Reading Brooklyn

Brooklyn is famous for its writers, and my 'hood is no exception. Marianne Moore lived around the corner from me on Cumberland, and Richard Wright lived on Carlton (echoes of Toronto in the street names). Even the old beard himself, Walt Whitman, helped establish Fort Greene Park, where just this morning I was sweating in the hellish humidity. From that vantage point, Wally could see the Manhattan skyline, and no doubt the passenger ferries that scuttled back and forth from there to the rump of Long Island, immortalized in his Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious
          you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning
          home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to
          me, and more in my mediations, than you might 
          suppose.*


Oh, Walt, you clever dog. Nothing extends the shelflife of a poem like a shout-out to your future readers. Your poem has outlived the ferry itself, replaced by the bridge of Moore's lesser-known poem "Granite and Steel," which now has a fancy bike lane and a new pedestrian park, in the construction of which no workers gave their lives -- a fact that doesn't detract from the appeal of the thing one bit, its equal parts rationality and romance intact:

Untried expedient, untried; then tried;
way out; way in; romantic passageway
first seen by the eye of the mind,
then by the eye. O steel! O stone!

More recently, my little corner of the borough has housed and homed the likes of Colson Whitehead, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, Nelson George and Amitav Ghosh. While I can't say I've met these people personally, I probably wouldn't recognize them if I had, and besides, I prefer to read writers' work than see their faces. (For those who prefer the latter, there are some stalkerish Google maps that pinpoint the addresses of Brooklyn literati like the Foers, Lethems, Krausses et al, but you won't find a link to it here.)

To that end, I have been frequenting my local indie bookstore, Greenlight, and have left with goodies made in Fort Greene like Whitehead's The Colossus of New York (which, to those sensitive to cadence, is alternately waves and elephants crashing on the beach) and Sag Harbor, Egan's Look at Me, poet Laureate Tina Chang's Half-Lit Houses, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America and Anagrams (I know, I'm slow) as well as some other thematic curiosities like Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind.

Pop quid pro quo: Who are your favourite Brooklyn writers, or favourite novels/poems/stories of New York? I really have nothing better to do than to read them.

*My pretty 1960 paperback Rinehart & Co. edition of Leaves of Grass is marked New York - Toronto, further proof of Whitman's foresight.