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/brutality 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 flimsily to the ground. C'est la vie.