Charyn is an important writer about New York. I think he
lives in the West Village. _Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old
New York, The Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway_ has a lot
to say about gangsters, night clubs, the gangs, Runyon, The
Jazz Mayor (Walker), Jack Johnson, Fanny Brice. There is so
much about these people elsewhere, but Charyn has a respect
for the connection between the hoi polloi and the Big Wheels
that is all his own. The book is dedicated to his "bestiary":
including Owney "The Killer" Madden. Read it and see if
that's justified, and noir. The last chapter is about the
"sanitized tourist district," Disney Times Square. This is
written smack in the worst time of all in New York,
Corporation Bloomberg, as bush-wa like
"family-friendly,"
"clean," and "decent" cover the immanent immersion of large
swaths of Brooklyn, Coney Island, the Bronx, the Lower East
Side in the maw of the kind of real estate moguls who have
held the 9/11 memorial hostage for 5 years to the ideal of
maximum upscale retail outlets.
_Metropolis: NY as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land_
(1986) has terrific coverage of the Lower East Side novels
like _Haunch Paunch and Jowl_ and _The Rise of David
Levinsky_, and has as lot to say about peddling, about the
East Village artists of the 80s like David Wojnarowitz, about
Arnold Rothstein, and Ed Koch (whom Charyn hung out with for
a month and brilliantly dubbed a 20th century Golem). There
is a strong thread of Jewish social consciousness,
materialist glut, guilt, and redemption about the book.
Both books have paragraphs on _The Great Gatesby_, obviously
a strong force in Charyn's writing life. They make quite a
companion to The Isaac Quartet. Isaac has an intestinal worm
in him, which rather magically helps his rise and his bizarre
election to mayor (if only). But it is a worm that he has to
cope with, and eliminate before it eats whatever is left of
him that gives him a sense of cohesion with the people he is
going to lead. If he fails (or if he becomes the purifying,
destroying Golem that no one can control), pin-stripped
bloodless vampires grinning with perfect Cupid lips (with
names like Trump, Silverstein, and Ratner) will suck the
city's blood and destroy any semblance of diversity, privacy
and self-expression.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 May 2006 EDT