A man with many hats

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
4/28/07

Paul Pines is a poet, professor and psychotherapist — an alliterative coincidence that suits someone who sees everything in life as grist for the creative mill.

At a few weeks shy of 66, Pines has already collected several lifetimes’ worth of grist. He’s been a jazz club owner and a cabbie in New York City; a Vietnam vet who found temporary paradise on the beaches of Belize; and a novelist who dabbled in cheap erotic fiction to pay the bills.

These days, he’s living what he calls "a very suburban life, on the surface of things." He’s a husband and father, the kind of guy who seems at home in an armchair with a dog at his feet and a cluttered bookshelf at his back. He plans to retire this spring from teaching creative writing and literature at Adirondack Community College, although he will continue his psychotherapy practice at Glens Falls Hospital.

There’s a surprising lack of nostalgia in Pines’ descriptions of his bohemian past. While you could view his last two decades as comparatively dull, he gratefully calls this time "my second incarnation," a chance to reflect on things below the surface.

"There are people who go on forever collecting experiences, and they become repetitious," Pines said recently. "For me, the completion of that particular stage of my life ... freed me to grow in other areas of my life. Now my adventures are in the emotional realm."

In his latest book, "Taxidancing," a collection of poems to be published this fall by Ikon, Pines included aspects of both his past and present.

"Half of them are poems I wrote while living in the jazz world and others were written much more recently," he explained. "I thought it would be interesting to have those side by side."

The title is a play on words, adding whimsy to the mundanity of taxis weaving through traffic to pick up fares. It’s also a reference to the "taxi dancers" of the Great Depression, women who charged men by the dance for companionship. Pines is fond of images that combine beauty with a hint of something darker, and believes that pairing lies at the heart of jazz.

"The juxtaposition of sublime music and danger is really what, to some extent, jazz has been about," he said.

He recalled a jazz club he frequented in the 1960s in New York.

"It was called Slug’s Saloon, and it was like the gateway to Hades. There was this sublime music, but drugs were passed around openly, and a great trumpet player got shot right on stage."

When he opened his own jazz club, The Tin Palace, in the Bowery section of Lower Manhattan in 1970, Pines said he "took great care" not to let it go the way of Slug’s. Drug use was forbidden on the premises, although he didn’t ask what people did out on the sidewalk.

"My idea was to create an environment in this sort of no-man’s land that was safe for the arts," he said. "It became very exciting."

Some jazz greats performed at the Tin Palace during the ’70s, he said, including David Murray, Claudio Roditi, Henry Threadgill, Hilton Ruiz and Eddie Jefferson. Pines eventually closed the club and moved to Central America, but he used it as the setting for a mystery novel, "Tin Angel," published in 1983.

"Tin Angel" got strong reviews in The New York Times and other high-profile publications, was translated into several languages and even optioned for a French film (though that never materialized). It also earned Pines a six-month fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts as a writer-in-residence at Crandall Public Library.

Pines only meant to visit Glens Falls, figuring he could earn enough money here to live for a year in Belize, where, after the Vietnam War, he had bought a few acres of beachfront property with a buddy from the Merchant Marines.

But one dinner changed everything.

He met his wife, Carol — an aspiring opera singer who, it turns out, lived in uptown Manhattan at the same time he lived downtown — while tossing a salad at a mutual friend’s house.

"We kind of fell in love in about five minutes," Carol said. "I just had a sense of his tremendous depth of spirit and humor. And I know this sounds corny, but there was that sense of finding a soulmate."

As Pines puts it: "We just knew." They were married in October 1985.

His next book, "Redemption," took on U.S. involvement in a genocide in Guatemala. Pines’ agent in America said he couldn’t sell the book, although an editor in France accepted it.

"The subject matter was not what people wanted," Pines said. "I was deeply upset about not having it out in English, just devastated. I stopped writing everything except poetry for a while."

When Pines did return to book writing, his next two attempts were also rejected by an agent as "not big enough" to sell. He sees this as evidence that what used to be considered "mid-list" fiction is disappearing from the market.

"The problem is that fiction is no longer a marketable form, unless it’s genre fiction," Pines said. "We have a public that’s no longer reading. And when they do, they don’t want endings that are too dark. They want to be reassured that they will live eternally, be young and triumphant."

This doesn’t mean that writers should stop writing, Pines said. It means, he tells his ACC students, that "you had better enjoy the process, and find ways to support yourselves."

And, in his view, it doesn’t matter whether the support comes in the form of a prestigious arts grant or churning out cheap paperbacks under a pen name.

"Every moment I’ve lived is subject matter," he said. "Your moments can be as dispensable as refuse, or as valuable as you choose to make them."

Glens Falls one of the worst places to live in U.S.?

Published on 12/14/2006 in THE POST-STAR's Go

Dave Gilmartin, 30, works as an advertising copywriter in Manhattan and makes fun of other cities in his spare time. His first book, "The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America," was published by St. Martin's Press in October 2006.

The book is based on responses he received from using Craigslist and other Web forums to ask people about the worst place they had ever lived or visited. There are two New York cities included among the top 50 "worst places" -- Syracuse and Glens Falls.

At press time, the book's sales rank on Amazon.com was 36,020.

Q: So, what's your beef with Glens Falls? How did it make it into the top 50 worst places?

A: I guess the main theme I went with is just how it is all about neighboring towns. You know, I'm from New Jersey and we do that all the time, we pretend we're cool because New York City is right next door. With Glens Falls, it's all about Lake George and Saratoga. Like if the guy next door has a nice lawn, but I don't -- well, I'm close to the nice lawn! I don't want the speed of escape to be the best thing about where I'm living.

The other theme I heard from a lot of people is that the teenagers are all bored and can't wait to escape. But Glens Falls is pretty tame compared to some of the others, actually. It's certainly no Detroit!

Q: Ever been to Glens Falls?

A: Well, I've been through it. I just kind of drove around. I basically had what I was going to write at that point. I mean, the book is largely testimonials and quotes...I'm a humor writer, and I don't have any journalistic sensibilities! (laughs) Syracuse is the one (of two New York cities included in the book) I know much better, personally. Glens Falls is one I sort of uncovered. It just kept popping up. And I was doing so many large cities that I wanted a small, boring town, too.

Q: What are some of the worst things people said about Glens Falls?

A: That it's a big, boring ghetto..."home to the high school basketball hall of fame, as well as lost dreams and failed aspirations." That's a quote from a local.

Q: How did you write the book?

A: I did polling online, survey-taking...went to every Craigslist in the country and asked people, "What's the worst place you've ever been?" Then, once I had votes, I would start corresponding with people. It was cool, I actually got to meet a lot of interesting people who really hated their towns. People were really willing to unload.

It took about a year and a half. I did some traveling, too. There wasn't really any great method to it. I tried not to pick all 50 from Jersey, which was a challenge. Then there's some, like Baltimore, that's a shoo-in regardless of any research...

Q: Where did you get the idea?

A: I work in advertising and do some magazine junk, and I was talking to an editor one day, trying to think of something satirical to write. It was around the time the "Best Places to Live" articles come out every year, so I just thought of the opposite. It was totally random. I just like to make fun of stuff, I don't know what that says about me! (laughs)

I'm from Jersey, so I think that's where my expertise came from. My whole life, I've been made fun of for being from Jersey, so it's fun to spread it around a little bit. Not that we aren't bad, but other places are too... The whole point is just to be funny. I'm just trying to be funny, and I think about half the people get it, and half are very angry.

Q: Oh, yeah? So you've gotten complaints from some of the places you wrote about?

A: Big cities don't care. Like, I haven't heard from Detroit, they've got bigger fish to fry. But Mitchell, South Dakota -- they covered my book like it was the presidential debate. I debated the mayor on the radio for like 45 minutes!

Q: So, I noticed from a Google search that Dave Gilmartin is apparently a pseudonym. Why not use your real name?

A: Yeah, I wish I hadn't let that slip...it's a long, boring story, but the easy answer is that I didn't want anyone from Detroit to find me and kill me. They've killed people for less than this!

Q: Any plans for a second book?

A: I feel like I need to write something really positive next, to realign my karma. A book about puppies or something...although a book about the worst colleges would be really funny.

Melville's local ties

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
11/18/06

Albany Academy boasts several famous alumni, but one of the most famous was a dropout.

Herman Melville, author of "Moby Dick," attended the boys academy from 1830 to 1832, until his family’s financial woes forced him out of school and into the working world at 12 years old.

So Melville would probably be astonished to learn his alma mater is throwing him a major party this weekend.

"He was not here very long, but we’re taking the right to claim at least part of him," said Caroline Mason, head of schools for the girls and boys Albany academies.

Mason conceived the idea for what grew into a three-day celebration called "Why Melville Matters Now," involving everything from lectures to art exhibits and dances inspired by "Moby Dick." The University at Albany’s Center for Humanities, Arts and Technosciences co-sponsored the event, and several local cultural institutions worked together to add interdisciplinary elements.

Intellectual stars like Andrew Delbanco, Stanley Crouch and R.L. Lane agreed to speak, and dozens of scholars from as far away as Europe planned to attend the symposium, delivering papers on esoteric topics like "Archipelagic Thinking in Melville and Deleuze;" "What’s With the White Jacket?: The Plight of the Individual on the World Frigate;" and "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: 1850s Herman Melville as Big Daddy Countercultural Beat Generation."

The Albany Institute of History and Art installed an exhibit of Frank Stella’s paintings inspired by "Moby Dick," and the academy installed a piece by artists Richard Garrison and William Bergman featuring a three-story-high whale and pen.

About 150 people signed up to read aloud a section of "Moby Dick" during a 24-hour reading marathon that ends at about noon today, with novelist William Kennedy of Albany and television personality Andrew Rooney of Lake George serving as famous bookends to open and close the reading.

Starbucks, the national coffee chain, offered to donate coffee for the reading when Burns suggested that the chain might have taken its name from a character in "Moby Dick."

In other words, this party became a project almost as large as Melville’s legendary white whale.

"We’ve never done an event on this scale before," said Carol Burns, communications director for the academies. "Everybody is excited about it."

So, why does Melville matter now?

As Mason pointed out, his work still shows up frequently in popular culture, inspiring songs, movies, plays and other creative endeavors.

"Besides the fact that he’s a great American novelist, I think he posed a lot of questions in the early days — about theology, existence, social issues — that are still being asked today," she reflected. "He was ahead of his time."
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Melville’s life

The future author of "Moby Dick" entered the world as Herman Melvill on Aug. 1, 1819, in New York City.

His mother, Maria, was the granddaughter of Gen. Peter Gansevoort, the Revolutionary War hero for whom the Northumberland hamlet of Gansevoort is named.

Maria married Allan Melvill, an ambitious young merchant from a Scottish family in Boston, and had eight children — Herman was the third. They lived in Manhattan until Allan’s business failures forced the family back north to stay with relatives.

Young Herman and several of his siblings enrolled at the Albany Academy prep school about 1830, but the family was bankrupt by the time Allan died of pneumonia in 1832, and 12-year-old Herman was pulled from school to work as a clerk in the New York State Bank (founded by his grandfather Herman).

Perhaps to separate them from the shame of bankruptcy, the family added an "e" to its last name around that time.

Herman got hooked on maritime adventure as a teenager, working as a cabin boy on a voyage from New York to England and back. After a few years as a schoolteacher, he set sail for the South Seas in 1841 and stayed abroad for three years, living among various island cultures. He wrote several books about his travels, including "Typee," "Omoo," and "Redburn," which were fairly successful.

He married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847 and they lived in Pittsfield, Mass., for many years, where he wrote "Moby Dick" and "Pierre." The novels were unpopular during his lifetime (less than 3,000 copies of "Moby Dick" sold) and he turned to writing poetry, with similarly discouraging results.

He supported himself in later years by working as a customs inspector in New York City, where he died on Sept. 28, 1891—- with so little fame that an obituary in The New York Times listed his name as Henry Melville.

Several decades later, critics and biographers began a revival of public interest in his work, and he is now considered one of the greatest American authors.

~~~~~~~~~~
(Companion piece)

NORTHUMBERLAND -- The gloomy bulk of the old Gansevoort Mansion would fit right into the landscape of "Moby Dick," the massive masterpiece by 19th-century American author Herman Melville.

The four-story wooden structure is as simple and sturdy as an old whaling ship, with peeling paint that evokes the grayish blues and whites of a northern sea.

The house was built about two centuries ago by either Gen.l Peter Gansevoort or his son Herman, who fathered another Herman, the author’s uncle. The author’s mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville, inherited the property in 1862.

The youngest Herman visited the rural estate many times throughout his life, and may have written portions of his works here. An original manuscript of his first novel "Typee" was discovered on the property in 1983 (the New York State Library bought it for about $400,000 at auction).

The property was sold out of the family in the late 19th century, and it was the headquarters of the local Masonic Lodge for the second half of the 20th century.

The current owner, Lynn Ruhman, bought it from the Masons in 1995 with the idea of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast.

"It just never happened, it’s too much work," Ruhman said, adding that she plans to sell the property soon. "But if I had done it, I would have named one of the rooms after Melville."

She lives in the bottom half of the house with her daughter and boyfriend, and runs a small hair salon called "Emotional Rescue" on the ground floor.

A tour through the upper floors reveals traces of its earlier history — the thick-planked wood floors and heavy-paned windows probably looked the same in Melville’s day — but it’s definitely a fixer-upper.

Coincidentally, Ruhman’s previous residence was the first home built by General Peter Gansevoort, on land confiscated from Royalists after the Revolutionary War.

"I’ve had two 200-year-old houses, and that’s enough," she said, laughing.

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