Union Square has a dog park now. Fritzy would have hated it. He hated organization and contrivance of any kind. In this way he hardly lived up to his name. It was bestowed on him by a bunch of kids in boarding school in West Islip who concluded he’d been born in the uniform of an SS general. Fritzy was Border Collie, Springer Spaniel and God knows what else. He had the general demeanor and attitude of a Panzer division commander, but he didn’t like taking orders from Berlin or anywhere else.

When I was in high school in Manhattan in the late 1940s and early 50s Fritzy and I would set out every night after homework and follow roughly the same route. I should say I followed Fritzy, who preferred to go west on 19th Street through the Block Beautiful from Third Avenue to Irving Place, south on Irving to 14th Street, which divides uptown and downtown, west on 14th to Union Square, clockwise around the park, and then east on 14th to Second Avenue, north on Second to 19th and our home, a brownstone between Second and Third on 19th.

Fritzy’s route

I thought of valiant Fritzy the other day as I walked this old route. Block Beautiful is still there, posh as ever. Pete’s Tavern at 18th and Irving is still there, still looking like O. Henry’s watering hole. But the tacky movie house on Irving where my mother and I watched interminable Soviet propaganda films is gone. And so are those venerable department stores, Ohrbach’s on 14th Street looking north and S. Klein looking west out over the square. The Academy of Music on 14th is gone too. Ohrbach’s was genteel and moderately priced, but S. Klein’s on Union Square East was savage and discounted. You could always count on being discounted and elbowed by somebody’s grandmother at S. Klein.

Conspicuously missing is Luchow’s, that legendary 14th Street restaurant that my stepfather, Dominick Guccione, from his tenement flat on Elizabeth Street, thought of as uptown. Before World War I, when he was still learning English with the concentration of a brain surgeon, he sold newspapers in front of Luchow’s, and on cold winter nights he kept himself warm by singing arias. He had a following and was known as the Street Caruso. By the time I met him on a stoop on Second Avenue when I was nine he could recite poems by Andrew Marvell and John Donne in perfect upper-class New York English. (Is there still an upper-class New York accent?)

I miss the stench
The odor of food in today’s pizzazzy square is dizzying. Eateries seem more common than trash bins. But I miss the stench of stale beer and mustard coming from the old arcade with its hot dogs, goofy game machines, carny music, pickpockets and grifters. In fact, there aren’t enough grifters. I miss their stories, their loony cons. There are many more vendors, musicians and artists now, all of them properly sited and licensed on Union Square West. And the park and street signage is sprightly.

But the Irving Trust to which I made regular cash runs for Dominick is gone. I remember the day we stood there stuffing cash into brown bags to bail somebody’s son out of the The Tombs. The Irving Trust looked like a bank. It looked as if you could trust it. These days most banks look like Au Bon Pain.

The new buildings look like gift boxes. They lack the character and substance of their demolished predecessors. They seem cautious and anonymous, as befits a society loony about exotic dangers. The former buildings had a sense of thereness, of belonging, but these buildings could be anywhere. They’re interchangeable, and they rebuke the bravura efforts of the city to make the square festive.

Het up old men
The park in my youth was dowdy, peopled by groups of curdmudgeonly old men from Eastern Europe who were permanently het up about something, usually with good cause. There were lots of speeches, most of them leftist, and serious chess by men who seemed to hold the world in their hands. Today’s chess players don’t look like Doctor Strangelove and nothing seems to depend on the outcome of their concentration. I wouldn’t say the old park was in disrepair or disrepute, but it was nothing like the vibrant, upscale destination I strolled the other day.

Fritzy wouldn’t have liked all the well-bred dogs in the park nowadays. They actually obey their masters, or at least they pretend to. Fritzy always wondered why I was loathe to obey him. He had the name, the uniform and the bark, after all.

Stroller Nazis
The park still has its merciless mow-you-down socko beauties, more dazzled by their own looks than you are. They strike me as lacking the leisured panache of former times. They seem a bit forlorn without store windows to admire themselves in.

The codgers of yore, always quick to label moderates Nazis, wouldn’t have liked the Stroller Nazis blitzkrieging the park these days—you know, those grimly affluent mommies who use their babies’ strollers as battering rams, forcing even the elderly on canes out of the way. Who knows what has made them so angry and imbued with their silly sense of privilege? They clearly need to get over themselves for the sake of public order, but I haven’t a clue how they might, busy as they are spending in support of the City of Lucre.

Subdued and prosperous
The crowd is more subdued and prosperous-looking now, and while it’s more ethnically diverse and younger, it seems at once more homogeneous, more assimilated.

There were no boom boxes when Fritzy and I patrolled Union Square, and I saw none the other day, but it seemed to me that fully a third of the people were wired for sound, and everywhere cell phones flashed and played their various tunes. The wiring of so many heads gives the false impression of introspection.

The requisite number of wireless heads listening to their own voices still wander around, but they seem less intent on pursuing an agenda.

There seem to be fewer of those people who just have to be where you happen to be standing or crossing your path with the intent of an F16. And I didn’t see as many exhibitionists as I remember from the old days. People seem more taken up in their own business, less interested in being interesting. I call this progress.

—DM

Good artists always see the same things we see in uniquely different ways. But once in a great while an artist completely re-imagines the world. It’s not a godlike act, it’s a necessity. It’s the only way such an artist can come to terms with what he sees.

Armando Reverón (1889-1954) was such an artist. There are two poignantly contrarian aspects to his career:

— instead of working in glamorous venues like Paris and New York, navigating webs of critics and peers, this Venezuelan artist (inset) lived and worked in a small Caribbean village, Macuto; and
—he belonged to the schizophrenic caste, a much discriminated against group of people who have often been deprived of their dignity and rights by a society only beginning to understand them.

Given these seemingly disqualifying circumstances, he created and enchanted a world apart into which we now have a view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

The central facts in Reverón’s life seem to have been his experience of women, particularly his companion, Juanita Rios, and his schizophrenia. Women enabled him to explore the shadowy and haunted fastnesses of his listening, hallucinatory mind in behalf of the greater purpose of his art. Women were his collaborators.

My own meditations, as I navigated the human currents inside MoMA, jostled by self-important cellphone exhibitionists, followed two courses:

—we know next to nothing about madness, and whatever it is, it’s perfectly capable, along with what we call talent and inspiration, of giving us grandeur and enlightenment; and

—why don’t men give it a rest and turn over management of world affairs to women? We need women’s coping skills in this data-rich environment. They’re not as impressed as men are by idealogical popinjays. It seems unlikely women will make a bigger mess than men have made. But of course we all know it’s not about that, don’t we?

There’s a whiff of caricature in Reverón’s majas and odalisques, or is it perhaps a ghostliness, as with an after-image? The artist isn’t doing all the work here; Juanita and the other women share his sensibility. They clearly apprehend his impulses. This artist in his paintings and sculpture celebrates the otherness of things.

His self-portraits arrest not just a moment of recognition but a kind of sorrow at having to inhabit such a paranoid zone. Wearing a straw hat or a top hat, he is crowned with thorns and he has the look of a man who knows nothing ends well.

—DM

Celebrity idolatry and our way of defining success are entwined vipers. This most churchgoing of nations defines success by sales, approbation, bad behavior, critical attention, wealth and power.

Why is not standing vigil by a sick friend’s bed, writing one good line of poetry, shedding one moment of light in a dark corner, cheering one fellow human soul, why are these accomplishments not defined as success in a nation of such conspicuous religiosity? Why is a life decently lived not as celebrated as an empty head famous for being famous?

Why are our pulpits big-mouthed about homosexuality, family values and abortion but mealy-mouthed about a society that defines success by such obscene measures? Where are their values? Could it be they’re firmly rooted in the business ethos?

I used to attend, had to attend newspaper editorial conferences presided over by a publisher whose sagacity seemed to consist of saying, Well, it’s all in the way you frame things. This is the kind of huckster’s pragmatism that serves a commodified society well.

The country is down to five newspaper book review sections: such hand wringing in the blogosphere. But it’s not so surprising when you consider that newspaper book review sections and their best-seller lists are a measure of business success, not literary accomplishment. They’re like the stacks of books in the front of chain bookstores. They tell you how much money has been spent by the publishers on promoting certain books, while thousands of other books go unreviewed, not because they were found undeserving, but because they weren’t published by Big Money. The industry’s definition of success is how well Mammon is served.

And when Big Money’s books are reviewed some fool critic often as not will ask if the writer can do it again? As if that matters. But of course in a money-obsessed, horse-race society, it matters all too much.

—DM

I have architectural dreams. Every once in a while I find the setting in a book or a movie. One sleepless night I turned on the television set and
watched The Sicilian, a 1987 film directed by Michael Cimino. It opens on a misty morning in Palermo—and there was the morose, dripping architecture of one of my recurrent dreams.

Another time I encounter a Giorgio de Chirico painting (inset) and I have the feeling the artist got something wrong, because I know this scene better than he does. Or I see a photograph of a square in Blida, Algeria, a town I’ve never seen, and I remember crossing the square late one evening about five feet off the ground.

I do a lot of flying in my dreams. Nothing streamlined, kind of loopy like a  swallow, except I tend to pass through walls.

It took me many years to recognize that to my way of thinking these architectural dreams were actually the architecture of my mind. So Cimino’s  glum buildings, which seem never to emit or reflect light, represent a certain demeanor of my thinking. And de Chirico’s pristine, bright  buildings and piazzas, struck with light, represent some kind of post-apocalytpic Turin of my mind, although I’ve never seen Turin, except in photographs and films.

Many people have imagined Persepolis, Antioch, Babylon, and other fabled cities—artists, filmmakers, writers. So of course I have a store of visual ideas about how these places might have looked. But I don’t visit them in my dreams. I do visit marbled Greco-Roman cities, but they’re always empty, perfectly maintained and empty. I have no idea what I’m doing there, no particular feelings. If these Greco-Roman buildings represent a cast of mind, I’ve yet to understand it. I do like whiteness, order, symmetry, grandeur. Perhaps I rest in such places.

—DM 

Stunning new information, says Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Shocking revelations, says another anchor. We’re stunned and shocked 24/7. We need some algorithms for talking about just how stunned, shocked and entertained to a fare-thee-well we are.

Our wonderful young men and women are coming home depressed, with post-traumatic stress disorder and brain damage that we’re not prepared to treat. Our young women are coming home suffering from indecencies inflicted on them by their fellow warriors. All these fellow Americans are coming home to a society suffering post-traumatic entertainment disorder. One of the symptoms is that our collective mind won’t focus on anything but flickering images and hyper-sound.

When I was a rookie reporter for The Providence Journal we used a style book that warned us not to say information had been revealed, but rather that it had been disclosed, because the word revelation has religious connotations. But how are you going to weaponize words with a style book like that? The delivery of news is losing not only proportion but sense.

The other day I visited The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I tried to open my eyes and my mind to the experiences awaiting me in each gallery, but what struck me was the number of fellow museum-goers who could not detach themselves from their cellphones, even when they knew using them is not permitted in the galleries, even when they knew it was impolite. They were hooked on the distraction. So I eavesdropped to see if their lives were perhaps much more important than mine. What I heard was trivia not dissimilar to what we now hear on so-called TV news. We have become a nation in search of distractions. How long can such a nation preserve its civil liberties? If we don’t care who’s minding the store we’ll be locked out of it, just as the current administration in Washington has busied itself locking out our elected representatives. We can’t rescue the right to know if we don’t want to know.

I think infotainment is a dangerous drug and, along with alcohol, we should start talking about its hazardous effects.

—DM

On page 351 of his endlessly informative and graciously written
Waterfront, A Journey Around Manhattan, Phillip Lopate quotes
Jacob Riis (inset), reformer, reporter and photographer: “It is just a question whether a man would take seven percent and save his soul, or twenty-five and lose it.” He was talking about affordable housing, but he could have been talking about newspapers or any number of other enterprises from which shareholders and executives, seemingly unworried about their souls, have been extracting piratical profits.

So faceted is Waterfront that I fear it’s boorish of me to single out this particular vignette, but I excuse myself on the grounds that Riis is talking about our Grendel, the beast we must kill: greed. I’m tempted to say boundless greed or outrageous greed, but greed is greed. The trouble with greed, as opposed to gluttony, is gluttony kills gluttons, but greed kills the rest of us. Indeed Lopate describes a horrifying instance of this on page 381 when the sidewheeler General Slocum loses 1,031 passengers because her captain unaccountably refuses to dock his ship burning in the East River. To save money, the owners had allowed life rings and hoses to rot. The lifeboats and rafts were wired to the deck. The ship illegally carried barrels of hay and oil, and a steam valve that should have been in a storeroom was missing. The ill-trained crew jumped overboard to save themselves instead of their passengers. The captain took the rap for the owners and went to jail.

We must either decide that to our way of thinking greed is synonymous with capitalism or capitalism can temper itself or be tempered with responsibility towards those of us who must content ourselves with not being obscenely rich.

Phillip Lopate’s book is not about greed, but inevitably the subject crops up as he tells us the fabulous history of Manhattan’s waterfront.

If capitalists will not confront themselves with this issue, then society must do it for them. We must say, If you want us to consume your goods and protect your businesses with our lives, you must pay your fair share in taxes and you must pay us decent wages. But we need these huge profits to compete in the global arena, the moguls tell us, as they stash their gains in the Caymans and throw themselves another party.

This is the debate we ought to be having, not the distractive foofaraws the political swindlers of every stripe would like us to have. And because Manhattan is about trade and money, as well as art and imagination, Waterfront reminds us that the issues we get all hot and bothered about are usually not the ones deciding our fate, and that’s just the way the politicians and the overpaid CEOs like it.

—DM

I take great comfort in the fact that no two snowflakes are alike. The implications seem far weightier to me than anything I read in the newspapers. My favorite pasttime in winter is shoveling snow. I imagine myself some kind of cosmic geometrician moving blocks of blue light, blocks composed of an infinity of flakes, each one unique.

The blue light in snow and ice is an aspect of absorption of red and yellow light, leaving blue. It’s the same with water. Nothing magical about it as long as you subscribe to the idea that it’s random and accidental, the alternative being a kind of worship, or at very least awe. I suppose I could worship accidentality, but it gives me a headache.

People take their comforts where they can find them: an ascending stock market, winning a game, a rich husband, a trophy wife, but I feel more comfortable with infinity. I should have been a mathematician. I have the temperament, but unfortunately I get the import better than I get the numbers.

—DM 

The stick in the eye of the unknown writer is that nothing succeeds like success. And success is defined as what sells.

My personal library is filled with books most publishers wouldn’t touch today. Many weren’t commercial successes in their time.

I’m unimpressed by the books booksellers stack in the fronts of their stores because I know they’ve been paid to do it.

As for my own writing, I like to think a handful of readers in each future generation will be thankful for it. Will that be success? For me, yes, for marketers, no.

We live in a market society. We like the term market economy because we don’t like to admit the consequences of leaving taste to bottom-liners. There is a price to pay for sanctioning such a society; part of that price is that we may become too dumb to stay free.

But we’re not helpless, we just like to pass the buck. So here’s a modest manifesto for writers who deplore the situation. All of you, big and small, successful or not. How about committing yourselves to giving an unknown writer a hand once a year, like Christmas charity? How about going out on a limb for a writer you know damned well the marketers will shoot down? How about admitting you’re part of the problem?

I know, I know, some of you have done just this. But how many of you, and how far did you go?

And you journal editors, how many appreciations of unpublished writers have you published? None? Oh my, is there an obscure, inviolable rubric against it? No? It just isn’t done? Readers wouldn’t be interested? The readers are already imposingly uninterested in much of what you publish: the ego strut of big name writers and critics, the snide demolitions, the literary politics, the self-congratulatory networking.

I made a career of reporting and editing, and I swear to you that the greatest, most steadfast pleasure was always in helping another writer become what he or she could become. Sometimes it meant dropping a few semicolons or resurrecting a buried lead. Sometimes it meant finding someone a job, swearing by someone at risk to my own reputation. But nothing in memory is as pleasant, certainly not the awards and promotions.

You can do it. You know you can. But it’s going to cost you. You’re going to have to call in some chips. And yet the cost to you won’t be as great as the cost of crackpot commercialism is to our culture.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. I don’t know exactly how you as writers can help each other. But I know it can be done, and so do you. And I know we have no business complaining if we haven’t extended a helping hand to someone out in the cold.

—DM

Sometimes a story is swept away in a torrent of facts. In the land of yak in which we live, truth is often the first casualty of information. For this reason fiction is often best suited to convey truth. BBC America has just shown the six-part series The State Within, starring Jason Isaacs (inset), a fictional account of a war manufactured by the United States government to fatten the coffers of a multinational corporation.

The 2006 series, written by Lizzie Mickery and Daniel Percival, authors of Dirty War, was shown in Europe last year. If it had been made and aired in 2002 we might well have been spared much of the agony and explosive divisiveness of the Iraq war, because this fictional account of greed and trickery could have provided the American public with a framework for the Iraq story, which is otherwise a wall hanging of wet paint leaking every which way.

Would it have been the correct context? We don’t know. But it would have significantly enabled intelligent debate, which has arrived on the scene stillborn.

This is why fiction is so essential to our comprehension of our circumstances. Try to imagine Western civilization without the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Aeniad. You can’t, because they enable us to tell our stories. They make sense of what would otherwise be tsunamis of information swamping us. These great works of fiction bring coherence and meaning to the human experience.

If the American public had been able to view something like The State Within during the propagandistic, fear-mongering run-up to the Iraq war, that public might have said, Whoa there, let’s think this through. But we didn’t think anything through. We weren’t allowed to. We were cattle-prodded into a war by liars with an agenda, and the facts failed to reveal the agenda. Fiction writers are often prescient, usually savvy, and while it’s obvious Mickery and Percival were moved by the Iraq war, their film might well forewarn us against a similar misadventure in Iran.

In a society where non-fiction books and reality shows are promoted over fiction, the reality, the daily torrent of facts, blinded us to the underlying truth. Reality is deceptive. Nothing is as it seems. And because this is so, we need fiction to help us peel away appearances and rhetoric. Fiction is a reverse pickpocket. Pickpockets create a diversion. They bump into us, alarm us, and while we’re distracted they clean us out. That is how we got to Iraq. We were distracted by globetrotting pickpockets. But fiction slips truth into our pockets. That is what The State Within is doing, albeit too late to avert the tragedy in which we now find ourselves.

—DM

I used to sit next to my stepfather in his office doing my homework, answering the phone and occasionally making a call for him. I looked forward to this afternoon ritual at 215 East 19th Street in Manhattan.
It was our daily moment of companionability. He would use his big sterling silver fountain pen to sign checks, I would use an antique green Oliver typewriter, sometimes for homework, sometimes to bang out a poem.

When my stepfather was done with office work he would read Dante in the original Italian, or Shakespeare or Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam. He had very little formal education, but he was a prodigious autodidact, and it had served him well. We were surrounded not only by big showcases filled with tiger and polar bear rugs, the heads snarling through the glass, but by buildings he owned in the neighborhood. Taxidermy was my stepfather’s trade, but his money was based in real estate and his success in his unassailable and much appreciated integrity.

One day he put down his glasses and said, Call that suit and tell him I’m gonna break his face. I was used to him expecting me to read his mind, and most of the time I could. But this time I was stumped. I had never heard lawyers wearing expensive clothes called suits before. You know, the son of a bitch with the hair, he said. Yes, I knew the son of a bitch with the hair. He had filed a suit in behalf of a tenant who had done a great deal of damage to an apartment and then pretended it was that way when he moved in, something I personally knew to be untrue, since I helped maintain the apartments. Oh yeah, I know who you mean, I said. But then there was that part about breaking his face. I’ll tell him thank you for the letter and we’ll refer it to Frank. Frank was the family lawyer. My stepfather looked rather fondly at his little consiglieri and said, Yeah, something like that.

Now that I’m an old man I rather enjoy contemplating how much I don’t know. But as a younger man I pretended to know a great deal, and one of the things I pretended to know was a good suit. But the truth is I can’t tell an off-the-rack suit from a Brioni. Oh maybe if I took my glasses off and studied the material and the seams up close I could tell, but I’m not one of those people who can size up your suits and shoes at a glance. I’m told many men and women can, and they scare me. But I don’t think they ever scared my stepfather. He knew those suits were empty. He wasn’t a bit impressed.

(Photo: My stepfather, Dominick J. Guccione, in his taxidermy studio).

—DM