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Letters to The Editor, Week of March 24, 2016

Letters to The Editor, Week of Jan. 3, 2018

Dad, the black Bukowski

To The Editor:

Re “John Farris, bohemian poet who chronicled life on Lower East Side” (obituary, Feb. 11):

As one of John Farris’s lesser-known daughters — that kind of thing can happen when you are the illegitimate child of two ’60s Afro-bohemians consorting through a haze of “lids” of sensimilla — I read Ms. Ferguson’s article with ambivalence.

Ms. Ferguson did a bang-up job of capturing the essence of this, um, “difficult man” who seemed to be a black version of Bukowski. It was amusing to read all of these people’s accounts of this man who sired me, who knew him better than I ever did.

The closest I ever came to meeting John was meeting his daughter Chinyelu “Bibi” Duxbury and her son, which was a lot like being a contestant on Jerry Springer. Stay tuned for that chapter in my up-and-coming memoir, LOL.

My story regarding John is a bit more sad. I grew up longing to meet, know and understand this man, whom my single lesbian mother simultaneously praised, yet while also using me as a proxy to vent her rage against him. I was never sure, though, if it was his absence that made her so mad or if it was the fact that I looked and acted like a female mini-me version of him.

My feelings toward John are thorny because we attempted to reconnect via phone when I was a 20-year-old peepshow “dancer.” His reaction to me was one of revulsion and rejection, which I found to be fantastically hypocritical and outrageous, considering that he was one of my mother’s teachers and a married man upon my conception. My mother’s father — a well-respected blue-collar man with middle-class aspirations and conservative Midwestern Christian values — was so scandalized that he only agreed to assist us if my mother agreed to a ruse that would convince people that she was merely my sister and my granddad was my father!

Twisted, to be sure, but such was the fate of the teenage unwed mom when I was born. My birth angered a lot of folks, but I take a perverse pride in being a homewrecker before I was even born. Perhaps I am like John more than I ever wanted to admit.

Anyway, thank you for this article on this man. I am located in San Francisco and I have many traits of John’s, for better and worse.

Nikki K

 

City wants tax revenue

To The Editor:

Re “Time to look at bigger picture on small businesses” (editorial, March 17):

New York City collects property taxes based on annual rent rolls, residential and commercial. Do you now see why New York City will never change the laws regarding commercial lease renewals?

Barbara Paolucci

 

Selfish NIMBYism

To The Editor:

Re “Fox has his facts all wrong on Pier 57 project” (talking point, by Diana Taylor, March 3):

Setting the record straight is important, and Diana Taylor does an excellent job of doing so. It’s incredibly easy for people to knock down the hard work of those trying valiantly to make Hudson River Park a better, more financially sustainable place for the 17 million-plus users who love it.

But trying to torpedo projects like Pier 57 and block the air rights transfer that will save Pier 40 is selfish NIMBYism that will result in our park being chronically underfunded and costing the community precious resources that we can’t afford to lose.

Peter Braus

 

Yiddish is dead? Feh!

To The Editor:

Re “Formerly of ‘Fiddler,’ Finkel, 93, far from final act” (arts article, March 3):

Interesting piece, but Yiddish is not considered a “dead language”! Endangered, but by no means dead.

Bill Weinberg

 

E-mail letters, not longer than 250 words in length, to news@thevillager.com or fax to 212-229-2790 or mail to The Villager, Letters to the Editor, 1 Metrotech North, 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY, NY 11201. Please include phone number for confirmation purposes. The Villager reserves the right to edit letters for space, grammar, clarity and libel. Anonymous letters will not be published.