Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Blue Hill Avenue by Mark Mirsky Literary Boston neighborhoods. The authors who have captured the sights and sounds of Boston over several hundred years did not limit themselves to locations on Beacon Hill and in town. In search of subjects and themes, they ventured further afield to the city's neighborhoods, to Allston and Brighton, to Charlestown and the South End, to Dorchester and Roxbury, to the furthest corners of the city, to Castle Island in South Boston, to Suffolk Downs in East Boston and to Brook Farm in West Roxbury -- and even out into the waters of the harbor. You'll see the places that inspired them on this second map of literary Boston. "The car stopped [at Allston Station, now the Sports Depot] and I got off, into the middle of my shadow. A road crossed the track. There was a wooden marquee with an old man eating something out of a paper bag, and then the car was out of hearing too. The road went into trees, where it would be shady, but the June foliage in New England not much thicker than April at home, I could see a smoke stack. I turned my back to it, tramping my shadow into the dust.” "Almost all the farmers, within a reasonable distance, make it a point, I suppose, to attend Brighton fair pretty frequently, if not on business, yet as amateurs. Then there are the cattle people and the butchers … and the dealers from far and near, and every man who has a cow or a yoke of oxen to sell or buy, goes to Brighton on Mondays." "Fenway Park … is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old- fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities." 4. Eugene O'Neill's self-written obituary. When O’Neill died, in 1953, at the Hotel Shelton, now a Boston University dorm (91 Bay State Rd.), he had already written an obituary notice: “Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room.” 5. “Murder at the Gardner” by Jane Langton (1988) "Mrs. Jack had expected fashionable Boston to follow her from Beacon Street with new ranks of lofty marble town houses. But fashionable Boston had gone elsewhere, and now the elaborate dwelling she called Fenway Court stood by itself.” “We turned south on Huntington Avenue, past the new high-rise apartments, a hospital, another college, and out onto the Jamaicaway. Big houses, mostly brick, set well back and sumptuous, lined the road. Elms which had survived the Dutch disease arched over it, and to the right in an extended hollow was Jamaica Pond, wooded and grassy under the gray slush.” 7. “An American Politician” by F. Marion Crawford (1884) “The ice had been cut away in great quantity for storing and the thaw had kept the pond open for a day or two. Then came the sharpest frost of the winter and in a few hours the water was covered with a broad sheet of black ice that would bear any weight." “And, by-the-by, we were favored with many visits at Blithedale [Brook Farm], especially from people who sympathized with our theories. …In their view, we were as poetical as Arcadians, besides being as practical as the hardest-fisted husbandmen in Massachusetts.” “On a Sunday in late August, a train came out from Boston to Camp Meigs in Readville [where the 20th Massachusetts Regiment was training], a gridiron of tents on the dusty plain between the Neponset River and the Blue Hills. … Dorothy Wedge Warren and several of the other mothers had made a white silk banner. On one side was the Massachusetts coat of arms, on the other the Latin words Fide et Constantia, faith and constancy.” “The Cathedral [of the Holy Cross] had been in its day an architectural marvel. … [But] at the turn of the century a noisy procession of elevated trains began roaring past [its] enormous rose window at three-minute intervals. The intolerable clatter marred the dying fall of pulpit oratory, broke in on prayer, and destroyed meditation.” 11. “The Late George Apley” by John P. Marquand (1937) “You said we shouldn’t be seen together, [Mary Monahan], but you met me that Sunday on Columbus Avenue. … I am going down to Worcester Square to call on you next Sunday. If your brother Mike doesn’t like it, it’s time he knew better.” 12. “The Promised Land” by Mary Antin (1912) “[To Antin, who came from Russia as a young child] Dover Street was my fairest garden of girlhood, a gate of paradise, a window facing on a broad avenue of life. Dover Street was a prison, a school of discipline, a battlefield of sordid strife. The air in Dover Street was heavy with evil odors of degradation, but a breath from the uppermost heavens rippled through, whispering of infinite things.” 13. “The Rise of Silas Lapham” by William Dean Howells (1885) “Lapham drove on down Washington Street to Nankeen [Chester] Square … where he had lived ever since the mistaken movement of society in that direction ceased. He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that the South End was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of his flight to the Back Bay threw in his carpets and shades for almost nothing." 14. “Boston Boy” by Nat Hentoff (1986) “But to the regulars, there was no place like [the Savoy Café], certainly including home. The music; the conversation; the chance to talk, as if you had been accepted as an equal, with the musicians between sets at Morley’s next door. And a regular could watch, over the seasons, love affairs begin, grow, and explode at the Savoy Café.” “Dudley Square was full of Saturday afternoon bustle: kids running out of the library, police cars taking up too many parking spaces, women jockeying strollers and shopping bags, men checking out the women and one another’s cars. … The smell of Jamaican meat pies from Dudley Pastry wrapped around her like a mother-made cloak. The music snaking out of Nubian Nation across the street put extra rhythm in her walk.” 16. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965) “So I went gawking around the neighborhood - the Waumbeck and Humboldt Avenue Hill section of Roxbury. … I saw those Roxbury Negroes acting and living differently from any black people I’d ever dreamed of in my life. This was the snooty-black neighborhood; they called themselves the ‘Four Hundred,’ and looked down their noses at the Negroes of the black ghetto, or so-called ‘town’ section.’ ” 17. “The Given Day” by Dennis Lehane (2008) “[Lieutenant] McKenna raised a hand above them all. ‘We are sworn to serve and protect Americans in general and Bostonians in particular. The Letts, well,’ he chuckled, ‘the Letts are neither, gents. … They have chosen to ignore the city’s strict orders to march and plan to parade from the [Dudley] Opera House … until they reach Franklin Park, where they will hold a rally in support of their comrades - yes, comrades - in Hungary, Bavaria, Greece, and, of course, Russia.” 18. “Agnes Surriage” by Edwin Lassetter Bynner (1886) “Arriving after a long drive at the [Governor Shirley’s] House [where Agnes, a Marblehead girl, was to sing], they mounted the granite steps and sounded the ponderous knocker.” “Now and then he made a mistake. For instance, the time after the great hurricane which knocked down the huge elm trees along Blue Hill Avenue. … It was just before the elections. Simcha [Tantzenn] toured Dorchester with a sound truck announcing … the lights would be on the next day. ‘I pwomise!’ … So none of the merchants bought ice for their deep freezers. … When Edison finally turned the electricity on, thousands and thousands of frozen foods were ruined. And so was Simcha — temporarily.” “At Columbia, [Peter Fallon] took a left onto Boston Street. [It was] strange to see the Clapp House, one of the oldest houses in Boston, sitting on a grassy knoll, just a dark shadow looking out at all the televisions flickering in the three-deckers across the street.” 21. “Darkness, Take My Hand” by Dennis Lehane (1996) “Meeting House Hill is the dividing line where [Patrick Kenzie’s] neighborhood ends and Fields Corner begins. … The tip … rises through the grid of cement and tar to form a pauper’s field in the middle of a neighborhood so blighted you could fire a missile through its center and no one would notice unless you hit a bar or a food stamp office.” 22. “The Diagnosis” by Alan Lightman (2000) “A voice on a speaker said, ‘Next stop, Ashmont. End of the line. Ashmont. Thank you for riding the T. Don’t forget your belongings.’ … Chalmers sat dazed in his seat. … The train was empty and silent. In the distance, an automobile groaned, sliding its sound into the muffled hum of the station. … It was 9:09 by the giant white clock in the station.” “The language of racing felt like my true native tongue. And the track itself - Suffolk Downs, with salty breezes shifting in off the ocean, and the sweet smell of cigar smoke, and crowds of bettors … lining up at the windows - felt like my truest home, a place where the rules were as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror.” “The shape of the Charlestown peninsula, as [Loyalists in Boston] saw it … was that of an enormous muskrat, half submerged … the low fortifications thrown up by the rebels were on the middle of the three swellings; and across the floating tail that in reality was Charlestown Neck, more and more rebels coming for the fight still were moving.” 25. “The City Below” by James Carroll (1994) “[Terry Doyle] knew that the impression most outsiders had of Charlestown came from the fearsome, low-rent end that abutted the Mystic River Bridge from which commuters looked down. … Outsiders … knew nothing of Monument Square or the streets leading into it where fine Victorian houses stood, proudly kept not by the wealthy who had built them, but by the large, intact families of Irish firefighters and cops.” 26. “Old Ironsides” by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1830) “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky.” “ ‘Wacko’ loved Castle Island with its Civil War era fort and wide-open spaces that offered few hiding places for police surveillance. … Sean Brancaccio threw up his arms and stretched like a cat. ‘It’s a beautiful thing, Jack, a real pretty score, almost as pretty as this place in the morning. Nothing beats Castle Island, huh, but the trick is to get here early before the morons arrive.’ ” 28. “All Souls” by Michael Patrick MacDonald (1999) “There was always something to do in Old Colony, and it seemed a much bigger place than the six or so blocks it actually was. … We had our own beaches - plastic wading pools and lawn chairs on the cement in front of the buildings. And we had our own friendships and fights. … Old Colony was all ours, and we never wanted to leave.” 29. “Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller” by Neal Stephenson (1988) When I got to the water between Spectacle Island and South Boston … the sky was blue in the east and black in the west. I had no interest in wasting time. … The wind was coming up, the temperature dropping, and below me was a sea of poison. [Environmental vigilante Sangamon Taylor] struggled into the scuba gear … turned on the big strobe, and dove.” User Search limit reached - please wait a few minutes and try again. In order to protect Biblio.com from unauthorized automated bot activity and allow our customers continual access to our services, we may limit the number of searches an individual can perform on the site in a given period of time. We try to be as generous as possible, but generally attempt to limit search frequency to that which would represent a typical human's interactions. If you are seeing this message, please wait a couple of minutes and try again. If you think that you've reached this page in error, please let us know at [email protected]. If you are an affiliate, and would like to integrate Biblio search results into your site, please contact [email protected] for information on accessing our inventory APIs. Can you guess which first edition cover the image above comes from? What was Dr. Seuss’s first published book? Take a stab at guessing and be entered to win a $50 Biblio gift certificate! Read the rules here. This website uses cookies. We use cookies to remember your preferences such as preferred shipping country and currency, to save items placed in your shopping cart, to track website visits referred from our advertising partners, and to analyze our website traffic. Privacy Details. Mark Jay Mirsky. Mark Jay Mirsky was born in Boston and grew up in the Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury districts, which border Franklin Park to the east, north and south. Attending Boston Public Latin, Harvard College and Stanford University, Mr. Mirsky has previously published four novels, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, Blue Hill Avenue, The Red Adam, a collection of short stories called The Secret Table, and several books of criticism: My Search for the Messiah; Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah; The Absent Shakespeare; and his latest, The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Satire to Decay. He is the coeditor of Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press) The Jews of Pinsk Volumes 1 & 2 (Stanford University Press), and the editor of Robert Musil’s Diaries in English (Basic Books). He founded the journal FICTION in 1972 with Donald Barthelme, Jane DeLynn, and Max and Marianne Frisch and has been its editor-in-chief up to the present. A Professor of English at The City College of New York, he has served as its chairperson and director of Jewish Studies. His reviews and articles on architecture and literature have appeared in The New York Sunday Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, The Progressive, Haaretz, and numerous other publications. His play Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard was performed at the Fringe Festival in 2007 and is posted on www.indietheaternow.com. An autobiographical essay published in 1999 on Mark Jay Mirsky can be found in Volume 30 of Gale’s Contemporary Authors, and a chapter is dedicated to him in Jules Chametzky’s collection Out of Brownsville. His latest novel about Boston lost in the 1960s is called Franklin Park: Puddingstone, and will be published as a text as well as an e-book. Mark (Jay) Mirsky Biography. Nationality: American. Born: Boston, Massachusetts, 1939. Education: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, B.A. (magna cum laude) 1961 (Phi Beta Kappa); Stanford University, California (Woodrow Wilson fellow), M.A. 1962. Military Service: Served in the United States Air Force Reserve, 1962-68. Career: Schoolteacher, Boston, 1962; staff writer, American Heritage , New York, 1964; lecturer in English, Stanford University, 1966. Lecturer, 1967-70, assistant professor, 1970-74, associate professor, 1975-80, director of the M.A. program, 1978-84, and since 1980 professor of English, City College, New York. Founding member of the Board, Teachers-Writers Collaborative, 1967, and Fiction Collective, 1974, both New York; editor, Fiction , New York, 1972-91. Awards: Bread Loaf Writers Conference grant; National Endowment for the Arts award, for editing, 1980, and senior fellowship, 1981; Creative Artists Public Service grant, 1982. P UBLICATIONS. Novels. Thou Worm, Jacob. New York, Macmillan, and London, CollierMacmillan, 1967. Proceedings of the Rabble. Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1970. Blue Hill Avenue. Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1972. The Red Adam. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1989. Short Stories. The Secret Table. New York, Fiction Collective, 1975. Uncollected Short Stories. "Swapping," in Statements 1 , edited by Jonathan Baumbach. NewYork, Braziller, 1975. "The Last Lecture," in Tri-Quarterly (Evanston, Illinois), Spring 1976. "Last Boat to America," in Massachusetts Review (Amherst), Summer 1981. "Child's Alphabet," in Literary Review (Madison, New Jersey), Summer 1982. Other. My Search for the Messiah: Studies and Wanderings in Israel and America. New York, Macmillan, 1977. The Absent Shakespeare. Rutherford, New Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994. Editor, with David Stern, Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classic Hebrew Literature. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1990. Editor, Diaries, 1899-1941 by Robert Musil, translated by PhilipPayne. New York, Basic Books, 1998. A catalogue of Mark Mirsky's fictional liabilities in his early work is short and bittersweet: he reworks worn material; he cannot resist dreamworld and fantasyland scenes; he is too delighted with royal-purple prose and "experimentalism"; finally he breaks himself up with broad ethnic humor that often offends. Yet he has such large talent that he skillfully turns each of these faults to advantage even when he does not transcend them. His first volume of fiction seemed partly to be a parodic mélange of Aleichem, Singer, and Malamud. The inversions of Yiddish, the barrage of exclamation and interrogation points, the spread-finger resignation of the Jewish immigrant, all knotted and clotted the young writer's style and suggested the bar mitzvah school of cheap Catskill entertainment. Thus, the "Introduction" begins: "I've got the whole state of Jewish affairs right between my fingers! What? You don't understand? Take a seat. Don't worry, it won't break. A bit cracked but it's had a rest. Watch out! Watch out for that pile of books. Knock one over, my whole place is on your head. Pages, dust, dirty yarmulkes. Eh! Let it fall." In spite of such false starts, Mirsky knows and loves his "material" and manages to move us to both laughter and pity in this collection of tales about East European immigrants struggling to remain Jews in their new homeland. The familiar figure of the schlemiel hero is brilliantly renewed in the collection's finest story, "The Shammos from Aroostook County." Five years later, Mirsky returned to the struggling Jews of the old towns near Boston with Blue Hill Avenue. Although he labeled his tale "vaudeville," he writes here with more control, except for an inappropriate slapstick ending. Four of the characters are superbly drawn: Rabbi Lux, who is "a little too good, too pious for much of Dorchester"; the rabbi's wife, once timid and passionate, now a loving, lunatic protectress; Simcha Tanzenn, a canny, lisping politician who collects on favors rarely delivered; and a demented Jewish mother, who uses the telephone like a mortar and wills her war-lost (and worthless) son back to safety. Mirsky's latest treatment of Jewish traditions, The Secret Table , is more serious in tone and, despite some obscurity of form, marks another fictional advance for the author in portraying his fierce bookish forebears. The first novella depicts the search through memory of thirty-year-old Maishe for the womb-security now lacking in the decayed streets of Blue Hill Avenue: the companion novella, "Onan's Child," builds upon Genesis to explore, through Jacob, Isaac, Joseph, and Onan, the terrible contradictions of man's nature and Jewish history. In both stories, past and present, subjective and objective worlds, the Jew and the universal man, are blended into a believable, densely-textured reality. Mirsky's second novel, Proceedings of the Rabble , may be his most ambitious. Anticipating Robert Altman's film, Nashville , in an urban locale, Mirsky uses the evangelical right-wing political crusade of William Starr to portray the murderous impotence moving American democracy toward rage, outrage, and self-destruction. Despite the straining interior-cinema technique employed, Mirsky's apocalyptic ending matches the final upheaval of West's The Day of the Locust. The first clue that The Red Adam is a modern fable lies in its title; a close second is the name of its narrator, Job. But this Job goes much further than his biblical counterpart, who tried to understand the mind of Job: Job Schwartz attempts to become God by creating a man in his own image. In his novels, Mirsky renews such staple items of contemporary American fiction as megalomania, violence, sexual sickness, and the Jew as representative sufferer, so that they still serve to tell us about ourselves. Puddingstone. Puddingstone goes to the heart of Boston’s “savage geography” in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Mark Jay Mirsky, whose Blue Hill Avenue was praised by The Boston Globe as “one of the 100 essential books about New England,” has concocted a hot pudding out of the simmering racial and ethnic animosities in the city. Centered in the districts around its historic Franklin Park, Jews, Irish, African Americans, Yankee bankers, and the last of its native Ponkapoag Indians, join in a general assault on the civic peace. In a battle during the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and a riot in Charleston’s projects the smoldering resentments burst out but turn into a vision of Kabbalah and the Tain Bo Culaigne as the rabble of the city, together with its police, Cardinal, Mayor, psychiatrists, rabbis and reverends go at each other. Moments from the Irish cattle epics, 13th century mystical texts, Boston politics and gang wars flash against the skyline. The candied puddingstone, squeezed together by the retreating glaciers of a distant ice age, splits apart in the heat of this while the gates of the zoo and insane asylum open to rain madness on the city and dissolve it in Messianic fantasies. Puddingstone’s events are filtered through the story of a Hebrew-school dropout, Maishe Ostropol, who returns to Boston and its suburbs as a popular Reform rabbi advocating new religious practices. The rabbi throws his congregation into turmoil then disappears on a tour with its Sisterhood of Jewish sites in Europe. When Maishe mysteriously finds his way back to his childhood neighborhood on Blue Hill Avenue and disappears into its Franklin Park, the city of Boston begins to shake with the birth pangs of Utopia. Category: Fiction » Humor & comedy » Satire Published: July 16, 2014 Words: 58,270 Language: English ISBN: 9781311098658. Mark Jay Mirsky was born in Boston and grew up in the Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury districts, which border Franklin Park to the east, north and south. Attending Boston Public Latin, Harvard College and Stanford University, Mr. Mirsky has previously published four novels, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, Blue Hill Avenue, The Red Adam, a collection of short stories called The Secret Table, and several books of criticism: My Search for the Messiah; Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah; The Absent Shakespeare; and his latest, The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Satire to Decay. He is the coeditor of Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press) The Jews of Pinsk Volumes 1 & 2 (Stanford University Press), and the editor of Robert Musil’s Diaries in English (Basic Books). He founded the journal FICTION in 1972 with Donald Barthelme, Jane DeLynn, and Max and Marianne Frisch and has been its editor-in-chief up to the present. A Professor of English at The City College of New York, he has served as its chairperson and director of Jewish Studies. His reviews and articles on architecture and literature have appeared in The New York Sunday Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, The Progressive, Haaretz, and numerous other publications. His play Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard was performed at the Fringe Festival in 2007 and is posted on www.indietheaternow.com. An autobiographical essay published in 1999 on Mark Jay Mirsky can be found in Volume 30 of Gale’s Contemporary Authors, and a chapter is dedicated to him in Jules Chametzky’s collection Out of Brownsville. His latest novel about Boston lost in the 1960s is called Franklin Park: Puddingstone, and will be published as a text as well as an e-book.