The Princess Anne

You Will Not Find Her at the Bottom of the River On Whose Shores Your Life Has Been Squandered, by David Hollander

Well then down you go.  Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.

Your heart punching at the wetsuit as you sink to the bottom of this urban river on whose shores your life has been squandered, this river which preserves that original conundrum from which the entire cosmology was birthed in an unfathomable instant of fire, pushed from some icy womb of Nothingness so as to spread out virus-like and then die its slow death.  The depth gauge glows green in the murk, fifty feet, then sixty and then yes, as promised, here is the oily bottom rising up to meet you and you lay your belly down in the earth’s black blood, indulging in the deep gulps of air you’ve been counseled against taking, your body hot and electric within the suit as if the neoprene enclosed only pulsing organs and circulatory twine.  You peer out across the riverbottom and down a corridor of visibility above which the particulate matter hovers like smoke in a housefire, then you kick hard once and glide out above the planet’s bottom where creatures deformed by metropolitan poisons live out their sorry half-witted lives.

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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 Authors, David Hollander, Freight train, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Objects, Teredos & Gribbles, The Princess Anne No Comments

You Will Not Find Her at the Bottom of the River on Whose Shores Your Life Has Been Squandered by David Hollander

Well then down you go.  Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.

Your heart punching at the wetsuit as you sink to the bottom of this urban river on whose shores your life has been squandered, this river which preserves that original conundrum from which the entire cosmology was birthed in an unfathomable instant of fire, pushed from some icy womb of Nothingness so as to spread out virus-like and then die its slow death.  The depth gauge glows green in the murk, fifty feet, then sixty and then yes, as promised, here is the oily bottom rising up to meet you and you lay your belly down in the earth’s black blood, indulging in the deep gulps of air you’ve been counseled against taking, your body hot and electric within the suit as if the neoprene enclosed only pulsing organs and circulatory twine.  You peer out across the riverbottom and down a corridor of visibility above which the particulate matter hovers like smoke in a housefire, then you kick hard once and glide out above the planet’s bottom where creatures deformed by metropolitan poisons live out their sorry half-witted lives.

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Sunday, September 27th, 2009 Authors, Body, Body of Water, David Hollander, Formica dinette, Freight train, Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks, Grand Piano, Hudson River, Objects, Oil, Stripped cars, Teredos & Gribbles, The Princess Anne No Comments

The Last Days of the Princess Anne by Claire Shefchik

On February 2, 1920, the Princess Anne, en route from Norfolk, Virginia, ran aground off Rockaway Beach while entering New York Harbor. After sending a distress call, all 175 passengers aboard were evacuated safely. The crew, however, insisted on remaining aboard until they could be allowed to retrieve all luggages from below decks. For nine days, the Princess Anne sat in the harbor with the crew aboard before the hull began to crack, and they at last agreed to be rescued. The site of the wreck remained undisturbed until 1957, when a dive team recovered not only the little remaining luggage but a journal describing the nine days previous, left behind by the registered shipboard nurse, a Miss Agnes Channing (a.k.a. Mrs. Charles G. O’Shea, Jr.), 26, of Queens Village, N.Y. and lately a Red Cross veteran of the Italian theatre.

Day One

We made the decision to stay behind actually rather quickly. Less breezy was the consensus about how to pass the time.  Certainly, the motionless steam-hulk under us gave up a certain post-apocalyptic feel, and indeed, a percentage of us voted to act as if we’d motored to the end of the world. Others were keen to evoke the air of an officers’ club, in the Rue St. Denis perhaps, one glimpsed through the slatted-wood doors but whose mysteries never had been revealed; the purple smoke and pinkish satin of its milkmaid-prostitutes, spread over the banquettes at the height of their art for one.

I for one, felt compelled to give in to my own drive to craft a parallel world. But I also recognized the weight of my civilizing influence, was just about the men’s sole anchor. Thus I proposed a rotating schedule, to begin today, in appropriate east-meets-west fashion, with tea-parties and sewing circles, taking turns with chiffon handkerchiefs and cricket games, our repertories drawn from the church picnic songbooks at First Presbyterian of Queens Village. The crew promptly concurred.

Afterward, in the forecastle I explained my reasoning to the barkeep, the young Virginian Mr. Freddy Heatherton. I suspect that we shall find scarcely a minute, as this strange sojourn lags on, between all the accompanying rum raves, bourbon blasts, whiskey socials, happy hours, pig-and-whistles, nightcaps, pub games and grog nights, for the enactment of stimulating exercises and revues, for the edification of us all.

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Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 Authors, Body of Water, Claire Shefchik, Objects, Rockaway, The Princess Anne No Comments

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