Volume 56, Number 13 · August 13, 2009
'Love Is Like Park Avenue'
By John Ashbery
I first read Alvin Levin's Love Is Like Park Avenue when I was about fifteen, shortly after it was published in the New Directions 1942 annual.[*] At the time I was beginning to explore contemporary experimental writing, thanks in part to the excellent collection at the Rochester Public Library, an art deco gem still extant on the edge of the city's faded downtown. In fact I was searching not just for modernist writing but sexy writing as well, having already looked into Henry Miller and ignored critical warnings against combing Ulysses for the 'naughty bits.' Levin's narrative provided plenty of those, in graphic accounts of steamy sexual encounters that used such hitherto unprintable words as hard-on, cocksucker, frenching, and come (where were the censors?) in breathless run-on sentences that suggested its author too had read Molly Bloom's soliloquy. The biographical note on Levin mentioned that the text represented about one third of a novel. I waited impatiently for New Directions to publish the complete work.
Feature, 692 words
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