From the Village Voice article
"Here are 25 New Yorkers Who Really Need Pope Francis to Forgive Them."
I'm reading The Village Voice this morning — orthography buffs will know why I capitalized the "t" in "the" in this sentence and not the previous sentence — because I'd arrived at
"R.I.P. St. Vincent's Hospital" in connection with the story of the white man who settled Brooklyn.
It was where the lowly, the mighty, and the garden-variety zany denizens of downtown were born, cared for, and died. Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Village poet who first proclaimed the lovely light of a candle burned at both ends, was given the hospital's name after it saved her uncle's life. It was where Gregory Corso—the beat poet who "sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra," as Jack Kerouac said—was born in 1930.
St. Vincent's Hospital is the St. Vincent in
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
The white man who settled Brooklyn is the subject of
the post that's sat at the top of this blog overnight and was the subject of conversation between Meade and me as we assembled breakfast this morning. Meade thought it was funny that the article about the man had the correction: "This article initially quoted B.A. as saying he was born in 'Mt. Sinai.' He actually says he was born in St. Vincent's. We regret the error." As if such a trivial error, amidst everything else that happened, could be a subject of serious regret.
I took the position that, in New York City, the difference between Mt. Sinai and St. Vincent is huge. For a man who is adamant about his urban territorial credentials, the difference is intense. Born in St. Vincent's? He may think he's a natural-born hipster. He's 46, so he was born in 1969. That was the year of
the Stonewall riots in the Village, and he was saying "I grew up with Stonewall, I grew up on the laps of drag queens." He also says: "So what I have in this city is ownership. When I look at the concrete I think, oh my blood mixes with the concrete." Blood and concrete ≈ St. Vincent's.
As for St. Vincent himself —
St. Vincent De Paul — he was captured by Barbary pirates in 1605 and sold into slavery. His second master was a
spagyrical physician, and Vincent learned medicine from the Muslims, converted to Islam, and had 3 wives. There's more to that story. He gets back to France and to Christianity, and, obviously, sainthood. [ADDED: The linked Wikipedia article is incredibly confusing, as
discussed in the comments, but, to be brief, the "converted to Islam, and had 3 wives" part isn't about Vincent.]
And Martin Shkreli, the man whose name festers in the post title? Don't you know who he is? His fame, too, lies
in the field of medicine: "Thanks to Martin Shkreli, life-saving drug Daraprim will now cost $750 per pill—up from $13.50. And no one, not even the FDA, can stop him."
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