so. last year i took this amazing class taught by Dr. Jacobson: Chicago and NY at the turn of the 20th century. it was an honors class. and i ended up focusing a lot of my thought on bohemianism and the village. this semester i'm taking a class : the american novel between the wars. a lot of the same topics are being covered. okay not a lot but my mind is wandering to the same things, such as the village and bohemia. so in class we have read this article titled The Temper of the 1920s.

"bohemianism was understood to mean a gay disorderliness of life, cheerful bad manenrs, and no fixed hours or sexual standards."

 "the young artists of the decade gained confidence in their ownn importance as a group. The critized and distrusted the middle-class conventional man as an insensitive and incompetent person who could never be aware entirely of vital realities because he had trained himself to ignore them.  Hence the belief that the artist possessed the exclusive insights and a sensiblity denied to the non-artist."

"Nietzche consistently supported it, but because he fromo time to time made statements that, taken from their context, could easily be made to support the artist's point of view."

Basically saying that 'Villagers' were viewed as such and were supported by those who saw them.

"to the degree that bohemians were political radicals, they were interested in Marxist theory... linked capitalist oppression with middle class stupidity and often tought of the capitialist as inhuman and insensitive. "

"He was an anarchist who resented all forms of systematic intrusion upon his private life."

today? does this apply to today as much as i think it does? it's not even the issue of application but of truth. that these quotes are still applicable for today.

i for one resent stupidity and intrusion of personal life in a systematic form.

"Midwesterners were so prominent among the expatriates, especially in Paris, that Ford Madox Ford...asserted that almost all teh new writers seemed to have come from the Midwest."

Ms. Peters is from WI,  Dr. Jacobson is from Chicago.  and most of the professional poets i have met and work with are from the midwest.

i am convinced that while the face of the village is re-worked by NYU, it's fundamentals will never change.

the village is the village, is and will be the village.

what did i do today? worked on the bookstore Book...the keeper of records of sales made and settled. I MADE THAT CONSIGNMENT FORM. so it's my baby all the way so far.

helped galinsky fix the bar and shelves a bit.  mostly worked on books. takes up a lot of time, inventory, recording, precision.

can the bowery at Houston ever change? nyu can do all it wants, but the white house-flop house is still just across the street.