Of Bohemianism and Creativity: Life as Narration By the time I finished reading this haunting and poignant book, I was wondering whether there is a connection between self-exile (a term I use very loosely) and man’s unending desire to narrate. Creation is a solitary act. When I was still living i...
I discovered Up in the Old Hotel almost a dozen years ago and fell in love with Joseph Mitchell and his paean to times gone by in New York City. He spoke to me of places I’d visited, some that seemed familiar, and others I could only imagine. For example, there was the Fulton Ferry Hotel, a six...
As a young newspaper reporter in 1930s New York, Joseph Mitchell interviewed fan dancers, street evangelists, voodoo conjurers, not to mention a lady boxer who also happened to be a countess. Mitchell haunted parts of the city now vanished: the fish market, burlesque houses, tenement neighborhood...
After Joe Gould's Secret - 'a miniature masterpiece of a shaggy dog story' (Observer) - here is another collection of stories by Joseph Mitchell, each connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City. As William Fiennes wrote in the London Review of Books, 'Mitchell was the la...
Flood OLD MR. FLOOD A TOUGH SCOTCH-IRISHMAN I KNOW, Mr. Hugh G. Flood, a retired house-wrecking contractor, aged ninety-three, often tells people that he is dead set and determined to live until the afternoon of July 27, 1965, when he will be a hundred and fifteen years old. “I don’t ask much he...
‘Fine pneumonia weather we’re having,’ the bartender remarked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s one hell of a day.’ A portly old man standing a few feet up the bar gave a grunt, abruptly put down his beer glass, turned to me, and said, ‘My boy, a profane word never yet had any effect on the weather.’ The rem...