Gossip Central

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson: Poetry for the New Year

The quiet charm of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, his latest movie, about a poet evoking the time and place of predecessor wordsmiths William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, impresses with vitality, a life force. So much, that two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, Sylvia Miles, quipped, she paid her academy dues just to nominate this work for a Best Picture Oscar: “It’s the best film I’ve ever seen on a creative person.” In a season of noisier films, will academy voters notice this gentle work of art?

Adam Driver stars. Paterson is ensconced in the workaday life of a bus driver in Paterson, picking up his vehicle at the depot, picking up passengers on his route. He enjoys a happy home life with Laura (Golshifteh Farahani obsessed with circles or maybe orbs, and his neighborhood bar where he ties up his dog outside and retreats for a nightly beer, his routines as regular as the movements of the planets. Even his most casual observations, visions realized onscreen in a clever scrawl, recast all in the language of the eternal.

Remembering the Gotham Book Mart

 
“That’s our trouble,” said my friend Roger, “everything used to be something else.” I had just told him about meeting my brothers and their families for the third Chanukah candle, 13 relatives in all, at a glatt kosher restaurant called Taam Tov in the Diamond District, on the very site of the legendary Gotham Book Mart. On November 17, 1986, my book, Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics, one of the first full-scale studies on the iconic beat poet and novelist, was celebrated here. A sign, “Wise Men Fish Here,” marked the spot, a literary emporium on a bejeweled street. The James Joyce Society met here. Among many other book parties, a reissue of Junkie was feted here too, in 1977. Carl Solomon and Patti Smith attended, honoring William S. Burroughs’ work. Poet Allen Ginsberg, who had clerked here back in the day, snapped my picture.