Summer books, beach reads

On a trip to the beach, Lady Gravesend and Miss Cottonwood spotted something funny. As we threw our towels and too-pale bodies down onto the sand, we saw a young woman nearby reading a book. She was reading Nietzsche.

We thought, “Really?” and giggled a bit. But then that sparked the question, what is a summer book, a beach read? Neither of us really goes for the bodice-ripping variety; beach reads don’t have to be as flimsy and pointless as our cover-ups. On the other hand, neither of us was tossing Beyond Good and Evil in our totes anytime soon. So, we thought hard about our ideal summer book.

Lady Gravesend: I find that a book about love, tragic and fleeting, is perfect for lazy summer consumption. Among the best summer books, is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. This book is the ultimate paperback to throw in your beach bag and read while lying in the sun. The main character opens with a memory of first love on the beach during a childhood summer. Nabokov creates that “little girl with the seaside limbs” that haunts you and the narrator while both follow Lolita around the novel.

But this is not my favorite. No, of the creepily sensual variety I prefer Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. It is a filling read best enjoyed in late July or August when you start to contemplate the quickening end of the summer. Mann’s prose is textured and rich--like running your hand over expensive linens at an overpriced beach resort. The novel follows Gustav Aschenbach, a disciplined and successful artist as he follows an urge to vacation in Venice. As one can imagine, a struggle ensues for Aschenbach as his own Xanadu threatens to consume him.

Miss Cottonwood: My favorite summer read is F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.

The book opens hauntingly on a midsummer day. A story unfolds on a beach, under a scorching French sun that, we learn, burns the delicate legs of an American ingénue. Fitzgerald undercuts the oppressive heat emanating from the pages with a chill of sad nostalgia that weaves in and out of the lines. Rarely have I felt more mixed in with the sand, the air, and the figures of a writer's imagination.

The book goes on to sketch the lives of a wealthy circle of friends living in South of France. The central storyline, the curve of the Diver marriage, sharply mirrors Fitzgerald's own struggles with his wife Zelda's mental decline and, eventually, his own. According, his characters are strange, fragmented, and deceptive in the most alluring way. Who can forget Dick Diver's instant magnetism, Nicole Diver's malefic loveliness, and Rosemary Hoyt's ambrosial innocence?

The book is rich, tragic, and imperfect. You may really fall in love with Dick Diver -- something that you never could do with Jay Gatsby because you were told that you had to -- or maybe you will despise him. Either way, you are likely to feel something under the French sun.

But will you enjoy this book? Well, it's a Fitzgerald! Let the words wash over you. Let him take you to the passionate and torturous fragment of his psyche that forever floats along the French Riviera. You would be hard-pressed to find a more transporting summer experience.

With that, we hope that everyone enjoyed the first official weekend of summer!

-- Lady Gravesend and Miss Cottonwood

Rockaway Beach Vignettes: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius

This vignette series will be running over the summer about Rockaway Beach, New York.


Ran into Mulroney on 96th eating fish tacos and he was off the junk so he and Red Hat and Pretty Boy and I went to the Bar for a pina colada. Yeah Mulroney was good with soul present eyes and we were all feigning for that frozen rum drink. I said to Mulroney “I thought you were wearing tanks all summer: what’s with the button down.” He smiled and opened his shirt to show his commitment – a black tank revealed. “It’s a little chilly, ya know.”

As we walked down 95th to the Bar, a car pulled up to park. Mulroney familiar with its driver ran up to the passenger window. “Its Bodi!” I knew of this person and was curious to meet this storied surfer. Mulroney waived us on to the Bar and said that Bodi would be joining us there. Past a group of children perpetually playing on the street who were all too curious and then on to the first tier of our favorite place. It is the afternoon during the week and in the seventies, cooler than usual. The Bar is empty but for a few others craving the summer drinks. I just bought two packs of American Spirits and was happy to sit down to a rum high and smoke my American tobacco. I gave a cigarette to Red Hat even though I felt bad—his being young and all. We were waiting for our drinks. I didn’t feel like a lecture but reminded him that they cut off the oxygen to your brain. He looked a little disturbed—good…success.

The drinks arrived and we settled into a long relaxed sip on this beach veranda. It was a pleasure to have this spot so Appollonian and quiet—the nights erupt into a Dionysian ritual of sex, jealously, drunkenness, and the deafening roar of the present. All are completely in the moment with no future and only few are unfortunate enough to bring in a past.

We wait for Bodi to arrive—his Guinness foams and settles long before his arrival. Red Hat and Pretty Boy take off for the skate park after one. Mulroney convinces me to stay for at least two more—how could I say no with nothing to do for the afternoon. Mulroney nods to an approaching car, “ugh, here comes Fake Frank.” “why do you call him that?” “You will find out in about two minutes.” A far too blond man with no shoes and a Grateful Dead T-shirt approaches us with a drunk and cheery girl. “Hey, there Mulroney…Oh man, I haven’t seen you in (pause for fist bump)…wow, how are you?” Introductions. “Hey I know you?” “Uh, nah but maybe I have seen you around.” No matter Fake Frank is already consumed the annoying banalities uncharacteristic to the neighborhood. Mulroney placates then rolls his eyes as the two disappear into the bar for their drinks. “Yeah, I got ya, Mulroney” Laughter. Sip Drinks. The kids from the sidewalk come up towards us—one boy gave me a white flower taken from the house next door. He is our instant friend.

A man rounds the corner—big and husky. He is wearing white linen pants and a button down, sunglasses, an Irish cap, and using a wooden cane. Banged up clearly. This is the surfer from Nicaragua. This is the man all the other surfers talk about. He sits down with big warm handshakes all around. He sits down like Santa with his beard and his legs apart for a listening lean. After he lifts his warm beer, Mulroney looks pleased and they catch up. He was injured in an accident—hence the cane. I am out of my league and thinking I should depart. Not good for ladies to be hanging out with so many men— as I stand to leave Mulroney insists that I stay for at least one more. Bodi takes notice of me then and offers his introduction. “I am the girl who lives with the dark haired man” Ahh…yes, there is recognition now—he came to one of our yard parties. Already warm on rum I say “I have heard of you—the surfer from Nicaragua.” This pleases the crowd and Bodi who is attentive to me now. We talk of Nicaragua while Mulroney gets my drink—of international relations and drug trafficking—of the people and the jungle. Mulroney arrives with a rum floater on my pina colada. I avoid these but am not upset at its arrival. I settle back into my wrought iron chair of curly-cued roses and chipped paint and take the golden brown rum off with a slow sip.

The rum is getting me now as the banter is quicker and Fake Frank arrives to speak more banalities to Bodi whose patience is of the worldly kind. Fake Frank and the girl tuck themselves into the corner for some making out while we continue a better conversation now about Dante’s Inferno and who was the third man in the mouth of the devil. No one can remember and Bodi says he can’t because he is too high. He is reading Don Quixote in Spanish –“DO you know Spanish?” No. “My friends are teaching me.” I think they are …Yo quiero cerveza...ha.

- Lady Gravesend

Carrie on, and on

I remember my first trip to New York City.

I was thirteen and on my eighth-grade art class field trip. We visited the galleries and also managed to cram in a Yankees game, two Broadway shows ("Phantom" and "Stomp"), Ellis Island, and a tour of Columbia University. I remember going to sleep every night on my bunk in the Big Apple Hostel, happily filled with streetside hotdogs and bright new memories.

This was my first impression of the city: it was a place larger than its physical size, maybe a little rough around the edges, but nevertheless glowing with positive energy and endless possibilities. In New York City, there could be something for everyone, and no limits at all.

But the next time I stayed in the city, it felt different. You see, by then, I had discovered "Sex and the City."

People say that the four women of the HBO show obviously live in a fantasy world, a hyperreal New York. But that wasn't obvious to me. The fantasy was spliced with just enough reality to make it believable. Carrie Bradshaw buys $400-dollar heels but she also struggles to make ends meet when her building goes co-op -- that sort of thing. Besides, the show was based on true New Yorker Candace Bushnell and her jazzy social column, which I read.

Before moving, I subconsciously decided that my life in the city would be scripted by "Sex." For awhile, my footwear was five-inch heels that I couldn't walk in, my nourishment was sugary Magnolia cupcakes that I couldn't really stomach, and my transportation was a taxi cab that I couldn't afford. Being seen at flashy restaurants and sauntering around the Meatpacking District became not just the height of living, but the only way of living.

It seems pretty silly now, looking back. The funniest part of it all was that I had come to New York to explore, live without limits, and find myself. I wasn't doing very much of that while trying to live Carrie's life.

I actually feel a little sorry for Carrie and her friends. As it turns out, after six years on television and two movies, the "Sex" women are done exploring. They now live in a frozen Cosmopolitan. By the second movie, the women are settled in their ways and finished with the city. They are so finished, in fact, that the screenwriters keep them in Abu Dhabi for most of the movie to make it seem like they're still the adventuresses that we once knew.

How lucky the rest of us are, then, to have unscripted lives. No limits, rules, or absolutes can hem us in. Maybe New York really is the place that I thought it was when I was 13 after all.

- Miss Cottonwood

Therapy Row with Estlin

My father led me through the rusted gates at Patchin Place when I was about fourteen years old. I felt an excitement that was unparalleled—I was in New York City for the whole afternoon. As a young girl from a rural town in Pennsylvania, I had arrived in the mecca of literary greatness. From my bedroom, where I poured over my copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Eugene O’Neill to the street where they walked alone or traipsed with friends. Greenwich Village was a distant Narnia for me—and yet here I was following my father into some forgotten corner of the city.

My father pushed us farther into the shaded urban cul-de-sac towards the humble doors of Patchin Place residents. He was going to the psychiatrist for a routine visit. He could not imagine the significance of this visit though; that it would shape his daughter’s life. As he ushered me towards his doctor’s office, I noticed a placard in the left corner with a familiar name on it: ee cummings: 4 Patchin Place.

In the 1990s, Patchin Place became a home for therapists who were attracted to this quiet place in the city. I spent the next hour in the waiting room reading gay lifestyle magazines and discovering that RuPaul was indeed a man. I was unusually patient because my father promised that I could buy a book from the Barnes & Noble I saw on 6th Avenue.

Years later, I ponder the desire of therapists to settle in that little cove. It is ironic that professionals, who spend their lives dissecting the human soul, placing the broken pieces of a life together to create a functioning adult, took over a place that attracted artists unafraid to inhabit a soul collapsed or very nearly on the verge of destruction.

Why would those who are devoted to fixing the human mind be attracted to a place where people went to absorb themselves in the intangible soul? Could it be these therapists were reluctant romantics; that they wanted to work out of a place at the very margin of normal functioning?

ee cummings himself did say that living at 4 Patchin Place “meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.” If the artists who dared to plow boldly into the unknown fields of the mind to place their feet at the very edge of sanity could find comfort on Patchin Place, then so too could those who staked their claim in that place to work and cipher paths in that wilderness.

I took a trip back there recently, having come a long way from youthful wonderment. I wanted to revisit a place of inspiration, a place that brought me to New York City and that I think, subconsciously, still keeps me here.

- Lady Gravesend