Got this quick note from Josh Millstein at the Community Bookstore, organizer of many of their incredibly interesting sounding book clubs. Don’t let the names scare you, you don’t need an MA or be a member of the MLA to understand what’s going on. These groups are for EVERYONE.

This is just a quick reminder that the MODERNIST LITERATURE BOOK CLUB will be meeting next Wednesday, Nov. 28th, at 7:30pm. If you haven’t picked up a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, now’s your chance! Stop in and pick up a copy from the store today, just in time to read it over the holiday.

We love new faces, so don’t be afraid to come out! Hope all is well.

Thanks for your time,
Josh Milstein
Community Bookstore

Got an email this morning from Erin McHugh, author of The Portable Queer. There’s a reading on November 27th

I was pointed your way — or towards Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn — by Samantha, the events person at the Barnes & Noble on Park Slope. I’m reading there on Tuesday night, November 27, at 7:30 p.m. and when I told her I had few friends in the neighborhood, her first words were, “Get on the blog, babe!”

So let me tell you just a bit about my books, THE PORTABLE QUEER, and perhaps you’ll toss in a mention of my B&N reading — I would be most grateful. In fact, they’ll be appearing in th Holiday Gift Guide in TimeOutNewYork this week, so they’re getting some great attention.

THE PORTABLE QUEER is a trio of smart gay gift books: one is a book of quotes, one vignettes of gay history, and the third full of biographical sketches. They’re $12.95 each, and you can take a look at them on Amazon (they recently reached #1 in the category’s hot new releases) or bn.com in all their glory. I was featured on Larry Flick’s show on Sirius Radio the other morning, too, for those of our friends who were driving around looking for a parking space!

EDGEnewyork.com, a terrific gay site, called them “A great choice for the upcoming holiday season” in a fabulous review last week:

Somewhat postcard sized with brightly colored covers sporting what could easily become the new queer crest (think Hogwarts!), The Portable Queer is a collection of very concise coffee table (or pocket, or Christmas stockings) books that contains a clever and didactic compilation of data that you should already know but of course don’t because you have been too busy “reading” PerezHilton.com.

The series, put together by Erin McHugh, balances a great deal of information both from the annals of history and from the more mundane stocks of pop culture, you know, all the stuff we gays are made of. Many of the phrases or characters presented here you have probably already run across at some point of your varying-degree of rainbow colored life, but it is great to have our own version of Cliff notes in such a fun, bite-size way.

McHugh creates the perfect middle ground for both the bookworm and the tabloid fan, with all the variations of queer readers in between, but the biggest merit of The Portable Queer is how useful it can be to introduce friends and foes, fag hags and gay bashers to queer culture.

I love getting these BREAKING NEWS emails from the Brooklyn Paper. It’s very cool. Yesterday they dug into the story of the Coney Island information meeting that was cancelled. Here’s an excerpt from Adam F. Hutton’s piece, which focuses on Senator Carl Kruger of Bensonhurt. Read more, of course, at the BP.

A state senator who opposes Mayor Bloomberg’s Coney Island redevelopment plan claimed victory at the first public hearing on the proposal Monday night, boasting that he was able to shut down the meeting by bussing in hundreds of people to the event.

“Score one for the good guys,” state Sen. Carl Kruger (D–Bensonhurst) shouted to his supporters after the Coney Island Development Corporation hastily canceled the meeting. “We won the ground war. You made a point tonight, and that is that Bloomberg isn’t going to push his Manhattan plans on Brooklyn without hearing from Brighton Beach, Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay.”

More than 150 people had RSVP’d to attend the scheduled meeting at Coney Island Hospital, where officials from the City Hall-run CIDC planned to show off Bloomberg’s proposal to residents for the first time.

But Kruger was ready. Days before the meeting, he said Bloomberg’s vision was similar to “many failed plans” to revitalize Coney Island considered over the last 50 years and predicted it was “headed for the file cabinet.”

He also raised the central question many are wondering about the mayor’s proposal: How much will it cost to buy out developer Joe Sitt, whose Thor Equities has spent somewhere between $100 and $200 million to buy land in Coney’s amusement zone — land that the mayor now wants to buy, rezone as parkland, and have an outside theme park operator develop as an all-year attraction.

The Park Slope 100 will be rolled out on December 6th. So if you have any nominees, send them in now. This year’s list has a different feel from last year’s.

Last year’s was foundational. It had all the "obvious" choices—ZuZu’s Petals, David Yassky, the Dinnersteins, Paul Auster, Chris Altman, Debbie Almontasser, Al Di La, Pastor Meeter, Rabbi Bachman, Susan Fox, Kim Maier, Daniel McEnney, Daniel Goldstein, etc. —with some interesting "unknowns" thrown in for good measure.

Last year, I called the list a highly opinionated, inherently flawed, subjective, obviously controversial list of talented, energetic, ambitious, creative
individuals with vision in the Greater Park Slope area who reach
outward toward the larger community and the world to lead, to help, to create, to teach, to
improve, to enhance, to inform, to network, to make change.

The people chosen for last year’s list were community
activists, entrepreneurs, volunteers, spiritual leaders, publishers,
bloggers, leaders of organizations, social workers, therapists,
artists, writers,
educators, politicians, chefs and restaurant owners and whatever else
I’ve left out.

This year’s list is just as far reaching and just as interesting. To me, it feels more topical—many of the people on the list have been mentioned on OTBKB.

Last year’s list may have included a disproportionate number of people connected with education and/or parenting. Last year, there were a lot of bloggers, activists, and politicians.

When all is said and done, I don’t know how it will play out but I know it’s going to be a great list with great people and great stories.  If you have nominees please send them in ASAP.

Best of all, the Park Slope 100 now has a spiffy logo designed by Elizabeth Reagh of Good Form Design.

It’s always an honor to have Richard Grayson’s columns on OTBKB. An English and composition instructor in numerous colleges around the city, Grayson is author of "With Hitler in New York" and "I Brake for Delmore Schwartz," as well as other books.

This column is about the annual celebration of Dutch culture in New York City. He wrote me, referring to my recent column about cleaning out the basement, "Of course you’ve been ‘sweeping memories away’ but we need to hold on to some stuff, too, I hope."

Sunday was the last day of “5 Dutch Days, 5 Boroughs” – the  annual celebration of Dutch culture in New York City.  The day’s events included a morning service at the Old First Reformed Church on Carroll Street and Seventh Avenue as done in its congregation 300 years ago, using the Netherlands Liturgy of 1619, and an afternoon family exhibit at the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House in Ridgewood to show kids what life was like for young people in the early years of the city.

Four centuries ago, of course, Brooklyn was part of the great Dutch commercial world empire, but traces of Dutch Brooklyn have all but vanished in my lifetime along with the dirt roads like Mill Lane I used to walk and the wooden planks that preceded sidewalks in my little corner of what had been Nieuw Amersfoort.

When I was born, about 70 Dutch-American farmhouses stood in Brooklyn.  Today only 14 are left.

On Sunday afternoon, I was at the Lefferts Homestead for “Disappearing Dutch Brooklyn – Where Have All the Houses Gone?” — a presentation by anthropologist and archaeologist Christopher Ricciardi, who showed slides from his dig at an old house I know well, the Hendrick I. Lott House on East 36th Street, down the block from my friend Ken Falk’s house in Marine Park not far from where I grew up.

Living in this Dutch Colonial farmhouse from 1720 until 1989, members of the prominent Lott family participated in the Revolutionary War, supported abolition – freeing their slaves as early as 1801 and then hiring them as paid servants – and may have later used the house as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

In 2001 Ricciardi and his colleagues from the Brooklyn College Archaeological Research Center discovered the slave quarters, a windowless, cramped garret room roughly ten feet square.  A tiny space – a closet within a closet, its door hidden behind coat hooks that would have held a curtain of garments – may have been a way station for escaping slaves.

Ricciardi acknowledged that just as many 18th century houses claim that George Washington slept there, most pre-Civil War houses in the North claim to be a stop on the Underground Railroad.

But two different descendants of the Lott family, who didn’t know each other, both remembered the same story when given tours of the old homestead. “They said this was where they kept their runaway slaves,” Ricciardi said.

Although southern Brooklyn Dutch farmers were quite wealthy, Ricciardi noted, apparently they were not materialists like their equally rich counterparts in Manhattan and what is today brownstone Brooklyn, who had more opulent homes.

The dig proved that the Lotts lived frugally, with plain dishes, glasses and pipes and no fancy materials in the construction of their house.

The Lott House is one of four Brooklyn sites owned by the Historic House Trust of New York City, along with the Lefferts Historic House Museum (c. 1783), the Old Stone House (1699), and the oldest structure in New York City, one I can recall my first girlfriend’s mother, an East Flatbush community planning board member, fighting to save in the late 1960s: the original portion of the Pieter Classen Wyckoff House on Clarendon Road and East 58th Street, which dates from 1652.
The Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum now looks a lot better than the old dump with a caved-in roof sporting a crooked TV antenna I remember from that day in August 1970, when Mayor Lindsay presided over a ceremony marking the start of its restoration.

In a fascinating Q&A session following his presentation, Chris Ricciardi said that it’s hard to get New Yorkers interested in southern Brooklyn’s old Dutch farmhouses because they’re a bit out of the way. But, he concluded, it’s important to respect our borough’s past and preserve our common heritage.

Despite the excruciatingly painful treatments that Toby Pannone’s is receiving for the neroblastoma, a relatively rare and fierce cancer that has taken over his body, Toby is still able to enjoy the few days when he is not in the hospital. Recently he enjoyed time in Prospect Park and at the Brookyn Children’s Museum.

He and his parents, Mooki and Stephen are managing to stay strong and hopeful despite the living hell that they inhabit. Mooki’s writes, "Living with neuroblastoma is so singular, isolating and overwhelming,
that I feel like my words don’t even come close to describing what is
really going on in Toby’s life."

Recently Toby started a painful—but potentially helpful—treatment called 3F8, which is described here by Toby’s mom, Mooki on the family’s blog.

3F8 is mouse derived monoclonal antibody that is injected into the
bloodstream where it finds neuroblastoma cells, attaches to them and
then signals the patient’s own white blood cells to kill the
neuroblastoma. The white cells are boosted into “killer” cells through
daily injections of GM-CSF. With time, as Toby’s own immune system
recovers from chemo and becomes stronger, the 3F8 treatments may help
his body learn to fight tumors on its own. The aim is to give repeated
3F8s for up to two years, on a cycle of one week on, two to three weeks
off.

The main side effect of 3F8 is pain because it also attaches to a
marker on nerve cells. And the pain is excruciating. I can barely
describe it. And that’s the real reason why I haven’t been able to
write in two weeks. All I wanted to do by Friday was crawl into a dark,
quiet place, and not relive the experience by putting pain into words

The Written Nerd works at an independent bookstore in New
York City’s SoHo neighborhood and hopes to someday own a bookstore of her own.

TWN loves reading books, talking about books, and "being
where literature hits the streets." She lives in Park Slope with her ALP (Adorably Literate
Partner). She publishes these great Brooklyn Lit Life interviews. Friday, she posted an interview with Edwidge Danticat. Here’s an excerpt. Read the rest at the Written Nerd.

Why do you think Brooklyn has such a
dense population of writers? Is there something particularly literary
about Brooklyn?

Brooklyn
lacks the craziness of having to be all business all the time
publishing wise, plus it offers a community. I think that’s very
appealing to writers.