Join me at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 14 at the Newburgh Free Library, 124 Grand St., for the city’s first annual Poetry Circle! Read your favorite poem out loud, or just come to listen to the poems others bring. Either way, it’ll be lots of fun for all ages. (This is a direct order from the Newburgh Poet Laureate, so don’t even think of missing out!)
Everybody gets to say ONE NICE THING ABOUT THE POEMS WE HEAR AT THE POETRY CIRCLE!
New hobby, at age 73: Re-reading all the books in my house i’ve had since … high school? College? … whose crumbling, yellowed pages have been gathering dust for decades on my shelves and whose plots and characters’ names i could not tell you at knifepoint. Today i finished “Return of the Native,” by Thomas Hardy, a prolix Victorian-era fellow who i believe was paid by the word. This 360-pager was an “abridged edition,” i noticed halfway through it. TIP: If you skip all the descriptions of the drear and the drip and the gloom and the furze as the protagonists walk along the heath, it woul make a good 20-page love story.
My favorite thing in finding this book was the inside front cover, where i had proudly written my name with the precious little circle above the “i” that was, when i bought it as a 14-year-old, the last letter of my first name (i have long since reclaimed my “e”). And to be sure that, if you found it in 1964 and thought perhaps it belonged to some OTHER Geni Abrams, i added, “Homeroom 105, Albany High School.” Today, as i consign this tome to the Purple Heart box, i smile, “Hello, 14-year-old self!” to the writer of that signature. And, “Goodbye.”
Finished this book today, 60 years after i bought it. loove some of hardy’s poems, especially “channel firing,” but this “abridged” version of “Return of the native” could profitably have been about 340 pages shorter. disagree? let me know!
Lately I have begun re-reading books that either I never read in high school and college, or did read but didn’t appreciate. I donate them as I finish them, blithely telling myself that thereby I also am making progress on my Great Project of banishing from my house thousands and thousands of things I don’t need. This week I plucked from a shelf a yellow-paged paperback edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “King, Queen, Knave,” published in 1968 (cover price: 75 cents).
Well, the year 1968 gets an asterisk: It was published in 1968 in English. It was published in Russian in 1928. It’s a richly detailed psychological thriller, replete with the same kind of Nabokovian literary allusions and linguistic gymnastics that grace “Lolita.”
Finishing the book, I went straight to Wikipedia, to find out when “Psycho” came out. The Hitchcock movie “Psycho,” based on a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, came out in 1960.
What does that have to do with Nabokov? Well, here’s what: At the end of the movie, there’s that scary-as-hell scene in which a woman is sitting in a swivel chair, with her back to the camera and only her wigged head visible, and then the chair is turned around and in the chair is no woman at all. Instead, it’s demented Norman Bates’s mummified “mother” (which I recall as looking like a desiccated apple with a wig, stuck on a stick and “clothed” in a shawl).
To me, that was just as spooky as the famed “shower scene,” after which, you’ll recall, protagonist Marion Crane did not need a towel.
And here I quote from the next-to-last paragraph of Chapter 11 of “King, Queen, Knave,” (published, don’t forget, in 1928):
“He … knocked hurriedly at the landlord’s bedroom door. No answer. He pushed the door and stepped in. The old woman whose face he had never seen sat with her back to him in her usual place. “I’m leaving; I want to say goodbye,” he said, advancing toward the armchair. There was no old woman at all — only a gray wig stuck on a stick, and a knitted shawl.”
YIKES! Somebody call Alfred Hitchcock: Forty years later, this will make a really scary movie!
Or, in a rare non-snarky note, I could point out that Nabokov’s son Dmitri, who did the 1968 translation of his father’s novel, may have seen that 1960 movie, and been inspired to add that scene to the book. Since I don’t read Russian, I guess I’ll never know.
The cover ironically relates to recurring references to a steamy movie of that name that’s showing in Berlin. The book is anything but a bodice-ripping romance novel: It’s an erudite Nabokov offering that does, however, share one scene with a very famous movie.
Merriam-Webster notes that in the first three days after President Trump’s COVID-19 infection was announced, there was a jump of 30,500% (yep, you’re reading that right) in the number of lookups for the word, “Schadenfreude.” Check it out: https://bit.ly/3niByJX
And, unrelated, this news reminded me of an old New Yorker cartoon I’ve had taped to the wall of my home office for a long while.
One of the great things about living in Newburgh has been the free “Porch Concerts” that Kathy Lawrence performed all summer on Sunday evenings. To cheer us all up during the most stressful year anyone can remember, Kathy brought her musical talents (and her mic and electronic piano) out onto her porch here on Bayview Terrace. She sang requests from the audience as well as her own favorites from the American Songbook. Though ballads are her specialty, she can rock with the best of ‘em, croon songs from the early days of radio and belt out hits from Broadway musicals of all decades. She can pivot to novelty tunes too, to satisfy some of us goofier listeners. Between numbers, she shares her phenomenal knowlege about composers and lyricists. Neighbors near and far came to sit on “the Bluff” across the street from her house and enjoy her strong and agile soprano voice. She is a delightful entertainer who further endears herself to her loyal fans by interacting with them frequently. Her sweet mom, Carol, is similarly gifted, and often joined Kathy on harmony. The audience brought picnic blankets or lawn chairs. Some of us busted out some wine or tea (or, in the case of at least one young music-lover, some teething biscuits).
At the top of the Heights, with the river and the hills behind us and the wonderful music before us, Kathy’s Porch Concerts have given us all a wonderful respite from our woes. Let’s hope she’ll do it again next year, no matter what’s going on in our country and the world.
Kathy Lawrence of Newburgh, an AirBnb Superhost, is also a super singer.
Kathy takes requests during her last Porch Concert of the year on Oct. 4. If it’s a song from the American Songbook you want to hear, chances are she’ll just happen to have the sheet music for it.
HAH, I’m not even in the Top Twenty, Brian!
Welcome to my website, featuring my podcast, The Newburgh News. Always on tap: ideas, photos, interviews with intriguing people, and news of the goings-on and comings-up around Newburgh, N.Y., and the greater Hudson Valley.
Powered by Squarespace.
