a box of junk. It was in worse shape after twenty one years of my careful stewardship than twelve on a dusty fourth grade bookshelf. Figures.

I like the poems (though I admit the use of the word "boss" in the last two lines of "Wise Witch" is inexcusable even for a nine year old) and happy with the pictures. Unfortunately the cover and the poem, "Zing the Thing" are missing. Perhaps they'll turn up as I finish unpacking but considering my track record at not losing things I kind of doubt it.


I know, "morgue" is misspelled


Is that a ghost or a midget in a sheet and does that zombie have sciatica?



I like the spaceship and the Martian sigil on its fin




Who tied the bib on the shark?




I seriously like the effect caused by no outline around the cross. It sort of glows more brightly.

The Church Project

So I didn't get the slightest chance to work on my vaunted church project. Between moving into the new homestead, unpacking, and dealing with a contractor and his subcontracting minions the church project has been put on hold. With some luck and careful planning (and those who know me know how likely that's to happen) I should be able to get started this fall.

I'm back(ish)

So I have finished exiting my apartment of the past six years, thrown away dozens of bags of junk, given away several large pieces of distinctly mediocre furniture, donated several working appliances and nice articles of clothing to the Salvation Army and have moved my remaining stuff and my wife's stuff into our home.

Upon moving I we promptly realized I still had too much stuff to keep it all. My first task was to start culling books. Despite having bookshelves that run the length of our home they are not enough.



I have gone through all my books and pulled boxes and boxes worth of things I have will never read/read again/admit I ever bought. I have pulled hundreds of books and it was slightly heartbreaking but it will continue. The proceeds from the sales of books on Amazon will NOT be used to just buy more books. In fact, it will in all likelihood they'll be plowed into buying things to store the remaining things I own.

Staten Island's Boat Graveyard

For as long as I can remember (and some days that further back than others), I can recall seeing numerous rusting boats and small ships in the waters off Tottenville. I know I'm more concerned with the North Shore but this stuff is really, really cool.

I found someone's cool photo collection of the ship graveyard and here's the link.

Boat Graveyard Gallery

Million Dollar Wall

So I don't know exactly why this massive retaining wall was so named but I'll guess it's the obvious one - it cost a million dollars. There's definitely something to be said for letting the public know what a municipal undertaking costs. Remember, the government does nothing to earn money. It only gets money by taking it from us and then, ideally, spending it on things we'll all benefit from.

What's cool about the older picture below is the view of the rail yards. There were rail bridges and barges (my grandfather worked as a carpenter for the Erie-Lackawana Railroad fixing them) that brought everything to the Island it needed. There's another picture I'll try to track down that shows a birdseye view of the railyards from the other direction and really leaves the viewer impressed by their size. Now there's nothing there of any consequence (c'mon, it's pretty but the Yankee's Minor League stadium just doesn't count) except the 9/11 Memorial and parking lots almost up to the water's edge. Someday there might be a passenger train again along the north shore but sort of massive industrial undertaking represented by the railyards will never be replicated.

What I've Read Since March 20th

Lehane, Denis Gone Baby Gone - solid crime writing
Pelecanos, George Shame the Devil - overdone crime writing
Smith, Scott The Ruins - interesting failure
Higgins, George V. The Friends of Eddie Coyle - amazing crime writing Hedges, Chris I Don't Believe in Atheists - too rambling
Puzo, Mario The Godfather - some of the best garbage ever
Mignola, Mike Garden of Souls - great BPRD
Chabon, Michael Maps and Legends - good essays, even better cover
Cotterill, Colin Thirty-Three Teeth - great
Cotterill, Colin Disco for the Departed - great
Wright, N.T. The Gospel of Jesus and Judas - good critique of gnosticism
Brooks, Terry The Scions of Shannara - fun, dumb diversion
Brooks, Terry The Druid of Shannara - see above
Cussler, Clive Raise the Titanic - one of the worst books I've ever, ever read
Mignola, Mike Dark Calls - usual high quality Hellboy stuff
Williams, Tad Shadowmarch - surprisingly good
Ingle, Bob and McClure, Sandy The Soprano State -riveting and utterly depressing examination of NJ corruption

My Tie

This lovely tie was bought for me by my Aunt K. She was quite aware of my infatuation with all things New York City and I had recently become employed by an agency of the city. I worked on Chambers Street, right across from the Tweed Courthouse Building. That's just above the park in the lower center of the tie picture.

At the time my taste in ties was particularly retro. None of the ties I wore were more than a few inches wide and none were especially colorful. In fact they all tended toward black and navy blue. I wore this tie once.

Recently, during the slow process of cleaning out things and boxes others up in order to one day move into my new home I came across this poor bedraggled tie hanging deep within my bedroom closet. I can't bring myself to wear the thing but I don't want to just throw it away. So I took a picture. If you find yourself falling in love with the poor item it will be available for sale at the yard sale I'm participating in on the sidewalk in front of St. Paul's/St. Luke's Lutheran Church on the corner of Decker Avenue and Catherine Street in Port Richmond, Staten Island on Saturday, June 14th, 2008. There'll be plent o' junk for all.

Memorial Day

I won't talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because my own feelings are long, complicated and too depressing to wade through right now. I will, however, put up this link to CNN about the Americans killed since the Long War began over five years ago. My father always was annoyed that Memorial Day became a sort of general military celebration instead of what it should be - a day to commemorate and pay homage to the thousands of men (and women) who've had their lives cut short while serving in uniform.

Iraq War Dead
Afghanistan War Dead


Whatever your feelings about the war, these Americans served where few of us have the courage or inclination to do so and they generally do so with at least a fair degree of honor (Abu Ghraib as the big exception and that's got a lot to do with the bosses) and without the frothing at the mouth craziness too often expressed in the news or movies.


So take a few minutes and remember these dead men and women and think about their families and the gap they'll never fill. This war isn't working out the way it was planned or presented to the public, but those things aside for the moment, it reminds us that their are hundreds of thousands of Americans willing to submit to the discipline of the armed forces and then risk their lives in order to do the really dirty work we need done.

Married

So I've been distracted from posting my bits 'o' nostalgia because I got married. I haven't forgotten my loyal readers (both of them) and I will return shortly. But I did (did I mention?) get married and I'm getting a house done so I'm a little off track with Ape Shall Not Kill Ape these days. Later.