Richard Haffey

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    • Home
    • Welcome / Reviews
    • CUSTODY Book Clubbing
    • Reading After Custody
    • CUSTODY FINALE
    • June Writing & Reading
    • Custody -- April 2024
    • CUSTODY - March 2024
    • CUSTODY - JAN & FEB 2024
    • CUSTODY December 2023
    • CUSTODY - Oct & Nov 2023
    • Original Fiction Series 3
    • Original Fiction Series 2
    • Original Fiction Series 1
    • List of Recommended Books
    • Under Vesuvius
    • Audio Recordings
    • Love Song
    • Books Jan to April 2024
    • Books Oct to Dec 2023
    • Books May to Sept 2023
    • Books Jan to April 2023
    • Books Oct to Dec 2022
    • Books June to Sept 2022
    • Books Jan to May 2022
    • Books June to Dec 2021
    • Tails or Heads
    • Testimonials
    • Contact Me
    • Author Interviews
    • About Me

Richard Haffey

Richard HaffeyRichard HaffeyRichard Haffey
  • Home
  • Welcome / Reviews
  • CUSTODY Book Clubbing
  • Reading After Custody
  • CUSTODY FINALE
  • June Writing & Reading
  • Custody -- April 2024
  • CUSTODY - March 2024
  • CUSTODY - JAN & FEB 2024
  • CUSTODY December 2023
  • CUSTODY - Oct & Nov 2023
  • Original Fiction Series 3
  • Original Fiction Series 2
  • Original Fiction Series 1
  • List of Recommended Books
  • Under Vesuvius
  • Audio Recordings
  • Love Song
  • Books Jan to April 2024
  • Books Oct to Dec 2023
  • Books May to Sept 2023
  • Books Jan to April 2023
  • Books Oct to Dec 2022
  • Books June to Sept 2022
  • Books Jan to May 2022
  • Books June to Dec 2021
  • Tails or Heads
  • Testimonials
  • Contact Me
  • Author Interviews
  • About Me
Curley Qs

Book Archives - Jan to Apr 2023

Just down Main Street from Mystic Pizza above the 

Yellow Brick Mall, I wrote ads and catalogs to sell books.

The Ed(Curley)itor kept an index card for very book he read for pleasure: Title, Author, Synopsis, Publisher on front; why he liked it on the back. In memory of Ed, here's some CurleyQs.  

April 2023 to January 2023

April 2023

  

I am continually intrigued by the intersection of creedal orthodoxy with human constructs and their exercise of authority and wielding of power. This month’s novel and short story each offer an occasion of reflection on this phenomenon. My timing of these choices is purposefully aligned to Lent’s mid-month climax in the saga of Holy Week. 

her book

Middle Book in Trilogy

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam



The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam

  

The Good Muslim tracks two lives, in two timelines. 


Siblings Sohail and Maya Haque, each war-scarred and violence-marred for life, first struggle in the immediate post-war years of 1972-73. They choose separate life paths to cope in the aftermath of their experiences in the Bangladesh Liberation War. 


In 1984-85 they confront how seemingly irreconcilable those choices have become as their paths collide. He is now a charismatic Muslim cleric during the rise of religious fundamentalism. She is a medical doctor and resurgent revolutionary journalist protesting the dictatorship into which Bangladesh has descended.


The Good Muslim heart-fully depicts the fog of war morphing into a long shadow over a country, independent but still not free; and a tragic family, bereft of the love that bound it once, before being shred to pieces by misunderstanding and silent secrets. 


The Good Muslim is the middle volume of a trilogy. It follows the siblings’ stories after the war at the center of the first book, A Golden Age. The third volume is The Bones of Grace. Each book features a generation of the Haque family.


(c) 2011 Harper Collins Publishers Ltd 

April 2023

My Story

The Teacher and the Bishop

The Teacher and the Bishop

The Teacher and the Bishop

The Teacher and the Bishop

The Teacher and the Bishop

  

The story conflates two timelines in my life that parallel those in The Good Muslim. 


In 1972, I organized a high school seminary's concert to raise funds for Bangladeshi war refugee relief. 


In 1983, I was involved in the publication of Sacraments & Sacramentality, a book cited in “The Teacher and the Bishop.” 


However, the short story is not completely autobiographical and the characterizations of personalities in the story are fictional. 


Nonetheless it is intended as a cautionary tale about hegemony in religious, political, or cultural orthodoxy.


Origins

The Teacher and the Bishop

Beware! Period Fiction Ahead

In the origin short story collection, 

Tails or Heads, 

LINK

this story is paired with

 “Pastor Emeritus,” 

released on this website as original fiction last August. 

LINK




Click Here to Read This Month's Story, The Teacher and the Bishop

Beware! Period Fiction Ahead

Beware! Period Fiction Ahead

Beware! Period Fiction Ahead

  


Writing fiction purposefully set in a fixed point in time is tricky business. References require precision by the writer and, perhaps even, fact-checking by the reader. 


This month’s story incorporates books, poems, movies, and notable historical persons in literary and clerical circles (including two popes). 


To flesh out some of the references in “The Teacher and the Bishop,” here’s what might be a helpful list for you to assemble: 

an author’s bio, 

a poet’s work, 

a movie’s prior versions, 

and even a sainted or resigning pope’s backstory 


Each can be searched on the web to carry you back into real, non-fiction time. 

Books . . .

Beware! Period Fiction Ahead

. . .and then Some

  

Bibliography


Berry, Thomas. “The New Story: Comments on the origin, identification, and transmission of values.”

in Fabel, Arthur and St. John, Donald P. (eds) Teilhard in the 21st Century: The Emerging Spirit of Earth

pp 77-88 © 1978, 2003 Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.


Cooke, Bernard. Sacraments and Sacramentality. © 1983, 1994, 

Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, CT


Fox, Matthew. On Becoming a Musical Mystical Bear. © 1976

Paulist Press, New York, New York 


Rahner, Karl. The Church and the Sacraments. © 1963 

Herder and Herder, New York, New York. 


Schillebeeckx, Edward. Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God © 1963, 1987

Sheed & Ward, New York, New York 


. . .and then Some

Beware! Period Fiction Ahead

. . .and then Some

  

Movies

King of Kings 1961 version

The Maltese Falcon 1941 version



Poetry


Browning, Robert

Andrea del Sarto 


Hopkins, Gerard Manley 

God’s Grandeur 

Pied Beauty






March 2023

  Stagecraft offers a change of pace this month. Drama and comedy replace novels and short stories during this month’s observance of Women’s History Month. 

Women's History month

My Work

Scenes from a Business Affair

Scenes from a Business Affair

This month is an experimental play script in place of a short story. 

Scenes from a Business Affair

Scenes from a Business Affair

Scenes from a Business Affair

  

During my days of formal literature studies, I heard an anecdote about William Faulkner. He opined having his great novel, The Sound and the Fury, printed using 14 different ink colors for the type when it first appeared as a novel in 1929. The publishing economics and technology of that time made such a printing infeasible. It appeared in traditional black and white. 

(Only 50 years after his death did the Folio Society issue a limited edition of 1,480 copies with that reconstructed color text, in 2012).
 

In the early 1990s I began a writing project that reminded me of Faulkner and his idea to mark different time periods — and the resurfaced memory of them — in various colors in his book.  
 

I was working on a play script that dealt with the power of the spoken word, specifically its capability to inflict harm and injury. Particularly, harm and injury to women. This was years prior to the use of our current term of “hate speech.”
 

So, I stripped the script of traditional stage directions and placement of the speaker’s name before the character’s spoken lines. 


I challenged myself to create a script wherein the spoken word would have to have the power to: 

(a) identify the character, 

(b) describe the location of the scene, (c) convey character interactions, and (d) give the reader insights into the character’s temperament and 

(e) even appearance. 


Since the script was not recorded but was to appear solely in print, the typefaces (like Faulkner’s forsaken colors) would have to carry some of the weight. 

I assigned each character a typeface resembling what I imagined they looked like physically and that reflected their interior personality, and even their voices.
 


Scenes from a Business Affair


And so was born—Scenes From a Business Affair.  


In this iteration I also chose in limited instances to indent and right-left justify the type on the page to add to the feeling of interplay between some workplace characters. 


I share it here during Women's History Month, which itself was initially conceived to honor working women. 


The play is set in the workplace because that is where I experienced most of my dealings and relationships with (non-family members) women over the last 50 years or so—and witnessed the power of words used against them. 

It was also there that I encouraged them to speak up and use that same power of words to frame—for themselves and their sister-descendants—a fairer workplace and more just world. 


I hope you give it a “look-see.” 


Reading Scenes From a Business Affair purposefully requires some concentration. Some paying attention to detail, so you feel who is speaking and how they are speaking and what they are saying. 


As one of the world's greatest English-language playwrights wrote, 

“the play’s the thing …” to catch us.


 So may I encourage you to be looking into the eyes of women—in the workplace and no matter where they are—when they speak to you and when you talk to them. 


And not just this month, either. 

But this month can be a start. 




Click to read this story

March 2023

Their Plays

She Persisted: Thirty Ten-Minute Plays by Women over Forty

She Persisted: Thirty Ten-Minute Plays by Women over Forty

 

She Persisted: Thirty Ten-Minute Plays by Women over Forty

She Persisted: Thirty Ten-Minute Plays by Women over Forty

She Persisted: Thirty Ten-Minute Plays by Women over Forty

   

Edited by Lawrence Harbison


This is a collection of short plays that can be read privately, read aloud in multiple speaker parts, or acted out on stage (all within the proper limits of permissions listed in the book). 


The volume title derives from the experience of these creators—all who were shunned by the theater community because they were women and whose work was ignored and left unperformed within the male-dominated producer-director-playwright society of professional stagecraft for decades. 


This book only exists because they persisted and continued to imagine and write plays and refused to be forgotten. 


For International Women’s Month I picked this book and this milieu to honor their struggle and to place before you the issues, concerns, and characters embodying their view of the world and women’s “place” in the world—which these plays demonstrate is every place.


In addition to the plays themselves, this volume is a treasury. 

The preface portrays the history of theater chauvinism the book strikes out against de facto. Its lesson can no longer be ignored and the past it models can no longer be allowed to perpetuate. 

Before each play there is a biography and dramagraphy of each playwright. These thirty data capsules provide a stunning array of accomplishments and artistic achievements. 

Lastly, there is an index of venues of ten-minute play producers, encouraging to playwrights in the wings and playgoers in the seats.

  

© 2021 The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Company

The Playwrights

She Persisted: Thirty Ten-Minute Plays by Women over Forty

The Playwrights

Here are the women who have a play represented in this collection 


Sheri Wilner

Cynthia L Cooper

Susan Cinoman

Michael Angel Johnson

Denby Swanson

Audrey Webb

Karen Malpede

Lynn Rosen

Jennifer Maisel

Rita Anderson

Judith Leora

C S Hanson

Laura Rohrman

Jacquelyn Reingold

Jenny Lyn Bader

Julie Weinberg

Yvette Heyliger

Liz Amberly

Royal Shirée

Betty Shamieh

Bridgette A Wimberly

Lucy Wang

Victoria Z Daly

Christine Toy Johnson

Susan Kim

A D Williams

Thalia Cunningham

Inda Craig-Galván

Donna Latham

Donna Hoke

Why Plays for Womens' Month ?

The Playwrights

Why Plays for Womens' Month ?

Why Plays for Womens' Month ?

Why Plays for Womens' Month ?

  

Performing comedic or tragic drama creates provocative statements that can not be ignored. Theatrics engage participants and audiences emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Participants bond deeply in the experience, whether stagehand or actor, director or producer. Each of these dynamics has the power to offer men and women occasions in this dedicated month to transform visions and relationships, to reconsider just how genuine they are in their respect for a particular woman and for all women. 

Community groups, reading clubs, library associations, campus frats or sororities, and employees in the workplace can instigate reflection and change by experiencing these plays in a manner practical and suitable to their situation. In short, these are opportunities “to act out” and not “act up.” 

February 2023

  

Superbowl and Black History Month 

Two things clashed—and then fused together—as I readied a website theme for observing this month.

  

  • It’s SuperBowl month. I’ve been aggrieved since last summer by the associated onslaught of enticements to participate in betting on sports. Petition-signing campaigns and ballot referendums abounded last fall. Now public airwaves for TV and radio bombard audiences with overt commercials that would make the tobacco industry blush. Sports personalities, analysts, and broadcasters on talk radio very openly discuss their bets and wagering prowess. Whole segments of daily video and audio schedules dedicate time to oddsmakers, while influencers give advice on fantasy leagues; both presented solely as transactional gaming. Scoreboards and upcoming game schedules carry not just team names and records any longer, but odds for projecting who will win or lose an upcoming game, and amazingly, provide statistics to prove why that will be the outcome. 
  • Also, and more significantly, it's Black History Month. I wanted a book selection that would explore that from a vantage point that was unexpected and different enough to grab attention. I wanted a vehicle to help to revisit the historic nineteenth-twentieth century progression from Reconstruction-through-Redemption (the assigned names to a short era of Black empowerment [1865-1877] and its longer aftermath of disenfranchisement [1925 and beyond]) {Please see footnote 1 for a reference}. 
  • I especially wanted to demonstrate the view that this cycle-of-shame reinvented itself within a twentieth century microcosm, because I wished to shed light on it’s ugly resurfacing in socio-political, twenty-first century racial and electoral clashes. I found that vantage point—amazingly connected to bookmaking—among the scraps of paper bearing losing policy game numbers blowing down the often hope-dashed streets of 1920s Harlem. 
  • {1} Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and The Rise of Jim Crow Penguin Press, New York, 2019  An invaluable guide to this era. 

For February

Their Book and WebSite

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

February's Theme - GAMBLING 

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

  

By   

Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, Graham White 



This book is written by four Australian historians whose area of study is primarily the experience of the Black community living in New York City. Don’t be put off by the irony that half the team has the last name of White. 


While this book is rich in content and information, the team-writing seems to be missing a smooth and unifying narrative voice. Nevertheless, this book is certainly worth your patience and time.


 [And it brings along with it an added multi-media bonus. But more on that later]. 


First, let’s move on to the book and its story …


… The 1920s were the heyday of the Black-run-and-operated numbers and policy games that accounted for the richest and culture-dominant, non-governmental economy of America between World War I and World War II. Multi-millions of dollars a year were wagered—a nickel and a dime at a time—by the citizens of Harlem and the Tenderloin

(the latter neighborhood occupied the current-day site of Lincoln Center). 


Over the first three years of the 1930s, White gangsters grappled away this lucrative business and brokered it into yet another tragic sucking-away of Harlemites’s financial resources and destiny—into the hands and coffers of other-than-people-of-color outside the Black Metropolis. 


In 1933 there was street war between the white outsider, Dutch Schultz, and the black queen of numbers, Stephanie St Clair, for control of money and the promise of self-determination and dignity. Playing the Numbers recounts this epic struggle, which deserves remembrance a century later and reflective understanding—to stand boldly as an object lesson in our tumultuous decade of racial, economic, and political strife. 



  

Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars

Multi-Media Website Bonus

  





 

In an interesting intersection of themes, Playing the Numbers documents how "Black Bankers" (those who operated the earlier numbers and policy games in Harlem) bankrolled the financial and promotional advancement of Blacks in amateur and professional sports, especially in boxing and the Negro and Cuban/Caribbean baseball leagues (New York Black Yankees and New York Cubans) prior to their integration into the mainstream Major League game nationally. 


While reading this book, I felt at times that the Australian authors were too “distanced” from the New York experience. But I came to appreciate that these historians doggedly researched in places a native New Yorker would perhaps not think to look, or interrelate, to draw an integrated picture. The authors’ reputations and literary stature gained them access to, and assistance from, repositories I imagine would not be sought out, nor readily obtained, by general or casual readers. 


The authors’ research is expansive, with primary sources from the Black press of the day, police reports and court records, as well as oral or written memoirs of the participants and their minions. These troves yield the stories and glories, the games and the shames, of the two decades of power brokers in and outside of Harlem’s Black Metropolis. 


But rest assured, you will discover as I did that Playing the Numbers does begin with, and does return to, the men and women of color who called Harlem and the Tenderloin home, and who strove every day to do the best they could to survive and thrive. 


It is their lives we can learn from mostly—in our troubled twentieth-first century times.


© 2010 Harvard University Press

Multi-Media Website Bonus

Enjoy these enlightening excerpts from the book:

Multi-Media Website Bonus

  

Digital Harlem: 

Everyday Life from 1915-1930


The book authors and their collaborators have created an associated and more extensive interactive website you can easily use. It provides visitors with an experience of Harlem in the early 20th century. It is based on working with an interactive street map (above). By choosing what you want to examine from its heuristically-responsive menu, bursting with cultural and historical facts and figures, you can see where people owned and operated their businesses, lived and played, shopped and went to school, brought children for daycare, went to church and met in social organizations, held parades, played cricket and basketball, and baseball; went to theaters and night clubs and had run-ins with the law. And each topic has explanatory notes to fill in the history and the “people’s story” of life in Harlem, including a dedicated segment to the Harlem Renaissance. 

As an example close to the book’s theme, the website features an expanding and contracting timeline that populates with data on pop-up menus from actual police reports and court records detailing arrests dates, infractions, and penalties ascribed to individuals, described by name, birth date, age, family origin/heritage, and plotting locations where the arrests were made for playing numbers. 

Digital Harlem is designed for easy and engaging use by historians, bloggers, students, teachers, community leaders, family archivists and the simply curious. https://drstephenrobertson.com/digitalharlemblog/teaching-digital-harlem/#Black The site also provides an extensive bibliography of other works by the authors and references employed to create the website. 

Enjoy these enlightening excerpts from the book:

Enjoy these enlightening excerpts from the book:

Enjoy these enlightening excerpts from the book:

    

“Hitting the numbers usually resulted in a payoff of a few score dollars, at most a few hundred. This made an enormous difference to a person’s life for the next few weeks, but it did not mean the individual never had to work again. In this context, regularly investing spare nickels and dimes on a number, and every few months receiving a windfall that allowed debts to be paid off, made sense. Gambling on the numbers played an important role in the economic lives of ordinary African American men and women.”


“Almost to a man or woman, Harlem bankers … [those who controlled the numbers game] …were what was then known as “race men,” champions of black enterprise and fervent believers in the importance of the black community in northern cities. They also had deep pockets. That is why the white takeover of numbers in Harlem during some of the worst years of the Depression was a disaster for the Black Metropolis.” 


“Gangsters and the mob moved into Harlem in the early 1930s, and there they would stay until numbers was eventually made redundant by the state-run lotteries in the 1970s.  

21st Century Wagering: A Sportsbook Sidebar

Enjoy these enlightening excerpts from the book:

Enjoy these enlightening excerpts from the book:

  

Reading about Harlem numbers in the 20s and 30s made me think immediately of 2020s sportsbook operations a century later. There’s a big difference. At their inception, the numbers and policy games of the last century used winning numbers based on objective daily performance of the financial markets. For a while, these gave way to horse racing parimutuels. To the contrary, human athletic performance lights the sportsbook fuse exploding in the 2020s fandom population. 


My primary thoughts were about the sports book focus on the NFL and what I see there as an objectification and depersonalization of the athletes and the devaluation of team camaraderie. In short, sportsbook has monetized the efforts of NFL player athletes (a little more than 70% of whom are non-whites) to the detriment of their recognition 

and appreciation as persons. These sports figures are no longer emulated as potential role models. Instead, they are dehumanized chattel worth only the money they can provide for those who control the economy--the vendors--who also victimize those bettors who become addicted to chasing the promise of riches, often to the wreck-and-ruin of their lives and that of their families. 


Sports book syndication popularized in operations such as DraftKings and FanDuel have taken over professional athletics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the NFL. (And that lengthening shadow is darkening collegiate sports as well). 


This viewpoint appears to many, I know, to be far-fetched and, seemingly, an hysterical overreach — rather than a possible valid insight to consider. But all I heard over and over again last month in the days after Damar Hamlin’s Monday Night Football horrific on-field collapse was how fans, commentators, and sportscasters were stunned into realizing the player was being thought of as a human being, a person, with a mother (in attendance), and teammates, and friends, and a community benefitting from his activism.

 

I wrote later in that first week of January: “So now thankfully Mr. Hamlin begins to recover. Yet games will be played this weekend again and the monetization of effort and victimization—of athletes and fans alike—will resume with the whistling of the opening kickoffs.”


The personal excellence of the individual athlete and the achievement of team excellence, once heroic and held up as a civics lesson and for modeling to aspiring youths, have been subjugated to nothing more than a transactional pseudo-relationship. The player has become an avatar—stripped of personality and devoid of competitive camaraderie and team identity. And a fandom’s lusting desire to monetize that performance, in real time or in a fantasy, contorts and seeks to control it for profit and gain. This collective body of surrogating onlookers and dreamers is equally victimized on most weekends by that syndication of wealth transfer. 


Most sadly, those treasure-tempted avatars themselves retire after a short career of labor in the fields, bearing their scars for life, not on their welted backs and thighs, but in their broken bones and torn sinew and in CTE’s confusion and darkness of spirit; with none of those gambled dimes and nickels, and more, set aside for their care.   

february original fiction

My Short Story

Gamble in the Woods

Gamble in the Woods

Gamble in the Woods

Gamble in the Woods

Gamble in the Woods

  

I did not have my brother’s teen-age-years’ experience of a summer job that introduced him to the game of numbers, as he unsuspectedly carried disguised luncheon orders to-and-from a storefront deli. My gambling introduction, at arms’-length, came later in life as the forests and hills of eastern Connecticut gave birth to the biggest casino in the world at the time, midwifed by the energized native American community asserting its political and economic rebirth in the last third of the twentieth century.  


I wrote this story in light of witnessing a community transformed and the sometimes downfall of phenoms and families, beauties and business owners who were unable to escape the lure of bingo cards that morphed into five-deck-boots of cards for Black Jack and hundreds of tables for poker, roulette or dice; or thousands of one-armed bandits that half-nelsoned the young and old alike, on spinning leather stools or in wheelchairs, inhaling cigarette smoke or canulating oxygen [ and sometimes incredibly, both simultaneously ]. 


I found the writing style of an interior monologue most suitable to examine the mind of the gambler in this story. What made him drive from Maine to Connecticut one snowy day in 1997? Where were his interior map-lines demarcating attraction and obsession and addiction? And what else—even outside those lines—made him tick?  

Click to read this story

January 2023

  

Welcome to a New Year. 

This site continues with a monthly book recommendation 

and an installment of my original fiction. 


This month’s selection of another author’s work gets me back to my comfort zone of historical fiction, and simultaneously continues the recent months’ arc of encounters involving people of different cultural and racial experiences, where comfort is not a goal. 


My fiction piece is a favorite of mine and one that comes closest to being categorized as 

historical fiction, with a significant cameo appearance by Walt Whitman. 


There are a few additional features here for your enjoyment 

and to place the fiction pieces into a broader non-fiction context.

click to go to original fiction

For January

My Story

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

Reconstruction

  

On a warm New York summer’s day in 1866, a railroad speculator and a wilderness cartographer encounter Walt Whitman and one another. Little do any of the three anticipate how much is to be discovered in their shared pasts, even though this is the first time they have met. 

I wrote the first stages of this Tale decades ago, longing about beginning anew after bitter times. I chose this Tails and Heads entry for this January because it seems we are here again, 

with a chance for a new beginning in 2023, individually and 

as a country. One can hope. One does. 

Click Here to Read This Story

Walt Whitman Birthplace - Long Island, NY

Walt Whitman Birthplace - Long Island, NY

Walt Whitman Birthplace - Long Island, NY

  

 Take a visit back in time. Climb the same staircase and look out the very windows America’s renowned poet did when he was not quite a 4-year-old boy, before his family moved to Brooklyn in 1823. The homestead - shown above as in 1908.  


The NY State 2002-constructed Interpretive Center on the property (of the originally 40-acre farm) is very informative and enjoyable. Using photos and text panels, the Center tells the poet’s life story, portrays the American urban settings he inhabited, develops a narrative of the nine progressive editions of Leaves of Grass (from 1855 to 1892), and includes a photo array of Whitman through the years. 

I found the staff friendly & welcoming, and expect you will, too. 

Start your virtual tour on the website link: https://www.waltwhitman.org

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman Birthplace - Long Island, NY

Walt Whitman Birthplace - Long Island, NY

  

In the last week of 2022, I bought this deluxe copy of Whitman’s last version of Leaves of Grass, his so-called “deathbed edition.” 


The clerk at Shakespeare and Company bookseller near Lincoln Center in NYC commented as she placed the volume in a carry bag: 

“We’ve been selling several copies of Leaves of Grass this month. Maybe Whitman’s making a comeback.” 


It was a fair enough December day to sit on a park bench by a pop-up farmer’s market nearby and read the introduction to his premier 1855 edition. 

Encountering the Good Grey Poet on his own terms, 

in his own city. Nice, that. 

Her Book

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

 

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

  

My choice this time isn’t a debut novel, but rather a return to an author I have read before and liked. 


Why Horse? 


Because I wanted to see if this new (and sure-to-be-a-classic) book was suitable for my eighth-grade, equestrian granddaughter. She should definitely read this book, but probably needs to wait until her junior or senior year in high school to do so. 


Part love story and part mystery tale, Horse keeps moving apace—sometimes grazing through the antebellum blue grass of Kentucky and then the expansive turf downriver in Louisiana; and other times, blazing around mile-long racecourses in two four-mile heats in the same day. 


The factual people and fictional characters in this novel have been endowed by Ms. Brooks with engaging personalities that propel the story forward, in a blend of historical events and creative imaginings, threading back-and-forth between 1850 and 2020 and the years between. 


As you read, you become immersed in the lives of an enslaved boy and an unstoppable horse in one century and a determined Black art historian and meticulous White scientist in another. Each pair is drawn together, yet kept apart, by the differences in the places assigned to them by the racially maligned societies they inhabit. 


Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Writing and Horses

  

All are linked across the centuries by contemporary oil paintings of this world champion racehorse, Lexington, and the preserved skeleton of this sire of countless famous thoroughbreds. 


Horse tracks down the intrigue and solves the mystery of how these artifacts may have become misplaced and publicly unappreciated over time, respectively reserved as private family keepsakes, or relegated to storage in unvisited museum attics. 


Ms. Brooks’ attention to detail and creative invention shakes the dust off and unmasks the enigma, refusing to leave it unremarked upon and hidden, just as she does the legacy of Lexington and the underpinnings of racism in America that her novel probes artistically and relentlessly. 


Horse is a rare breed: a masterfully told enjoyable story, and a timely read whose immediacy is real and with something important to be said and heard. 


© 2022 Viking

Writing and Horses

Horseracing and Race

Writing and Horses

  

PBS News Hour 

July 7, 2022


This month’s book selection provides a concise opportunity to gain insights into writing historical fiction. Here’s part of what the author told PBS New Hour interviewers in

Author Geraldine Brooks delves into an untold story of a racehorse and his caretaker:

“I like to find something on the historical record, that is extraordinary and, if you made it up, it would be implausible. It needs to be a story where you can know some fascinating things, but

you can’t find out everything. So, I am looking for those voids that imagination has to be deployed to fill.” 

I invite you to spend seven fascinating minutes with this interview: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O07y7bkYX2M

Horseracing and Race

Horseracing and Race

Horseracing and Race

  

New York Times 

Sept 9, 2022


Ms. Brooks pursues the racial tensions of each bookending century depicted in her story. 


In her Afterword she wrote: “As I began to research Lexington’s life, it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse; it would need also to be about race.” 


Earlier this year, two barbers from near Sarasota Springs NY were featured in the New York Times for their documentary of Blacks in horse racing today. It makes for fascinating reading and viewing. Give it a look.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/sports/horse-racing/real-players-backstretch-horse-racing.html


Copyright © 2021 Richard Haffey - All Rights Reserved.


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