Monday
Monday Miscellany
I stumbled across this feature last week: The worst nativity sets. The list is at 27 and, I fear, growing. There are some funny ones over there. Three of my favorites:
Montgomery
Fellow southern Catholic and friend of Flannery O'Connor, Marion Montgomery, died. I've long tried to find, and read, this trilogy, The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age, but I've only been able to find one volume and I didn't make hardly any headway in it. The biggest problem is, the volumes are hard to find and are expensive, but their titles alone greatly intrigue: Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed Home, Why Poe Drank Liquor, and Why Hawthorne was Melancholy (volume 3, and the only volume I've been able to procure).
Keep Ghetto Life?
New York City is intent on gentrification, even (especially?) in Harlem. They recently denied the sign of an ordinary liquor store in south-central Harlem. But the folks at the New York Observer asks a good question: Do we really want to level all of New York City to make it all the same? Perhaps some of the ugliness of big-city life ought to be preserved, even the ghetto life of the heroin-laced 1970s Harlem.
Should the city preserve its “ghetto” fabric, the same way it fights for its prewar grandees and, increasingly, modernist masterpieces? After all, we have spent the past two decades unmaking the decline of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, but if it all disappears, if the city becomes one giant Disneyfied Times Square playground version of itself, have we erased an important part of our history? This is no landmark, of course, but if the unseemly liquor store has no place in New York anymore, neither do the people who used to frequent them.
Look at the Lower East Side, at Five Point, at, uh, Chumbo. Excepting the Tenement Museum and the over-priced pastrami at Katz's, little of the history of European immigration there, of that storied old ghetto, remains. No bialys, no Gus' pickles and, sure, no more muggings. Instead, we have the Little Italy of the Torrisi Brothers, faux pawn shops megaclubs and the bourgie Hester Street Fair.
