Let’s Go into the Afternoon with To Russell’s Up in the Old Hotel
Tom Russell’s latest release Folk Hotel has been in my music rotation for a week or so now. And I like the album more and more each time I listen to it. There are few songwriters whose songs send me to Wikipedia to look up references as do Tom’s. As A matter of fact, I was sent scurrying on the first song “Up in the Old Hotel”. The first thing that I went to find out about was who was Joseph Mitchell, whose ghost wanders the halls of Tom’s Folk Hotel. Here’s what I found……
From Wikipedia….Joseph Mitchell
(July 27, 1908 – May 24, 1996) was an American writer best known for the work he published in The New Yorker. He is known for his carefully written portraits of eccentrics and people on the fringes of society, especially in and around New York City. He is also known for suffering from writer’s block for several decades
His book Up in the Old Hotel collects the best of his writing for The New Yorker, and his earlier book My Ears Are Bentcollects the best of his early journalistic writing, which he omitted from Up in the Old Hotel.
Mitchell’s last book was his empathetic account of the Greenwich Village street character and self-proclaimed historian Joe Gould’s extravagantly disguised case of writer’s block, published as Joe Gould’s Secret (1964).
From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything significant again…Read More
The Death of Dylan Thomas Up in an Old Hotel
The second one was a reference to the last words and the death of poet Dylan Thomas……
On 3 November, Thomas spent most of the day in bed drinking.[130] He went out in the evening to keep two drink appointments. After returning to the hotel he went out again for a drink at 2 am. After drinking at the White Horse, a pub he had found through Scottish poet Ruthven Todd, Thomas returned to the Hotel Chelsea, declaring, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record!”[130] The barman, and the owner of the pub who served him, later commented that Thomas could not have imbibed more than half that amount.[131] Thomas had an appointment at a clam house in New Jersey with Todd on 4 November.[132]
When phoned at the Chelsea that morning, he said he was feeling ill and postponed the engagement. Later he went drinking with Reitell at the White Horse and, feeling sick again, returned to the hotel.[133] Feltenstein came to see him three times that day, administering the steroid ACTH by injection and, on his third visit, half a grain (32.4 milligrams) of morphine sulphate, which affected his breathing. Reitell became increasingly concerned and telephoned Feltenstein for advice. He suggested she get male assistance, so she called upon the painter Jack Heliker, who arrived before 11 pm.[132] At midnight on 5 November Thomas’s breathing became more difficult and his face turned blue.[132] An ambulance was summoned.[134][nb 10]
Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at St Vincent’s Hospital at 1:58 am. He was comatose, and his medical notes state that the “impression upon admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy damage to the brain by alcohol, for which the patient was treated without response”.[135] Caitlin flew to America the following day and was taken to the hospital, by which time a tracheotomy had been performed. Her reported first words were, “Is the bloody man dead yet?”[135] She was allowed to see Thomas only for 40 minutes in the morning[136] but returned in the afternoon and, in a drunken rage, threatened to kill Brinnin. When she became uncontrollable, she was put in a straitjacket and committed, by Feltenstein, to the River Crest private psychiatric detox clinic on Long Island.[137] Read More
I will write more about Up in the Old Hotel later this week but for now let’s go into the afternoon with thoughts of whatever Old Hotel you may conjure up. And here’s Tom Russell’s “Up in the Old Hotel”
