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Wednesday, February 3, 2021

City Safari: Drug Trade Homeless----A New Report

   After writing and publishing two books on the homeless in Philadelphia (Learn To Do a Bad Thing Well: Looking For Johnny Bobbitt, and The Perils of Homelessness,both on Amazon), I’ve learned to keep an eye out for changes or trends in this area.

            What changes have I noticed lately?

            The homeless still come to the Kensington-Port Richmond area of the city for its cheap drugs. People still use heroin although for the most part heroin has been replaced by Fentanyl. There’s also Carfentanil, Cocaine and Methamphetamine. Meth seems to be the drug of choice among street connoisseurs, despite its terrible ingredients (battery acid, drain cleaner, and antifreeze).  A user told me once that when Meth is injected you have to be very careful because if you shoot it incorrectly into a vein, or miss a vein entirely, you experience spasms of horrendous pain. There are also visible scars from these mistakes: large crusty boils often form on the skin.   

            The other drugs—K2, or synthetic marijuana—reduce people to blundering idiots in that they no longer walk or move the way normal human beings do. People on K2 can jerk and spasm violently, throwing themselves to the left and then to the right and often spinning themselves around in circles. And they do it quite out in the open: in parking lots, near convenience stores. They are mostly young men, some shockingly young. Their condition is so far gone they find it impossible to speak or form a coherent thought. They mouth words that mean nothing; there’s an inability to focus. Often, they fall to the ground in a heap. Quite a few of them wind up sleeping wherever they fall. In my neighborhood one can sometimes find them wrapped around a column under the nearby Rite Aid in the early morning hours. They resemble the war dead in some horrid disaster documentary.

            Wandering men on drug safaris are everywhere in the city. Many are not recognizable as such because they are well dressed and conduct themselves normally.

            “It’s very hard to be a woman living on the streets,” a forty plus year old woman told me one night on Aramingo Avenue while I was waiting for a bus. The woman, whose name was Victoria, was there with her street buddy, Mark, the brother of Keith, the homeless man I wrote about in these pages not long ago.

            “It must be especially hard for a woman,” I replied. “Sleeping outside, waking up in the morning with no place to wash up, put on makeup or even brush your teeth.” Victoria agreed. “You have no idea. The winter is the worst time.”

            Talking with Victoria made me think back to an incident in a nearby Dunkin Donuts when a good-looking homeless girl barricaded herself into the all- gender bathroom and began dying her hair. She was in the bathroom for quite some time and, when she finally emerged, a lot of the dye was still on her hair. The manager inspected the bathroom after the girl left and discovered great gobs of hair dye all over the sink and toilet. You can imagine the scene that followed.   

Mark and Victoria, not a couple in the traditional sense, came to blows later when Mark discovered that Victoria went into his “stuff” and “borrowed a few things.” Those few things turned out to be items of value, including drugs. Their friendship ended almost as quickly as it had begun. This is the norm on the street. “You can’t trust anyone on the streets,” I’ve been told again and again. Even men who team up with other men, walking together everyday for weeks and weeks like old married couples, usually hit a wall when one of them does the other in.

 “I nearly overdosed and fell asleep and he went into my knapsack and took my cellphone…”

It’s an Ayn Rand world of every man or woman for himself. But if it’s not friends stealing from friends, it is strangers hiding along the streets where those in search of drugs go to “medicate.” Often these “hiders” are young teens who work in teams of two to five, sometimes more. They attack in packs like wolves because this gives them the advantage. They will attack the strongest of men, including the brooding strongman Justin, who came to Philadelphia from Lancaster about two years ago. (Justin, with his dark good looks, resembles a character out of a Genet novel.)

            Two eager teens jumped Justin from behind, one stealing his small knapsack containing his cell phone and a large amount of drugs. Thinking Justin a pushover, they proceeded to pummel him when Justin turned into a prizefighter, swinging and doing heavy damage to one teen’s jaw. The frightened teen, pleading for mercy, was released and ran whimpering down a dark street.

            A young man I interviewed for my Johnny Bobbitt book, Arno, can often be seen in my neighborhood. Sometimes he’s all-together, meaning standing straight and behaving normally, but at other times one can find him sitting curbside with his head lowered to the pavement. He disappears for long periods of time, which is typical of the homeless in the drug trade. Drug trade homeless transition from one neighborhood to another but generally they have one or two favorite neighborhoods where they will always revisit. Some will panhandle on Riverwards streets, only to travel to the Northeast to panhandle along the highly lucrative Roosevelt Blvd., and yet they always return to the Riverwards as if they were human Frisbees. The lucky ones hook up with people and find temporary shelter; some are arrested for drug offenses, while others do a stint in rehab. Most if not all resurface but some disappear forever.

I ran into Arno at my local Dollar Tree recently. He looked meticulously clean and all together, sporting a new jacket and a new attitude.

            “Wow,” I said. “Good show. You look great.” I noticed a peculiar miniature Scotch patterned knapsack with lots of “lock down” straps over his left shoulder blade. I’d never seen such a tiny knapsack with so many straps. Ironically, just as I was thinking this, Arno began to explain how he was running drugs for a big-time pusher (or pushers).

            “I have $5,000 worth of drugs in this little knapsack,” he said. “I run them to people and run the money back. If anything were to go wrong—if I lost the drugs or was robbed—I’d have to answer for it. It wouldn’t be good. It wouldn’t be nice. I’d be dead.”

            There was Arno standing in the middle of Dollar Tree with $5,000 worth of drugs on his person. But who would suspect? With his bright innocent looking eyes and clean-cut demeanor, he looked like a Port Richmond mamma’s boy out on a family popcorn buying spree.

            “Take care,” I said, “Be careful.”

 

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Pn Hilda Doolittle and Marianne Moore (City Safari)

City Safari: On Hilda Doolittle and Marianne Moore

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Philadelphia’s most famous cultural observer, writer Camille Pagilia, author of the classic Sexual Personae, writes that “Poetry began in ancient ritual as rhythmic chanting, and its early history was intertwined with music and dance. It belonged to the oral tradition for millennia until the invention of writing. After that, the visual format of the poem on the page became intrinsic to its identity.”

Two classic poets who were educated in Philadelphia but who then went on to move to other cities were Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. and Marianne Moore. 

Early photographs of the poet Hilda Doolittle show an elegant young woman who, in many ways, resembled actress Glenda Jackson in Ken Russell’s 1989 film, Women in Love.

 


 

Born in 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to a father who was a University of Pennsylvania astronomy professor, and a mother who was a pious Moravian, Doolittle at 15 was, according to poet William Carlos Williams, “…tall, blond, with a long jaw and gay blue eyes.”

In 1895, the family moved to Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where her mother’s religious beliefs (in Moravian theology, all souls are female, and Christ is the husband of the male, as well as of the female), began to form the foundation of young Hilda’s growing poetic consciousness and eventual attraction to ancient Greek culture.

In 1901, at a Halloween party on the Penn campus, she met poet Ezra Pound (Pound attended the University of Pennsylvania from 1901 to 1903), then a handsome, muscular undergraduate with a mop of copper colored hair. Their relationship and eventual engagement flourished during Doolittle’s two-year tenure at Bryn Mawr College, until Pound abruptly ended the romance.

 


 

Doolittle later followed Pound first to New York, then to London, where she agreed to meet him on the steps of the British Museum in order to show him samples of her poetry. Pound admired the brevity and the easy rhythm of Doolittle’s verse, and helped launch her career as a poet.

In his amusing but cryptic essay on Doolittle in Prophets and Professors, author Bruce Bawer asks how Pound could build poetry reform with imagism around the works of a poet named Hilda Doolittle.

“So, before Pound tipped his hat and departed…that day, he scrawled something at the bottom of the manuscript of Hermes; H.D. Imagiste, Voila!’ The pathetic, pretentious and much-patronized Hilda was no more.”

But Pound abandoned H.D. again—this time as a poet and not a lover—when another poetic school (vorticism) caught his eye.

By this time, Doolittle, as H.D., was already published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine and in Des Imagistes, the 1914 anthology of imagist poets.

Though intimate relationships between women were commonplace early in the 20th Century, women with lesbian inclinations were categorized as spinsters or pressured into heterosexual marriages. As a result, many women’s self-awareness of lesbian feelings usually occurred later in life. Doolittle’s own “discovery” was not actualized until after her 1913 marriage to poet Richard Aldington, which lasted several years.

In the 1920s, Doolittle met writer/filmmaker Winifred Ellerman, who used the pseudonym, Bryher. One of the richest women in England, Bryher supported Doolittle and provided her with a comfortable life so she could write.

The relationship between Bryher and Doolittle was more of a business relationship than a “marriage,” but Bryher’s love and commitment to Doolittle was the driving force behind a union that lasted 40 years. Bryher published several of Doolittle’s books, including her 1926 autobiographical novel,Palimpsest.


 

Though her novels were panned by critics as “slack and indulgent,” Doolittle’s work attracted the attention of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Her collected poems include: Hymen (1921); Heliodoroa (1924); and Red Roses for Bronze (1929).

Doolittle, however, chose not to publish her explicitly lesbian works during her lifetime. Pilate’s Wife, Asphodel and Hermione were published after her death in 1961.  

 


 

In Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum you will find poet Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village living room preserved in its original layout. Here, one can imagine what it must have been like when Moore, a friend of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot, began her routine of doing chin-ups.

Visit the Moore Room at the Rosenbach and you will see the metal chin-up bar in the poet’s reconstructed living room. You’ll also spot a 19th-Century settee and bureau, a footstool (a gift from T.S. Eliot) and a painting of a yellow rose by e.e. cummings.

Personal belongings aside, the details of Moore’s life remain as obscure as some of the meanings of her rhyming syllabic verse that the Cambridge Guide to Literature calls “marked by an unconventional but disciplined use of metrics, and a witty, often ironic tone.”  Moore, like. H.D., had had taken fancies for a number of women in her life but she never went to the extent of calling herself a lesbian. 

Moore’s mother, an extremely literate woman, didn’t understand her daughter’s cryptic poetry and was disappointed that this was the case.  

Nowhere in the Cambridge Guide, or in Helen Vendler’s 528-page masterful critique of American poets, Voices and Visions, is anything stated about Moore’s romantic life although other sources maintain that Moore, like. H.D., had had taken a fancy to a number of women throughout her life although she never referred to herself a lesbian. 

Moore was born in 1887 near Kirkwood, Missouri and lived with her maternal grandfather, John Warner Moore, who became an ordained minister in 1914. The family then moved to Carlisle and in 1916 to Chatham, New Jersey.

After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, a publisher told her that she should forget poetry and become a secretary. Moore followed the publisher’s advice for four years, though one of her works found its way into Harriet Monroe’s Poetry Magazine. Additional poems were published in Others Magazine. According to Vendler, these early poems echoed Moore’s concern that each work be part of a continuing effort to think through what poetry is. Though Moore would always examine painting, sculpture and decorative arts in her work—what Pound called “the logic of juxtaposition”—Vendler said that Moore’s way of writing became a search for identity.

Moore herself called most poetry “prose with a heightened consciousness.”

During most of her career, Moore condemned free verse, saying “it was the easiest thing in the world to create, with one intonation in the image of the other.”

In 1918, she moved with her mother to a basement apartment in St. Luke’s Place in Greenwich Village. The move was beneficial, since Moore believed that living in the city offered an “accessibility to experiences.” New York also radically expanded her ideas about poetry. What once had been a search for personal identity—she believed in Emerson’s dictum that “artistic imitation is suicide”—was transformed into a fascination for the world of trade and commerce. Because of commerce, Moore came to respect the values and inevitability of “influences.” T.S. Eliot’s collection of essays, Sacred Wood, also helped her see the value in the existing monuments of the past.

Moore’s first book of poems was published in 1921, her second, Observations, in 1924. In 1921, she began to write free verse (“The easiest thing in the world to create…”), and in 1926, she became editor of the prestigious literary magazine, The Dial. Her Collected Poems (1951) received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Throughout her life, Moore was a conservative Republican. As a conservative Republican it is doubtful whether she’d be a hot-in-demand commodity in Philadelphia’s over-the-top Leftist poetry circles were she somehow to return today and take up the pen.   

Moore even voted for Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Before her death in 1972, Moore willed her literary and personal papers, as well as the contents of her living room, to the Rosenbach.

 

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Monday, February 1, 2021


City Safari: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the prophet

Sometime in the late 1980s a Boston friend of mine brought up the books of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. I had never read any of Solzhenitsyn’s works but I was aware that he was the author of The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward,One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.

For a good many years Solzhenitsyn’s works had nothing to say to me. I was more interested in Susan Sontag’s critiques of art and culture; in Paul Goodman’s diary, Five Years; in Gore Vidal’s caustic, pagan wit; in Edmund White’s Parisian stories and in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin of the 1930s. The works of Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy and Henry Miller also filled my library shelves.   

 


 

The unkempt - looking Solzhenitsyn was, to my mind, too Russian. According to my Boston friend, Solzhenitsyn was also, “too conservative…a real reactionary.” Solzhenitsyn’s critics, including The Boston Globe, accused him of wanting to revive the Russian Orthodox monarchy and resented his harsh criticisms of the West.

    

“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press,” Solzhenitsyn said at Harvard University’s 327th Commencement ceremony in 1978.

 


 

“Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? Who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?”

   

The ‘press problem’ of course has multiplied exponentially since the author’s death in 2008.

Solzhenitsyn, the prophet, also stated:      

“I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.”

Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address established him as an arch enemy of liberal academics, some of whom even accused him of anti-Semitism (a label that can be carelessly thrown around, like the word racist.) Solzhenitsyn, who spent 8 years in a forced labor camp under the old Soviet regime because he criticized Josef Stalin in a personal letter, heaps many other criticisms of the West in his recently released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2, Exile in America, 1978-1994, by University of Notre Dame Press.

“Current literature in the West,” he wrote, “titillates either an intellectual or a popular

 


 

readership: it is degraded to the level of entertainment and paradox, no longer of a standard to mold minds and characters.”

He also observed that that when he was serving his time in the camps, still under Stalin, he imagined Russian literature after Communism to be “Luminous, skillful, powerful… dealing with the ills of the people and all the suffering since the Revolution!” Yet once the post-Soviet ‘emancipated literature’ came pouring forth, Russia’s new West-inspired authors behaved like “mischievous little boys using their first taste of freedom to pick up swear words in the gutter,” while other writers went for no-holds-barred-sex.

 


 

A third group opted for self expression: “A buzzword and the supreme vindication of their literary activity. What a pathetic principle. ‘Self-expression’ does not presuppose self-restraint, either in society or before God. And is there in fact anything to express?”

Solzhenitsyn felt that the American press was cut from the same cloth. “Articles were constantly appearing in The New York Times and its supplements, and in other major papers, saying that Russian national consciousness now being reborn consisted above all of anti-Semitism—which meant it was worse than any Communism.”

The Washington Post at the time even published a cartoon entitled the Virgin of Vladimir with a hammer and sickle on her forehead, with the caption, “Mother Russia.”

Some American critics even said that the rebirth of Orthodoxy in Russia was like the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

The New York Review of Books, like The London Review of Books, two publications that tend to only review books that meet its strict leftist standards, were also on Solzhenitsyn’s tail. In 1979, this fact was apparent to Solzhenitsyn who labeled the NYRB, “the stronghold of American radicalism.” The NYRB published a cover story entitled, “The Dangers of Solzhenitsyn’s Nationalism” and hinted that the former Gulag slave labor prisoner was a fascist.

“Nazism and Communism imagine themselves as exact opposites. They are at each other’s throats wherever they exist all over the world. They actually breed each other; for the reaction against Communism is Nazism, and beneath Nazism or Fascism Communism stirs convulsively,” Winston S. Churchill wrote in a 1937 essay.

To this day, Russia-hating among Americans has a long legacy quite apart from the evils rampant in the now gone Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn writes: “The Russia-haters are already sinking their teeth into Russia’s good name. And what would happen later, when we crawled out, weak, infirm, from under the ruins of the hateful Bolshevik empire? They wouldn’t even let us start getting back on our feet.”

The new Russian nationalists after the fall of the Soviet Union condemned Christianity, saying that it blunted the combative spirit and that it was “Judaism’s Trojan Horse.”  

“Russia has been slandered for centuries,” Solzhenitsyn continues, “Repent? We certainly have things to repent of –we’ve committed enough sins!—but it’s not to biased American journalism that we must repent…”

World forces aligned themselves against the Russian writer, especially when he migrated to the United States and took up residence in Vermont with his wife, Svetlova and their three sons.

Norman Podhoretz, editor for many years of the right-wing Jewish magazine, Commentary, came to Solzhenitsyn’s defense when he wrote. “In my opinion, Solzhenitsyn’s evident bitterness  over the fact—and it is of course a fact—that revolutionaries of Jewish origin played so important a role in bringing Communism to Russia is overridden by his consistently fervent support of Israel. “

The Boston Globe called Solzhenitsyn “a brooding apocalyptic presence” when it was supposed that the author had taken control of a “network of radio stations in Russia.” What didn’t help Solzhenitsyn was the fact that he was favored by President Ronald Reagan. Critics called him a Russian ultranationalist (“fascist scum …financed by Hitler”) Once again, he was labeled an anti-Semite. That label and other heavy handed virtue-signaling was enough to arouse the curiosity of Washington politicians. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations soon established a Hearing.

“American senators and congressmen like nothing better than to sit at microphones, on lofty platforms, brows sternly knit, and display their uncommon perceptiveness and superior intellect,” Solzhenitsyn wrote.

As it turned out, the Hearing came to nothing. It was merely an early form of Russiagate, the conspiracy theory that became the rage after the 2016 U.S. elections. The author, in addressing the issue, wrote that the anti-Semitism label “like other labels, lost its precise meaning due to thoughtless use, and different social and political  commentators over the decades have understood a variety of different things by it.”         

Solzhenitsyn recalls an interview with CBS’s Mike Wallace. “Mike Wallace asked dull and then vile questions—still the same well-oiled refrain that had been running for decades.”

Forbes magazine was fair to him in its reporting and editorials but during his life a number of biographies appeared that skirted the bastion of truth and took many things he said out of context, or otherwise presented false narratives. Solzhenitsyn even had difficulty within the USSR during the Glasnost period. “During these final years of thaw in the USSR,” he wrote, “they had managed to publish all the banned authors who’d died, and all the banned ones still living—all except me.” 

For the remainder of his life, the Russian writer reaffirmed the themes in his great Harvard Address of 1978. 

In 1994, he returned to his native (post-Communist) Russia. He died in 2008.   “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the celebrated Russian writer, has been laid to rest after a funeral service held at Moscow's historic Donskoi monastery earlier today,”The Guardian reported.   

Solzhenitsyn’s Philadelphia connection resides in the life and career of his middle son, Ignat, who is currently Conductor Laureate of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.   

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