We are sad 
to learn of the passing of former Chelsea Hotel resident Arthur C. Clarke. Despite being ill at the time, Clarke graciously sent an e-mail to support the Bards back in June. NPR and The New York Times have great coverage today. (Thanks to Judith & Mary Anne for the tip.)
Other appreciations of Clarke: Teresa & Patrick Nielsen, Jeff Vandermeer, Peter Steinberg, Colleen Lindsay.
The Chelsea Hotel of BD times is but a pale shadow of its former glory. No cats in the halls?! We’ve long heard rumors of an eccentric lady who kept a tiger in her apartment at the Chelsea way back in the 60s, but we tended to dismiss them as just too wild even for this primordial urban jungle. But now, at last, the truth comes to light. According to London’s Daily Telegraph, Theodora Keogh, granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt, and who died just recently at the ripe old age of 88, kept a margay, a South American “tiger cat” similar to an ocelot, while in residence at the Chelsea(1/29/08).
As you might imagine, Theodora led a colorful life, carrying a knife and swimming nude as a young girl, joining a ballet company early on, running with the Paris Review crowd in the City of Love, and writing nine novels with such scandalous themes as: incest between twins, young girls being lured to bed by diseased sculptors, passing history exams by threatening to expose teachers as lesbians, street musicians falling in love with child criminals, rape, unspeakable things, and being stirred to perform marital duties by “. . .memories of a dark, swarthy Indian boy walking in the Place Vendome.”
Theodora abandoned writing in 1962, and apparently moved to the Chelsea Hotel soon after. The affair with the margay, however, did not end well: one night, when Theodora passed out dead drunk in her room at the Chelsea—18 whiskeys, anyone?--the ravening beast gnawed off one of her ears!
We corresponded with Chelsea Hotel historian Sherrill Tippins about Theodora, and she was way ahead of us: she said that she had already contacted a biographer, who denied that the Tiger Lady had ever lived at the Chelsea Hotel, claiming instead that the margay incident had taken place in another building in the Chelsea neighborhood. But we here at the Chelsea know better: in addition to the confirmation of the old rumors, what other building in Manhattan would allow ferocious jungle cats to range freely through its halls?!
Theodora died on January 5 of this year in North Carolina, where, reportedly, she had had to give up raising chickens because they kept getting eaten by coyotes. (Yeah, I know, North Carolina doesn’t seem like a real big coyote state: no word on whether or not she was raising the coyotes herself.) -- Ed Hamilton
Poet D
ylan Thomas' house in Wales has been beseiged by raving real estate vultures hell-bent on laying waste to the historic structure in a psychotic frenzy of greed that can be satisfied only when they have squeezed every last farthing from the rubble strown lot upon which not one single-celled organism is suffered to draw breath and not one red brick is allowed to rest upon another. Oh, wait, that's the Chelsea. But Thomas' house is up for auction, I meant to say.
We are sad to learn of the passing of the great Jewish writer Jakov Lind, who, according to his obituary in the New York Sun (March 9, 07) lived at the Chelsea for 40 years, though he wisely spent part of his time in London and Spain. There are photos of Lind in both the Claudio Edinger book, Chelsea Hotel and the Rita Barros book, Chelsea Hotel: Fifteen Years. Lind is best known for his novels, Soul of Wood and Landscape in Concrete, although, as we learn from the Edinger book, he was also a painter and an anarchist. -- Ed Hamilton
French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard died earlier this week. Rita Barros, who photographed Baudrillard and his 
wife, for her book, 15 Years: Chelsea Hotel, recalls her excitement at meeting Baudrillard in his Paris studio and preparing dinner for him here at the Chelsea. We're happy to learn that he didn't like "The Matrix," feeling that the film makers had misunderstood his ideas. We just thought it was boring.
When I got to Paris on assignment to photograph Jean Baudrillard I was quite excited. I could finally discuss or at least ask him some questions that he had raised with books like Simulacra and Simulations. It was a warm afternoon and I vividly remember his small studio, books piled all over the place. He opened the door with a wide smile and announced that he was ready for the real image of himself. Time was short and the conversation got postponed to a later date.
Years later he called to say he was staying at the Chelsea so I made dinner for him, his wife and João Pedro a Portuguese common friend. He was very disappointed with the treatment of his ideas in the film “The Matrix” and wanted nothing to do with the whole hysteria.
The next trip to New York I got to photograph him in the hotel. He loved to stay here, better than a fancy place without a soul. “This hotel is a vanishing point of New York” he told me.
And now Baudrillard has vanished but his photo remains, a sign of the real for the real itself…..
Rita Barros
“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself” Jean Baudrillard
On the anniversary of his death, here's a rockin' tribute of sorts, by indie band, My Penis, to everybody's favorite drunken poet, Charles Bukowski.
Bukowski, as we've mentioned before, wasn't that impressed by his stay at the Chelsea. He didn't think it was much, but he figured maybe that was its charm. This from the man who checked into the hotel in just his socks because he got so drunk that he left his shoes on the plane.
Here, Bukowski reads his poem, "The Genuis of the Crowd"
Speaking of Bukowski, here's a shameless plug for a friend's book. Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press, written by Jeff Weddle and due out in the Summer, traces the development of Loujon which was one of the first presses to print Bukowski's work. Copies of some of the letters that Bukowski sent to Lou and Jon from 1964 - 1972 are available online and make for interesting reading.
Recently, Google made it easier for users to search through 7 million patents dating back to 1776. If your into that sort of thing here's what you might find: Samuel Clemens patent for improvement in scrapbooks, filed June 24, 1873. So, now we know, Mark Twain is responsible for the "self-pasting" scrapbook.
If you are really industrious you can come up with a whole list of patents filed by former Hotel Chelsea residents and guests. Didn't Arthur C. Clarke invent something?
Here's a gift suggestion for the Ramone fan on your gift list. T
oday is the final day that you can bid on Dee Dee Ramone's unpublished autobiography manuscript. The last time I checked the high bid was $659.57.
I guess the bids are not going to reach the same level ($155,401) as that 1966 acetate album by Nico and the Velvet Underground, which as it turns out was fake. The bid, not the album.
Thanks for the American Dream....
Novelist Susan Swan visited the Chelsea last summer, staying in Thomas Wolfe's old room (you remember Thomas: he wrote "You Can't Go Home Again" in room 
829). She considers Wolfe a literary father-figure, and, as you can see from the following story, her stay at the Chelsea was for her a profoundly spiritual experience.
First Installment:
Thomas Wolfe doesn’t knock. Why bother? He’s home. I hear his tubercular cough as he lets himself in. He floats through the wood and on down the curving vestibule until he is right where he wanted to be. Of course I scream and clutch the sheets to my chest. "It’s just me…a shade of my former self" His ghastly head inclines back and forth and I realize he is laughing at his own joke. Then he says: "Something feels amiss." I follow his eyes and say, "They divided your rooms in two. A musician lives in the other half. But I’ve got the best section. See? The fireplace still works." "Nothing like a fire." He stares at the silent blaze of my log. "Only those synthetic things give me the willies."
My Feet Hit The Floor with a Smack
I was raised to be the master of any social occasion. My feet hit the floor with a smack. Still clutching my sheets, I throw him a groggy stare: "Do you want a Scotch?" Again in the darksomeness, the silvery head moves back and forth: Yesssss.
Extending My Hospitality
I come back with a drink tray, the ice cubes in the tall glasses, sloshing and jangling. "You’re awfully quiet," I say. "Please talk--it makes me uncomfortable when people stare." He accepts his glass politely and sits down in an armchair by the fire. I seat myself on a nearby stool. "Forgive me," he says in a very faint voice. He has been gaping at me, trying to decide if he finds me attractive.
Thomas Wolfe on Me
He thinks the distracted look on my face suggests the abstracted devotion of a young nun. He can imagine a cowl draping my head. It’s a very literary way of looking at me, as you might well imagine.
A Shade of his Former Self
Frankly, Thomas Wolfe hasn’t had much success lately with his own writing. Did he mention that? He can’t concentrate long enough to start the flow. It takes all his energy just to hold himself together. Increasingly, he feels like someone lightened of every tissue and synapse.
Faded Letters
Once his writing was synonymous with American prose. But today his books are an "undergraduate indulgence." He read that phrase somewhere and God, it stung. Today his name is so faded on the mattering map of American literature that it is no bigger than the bottom row on an ophthalmologist’s chart--the tiny letters that only those with perfect vision can see. Thomas Wolfe, not Tom, I say to young friends who haven’t read his novels.
His Size Thirteen Shoes
"Somebody came here last week and took away your shoes," I tell him. "They had to be yours. Size thirteen--a fan, I think." He sighs, the sound of his gratitude like a whoosh of traffic noise.
I, Too, Worry about my Reputation in American Letters
I, too, worry about my reputation in American letters. Especially now that my book had been savaged in the Times. Following a silence of 15 years, I had brought forth a new work and heard it dismissed as "inconsequential, plodding novel & neither original nor memorable. " Brittle & overwhelmingly self-pitying " had been some of the dismaying phrases. "At least they didn’t say I couldn’t write my way of a paper bag." Thomas Wolfe replies. "The only thing a writer needs to concern himself with is staying open to experience. If we aren’t vulnerable we can’t write."
Thomas Wolfe on the Writing Life
No one thinks about what happens to writers after they lose the attention of their public do they? Writers either peak early or last too long. And who, more than Thomas Wolfe, dares to argue? He was raised to win but now he says losing is the art writers need to master.
Chelsea Hospitality
When Thomas Wolfe was a resident, Purdell Kennedy, the bell captain, was his best friend. Purdell would bring him free coffee with a dab of Scotch every morning and say, "A little hair of the dog, boy?" Poor Purdell, dead and gone so long now. He loves the hotel’s façade of rufous brick--its spidery balustrades and Victorian gables. How many nights did he cover the floor of his suite with manuscript pages? And sweat-stained shirts, fortified by raw gin? One thousand four hundred and eighty? Or was it only six hundred and two? And now he’s back to finish his manuscript.
His Last Masterpiece
He left the Chelsea in the summer of 39, planning to return to put the final touches on his last masterpiece. Instead he fell ill in Baltimore from acute pulmonary tuberculosis. To give him relief, the doctor bored a hole into his skull and fluid had spurted three feet into the air. Those were his biographer’s very words. He couldn’t remember what went on in the operating room. Just his brother remarking, "You’re going to be fine, boy." "I hope so, Fred," he’d replied. And look what happened!
Thomas Wolfe on His Critics
I can still remember every word of my last review. …Placental material--long, whirling discharges of words unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction & raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber…" Thomas Wolfe stops. He realizes he is getting distraught. And once he starts, he can’t help himself. He can recall every word. They all do. We all, he corrects himself. "If only that critic could hear me now! I don’t have a clue how I lost my biblical cadences," he says. "But after all these years I am turning into a modernist like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. They were enemies of mine, you know."
"Time transforms everyone," I reply. "No reason to think you will be any different."
Thomas Wolfe Plans to Fix the Critics
My next book will reassert my old prominence. It’s going to be a living diaogical--is that the right term? I shake my head. "Dialogical."…a living dialogical mural that fictionalizes the life of every man and woman in Eastern America. I will go back to my old Biblical cadences and put in every beauteous cranny of the world I love. Do you believe me? I put up my hand in protest. "I think you should know that I read one of your old journals last night and it made me cry." I’m sorry."Look, no need to be modest with me. I know the passage off by heart." I begin to quote: ‘No one owes the writer anything for writing…he may regret the stupidity or ignorance that keeps his work unknown, but he must accept it as one of the possible conditions under which he must work.’
Ah, Now He remembered
Ah, now he remembered. He wrote those words as a young man. When he didn’t know better. I see his eyes move to his old desk. Surely, now that I have welcomed him so hospitably, he can get on with his writing. At least, that’s what I think he’s thinking. "Don’t you want to hear the rest?" I ask aware his attention is straying."Oh god, no," he says. I give him a sympathetic look. "You know, I think you need to hear it. I take another gulp of her Scotch: "’No one asked the writer to write…let him expect nothing’”. My voice quivers slightly over the word nothing and then I compose myself. He extends his silvery hand for another Scotch and says, "Thank God, I am still a sentient being in some respects at least." (to be continued next halloween)
Susan Swan
Susan Swan is a novelist, journalist and one of York University's most prestigious public intellectuals. She is the author of six books of fiction including The Wives of Bath, a finalist for Ontario's Trillium and the Guardian Fiction Award in the UK.
Her most recent novel, What Casanova Told Me, was nominated for the 2004 regional Commonwealth Prize and as a Globe and Mail, Now Magazine and Calgary Herald best book for 2004. (more information on the reception to that novel can be found here)
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