Crazy Stable

Collage by students of the Brooklyn Museum Studio Art Program, 2006

The Stablemistress will be taking a break from blogging, and from the Stable, this week, so turn for solace to some newly renovated links at left to the infamous Bloggers of Brooklyn. Wouldn't my dear Walt have relished the blogosphere? I mean, can you imagine the number of posts the old darling could have cranked out in a week? And at least a third of them would have been at least this good:

To-day, I should say—defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions—an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours—fully aware of all that can be said on the other side—I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken—the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords—namely, Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which the future shall join in one city—city of superb democracy, amid superb surroundings.

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days: Human and Heroic New York