Letter from Philadelphia, PA
or the Printed Reef: why print will play a role in the coming movement
We were in Philadelphia from March 24th through April 7th 2025.
Writing this piece has been an act of discovery—I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride!
The Market
I kept returning to the Italian Market on East 9th Street during our two weeks in Philadelphia hoping I’d once again encounter the goat on a leash wearing a diaper who, with his bleating, halted the cars more successfully than any crossing guard I’ve yet crossed. Though I received the caprine blessing but once, each visit to the market twisted my eye-beams and I felt like Donne in love, or like the cardinal’s cloistered votes after they are read aloud in sistine secrecy—my attention pierced and threaded by strands poking out from motley 9th street doors.
Mostly, the motley strands were reams and reams of diffuse printed matter. Philadelphia’s a paper reef in fact, teeming with DIY print. Scaffolding and the reverse of street signs host overlapping stickers—I found the address of a house show and a fellow substacker on the backs of stop signs. The Italian American Herald sits piled on stoops like the kids in my old neighborhood in Manhattan who set off fireworks in the street. Zines spill off coffee shop counters, and flyers poke out from bookstore crates. Here though, unlike in most places we’ve been, the sidewalks occasionally get crowded because people actually stop to read what these streets have to offer.
I suppose it’s spring sun stops passersby—on our first morning in Philadelphia, everywhere, a great reawakening. The sun-side of the street, t-shirt and shorts warm, seems a lilac barrel in which my nose bobs for scent. Kyra and I discover most every museum in Philly is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so we decide to head for East Passyunk Ave, the street along which our dear friend David recommended we stroll.
On our way to Passyunk, before I knew a goat was known to stroll here too, we walk though the Italian Market for the first time, where the fruits and people thrombus, extending beyond the sidewalk—reminds me of New Orleans where the cars seem bashful for disturbing pedestrian reverie. Sausages, saucily, call to us from behind glass, and the mongers all wear telling hats, personalities bottled in brims. Gorgonzola belts and peppers sing. Italian arias waft from a boombox hidden behind a counter. People greet you on the street here as if that hasn’t become novel on every other street in urban America. Sweater stomachs are meant for hand wiping. Curbs are for vegetables, sitting slow, and chatting.
We stop on the market’s first corner to watch a 90-year-old wielding a dazzling hot pink walker turn light to dancing coins, and mount the steps into Anthony’s Coffee and Chocolate House, slowly but with resolve, as if he’d done so every morning for at least twice my lifespan. If he’s the actor on the moment’s stage, we, and the printed matter all around are his audience, peering upon his struggle from the telephone poles, street sign posts, and railings. Stacks of papers slump beside Anthony’s steps—the paper reef’s his stage.
We can’t help but follow the twinkling pink inside for a coffee. The clock above the door bears her gears to us coyly as if she were not presenting her innards for all to see, and more of the papers from out front—the aforementioned Italian American Herald—are splayed with errant coffee droplets across a cafe table. Mr. Pink Walker has settled in to a conversation by the window, and after ordering we settle into our projects—Kyra’s reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, and I begin, ostensibly, to write—recalling reaching Lake Erie while we were in Cleveland—but really, I’m listening to Mr. Pink Walker tell his much younger but still old companion a story it becomes clear his companion has heard many times before. Mr. Pink Walker keeps trailing off and staring, as if in absent minded ecstasy, up at the exposed gears of the clock. His friend waits for a moment—it almost seems that he relishes these brief lacunae, a chance to sneak in a daydream of his own—before prodding Mr. Pink Walker gently, “you were just about to say how Cohen . . .”
Together they construct the older man’s memory of New York half a lifetime ago where “Cohen made $40 million just last week”—but actually, the younger man nudges, “it was 40 years ago.”
I am roused from my eavesdropping when an elderly woman who seems to know all the people behind the counter inclines her nose towards Kyra’s book. “That must be good,” she says pointing at Martyr! “You’ve been completely engrossed.” Kyra smiles, agrees, recommends. For a moment, she chats with the woman. Then the woman and the two old men head back into the sun and wend slowly—she, North, the men South. We watch them merge with the bustle and sit with our coffee and our fresh found silence.
3.5%
The next day, as I write of Mr. Pink Walker in my black notebook, the green one’s predecessor and successor too,1 I am clutching another local publication. This one, more DIY than the Italian American Herald, harkens back to Philadelphia’s pamphlet printing prime. We’re sitting in The Last Drop, a coffee shop unafraid of Lou Reed’s raspier side, which Kay, who plays Juliet’s nurse recommended. Across the pamphlet’s top, next to a sigil ribbon wrapping a printed Liberty Bell which reads The Philadelphia Liberator, a Dozen Egg Index inscribed in the paper’s left ear documents the prevailing oological obsession. I’m a fish on the reef caught by the pamphlet’s first headline, “We the 3.5%: The Hidden Secret to a Successful Revolution.”
I finish a first draft of my thoughts about the Italian Market and, pleasantly depleted by the act of writing, pull the Liberator close, hoping I might really discover the key to making meaningful change in our country. And, the research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan which the article details, does not disappoint.
Chenoweth and Stephan found, in studies conducted between 2006 and 2008, and again in 2012, that it is likely that nonviolence and 12 million people in the US really could bring about a different sort of government here. Globally, between 1900 and 2006 all successful revolutions have had two things in common. 53% of them were nonviolent. And of those nonviolent revolutions, 100%, or all, which engaged 3.5% of the population—engaged, that is, says Chenoweth, in an active and sustained way—were successful. All big enough nonviolent revolutions in the twentieth century worked. Why not here, now, too?
There are roughly 341.8 million people living in the United States today. Three and a half percent of that translates to roughly 12 million people sustaining active and peaceful participation in a clearly defined movement. Or in Chenoweth’s words, we’ll need both a “large and diverse participation that’s sustained,” and “campaigns [that] have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.”
What would a movement like that look like? What would its more than protest methods be? What would it demand? And how might we bring about its rise? I carried these questions with me, and spurred on by some inkling that collecting all this physical print held an answer, to better inquire within their pages, I spread my findings in an arch before me like a fan pulled from kimono’s slips, on the wooden table by the stage door of the Academy of Music. I placed my notebook in which I’ve been churning thoughts, last, centrally, as my printed arch’s capstone.
The inkling becomes clearer when all this print I’ve collected begins to facilitate encounter. As I sit pondering, as Mark Fisher puts it, what if we held a protest and everyone came? another Mark, one of the fellows who oversees the stage door, comes by in a quiet moment to ask what I’m writing. We get to chatting and, as I share some of what I’ve learned so far about the history of printing in Philadelphia, Mark shares with me that he once gave historical tours of the city. I mention a pamphlet, printed here in the 1790s, that I’d been reading and he then, with great excitement, gives me on-foot directions—suppose I seem like I’ll actually go romping!—to the potter’s field related to the text—more on that later!
This happens again the next week, only this time, I am the printer, and in my hand I hold my brayer rolled with ink. My most recent linocut, to protect the table, is placed neatly on a slab I cut out of a merch box, and I’m about to test how it shows up on cardboard. Jack, the kilt clad house manager, bounces by just when brayer and arm are suspended and stops to take in my operation. They smile, ask what I’m making, and we get to talking. Some hours later I find Jack and give them a cardboard print from this stage door batch. We nod, both pleased with how they turned out.
The next day, our acquaintance having been forged by printing, and curiosity, Jack and I discover that we know someone in common through Jack’s deep circus connections and my tenuous ones. When Jack learns that I am interested in learning and writing about places that once functioned differently, they point me to the Cherry Street Pier which was a water treatment plant, and now hosts artist’s studios and exhibitions. Kyra and I, following Jack’s cairn, make for the Pier on our last night in Philadelphia. It’s in the shadow of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, and just so happens to be quite close to the potter’s field cairn Mark planted earlier. The exhibition inside is called Eggy. At once, I feel a kinship with the work for eggy is what my mom calls my fried egg tattoo. We pause to laugh in front of video of actors in a blackbox practicing seggsual healing as Marvin Gaye wanders into our ears.
Time and again, print draws in the curious. Is it the allure of paper? its mystique? which magnetizes people in proximity to ink? Printing, we are, I suppose, as close as we’ll come to practicing alchemy—turning wet pulp and fiber to ink stained permanence, and how?
Part of the magic of print resides in its physicality. We send our energy into a physical thing which is fully in the space with us. Crocheting in a public space, reading a physical text, painting on a canvas, laying dominoes in the square—all broadcast “I’m still in this space” though my attention presently is with that which I hold in my hands.
In our heads-down, phones-up modernity, a person out in public interacting with real paper, or rolling ink over a stamp, signals approachability. People have always been fascinated with alchemy. Unlike the blankness of a screen, shielded by custom from the prying eyes of strangers—most people would step back aghast if you admitted you were reading their computer screen over their shoulder, no?—physical print offers the people sharing space with us a clue as to our person, our personality. One doesn’t need to know what you are writing in a journal to have discovered that you share a mutual interest in journaling, to discern you share common ground more than just your current physical proximity.
Engrossed in physical print—Martyr!—as she sips a coffee in the Italian Market, Kyra encounters. A curious would-be bookfellow, who seems she really would take up a tome at the exhortation of a stranger fully divested from distraction, engages Kyra in conversation.
Engrossed in printing, I encounter—Mark, urban historian, and Jack, curious aerialist who feels like a friend-to-be if ever I should call Philadelphia home.
Because I had before me a printed copy of The Philadelphia Liberator which I could physically hand to Mark, we got to talking on a topic we could both relate to—I handed him a clue about me to bridge any potential gap between our thoughtspaces. Print, in its physicality, when multiplied by public space, facilitates encounter.
We need to facilitate encounter now more than ever. Through encounter will we bridge the gaps between ideologies, and we must unite the spectrum somehow if we are to become 12 million strong. Hints of print in this place’s past, whispering to me from streets flush with didactics, pique my curiosity—much like my printing piqued Jack’s—and so, always one to believe the past might guide the present, I began to look into the history of printing in Philadelphia. The past does not disappoint. The unearthing of print here is the unearthing of revolutionary moments, and movements, which have found kindling at different times. If print could help foment change a century ago, and two centuries ago, perhaps it could do it again, against all odds.
A Brief History of Radical Printing in Philadelphia
In 1747 when the advent of King George’s War with Spain and France brought threat of privateering up the Delaware River to the city, Ben Franklin “took action by writing and then printing and distributing a pamphlet entitled Plain Truth in which he proposed to bypass the recalcitrant Quaker assembly”2 which in its pacifism had consistently refused to institute a colonial militia for the defense of the city.
Franklin appealed to the working people of Philadelphia along explicitly class conscious lines. He signed his pamphlet “A TRADESMAN of Philadelphia,” and warned the “unhappily circumstanced . . . middling People, the Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Farmers of this Province and City!” that unlike the Rich for whom “the Means of speedy Flight are ready in their Hands” the People “cannot all fly with our Families” when the chaos of War comes.3
Plain Truth successfully incited a small rebellion. The largely Quaker assembly allowed for small militias to form in Philadelphia under the control of various “middling People” as Ben Franklin had wanted. Hatters, carpenters, upholsterers, and other laborers without wealth found themselves at the heads of companies of 100 or more men. That bears repeating—because of the ideas circulated in Franklin’s pamphlet, the pacifist Quaker assembly allowed for small militias to form. Print here hastened the organizing of the “middling People” into a polity which could not be ignored, into the beginnings of a community with a voice sounding in concert. The pamphlet was another brick in the path towards Revolution.
It wasn’t just poor and middle class white people mobilizing via the printed word though. With writing in print as far back as 1794 “the black community inoculate[d] itself against racism.” When yellow fever struck the city in 1793, white doctors unsurprisingly declared black people “innately immune” allowing city officials to draft Afro-Philadelphians into dangerously exposing roles as gravediggers and nurses while white Philadelphians deserted the city in droves to avoid the epidemic. And then when the fever lifted and the white people returned, rumors began spreading that black people had looted the homes of the dead in the absence of the whites.
So in 1794 Afro-Philadelphians Absalom Jones and Richard Allen published the pamphlet Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Epidemic in Philadelphia—this is the aforementioned pamphlet Mark and I discussed at the table before the stage door—to refute these deadly rumors. Jones and Allen, according to scholar Joanna Brooks, constructed a “counterpublic” through their printing efforts which celebrated the heroics of black people in the city faithfully performing their forced duties as gravediggers and nurses for the larger public betterment while sustaining losses from fever to which Jones and Allen showed clearly the black community was not “innately immune.”4 Far from stealing from the homes of whites, Jones and Allen showed that the people of color who buried the dead actually ended up paying out of their own pockets to cover all the associated costs of removal and burial.
In July of the same year that he and Jones published their Narrative, in January, Richard Allen, building on the momentum gained from constructing this printed “counterpublic,” founded Bethel A.M.E. Church, one of the two oldest black churches in Philadelphia.5 Print publishing and physical space devoted to the building of community go hand in hand. When people read in print their views expanded on or validated, they begin to feel as if they are in community already with those others out there reading too—a physical space to meet is the logical extension of the community implied by being a reader of pamphlets. I imagine that Allen and Jones’ pamphlet helped some marginalized black Philadelphians feel that they were not alone holding their isolation and grieving their loved ones who had fallen from fever. The church probably felt like a natural extension of the space the pamphlet began opening.
The church, opened when the free black community of Philadelphia was most needing a place of refuge, would go on to be a spot for organizing in the larger fight for abolition. In the summer of 1847, this same church that Allen founded would host Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison midst their westward journey to Ohio. To a large assembled crowd Douglass intoned,
“I regard every Slaveholder as a manstealer—the vilest of sinners, and all his professions of humanity and religion I throw to the winds. We have it in our power to rouse the church to its duty. Let us pass such resolutions and adopt such addresses as the occasion demands and as we can adopt, and publish them and the church will be roused. We should brand as the enemies of God and man every church and minister, that supports or apologizes for Slavery, and regard them and speak of them, as we would were it piracy they were supporting.”6
By the time Douglass had finished, the crowd had been in tears and had laughed heartily, and when he sat they applauded “long and loud.” He answered their “almost extravagant expectations” with passion, intensity, his “keenest satire,” and his “sparkling wit.” That Douglass, before a large crowd, could call into question the moral legitimacy of white churches in the final push leading to the abolition of slavery was surely in some small way enabled by the truths Richard Allen and Absalom Jones printed for their community while giving it physical space over fifty years before.
One group that met in the church in the years before Douglass ascended its soapbox advocated for something more than protests in order to rid the country of the scourge of slavery. As I learned of them and their movement, I began to think that their tactics could satisfy Chenoweth’s present call for diverse strategies beyond protest.
In 1830, seventeen years before Douglass took to the pulpit of Bethel A.M.E., a group known as the Colored Free Produce Society held its first meeting in the same room Douglass would later command. The group was building on threads that had started in Philadelphia, in print, as early as 1811.
In that year the Philadelphia minister Elias Hicks published a pamphlet, Observations on the Slavery of Africans and Their Descendents, which argued that consumers in the north were feeding slavery “which would, of course, stop as soon as they withdrew their support.” Hicks, in his sermons, went on to argue passionately for free-produce, or only buying that which was produced by non-slave labor. Hicks was not the only voice in Philadelphia printing in favor of free-produce—many of the loudest coming out of Philadelphia in the 1820s and 1830s were women’s and they went further than Hicks. Not only did they argue for a widespread boycott of all goods made with slave labor, they also called for the immediate and unqualified abolition of slavery, which hard as it is to believe now, was considered very radical at the time.
In England, in 1824, a decade before William Lloyd Garrison came to his senses and renounced his previous support for gradual abolition, Elizabeth Heyrick published Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, which was immediately reprinted for the first time in North America here, in Philadelphia. It gained a following, and because of continued demand, was reprinted a decade later in 1836, once again, in Philadelphia. Heyrick insisted that a total boycott was necessary because “Reason and eloquence, persuasion and argument have been powerfully exerted ... to little purpose.”’ Heyrick made plain for northern abolitionists that ““when there is no longer a market for the productions of slave labour, then, and not till then, will the slaves be emancipated.”7 The subheading of Heyrick’s pamphlet is telling—The Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of Slavery. Heyrick recognized close to two hundred years ago that strain which Chenoweth touches on in her research now—if a mass movement is to be successful, it must be nonviolent because only then will the numbers of people necessary to inflict change emerge. People can dedicate themselves to a nonviolent cause; it’s not asking too much. People want to fight injustice—it’s just that not everyone is willing to die to do so. Free-Produce provided tentative abolitionists with another path, one more broadly actionable than violence, and thus one that could spread and grow. We need another such path today.
In February of 1831, soon after they met in Richard Allen’s church, the Colored Free Produce Society built on Heyrick’s success in Philadelphia and connected the sin of the consumer with the sin of the slaveholder, proclaiming in Benjamin Lundy’s paper The Genius of Universal Emancipation—which was printed in Philadelphia for many years—that “every individual who uses the produce of slave labor encourages the slave-holder, becomes also a participator in his wickedness.”8
Soon mainstream white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison were calling for the same boycott that Elizabeth Heyrick, and Elias Hicks, and the Colored Free Produce Society were demanding. That is the sort of cross denominational appeal that a movement which could draw 12 million supporters would need. Which returns me to my questions—What would a movement like that look like now? What would its more than protest methods be? What would it demand? And how might we bring about its rise?
General Strike?
Later in the week, while standing in the crowd of the Hands Off protest that filled the field before Independence Hall, I saw a sign for a General Strike. I hadn’t seen any rumblings of one before and wondered if this might be the ‘Free-Produce’ of our time.
But then I went to the page currently set up and found both that General Strike US does not list any unions as partners, and has a list of demands so long as to frighten away the tentative. Clearly there is much work to be done—a movement like this which does not involve the unions of this country is a joke and needs to reevaluate its priorities.
On the issue of demands—there is a reason Bernie Sanders is currently drawing the largest crowds that have ever assembled for a political speaker in US history—“In Nampa, Idaho, we had twelve thousand, in the most conservative state in America,” Bernie said to Evan Osnos for a recent New Yorker article—his talking points have not changed since he was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont 35 years ago. He does not get distracted by all the cultural issues that polarize this country. As unfortunate as it may sound, the Democratic Party has forsaken working people of all ideological bents and if we are to build a new Free-Produce we must, for now, stop talking (not caring, just talking) about gun violence, and climate change, and abortion.
We must speak only of the overriding and paramount concern which faces this country now and which can unite disparate swaths of the political spectrum—the extreme concentration of wealth in this country. The tax lawyer Bob Lord, an expert if ever there was one, has said that if the present trend is allowed to continue, over the next forty years around 19 people will increase their share of the nation’s wealth from 1.8% to 18%. 19 people will own 18% of all wealth in the US. And that is just the top .00001%! The rest of the 1% will also still own more than the exorbitant amount they already own. This is what we need to be talking about—unceasingly. This is the issue that can unite the working people of this country, whether they live in Idaho or California, Arkansas or Massachusetts. When Ben Franklin took on the Quaker Assembly with Plain Truth he appealed to the working people of Philadelphia strictly along class lines. We must do the same now.
If ever a city were still brimming with the residue of a craft, Philadelphia rattles with the jangling movable type of the Leather Aproned Printer’s calling. The day before the Hands Off protest, I was bopping around the old city with my friend Austin, who had popped up to visit us from Baltimore for a few delightful days, when we happened across the printing house that the National Park Service runs out of Ben Franklin’s grandson’s former abode. It was as I watched one of my favorite park rangers I have yet met print a sample of Ben Franklin’s pre-war title pages that I reflected on what role printed matter might have in bringing about the rise of a new ‘Free-Produce’ movement.
After peering into the dug up foundations of Ben Franklin’s house for some moments, Austin & I push open the door to the National Park Service museum of printing, and slip inside. We are greeted by the smell of ink and a wooden Gutenberg printing press in motion. The press, run by my new favorite park ranger whose passion for printing lingers like a perfume in the room, cannot resurrect Ben Franklin or his grandson, but it can reconstruct their motions, and when we set the type we know they set here we are privy, for a moment to the pace of their thought, to what they read, to the great influence these gears and tympans, friskets and fonts9 worked on them.
When we ask more about what she does, the printing park ranger narrates her recent rabbit hole fall through all of Franklin’s letters to see if he spent more on the type, the ink, or the paper. And with the glee of a birder finding a lifer she declares that contrary to popular speculation that the type (sent across the pond in ships from London—he had only one Font available to him, would have had to develop a relationship with a typesetter to get more) was most expensive, it was actually the paper that was Franklin’s greatest expense. “Cotton paper,” she says after asking us to guess, from a touch, what the wet paper she was feeding into the press was made of. “You could send this through the wash. Just like our paper currency today—it’d just get clean.” With the smeared boxing glove dabber that Franklin would have used to apply ink, she blots the rows of letters, and folds the platen holding the paper down, on hinges shining, onto the type. Then she pulls the whole contraption along its rails under the press and turns the screw. As the press comes down on the platen I am half expecting wine to dribble from the edges, for grape sweat to mix with the ink she applied.
Print draws passionate and curious people towards it—I have seen this over and over again here in Philadelphia. If we are to sustain a new ‘Free-Produce’ movement, then those are the type of people such a movement will need filling out its ranks.
I know that what I am proposing—some sort of printed Renaissance—may seem like utter folly in our internet forward world, and to be sure, a commitment to printed matter will not appeal to everyone. This is part of the design however. We do not need everyone, we need a diverse and passionate core of 12 million people. And I think that print could act as a sieve to find those people.
If, as Mark Fisher has suggested, Capitalism does not need our buy-in to thrive, if in fact it hums along in the background of our lives, happy to feed and grow grotesquely on our passivity, then a successful general strike will necessarily need to ignore the borders between work and home as ruthlessly as the capitalism we wish to protest. So many websites run on Amazon servers—streaming at home will undermine a general strike because Amazon will go right on making money outside of working hours off our home entertainment; so many fast fashion companies—so many companies period—do not maintain ethical supply chains—if we continue shopping online during a general strike, the strike is undermined.
The border between what we may buy and what we must avoid is no longer as black and white as that which the Free-Produce movement drew. The commitment necessary will be intense, and it will encompass attention too. If we are to hit the ultra-wealthy in their pocketbooks we will need to ubiquitously withhold our attention as well as our labor. Here is the further part print has to play. To boycott successfully in the present day is to reinvest in the face to face, and print, with all its magical physicality will help 3.5% of us to commit absolutely to the strike.
During my uncovering of printed history, I was struck that at its core the history of printing is embedded within the history of building community. Whether it be Richard Allen and Absalom Jones creating printed space for black Philadelphians to mourn their dead, and then physically starting a church that served as a hub for abolitionist activity for the next half-century, or Franklin slowly swaying the Quaker sensibilities of his community to be more in line with his own radical politics, communities develop and evolve around the printing of the written word. Print in Philadelphia has always worked to change minds and to bring people closer to positions they once thought completely untenable. And in its glorious physicality, print brings people into public space, and causes them to linger there. Print is passed from hand to hand in public spaces, discussed in public spaces, used to paint on the back of in public spaces—the possibilities span unending.
In Philadelphia there is a mutuality forming. Public Space and print media already renew each other here—they always have. They could more. Much of the printing I’ve encountered here has been inside of spaces which require something of you to enter. For print, real ink on paper, to reclaim a space in the zeitgeist and to thus fulfill its promise to in turn help people reclaim public space, print must be brought into the public space we do have available to us. We must bring the zines spilling out of bookstores, the newsletters on coffee shop counters, the linocut hidden behind the stage door, out into the open.
The Singing Fountain
I never saw the goat in the diaper again after my second walk through the Italian Market. It wasn’t until after leaving Philadelphia that I realized a goat on a leash wasn’t really what I was looking for at all. I kept going back to the Italian Market, not to find the goat, but to sit down within the community I had witnessed there. I was seeking to return to the fountain—I learn later it’s called the Singing Fountain—we found on our first morning in Philadelphia, in a triangle where impossibly many streets converge causing cars confusion, allowing a small oasis for people to pop up. I longed to return there midst urban bustle, where no one was on a phone, but children painting, and elders conversing, and a book loved so well its cover had fallen off permeated.
Maybe thirty minutes after we finished our coffees and left Anthony’s, we come across the fountain wedged between Tasker Street, Passyunk Ave, and 11th Street. Free-form crocheted sculptures drape the metal waterworks, for Spring has not yet sprung enough to turn the fountain on.
A mother breast feeding rests her feet where the water will pool—crocheted fountain’s ledge her ottoman. She’s talking with another mother rocking a baby in a stroller. Arc around the fountain towards the two men speaking hushed, Spanish over the chessboard inlay on the triangle’s permanent stone table, and our eyes pass over two girls round 5th grade painting as they crouch in the fountain’s empty tiled basin. They’ve lined up all their blue paint bottles—they only have many different blues—under the central spire of the dried-up watering hole. Smiling, they select new blue paints and squeeze them onto their cardboard canvas, no palette, direct application.
Rove my Hearing! then my Eyes! further round the fountain. An old woman with a red felt brimmed hat pulled low over her eyes so she appears as mostly a talkative mouth storytelling, regales her bench mate wistfully, a younger by some three or four decades man, with admirably unwavering attention, as if his nose is strung through with twine and anchored to the red brim of her felt hat, with a story of her last trip as “an unmarried woman” fifty years ago to Mexico City where a bullfighter brought her onto the pitch after brunch to pat tomorrow’s bull. It was all science teaching in Philly after that—she’s lived around the corner for almost 40 years now she tells him.
He asks her name wondering if he knows her already somehow because he’s lived close by for a good while now too. “Cipollini’s my maiden name” she’s smiling already, “you know what that means? You know what I am?” He smiles too as he shakes his head. “Onions! I’m an onion!” She throws her nose skyward and laughs as warmly as it is today.
Then, as if there were no words left to speak, the woman sings him an old song about fountains, hopes he’ll learn it, for it carries the energy of the place.
I am diverted from my listening by a voice sitting next to Kyra across from where I sit writing in the fountain basin. Bent over, I’m scribbling in green ink. “Am I keeping you from drawing?” The voice asking me nods towards my little bird anatomy blank sheeted notebook adventuresome. The voice belongs to someone who seems on their way to perform with Spinal Tap. Huge hair curls all around a shy and smiling face. They’re reading a book with no cover but a ripped edge and twist a pencil through their fingers, seems a nervous twirl. They point to the fountain, then to where they sit. “This seat is the best for drawing the fountain.” Smile my way.
School’s out now it seems. Some more girls approach the triangle and one sighs as she shrugs her backpack off her shoulders. “The fountain’s busy today,” she says to no one at all, for her friends have continued on, not having noticed she stopped. She looks wildly around, heaves her bag onto her shoulders again, and runs with little steps after the pack.
A man beside me in the fountain has had his eyes closed with his face inclined towards sun, his hands pressed together between his outstretched legs this whole time.
There’s angels cast in bronze on the fountain’s central spire. Someone has wrapped them in crocheted tapestries. They’ve wrapped the little free library, and the benches, and the iron decorative posts dotting the triangle. We are all sitting in a sea of crocheted wrapping paper, colored yarn washes us in the absence of trickling water.
Already by the fountain the people gather, painting, meeting, laughing, writing, drawing, playing chess. We want to be with the people we don’t know in our cities. We want to feel the sun on our faces in the middle of our city grids. Here beside fountains not even flowing, we are happy. Here, in Philadelphia we find some hope. Here, it feels like a new vision of what is possible, for our country, for our world, could form in printed ink.
Let’s toss more print into the mix! Print draws the curious eh? More will linger, more will put down their phones, more will discuss the print they find waiting for them by the fountain, if we can embed print in our public spaces. There was so much printed matter lying around in Ben Franklin’s day that people used it as “bum fodder” when they withdrew to the loo. I want to use pamphlets in the bathroom again! I want print as the fabric of life again. We ought to be reading real print in bus stops, in parks, when it hits us in the face walking down the street blown by the winds. Embed print again in our public spaces, and we will be better able to keep them public. Embed print in public space and more of the passionate, and curious, will flow through the sieve, into the open. We’ll find the 3.5% there, by the fountain, when we are there too, on the reef, in community.
There is utterly no rhyme or reason to which notebook I use when. I simply pick them up based on my vague notions of each notebook’s vibe. So some notebooks begin before other notebooks appear and then are only finished when the latecomer has been filled. One notebook has no orientation whatsoever and has been slowly filling for going on ten years; inside, seventeen year old Jacques draws upside down next to twenty-seven year old Jacques writing about public art in Columbus, Ohio.
Simon P. Newman, “Benjamin Franklin and the Leather-Apron Men: The Politics of Class in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in the Journal of American Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Cambridge University Press: Aug, 2009), 167-168.
Ibid.
Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture: Jan 2005), 83.
Ira V. Brown, “An Antislavery Journey: Garrison and Douglass in Pennsylvania, 1847,”Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Vol 67, No. 4 (Penn State University Press: Autumn 2000), 536.
Ibid, 537.
Carol Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil: Free Produce and Radical Antislavery, 1820-1860” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 27, No. 3 (University of Pennsylvania Press: Fall 2007) 381.
Ibid, 390.
The vocabulary of printing has filled many of my library hours since leaving Philadelphia. I’ve had an obsession with printing coming. I am honestly surprised it took me this long to realize—my own potential, now reified, passion. What is this feeling of discovery, of a new shaft to plumb—a renewal of the purple spark of living, indeterminacy of my everyday leads me to a fresh lexicon, the long breath of a pearl diver before the big one.
Other things I loved:
- The discussion between the old woman and the young man on the park bench. This is great! So much vitality! You render their personalities and their archetypes stunningly! I quite like your character studies.
- The overwhelming sense that the piece itself is a printed reef and that this is part of the design of the structure when looked at from afar.
Things that I struggled with (not inherently bad things)
- The jump in an out of the discussion of a general strike in America. Do you support a general strike? To what end? By the end I have a sense you support a general strike to prevent wealth consolidation—but this comes out of left field and I don’t have a sense of how/why this could work
- How does the printed reef of Philly provide a model for what America should be? (This seems to be one of your main discoveries.)