back to Perlstein a mo ...
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_1960s_refracted
You had me going there for awhile, nnyhav, did you say that you spent some time in Brooklyn or lived there for awhile?
I ask because I spent a short time in Alphabet City; as short as I could possibly make it.
So when I looked at the article that you posted, you had me on two counts. First I looked at that familiar face and then said could it possibly be that Lisa Jones grew up looking like Joan Didion? Of course, I never thought Didion was someone whose looks were someone to write home about in her California days. But it is those bones, unmistakably sensitive,
and unmitigatedly tragic. She has since become a favorite writer of mine.
I have not even begun to touch everything that she has written for the NYRB.
Some people thought that Hettie Jones looked tragic (Lisa Jones looks pretty much like half a dozen people I have known) but, they could, I think, be accused of exaggerating.
I'm told that she was intensely serious. If not, would Leroi Jones have been printed?
I came down from the Bronx where I had been staying with a friend until I moved into the Hotel Paris because a resident there had mentioned that another of their mutual friends, Grass Oliphant, had mentioned that Barbara Grizzuti would be needing a room-mate to meet the rent. Not the greatest mistake I made because it was on 9th. just off 2nd avenue and next to the Polish Clinic. When that did not work out following the Allen Ginsberg reading, my downtown acquaintances picked me up at the bus stop from Connecticut and I found myself living on 8th.street or what had been No.6 MacDougal Alley where Gertrude Vanderilt Whitney had a sculpture studio which later became an art school and today is considered a kind of extension of the Whitney Museum or, the downtown Whitney.
This would inevitably lead me back across town or at least across Fifth Avenue past 2nd. to Alphabet City, simply as a preventative for having me decamp in the direction of Uptown. "It was a cold and blustery night...", with snow swirling about the cobblestones of the East Village beyond Tompkins square,and up many flights of stairs; where I was introduced to the mother of an Irish writer whom the next morning was discovered to be a pepper and salt silvered elderly woman who was half Native American. We typed a lot; while the Irish writer read James Jones and compared that to Norman Mailer, or The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy, which was circulating in an "unknown binding" as a 1957 publication.
So, I had to disagree a bit about a description of James Baldwin as a 1960s writer. But this made sense when I realized that young Greg Tate was born in 1969 and might see it that way; by which time my son was ready for "Joint School" which is a combo grade-school/Junior High-school because he was in the generation of Barack Obama instead of Amiri Baraka . I always felt that Leroi came down from New Jersey; which is why he went back (and where they ended up treating him the same way they did that made him leave in the first place).
Of course in those days, I sometimes confused him with Tad Jones. I thought of Stanley Crouch as mostly a jazz critic of a valid sort, being given more info about him at the nytimes.com forums via Red who became Blue (or was it vice versa) in the African American Literature forum (which was segregated). It was done away with in advance of any other forums become kaput. So you can see how Greg Tate never stood a chance.
But now, you've got me very curious where was that Jewish suburb that produced Rick Perlstein? East or West side of town? Otherwise by that description, I could not place him as a local jazz musician but I think that I was out of there by then, or I would have thought maybe he was the guy who used to say,"Pardon me, but are you going to finish what is on your lunch plate?",while I was busily talking with Denise Levertov about..."women and poetry", and he'd say,"Can I have it in that case?" What can one say to something like that? He ate it all up and left, which meant I and Denise could discuss a few things. No, I just don't think that was Rick Perlstein.
But in any case Jimmy Baldwin was a Fifties writer as much as a Sixties writer, and he didn't stop there going on into the Seventies and part of the Eighties, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who visited him at St.Paul de Vence which I hear is a swinging place as I have some pictures in my documents sent to me by a friend in Paris who liked vacationing there and still maintains a slot here but never posted after talking me into it instead.
