Philly in the Aughts: Blissful Ignorance?

The last time I had a prolonged interaction with Ms. Heller-Burnham: just as Apparition Poems was beginning to take shape, in late '09. Abs was in a despairing state, and she seemed to feel that her life was already over. I had called her to see if she wanted to contribute to Trish, a sonnet-sequence to Mary H, one of the efforts I had going at the time. After all, Abs and I were equally intimate with Mary Evelyn Harju. I am also unable to deny that the recession imposed an ending of misery and desolation on many of us, partial or complete. The Philly Free School's luck is a sturdy body of first-rate artistic work set in place, which means (& as is rare) that our apotheosis of Bohemia and Bohemian city-life was not for nothing. The pain the plebeians of the day must be in involves the opposite recognition- that, as the mob is also ripped to shreds by the Recession, the frivolity of the mob, or mob life, as an enterprise, guarantees that it was, in fact, all for nothing in the end; as all their plastic, cheaply made monuments tumble to the ground. C'est la vie.