When Thoreau was in New York

A lot of people don't realize that H.D. Thoreau worked in New York for a while, as a semi-successful free-lance writer, and as a door to door salesman, selling subscriptions to a magazine. This was when he lived on Staten Island, in 1843. He also visited the city on numerous occasions, in his capacity as part-time C.E.O. and chief engineer (my titles but they are accurate) of the family pencil and later graphite business. While there, he hung out in various places around the city (Henry James' house, the Hudson River waterfront, the salt marshes where now the Fresh Kills landfill sits), including the City Hall area, where publishing was centered. While downtown, I have to believe he heard nicknames, such as these, presented by The Bowery Boys, the most excellent Victorian New York blog, as culled from Luc Sante's Low Life, and introduced like so: "Just in case you're sick of reading '25 Random Things' lists on Facebook, feel free to post this tally of 19th and early 20th century bar owners and criminals in retaliation."

1 Boiled Oysters Malloy (owner of the Ruins saloon)
2 Dan the Dude (owner Stag Cafe)
3 Will Fox (piano player at Gombossy's Crystal Palice, who played wearing boxing gloves)
4 Diamond Dan O'Rourke (owner of a self-named bar)
5 Silver Dollar Smith (self-named bar on Essex Street)
6 Mock Duck (Chinese gangster, circa 1900, wore chain mail, wielded hatchet)
7 Slippery Johnny Leipziger (random crook, fun name to say)
8 Blonde Madge Davenport (prostitute who killed herself at McGurk's Suicide Hall)
10 Big Mame (also tried to off herself at McGurk's, ended up only permanently scarring her face with carbolic acid)
11 Chick Tricker (owner of the saloon Chick Tricker's Flea Bag)
12 Scotchy Lavelle (pirate turned saloon owner)
13 Johnny Basketball (rough who attended a 1940s Bowery ball)
14 Bridgie Webber (owner of San Souci Music Hall)
15 Johnny Camphene (bar owner who served varnish solvent as a liqueur)
16 One-Armed Charley (bouncer at the Hole-In-The-Wall)
17 Sheeny Mike Kurtz (member of the Dutch Mob, front for a pickpocket gang)
18 Mallet Murphy (owner of self-titled bar, wielding a mallet on wily customers)
19 Humpty Jackson (hunchback gang leader, headquarterd at a now vanished Lower East Side graveyard)
20 Lobster Kid (one of Humpty's gang members)
21 Johnny Spanish (ruffian known for carrying a minimum of four revolvers at a time)
22 One Lung Curran (specialist in stealing the coats of police officers)
23 Happy Jack Mulraney (whose facial rictus kept a frozen smile on his face)
24 Paddy the Priest (murdered by Happy Jack for mocking him)
25 Ding Dong (leader of a phalanx of children crooks)

(Upper left, actual Bowery Boys, NY Public Library)

Thoreau in the News

Here is Thoreau in the news, in Maine, where Thoreau liked to go to be in the woods (at least, after he went there first to look for a job and had some awkward resume peddling experiences: “A sensitive person can hardly elbow his way boldly, laughing and talking, into a strange town, without experiencing some twinges of conscience, as when he has treated a stranger with too much familiarity..."). The kicker in this column by Gordon L. Weil of the Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel is this observation on what you might call human ecology--he suggests an alternative spending of the $18.4 billion dollars already spent in controversial corporate bonuses:

If you paid people $40,000 a year with full benefits including health care, that bonus money would have paid 306,667 people for a year.

I would just add that Thoreau was also thinking of the well-to-do as being desperate. A good example is the scene in Walden wherein the authorial "I" is planting his garden while a couple of people from Boston, riding in a fancy gig (what would be the Lexus sedan of 2009), look at him as they make their way to their country house as if he were a nut or, to use his joke, a kind of crazy vine. It's a portrait of disengagement, in the time when the idea of a country house, or retreat, was becoming a middle class necessity, along with servants, hourly wages, and coffee table books. Here is more of the Journal column:

Do you wince when you hear a Washington insider or a Wall Streeter refer to "ordinary people"? I do.

I guess those who call us ordinary people must be "special people." They have the power to reach into our pockets for taxes or fees or to control some of our conduct.

It seems that the folks in charge either ignore or take advantage of ordinary people.

Take health care. Members of Congress have a great government-funded program. Congress seems intent on debating endlessly whether health care should be privately or publicly insured, while about 40 million ordinary people go without.

Or taxes. Tom Daschle, nominated to be health policy chief, failed to pay some of his taxes. He used a company limousine for personal purposes, but did not consider it income, he said, because he had grown accustomed to such service when he was Senate majority leader. Daschle withdrew, partly because his tax problems looked so bad to ordinary people.

Or pay. President Obama says it is "shameful" that Wall Street execs were paid $18.4 billion in bonuses at the same time as hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs and Washington was pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into their financial institutions.

If you paid people $40,000 a year with full benefits including health care, that bonus money would have paid 306,667 people for a year.

Or bailout money. Most ordinary people run, or work in, small businesses and community banks or use them. They get no bailout or aid, because they never got into trouble.

Meanwhile the auto manufacturers, who stuck with gas guzzlers too long, and the financiers who conjured up housing schemes that collapsed, get help that will come largely from ordinary people.

Henry David Thoreau, as good a philosopher as America ever produced, once wrote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The mass of men and women are the ordinary people.

The special people may struggle to make things better for ordinary people, but their lives -- corporate jets, big bonuses, congressional perks -- are far from desperate. They seem to live in a cocoon of privilege and miss some simple things that could help.

Thoreau might argue that, in fact, the simple things are luxuries.

Aeolian Markets

Playing the markets playing off us!

Life With Principle--or Cash

A performance that gets to the heart of what's happening in terms of dealing with "shameful" pay and stock markets crashing and Madoff and oil prices and reform and celebrity reform and cash, as well as Tuscany--by Beardo, yet another modern day Thoreau:

The market's gone all soft and the world has gone all hard.

Congressional Simplicity

The Opinionator shares this excellent video in today's post entitled The Early Word On Daschle's Exit:

The Night Poster Boy Spent in Jail

You only have to be a subway rider to know the work of Poster Boy, as show in this Flickr photo (above) by Poster Boy & Aakash Nihalani. Subway advertizements are cut up, pieces from one mixed into another, a nose from Angelina Jolie finds its way, for example, to something along the lines of a Viagra ad. Now this, from Gothamist:

Last night before a benefit he was scheduled to participate in at a loft in Soho, the street artist known as Poster Boy was arrested by an undercover cop. Poster Boy was listed on a flyer for the event, a festival put on for Friends We Love, a series of videos documenting the process of a dozen different artists, including Poster Boy, who talked with us just last week.

Photographer Jim Kiernan tipped us off to the arrest. He arrived at event at Broadway and Howard Street to meet up with Poster Boy around 7 p.m., but police had already arrived after spotting the Poster Boy's name on the flyer. Kiernan says, "There was an undercover cop on the block and they came and picked him up. As far as I know, he's still in Central Booking right now and waiting to get in front of a judge...It's the second time they've gotten him."

Reports indicate that the police believe they have found Poster Boy, but can there only be one Poster Boy making Poster Boy-esque vandalart?

He was reported by the Times to have been taken to Rikers Island. Word was that he was moving on to bigger things anyway:

Very 19th Century, Very HDT

The commons are back--in the woods, in the town square, in the community of ideas, which sounds too mystical but you get the point. If not, here's this:

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage and the CEO of Neoteny. He is on the board of Technorati and helps run Technorati Japan. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at SFC in Japan

Hedging Your Predictions

It is supposed to be a hedge hog? That's what the Oregonian says:

"Chriki", an African Pygmy Hedgehog faced the media and sunshine today at the Oregon Zoo. The little guy, whose name means "blessed" in Swahili, saw his shadow which in theory means that we have 6 more weeks of winter here in Portland. "Chriki" was held in the hands of David Bragdon, the Metro Council President, who explained that the old European tradition of weather prediction belonged to the hedgehog, but when early immigrants to the United States discovered there were no hedgehogs, they substituted the groundhog. Rob Finch/The Oregonian

Lego My Skyline

Plastic landscape painting is (here) poetic.

Mass of Men

The New York Times crowded elevator story--Fairway supermarket on the Upper West Side has an elevator that is slow and crowded and the only way to get your cart or stroller up to the second floor--points out that the crowded elevator is the only way the organic foods section. The photo is of an organic shopper situation: the crowds are reported to be happy, in some sense, apparently even in their surliness. Men (as well as women) massed are less desperate, and certainly less quiet in lives momentarily underlined in the seconds spent between organic and non-organic, which is very organic, even using elevator power.

But if the store is a gladiatorial arena, the elevator is, surprisingly, “a haven — an oasis of civility,” said Bernice Price, a neighborhood resident and elevator veteran. “People make a quick assessment of the spatial restrictions, and they help each other. There is a lot of silent communication. People don’t seem to push.”

Of course, even if they do push, you might make the argument that they are happier pushing than sitting in an empty parking lot. Then again, you might not.

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 16

Steelers win. Oh, well. Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, did not sell. It was a Cardinals loss-like failure. From The Thoreau You Don't Know, by Robert Sullivan:

After A Week, Thoreau owed $300 to the publishers, easily
several years’ income for him. To get out of debt, Thoreau manufactured a large order of pencils. (Thoreau and his family were well-known pencil makers.) However, in the time that he had been at the pond, the pencil market had been flooded with less expensive high-quality German pencils. Thoreau was forced to sell his pencils at a loss. He tried next to sell cranberries in New York; again, he misplayed the market. Finally he had handbills printed, advertising himself locally as a surveyor, a profession he would first use to clear his immediate debt and subsequently rely on for the rest of his life for income and for allowing him to see all of Concord and its environs at once more closely and more profitably. He took the copies of A Week himself, moving them into his parents’ house, 706 copies out of 1,000. “They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows,” he wrote, “which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin.” Thoreau could be haughty, of course, but he certainly knew how to be self-deprecating. “I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself,” he wrote to a friend.

And yet the failures of A Week cleared the way for Walden, the way he’d cleared the brambles from his land at the pond in order to grow beans. In some way, A Week, the elegy, was about finding a way to nature, or a life based on some higher truth, but in A Week Thoreau never actually accesses nature—it’s a travelogue that never goes anywhere. “We were always passing some low inviting shore or some overhanging bank, on which, however, we never landed.” He had forgotten a lot of the lessons he learned while in New York about writing commercially. With Walden, he would attempt to access nature more directly and, in so doing, find a way to live better. Sometimes writers have to write things to exorcise them. With A Week, Thoreau had gotten his pure Transcendentalism out of his system. As it happened, A Week ends on a Friday, a smooth sail, the week ready to begin again. (Thoreau especially enjoyed this section, and referred to it on his deathbed.) Now Thoreau was set to begin again, or yet again. One of the things he discovered while writing A Week was that he wanted to delve deeper into the idea of nature as salvation, as opposed to Christ. “I feel that I draw nearest to understanding the great secret of my life in my closest intercourse with nature,” he wrote. He had gotten all mystical, living at the pond, at the same time that he had become more obsessed with transcribing the actual: the details of tree rings, the levels of rivers. His two year-stint at Walden pond had brought him to the definition of what he might have called a good life: “A life of equal simplicity and sincerity with nature, and in harmony with her grandeur and beauty.”

PS: Thoreau went to Harvard. (Library of Congress photo.)

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 15

You have to believe that, at this point, with less than 3 minutes to go and the Cardinals having come from behind and now Pittsburgh looking like they are coming from behind, Thoreau could possibly be out of his mind with excitement. It's a great game.

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 14

You have to ask yourself, if you are Thoreau and you are live bloggin', and you now have a little more hope for Arizona to come back, now that they are only 6 down, what's the best commercial? If you are pretending you are Thoreau and live bloggin' you have to like the careerbuilder ads, even if the best single line was a promo for the Conan O'Brien show ("If you have a Conan lasting for more than four hours, call a doctor"--or whatever it was that Tina Fey said in the Conan O'Brien promo). You have to like the careerbuilder ads because they so relate to Thoreau. People think, Thoreau: nature, trees, birds, etc. But it's really, Thoreau: the nature of work, the ecology of our lives--how are we living if we are living only for one thing, work? Career was not really a word used for what we today call career before Thoreau, as can be seen in this illustration from the Oxford English Dictionary--a list of the years in which the career as we knows it begins to appear. After Thoreau, career becomes a word and, sadly, it begins to gain on the word life, the way the Cardinals seems to be gaining on the Steelers.

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 13

We are in the fourth quarter, at the 10, first down and goal, 20 Pittsburgh, 7 Arizona. The question here is: would Thoreau be interested in a game that is so measurement intense, given that he made his living as a surveyor, as you can see if you visit the Concord Public lirabry, which is where this image of one of his surveys can be found?

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 12

Trying to figure out what is happening in the game--i.e., trying to get a good view of the game...

from here

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 11

Back from the half. Live blogging the Super Bowl as if Thoreau were living blogging the Super Bowl is tiring--I feel like the mass of men. Speaking of which, Thoreau's brother and sister left Concord to work in factory towns, where the money was:


Library of Congress photos

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 10

BRUUUUUCE!!!
Bruce and Pete seeger sang the verses that people never sing--the most Thoreauvian verses, if you think in terms of Thoreau's interest in what a community might have in common--when he accompanied Pete Seeger at the President Obama's Inaugural Ball:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

For more see this at truthout.org. And the video...

Meanwhile, Bruce!

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 9

That was a 100 yard touchdown. Thoreau liked to walk but he took the train more than people imagine--no big deal for him. When he walked to Boston, while in school at Harvard, he walked to save some money. He also had to take off from school for a while to make money for tuition. Don't get me wrong. he liked to walk and walked every day, but why wouldn't he have taken the train? He wasn't an idiot. Speaking of idiots, how can you ask a coach of a team who just lost the ball and got hit with a huge touchdown what happened. That reminds me of what Thoreau is said to have said to Emerson when Emerson heard he was in jail, protesting the war against Mexico. (This is not a true story, since it didn't happened, but it speaks to the Thoreau-Emerson relationship which was strained to say the least, kind like the relationship between the coach who is losing and the reporter who says, to paraphrase, why did you blow it?)

Emerson: What are you doing in there?
Thoreau: What are you doing out there?

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 8

How did we get to Arizona from Pittsburgh? When Thoreau was writing, people were moving of town, the suburbs beginning, Concord an early suburb. Farmers were selling their farms. Trains were suddenly everywhere; thousands of miles of tracks laid down in the space of a decade. The west opened up via train travel, and new roads were built to get products to farther away markets. By the early nineteen hundreds, cars appeared, first as occasional touring vehicles, and then as a means of travel.

The railroad first brought tourists to Arizona, to see the ancient civilizations of America--i.e., Native Americans. As more people got more cars, train vacation became car vacations. By the end of World War II, the state roads were turned into an interstate highway system, and roads became not for occasional use but for everyday use, to connect the suburbs that Thoreau saw the beginnings of. In the 1970s and 80s, the South became a suburb of the North. At least that's how Thoreau might see it, if it were the end of the first half and Arizona just made an interception (I think) and he had just finished a beer and was starting a second. (Library of Congress photo.)

What if Thoreau Live Blogged the Super Bowl, 7

Touchdown!!!!
Arizona!!!
Thoreau never got West of Minnesota! Even though he really wanted to!!!
And he turned down an offer to go to Rome!!!