Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

At rest in the park

Peter has been reading Jonathan Lethem's essay collection The Disappointment Artist, and he reported to me yesterday morning that, according to Lethem, Montgomery Clift is buried in Prospect Park. Not only that, but I walk past his grave whenever I take the dog to the Nether Mead.

Forgotten New York confirms it. When the park was laid out, it surrounded a Quaker cemetery but didn't absorb it, and the cemetery survives, like a mitochondrion inside a eukaryote. It's still private property. Since it was nice here yesterday, I took my camera and walked around the barbed-wire perimeter. Just up from a baseball field, in a sort of alcove under some trees, there's a decent sight line, but not a great one. A sleeping man in a camouflage shirt, boots, and a trucker's hat roused himself for just long enough to assure himself that my presence was no more than documentary. No sign of Clift per se. (The whole thing is completely invisible in Google Earth, by the way, because their satellite pix were taken in summer, and the tree canopy covers it.)

Since I had the camera out, I also took this, an exposed cross-section of the layers that compose our street. We have no running water during the day this week, which is so nineteenth-century it's eighteenth-century.

Byron's lapdog

In the department of hitherto-unnoticed nineteenth-century antecedents to indie-hipster pop songs of the early twenty-first century, today we consider the fetching and puzzlingly mild Swedish rocker Jens Lekman.

Lekman sings a song titled "When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog," on an album of the same name, in which he imagines a relationship with his beloved somewhat like the elegiac, cross-species love in David Garnett's novel Lady into Fox (which you should drop everything in order to read, if you haven't already):

You can take me for a walk in the park
I'll be chasing every single lark
I'll be burying all the skeleton bones
Peeing on every cold black stone

As it happens, this trope has been deployed elsewhere---notably, in the out-of-control screed that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in the Atlantic in 1869, when she heaped shovelful after shovelful of sexual condemnation onto Byron and championed his wife. In Stowe's narrative, after Lady Byron concludes that her husband is not only incest-prone but also insane, she has a moment of regret before she leaves him---and his sister---forever:

On the day of her departure she passed by the door of his room, and stopped to caress his favorite spaniel, which was lying there; and she confessed to a friend the weakness of feeling a willingness even to be something as humble as that poor little creature, might she only be allowed to remain and watch over him. She went into the room where he and the partner of his sins were sitting together, and said, "Byron, I come to say good by," offering at the same time her hand.

Note that sometime in the course of the intervening century and a half, the Romantic poet-figure went from having the dog to being the dog.

Note: Peter adds that I ought also to have referenced Iggy Pop's "I Wanna Be Your Dog."