Here are a few of his judgments:

“I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time”—about The Catcher in the Rye

“Try and read it, I think it is important”—re: The Stranger

“Damned good piece of work”—The 628-E8 by Octave Mirbeau

“I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then”— about Kafka’s The Castle

“I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places”—Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest.

You can read more here.

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Lori Baker’s new short story collection, Crash and Tell, is led by a cast of women whose rich creative minds derail their own lives.

Many of the female characters in Crash and Tell, Lori Baker’s new collection of stories, yearn for experiences and lives they’ve envisioned for themselves but cannot possibly have. Instead action often occurs in the creative minds of these characters: a photographer, an illusionist, a library assistant, a middle-aged seaside tourist, a car-accident-victim pushover, a fictionalized Jane Goodall, and others. Dreams and memories complement plot. Conjecture runs parallel with narration. A pervasive aloofness creates a buffer between them and their sterile existence, as well as an emotional distance from the reader.

Yet in these mostly sardonic tales, Baker’s characters are reasonably (if ironically) self-aware. The stories are also, in general, wickedly amusing and Baker’s writing is both precise and quirky. Word choices often surprise but they also work in context. These are misfit stories after all and esoteric terms here and there rightly emphasize the absurdities facing her oddball protagonists. Every woman here is lost or searching or patiently waiting for life to come to her—rarely do they get what they want, if they even know what they want. They’re bourgeois pawns of their own (or their mothers’) making—with one character even happily recycling sad clichés.

“The Coming of Age of Jane” is one of the stronger pieces in the collection. In it, Baker fictionalizes Jane Goodall and re-imagines her as a debutante from Chevy Chase, Maryland who cannot escape her demanding, often inappropriate mother. In fact, Jane’s mother has literally followed Jane to her jungle encampment, and she and Jane openly battle for the attention and affections of Harry Morrison—an older fellow scientist—in a very primitive way.

Observing ape behavior as a statement on its evolved human version might be too obvious a ploy—or it might quickly devolve into schlock—for a lesser writer, but Baker diffuses this problem by properly structuring the story, then acknowledging its artifice. She also makes the story very funny; the reader is in on the joke.

He’s “slyly Jesuitical in manner, with a sort of dip-and-tarry gait that suggests lameness, although his appearance is otherwise robust.” This quote comes from one of Jane’s journal entries, which comprise the story and allow for Jane’s clinical human-ape observations (replete with drawings of the chimps). In this entry, she’s describing not Dr. Morrison but another male primate she’s been closely watching—an ape named “Marty.” Very soon Jane herself starts to resemble not the real Jane Goodall but perhaps Lady Greystoke, or Jane of Tarzan fame—a damsel in distress—and then ultimately “Lulu,” one of Jane’s female chimp subjects.

Lori Baker

Modified modern-day damsels abound in this collection: Jane; Virginia in “Crash and Tell”; Beryl in “At Sea”; Natalie in “Ghost Story”; Maria in “Experimental Maria.” These women are caught in a whirlpool of Crock-Pots, ne’er-do-wells, and pre-feminist expectations. Virginia, for one, is placed in peril’s way by the devilish Lenny, who drives a “brand-new bright red Lincoln Continental…around town like a fifty-thousand-dollar penis.” He purposely “pokes” Virginia’s car in order to get her “vitals”; he leaves her with the mistaken impression that they’d been involved in a car accident. Later Lenny asks Virginia to Wonderland, and this will be the first date she’s been on in years. It’s a “big deal” and something to mention at her next group-therapy session.

What follows might have otherwise been the grim tale of sad-sack Virginia but this story—like others in the collection—is buoyed by Baker’s humorous treatment and her sharply cynical viewpoint. It is immediately apparent that Lenny is a low-level criminal type—with his odd manner and speech, his “thoroughbred ferrets,” and his gambling problems and shady dealings. Well, this is obvious to the reader if not to Virginia, who is handicapped by low self-esteem, zero confidence, a plainly advertised desperation, and hyper-hypersensitivity. She’s a damsel, but there is no hero to save her from the villain. In net effect, the villain and the hero here are the same, and only Virginia is (ironically) unaware of this. Lenny fails to show up on time for their first date. Virginia imagines that he’s been killed in a car accident. When he does arrive later that night, Virginia is unprepared and she scolds herself. This is what she deserves for “imagining wreckage.” In the end though, what she’s undone by is a lack of imagination as well as a desire to quell her own loneliness.

“Still Life” is the energetic and ethereal opening story to Crash and Tell. Along with “The Coming of Age of Jane” and the title work, it forms the first and stronger half of this six-story collection. “Still Life” centers on an eccentric extended family of photographers and their cousin Louise, an illusionist whose performances enchant, befuddle and infuriate this tight-knit clan. One of Louise’s greatest performances leads to an irrevocable estrangement. Afterward the narrator retreats to a humdrum life as staff photographer for the local newspaper. Several years later, she encounters Louise by chance, but her cousin quickly disappears again. The narrator concludes that “Louise herself is lost among the words, which are themselves nothing more than representations, insubstantial as a scattering of moths. And so I imagine for her, a life of creative irresponsibility far removed from my own more prosaic but irreproachably real world of parades, supermarket openings, and portraits of the mayor.”

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Memory is a protean thing.

There is an eerie room of memories at the current exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Walk into it and all the signposts of a collective nostalgia are there but the room is more than the recognizable objects therein. And this might be what memory is: fleeting, inexplicable, overpowering, capricious, unreliable, and also concrete. And sometimes memory is all these paradoxes (and more) at the same time.

Hiding Places: Memory in the Arts attempts to explore this rich and confounding topic—memory—through the work of more than fifty artists, in an exceptional exhibition that will run through December 30, 2011. An installation of Mark Fox’s Dust (2008) is just one highlight of the show. Over the course of two years Fox—using acrylic and ink on paper—drew 2,000 of his personal belongings, and these drawings are affixed with metal pins to a fifteen-foot-high wall collage-like (detail of Dust). The effect is a powerful yet oddly calm tornado of context and connections.

There are also fascinating pieces by George Widener, Kendall Messick, Masumi Hayashi, Gregory Blackstock, and William Powhida, who attempted to draw every person he’d met in his lifetime in Everyone I’ve Ever Met From Memory (that I can remember). David Maisel’s photographic series of copper canisters, Library of Dust, is a testament not to the remembered but to the forgotten. The photographed urns hold the unclaimed cremated remains of psychiatric patients from the Oregon State Hospital (1883-1970); water damage over the years had transformed the urns into beautiful objects in their own right.

The show itself is divided into four categories (From Memory, Holding Memory, Forget Memory, and Shared Memory), and there are nearly too many superb pieces to list—as I remember. Check out the show yourself, if you’re in the vicinity of Sheboygan this fall, or visit online.

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Lebowitz (or simply, Fran) was rediscovered, it seems, by the Newspaper of Record (and others) after Public Speaking, Martin Scorcese’s HBO documentary about her was released late last year, and it’s no wonder. Fran’s a bullhorn. She speaks freely about what New York has devolved into these last decades, and she’ll say what a lot of residents want to say about their own city but, oddly, very often won’t.

Some examples:

“The West Village now is like Westchester…The difference between Greenwich, Conn., and Greenwich Avenue, is zero.”

“Someone recently said to me, ‘Fran, you know, if we were young, we’d live in Brooklyn.’ And I said, ‘Not me, I was never that young.’”

“[The pedestrian mall in Times Square] makes New York seem like a failed Rust Belt city, where they are trying to…bring people downtown to a mall where no one shops because the factory closed. It is the opposite of an urban environment.”

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Bill Cunningham, longtime fashion photographer at The New York Times, is the subject of a new documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, and what an enchanting film it is.

Cunningham is best known for his street-fashion photography. He’s worked for Women’s Wear Daily, Details magazine, and, since the 1970s, at the Times, where he produces the “On the Street” column and now a web video supplement to that weekly feature.

The eighty-something-year-old Cunningham can still be seen pedaling around New York town on his 29th bicycle (each of the previous twenty-eight were stolen), his film camera (still not digital!) around his neck, and wearing his signature blue Parisian street sweeper smock.

This man who operates among the elite, and is both known and admired by nearly all in the upper reaches of the fashion world, maintains an ascetic lifestyle. He is insanely, almost comically, frugal. He is rail-thin and, believably, professes that eating and drinking are not very important to him. He is only interested in taking his photographs and expressing his strong fashion opinions in what he reveals to his readers.

His artistic freedom is paramount. In fact, when Condé Nast acquired Details in 1988, Cunningham refused payment and ceremoniously tore up his checks. “You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do,” he said at the time, as shown in archival footage. “Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty, freedom is the most expensive.”

Until recently Cunningham lived in a small artist space at the Carnegie Hall apartments, not far from his neighbor and fellow photographer Editta Sherman, who figures prominently in the film. (Their pending—now subsequent—eviction is a secondary storyline in the documentary.) No kitchen for Bill. His studio is crammed with filing cabinets full of negatives which he, not the Times, owns, in a unique arrangement. There are few amenities in the building that are useful to him—other than a hallway closet to store his bike. Bathroom and showers are down the hall. Work is always at the forefront. His work is his life, and the viewer gets the sense that he really and literally means it.

“In a way Bill is the last bohemian—that whole way of being, all of those people who lived in that [Carnegie Hall apartment] building. That sort of commitment to creating art for non-material gain doesn’t exist any more,” director Richard Press told the National Post.

For a story focused on a single person, there is little of Cunningham’s personal history in the film. At one point, though, he’s asked about romantic relationships. He answers at first by asking the interviewer if what he’s getting at is Cunningham’s sexual orientation.

This is one of the few points in the film—another being when he’s asked about his religious beliefs—that Cunningham, who long resisted participation in the project and is always shown smiling and laughing, seems uncomfortable. In the end, he replies that he’s had no romantic relationships. “I suppose you can’t be in love with your work,” he adds, “but I enjoyed it so much.”

The French Ministry of Culture has bestowed on Cunningham a knighthood in France’s Order of Arts and Letters. At the party before the ceremony in Paris, Cunningham is seen scurrying around and taking photographs of the guests at his own fete. Later at the podium, a medal is pinned to his iconic street-sweeper smock. And thereafter he delivers the film’s most poignant moment when, in a speech spoken half in French and half in English, he expresses in words and emotion what it’s meant to have spent a life in search of beauty.

The film is playing in selected cities.

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The Creators of Value in this case are the “carefully-vetted” unpaid bloggers of The Huffington Post—that is, some 9,000 writers, including Tasini himself, although these people aren’t called “bloggers” in the document but rather “content providers.”

That HuffPost specifically “selected” or “sought” well-known people or so-called experts to blog on its platform for free is at the very crux of the complaint; “select” is a popular verb used throughout. The authors—two attorneys—separate those websites that use unsolicited unpaid work from those that “select” or “recruit” unpaid content providers based on a perceived marketplace value and an ability to drive web traffic to their sites, thus increasing exposure for the publication and boosting advertising dollars for the property and its owners.

In making this distinction, the complaint focuses on The Huffington Post squarely, because HuffPost has sought, since its inception in 2005, to fill its stable of “content providers” with unpaid experts (and celebrities, it might be added) as a means to drive revenue-generating traffic to its now very popular site, so says the Plaintiff.

Tasini’s own blog, Working Life, which focuses on economic and labor issues, is immune from this charge, according to the complaint, because until 2010 Tasini did not “select” contributors but rather allowed the general public to contribute “without regard for the ability to realize revenue.” (In non-legalese, Tasini makes a little moolah himself from Working Life.)

Tasini wasn’t compensated for the 216 articles he—a writer hand-picked by Arianna Huffington herself to contribute to the site—posted to The Huffington Post, between December 2005 and February 2011, when AOL bought HuffPost for $315 million and Tasini ended his five-year affiliation with the online publication, and soon after filed his lawsuit.

But why now? Why didn’t he launch this complaint earlier, before AOL moved to acquire HuffPost? Or why didn’t he just stop posting altogether in protest? These are some of the early criticisms of the lawsuit. Surely other so-called content providers, recognizing the inequity of their arrangement, have quit HuffPost for the reasons stated in the complaint, or never joined. But Tasini has stated in interviews that HuffPost content providers believed eventually “there would be money forthcoming.” If his class-action suit succeeds, they might be in line for thousands of dollars apiece.

Tasini has sued media companies before. When he was president of the National Writers Union, he famously took The New York Times et al.to the Supreme Court on behalf of freelancers whose print-only articles were then being added without payment into electronic databases in violation of copyright—a case he won.

In addition, AOL has been sued before for using unpaid content providers. Back in 1999, when the company was still known as America Online, but before AOL became Aol, a group of  so-called Community Leaders sued America Online, but the circumstances were significantly different. The plaintiffs claimed their “volunteer” work had been directed and regulated by AOL and, under terms of service, they were not volunteers or independent contractors—as freelance writers are—but employees with all the workplace rights of employees. The suit never got to trial, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, and AOL eventually settled out of court with the plaintiffs (ten years later). In comparison, the Tasini complaint doesn’t claim that HuffPost bloggers are HuffPost employees and makes no reference to violations of national labor law. That 1999 AOL suit claimed that AOL’s practices then were in violation of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act.

But to date none of HuffPost’s 9,000 bloggers have received payment for their “high quality, engaging” content, so says the complaint. Among these mostly “quasi-professional” writers—meaning those whose primary income comes from non-writing work—almost half are “published authors,” according to the suit. But unless further evidence comes out at trial—if there is a trial—it appears that these “content providers” were not under contract. And once they were given their HuffPost blogger credentials, they weren’t asked what they planned to write about or when they planned to publish. The Huffington Post simply gave its unpaid content providers a password and a platform and allowed them to fire away, it seems, under the pretense that the sheer enjoyment and prestige of expressing oneself on HuffingtonPost.com was payment enough. Content providers also received invaluable “exposure” that might—and sometimes did—lead to paid writing/speaking/tv appearance etc. opportunities elsewhere. Huffington has said that no contracts were broken; consenting adults of their own volition can decide whether they want to publish or not publish on HuffPost.

So-called exposure is another focus of this complaint. While HuffPost claims its bloggers receive substantial benefit from the publicity of posting to its popular website, Tasini’s suit claims the reality is precisely the opposite: that it is HuffPost that gains from the “exposure” generated by the “high-quality content” provided by its well-known and talented unpaid content providers; that the resultant web traffic creates “substantial” ad revenue for the for-profit company.

It was this unpaid-for content that in fact made HuffPost an attractive property to AOL Inc., so says the complaint, and though HuffPost employs a writing staff, its unpaid content providers are the ones who created the most popular part of the site: the Blog section. In addition, the complaint states, HuffPost encouraged its content providers to drive traffic to HuffingtonPost.com by promoting their own work on social networks, by using personal Facebook, Twitter, and email accounts etc., to attract as large an audience as possible to the HuffPost blog platform.

Tasini says that he did as asked for his HuffPost pieces, e.g. he reposted for his 4,000 Facebook “friends”—in no small irony—articles titled “A Worldwide Revolt Against Poverty Wages” and “The State of Labor – Now Take to the Streets”, among many others. But he doesn’t know how much traffic he actually brought to the site, nor how much revenue he raised for HuffPost by reposting or tweeting or emailing his stories to his “friends” and friends. The reason, according to the suit, is that HuffPost doesn’t release these figures and it claims that it doesn’t track such statistics for its content.

Tasini et al. charge that The Huffington Post does in fact track this information and “hides” page views from its “content providers” and this constitutes a deceptive business practice. Further, citing published reports, the complaint states that almost half of HuffPost’s visitors view only a single page, and this could likely be because users are being directed to the site by external links peppered around the web by the very content providers who are writing those posts for free.

So to summarize: The Huffington Post got a lot of famous or semi-famous people—some of them authors and journalists, i.e. professional and “quasi-professional” writers—to write posts for free, publicize for free those HuffPost articles they’d written for free, and implore their “friends” and friends and “followers” to read those articles, while HuffPost counted the advertising dollars as they rolled in, simply by providing a platform on which all of this free labor might occur. Hmm. Regardless of its intentions, or a person’s political leanings or views on labor history, one must concede that The Huffington Post created a clever little so-called business model. It’s really quite fantastic. And it is also very likely legal, so says The Columbia Journalism Review. But the same article poses a question: is it right?

This issue of fairness is a theme running through the “Factual Allegations” section of the complaint and, really, the entire document. It quotes from Arianna Huffington’s book  Third World America and accuses her, in effect, of saying one thing and doing the opposite—naturally, right and legal not being the same concept. But the complaint states that HuffPost “marketed” itself as a forum of news and ideas—a new “progressive” venture—in order to lure well-known content providers to write for the site for free but all along the company “intended to realize substantial revenues from the free content provided.” And this constitutes a deceptive business practice, according to the complaint. Therefore: a lawsuit was born.

Now whether or not this lawsuit has merit is, as they say on television, something for the courts to decide. Most lawyerly analysis puts its chances for legal success somewhere between dubious and slim. But the complaint also asks the court to address the following: in a digital age, should profitable media sites “be required to compensate the creators of valuable content from which sites derive substantial revenues” and, if so, how should they be compensated? (My emphases.)[1]

The court might never answer these questions but they are worth exploring anyway, it seems, and not in the typical to and fro of web chatter, nor on cable news shows, nor by posting links to Facebook or by tweeting, although this is all fine. Real-world, old-fashioned action might be better. Tasini’s motivations are his own, but his Civil Complaint No. 11-2472 reads more like manifesto than legal objection, more call to action than viable class-action lawsuit.

The most egregious effect of the HuffPost business model, according to the complaint, is that it broadly and artificially sets a “low price for valuable digital content.” It also has a “serious depressing effect on the value of intellectual content” as well as inhibits the ability of content providers to “support themselves as creators of high quality, engaging, digital content.” The complaint also describes the leaked AOL Way document and AOL’s move toward a content farm-like model. It quotes from an equity research report that AOL expects in the next twelve months that HuffPost will realize operating margins of 30%—a percentage almost unimaginable back before the quality of journalism began its long downward trajectory.

This revenue-versus-quality part seems very familiar. There is nothing wrong with earning money, of course, but remove references to “content providers” and “page views” and “Arianna” and “Tasini” and so forth and these events could almost be a case-study template for corporate-labor relations in the United States over the past few decades. Company A is attracted to Company B because Company B has figured out a way to pay its valuable creators less, in a way that Company A cannot, so Company A attempts to acquire Company B and a lucrative deal is struck. Some of those creators of value get to keep their jobs, others must go create value elsewhere, all perfectly legal, the bottom line is boosted, and that’s the end of the story. To which most American value-creators might reply, Well, that’s capitalism for you, bub, what did you expect? Or they might use that old standby: it is what it is. This might all be true. But right? Or does right even matter?

***

[1] I was asked or “selected” but not paid to write this piece. To my knowledge The Rumpus is hardly profitable. (If The Rumpus is one day acquired by a giant media conglomerate, I’d prefer stock.) To my knowledge The Rumpus doesn’t derive “substantial” revenue from its content, nor from anything else. I also doubt that they refer to the writing on The Rumpus as “content.” “Value” has a number of meanings. As for editorial value, well, that’s not for me to decide.

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Yet still they arrive at camp for a month and a half of training and exhibition games each February, all of which could likely be cut down to a couple of weeks at most, with a review of fundamentals and the necessary player cuts and reassignments.

Of course baseball writers follow teams to Florida and Arizona. From there they issue dispatches in voices that grow increasingly desperate for content. This made worse by the fact that, in addition to articles, they are required to write blog posts, make social-media updates, provide video and photographic evidence et cetera—and they must submit almost hourly.

This newer requirement doesn’t change the fact that very few interesting stories emerge and a reader/fan can expect little more than the boiler-plate pieces that have been filed from spring training since the beginning of pro ball. The majority of this stuff promotes hope for the upcoming baseball campaign.

“It’s a new year.” “Last year was last year.” “We’re an improved team, and we’ve got some good young talent. If things break our way, we could be the surprise of the division/league.” “Every team has the same record on Day One.” “We all have an equal chance at winning the World Series.” “Every good narrative requires conflict.”

Wait, who said that last one? It was R.A. Dickey, knuckleball pitcher for New York’s National League baseball team—the club that is also the biggest newsmaker this spring, for reasons that have little to do with baseball and more to do with the largest Ponzi fraud in United States history.

Dickey is a minor story by comparison, but an interesting one. He’s a journeyman pitcher who had a breakout 2010 season, when he was finally able to get his tricky knuckleball under control and record eleven wins for an otherwise mediocre team. This feat earned the thirty-five-year-old a two-year contract worth almost eight million bucks.

It’s been a strange journey for Dickey. A first-round draft pick by the Texas Rangers in 1996, his big rookie bonus was reduced by more than 90% after the club discovered he was born without an ulna collateral ligament in the elbow of his pitching arm, thus diminishing his prospects. He toiled as a conventional pitcher in the minors and majors, then as a knuckleballer, for more than a decade, before landing in New York last year, where his fortunes changed dramatically.

Dickey was also an academic All-American at the University of Tennessee, majoring in English literature. Much has been made of his interest in books. On a long bus trip this month, for example, he was described as flipping through Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. When asked for other recommendations from recent reading, he listed My Name is Asher Lev, Grendel, and The Odyssey. He regularly cites as influences the Bible, Frost, Shakespeare, and Hemingway. To see him interviewed is also a departure from the norm. He delivers thoughtful, intelligent, honest, direct responses not seen from many public figures—never mind from pro ballplayers.

Now Dickey has a contract with Penguin to write his memoir (with assistance from sportswriter Wayne Coffey). For the past five seasons, Dickey has kept a journal and he plans to draw from these writings. He says he will not spare himself in the memoir, baring all, and predicts a combination of Jeannette Wall’s The Glass Castle and Ball Four, the landmark and controversial memoir by Jim Bouton—also a knuckleballer—that was the first to reveal the behind-closed-doors details of major-league life.

“I’m definitely throwing myself under the bus,” Dickey told the Times. ‘‘That doesn’t feel great all the time, but it’s inevitable in any good narrative that there’s conflict…my past is littered with such narratives. I started to unpack some things from the past that made me who I was, both good and bad…there was a lot of brokenness and trying to rebuild a life. Some of it coincided very appropriately with my journey as a knuckleballer.”

As a New York Post headline summed it up: Knuckleball, yes. Knucklehead, no.

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Narrated in part by Riley and Richard Ford, the short documentary recounts major facts familiar to those who know Percy’s life story: born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916; grandfather’s suicide in 1917, father’s suicide in 1929, mother’s death by automobile accident when Percy was sixteen years old; life in Greenville, Mississippi, under the tutelage of his bachelor cousin William Alexander “Uncle Will” Percy; Columbia Medical School and contraction of tuberculosis while performing autopsies at Bellevue Hospital; the sanitarium years and his reading of Kierkegaard, Marcel, Maritain, and Heidegger; abandonment of his medical career; marriage to Bunt Percy; conversion to Roman Catholicism; struggles at novel-writing; publication of his first novel, the National-Book-Award-winning The Moviegoer, at age forty-five; subsequent novels and books of essays; eminence as “Southern writer”; his ushering of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces to publication, eleven years after Toole’s suicide, at the unrelenting insistence of Kennedy Toole’s inimitable mother Thelma Toole; natural death in 1990.

Telling the story are Elie, Tolson, Ford, Walter Issacson, Robert Coles, Linda Whitney Hobson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Thomas Cowan, Rhoda Faust, Marcus Smith, and Ben C. Toledano. Bunt Percy herself was also interviewed for the film. And so was Phin Percy, Walker’s youngest brother. Phin was seven years old when he and their mother drove off a bridge into a river, where she died; he speaks candidly about his mother in one of the film’s more poignant moments. There is also wonderful—and remarkably well-preserved—home footage of Walker Percy with his young family; an archival C-SPAN interview with Shelby Foote, Percy’s lifelong friend, with Foote at one point telling the well-known tale of their pilgrimage to the home of William Faulker, in Oxford, Mississippi—and Percy’s refusal to leave the car. There is also a very amusing clip of Thelma Toole, sitting at a piano, literally singing her praises to Walker Percy.

Walker Percy: A Documentary Film was a selection of the 2010 New Orleans Film Festival. It is being shown now in limited screenings (which can be requested) and is also available for purchase on DVD.

There are also trailers online.

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For more than a decade of his life, Adam Purple built and maintained The Garden of Eden, an Earthworks installation that existed on Eldridge Street from 1975 until 1986, when it was destroyed by New York City to make way for a housing project.

Early on Purple took his own photos, but as his garden grew he needed Wang’s help to create composite images of its entirety. “I enjoyed shooting the project because he was doing everything by hand, without power tools, which was remarkable,” says Wang. “It was back-breaking labor, day in and day out. He cleared five lots of demolished tenement rubble, made the soil, and planted the garden, reclaiming about one lot per year….Adam has to be one of the first people to talk about sustainability issues. It’s still radical now, and was more so back then.”

A collection of Wang’s Garden of Eden photographs is on display at Fusion Arts on Stanton Street in NYC through February 20. If you can’t make it to the show, there is also a fantastic short video online by Amy Brost. It features Adam Purple’s eloquent voice, telling the Garden’s story, along with photos by Wang (and a few by Adam Purple himself).

“It would have been better to kill me and leave the garden,” Purple states at the end of the piece. “Because, well, that’s the way I view it.”

Adam Purple still rides his bicycle around the Lower East Side. He’s in his eighties now—reportedly. Only he seems to know for certain what his real name is.

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“As a book center, the street is gone,” he was quoted as saying. “Somebody dies, somebody becomes moribund, somebody moves to Florida. Most of us never made a substantial living anyway.”

At the end of the article, using that inverted-pyramid journalistic form, the Times also quotes Jack Biblo of Biblo and Tannen’s bookstore, formerly at 63 Fourth Avenue (now home to The Shevchenko Scientific Society), and Biblo repeats Goldwater’s opening sentiment.

“I never intended to give up bookselling on Fourth Avenue, but you also had to work 16 hours a day, and sometimes you didn’t make a dollar.” He concluded, “It was a joy, but I’d hate to see it come back.”

Biblo got his wish. Those rare and used bookstores didn’t come back. In fact, things got steadily worse for independent booksellers—used, rare, and new—in the city. New Yorkers old and older can tick off a list of great independent bookstores that no longer exist (“…Brentano’s, Coliseum Books, Gotham Book Mart”). Younger New Yorkers might also point to the enormous Barnes & Noble in Chelsea that closed its doors in 2008.

But with Borders now experiencing financial difficulties and other bookselling giants focusing on web and e-book sales, is there an opportunity—if only briefly—for independent booksellers to make a brick-and-mortar comeback, filling a physical-store niche for the city’s readers and bibliophiles? This is the question posed by Crain’s New York Business.

“In retailing’s version of a David and Goliath story, the independent bookstore is making a comeback in New York,” the article states. “That’s right: in the land of crushing rents. Over the past couple of years, more than half a dozen indie bookshops have opened around the city, from Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to Book Culture on upper Broadway. (Another independent store may soon appear in midtown Manhattan.)”

Can it last? Can new independent bookstores succeed? One Fordham business professor, who follows the book industry, quickly put the kibosh on the entire dream.

“The new indies are tilting at windmills,” he told Crain’s.

Tilt away, we say, to potential indie owners. Why not open a bookstore in midtown (or elsewhere in Manhattan, or in an outer borough) and do what you love, curate—that fashionable term—if you must, even though you won’t likely make a substantial living anyway?

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