Carnival Row Quotes

We owned a garden on a hill, We planted rose and daffodil, Flowers that English poets sing, And hoped for glory in the Spring. We planted yellow hollyhocks, And humble sweetly-smelling stocks, And columbine for carnival, And dreamt of Summer's festival. And Autumn not to be outdone As heiress of the summer sun, Should doubly wreathe her tawny head With poppies and with creepers red. We waited then for all to grow, We planted wallflowers in a row. And lavender and borage blue, - Alas! we waited, I and you, But love was all that ever grew.

I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything --pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic-- as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though --what really got them to pissing all over themselves-- was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons.

The wind whistles down into the skyscraper-bound canyons, across the broad expanses of the avenues and the narrow confines of the streets, where lives unfolded in secret, day in, day out: Sometimes a man sighs for want of love. Sometimes a child cries for the dropped lollipop, its sweetness barely tasted. Sometimes the girl gasps as the train screams into the station, shaken by how close she’d allowed herself to wander to the edge. Sometimes the drunk raises weary eyes to the rows of building rendered beautiful by a brief play of sunlight. “Lord?” he whispers into the held breath between taxi horns. The light catches on a city spire, fracturing for a second into glorious rays before the clouds move in again. The drunk lowers his eyes. “Lord, Lord…” he sobs, as if answering his own broken prayer. […] Another day closes. The sun sinks low on the horizon. It slips below the Hudson, smearing the West Side of Manhattan in a slick of gold. Night arrives for its watchful shift. The neon city bursts its daytime seams, and the great carnival of dreams begins again.

When the world one loves is seen to be dying, the viewer dies a little with it. A great American painter, Reginald Marsh, exemplifies this truism. Every day until his death at the age of 56, he sketched and painted the most earthy, sweaty and lusty examples of humanity he could lay his eyes upon. His productive voyeurism led him through the entire spectrum of cheap cafes, carnivals, amusement parks, skid rows, exclusive clubs, opera openings, coming-out parties and everything in-between. His super-realistic canvases were jammed with the kind of people he loved to watch in the environments he loved to haunt. As his closing years approached, Reginald Marsh grew depressed at the changing scene. New styles were emerging and it now became more difficult to immerse himself in the vistas from which he had so long drawn, both in his paintings and life itself. His canvases of lumpy women and pot-bellied men were too unappealing for the “think thin” era of the 1950s, and his floozies violated the then-current Grace Kelly/Ivory Soap look. His disdain for modern masters (“Matisse draws like a three-year-old, “Picasso ... a false front”) became exemplified as he summed up modern art as “high and pure and sterile — no sex, no drink, no muscles.” Marsh’s “out of date” feeling reached its zenith when he was asked to take part in an art symposium. The first speaker, who was a then-popular New York painter, enthusiastically championed current trends. Then followed a professor who advocated new and dynamic experimentation in visual appeal. At last it was Reginald Marsh’s turn to speak. He stood on the platform for a moment, as if trying to collect his thoughts. A sad look of resignation appeared in his eyes as he gazed down at the audience. The talented watcher of his innermost secret lusts and life-giving scintillations declared softly, “I am not a man of this century,” and sat down. He died shortly thereafter.

I suppose the most important memory is of Mr. Electrico. On Labor Day weekend, 1932, when I was twelve years old, he came to my hometown with the Dill Brothers…. He was a performer sitting in an electric chair and a stagehand pulled a switch and he was charged with fifty thousand volts of pure electricity. Lightning flashed in his eyes and his hair stood on end. I sat below, in the front row, and he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose and he cried, 'Live, forever!' And I thought, 'God, that’s wonderful. How do you do that?'...So when I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of 'Beautiful Ohio' and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks because I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. And so I went home and within days I started to write. And I’ve never stopped.

In the Vienna Folklore Museum is a yellowing wooden goat head on a pole. It has flapping black ears, short, curved horns, wide black eyes and an enormous, gaping, snapping mouth, lined with sharp little rows of carved wooden teeth. The jaw is rigged so that it snaps closed when the performer, holding the pole and hidden beneath a sheet, pulls on a thin piece of string dangling from the back of the monster’s head. This creature is called a Habergeiß, a name almost certainly related to goats (‘geiß’ is the Austrian for ‘goat’) and it can be found prowling the streets and snapping at the unwary in Bavarian towns over Epiphany.ix Over in Poland there’s the Turon, another horned, shaggy monster head with a clacking jaw that’s held on a pole by a performer under a sheet. The Turon is led on a rope house to house, where its escort sings carols and the Turon jumps and claps his jaw, chasing the householders. In Romania there are the Corlata, monsters who appear at the end of the year led by groups visiting houses, and are made from (you’ll never guess) a horned, wooden head – a stag’s, this time – with a clacking jaw, held on a pole by a performer who hides under a sheet (although the sheet that covers the Corlata can often be extremely brightly patterned – one photograph from 2010 shows it covered in brilliant flowers). In North-East Germany there’s the Klapperbock (the snapping buck), in the Italian Tyrol there are the Schanppvieh – snapbeasts (although these normally appeared at Carnival rather than Christmas). In Switzerland there’s the Schnabelgeiß, the ‘beak goat’, which looks like all the other goat monsters except that the snout narrows to a point, to take the form of a beak. In Finland and Sweden there are the Nuuttipukki, more stags who bother householders, this time on St Knut’s Day, on 13 January (hence their name). And we’ve already come across the Finnish Julebukk – the Yule goat – another goat monster portrayed by a performer hiding under a sheet, this time made of animal hides. In some parts of Lithuania and Silesia, meanwhile, there was the Schimmelreiter – the grey rider – which came with a new innovation. As in Britain, this monster was a horse, with a snapping head that was often a horse’s skull held on a pole, but this one was played by multiple people and could be ridden.x It starts to feel like you can’t go to Europe over the Christmas period without being snapped at by an animal head on a pole, held by a performer lurking under a cloth.