Jean-Marie Le Clézio has to be the most humble Nobel-prize-winning author. Ri and I heard him last Friday, being interviewed by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. He has the distance of adult wisdom but sees the world through the thrilled eyes of a child. And he has a deep sense of privilege – he’d describe, for example, seeing abuses in colonial Nigeria where his father worked when he was young – a procession of Nigerians led “like a chain gang” to build a colonial official’s swimming pool, the official overseeing them in his shorts and white socks and wide-brimmed hat – and said that while such scenes made him angry he still felt intensely privileged to have born witness to them. He’s fascinated (as you’d expect) by words. Yet in an almost mystical way. “Each word is a world by itself – each word contains a world.” I thought of this the next day when I explored Brooklyn Botanical Garden where each of the plant names contains world upon world of meaning…
Blue Atlas Cedar
Schiedecker Crabapple
Toringo Crabapple
Scarlet Oak
Chinese Fountain Bamboo
Carolina Allspiece
Saucer Magnolia
Weeping Pagoda Tree (it was)
Snow Azalea
Virginia Bluebells
Weeping Hemlock
Hybrid Oak
Narcissus Poeticus
Nodding Virgin’s Bower
Siberian Fritillary
Bosnian Pine
Interrupted Fern
Wild Bleeding-Heart
Nodding Onion
Bloodroot
Eastern shooting star
Wild oats!
And that’s just a handful of them. Material for a multitude of stories.
Le Clézio is anti-affirmation (to the extent he can be "anti" anything!). Rather than novels presenting truths to the world he sees them as birthing questions. He talked about a humanism that isn’t human-centric, that tries to express, as far as possible from within the confines of a human mind, not only the dreams of humans but the dreams of animals and the dreams of plants as well. In the Botanical gardens I thought of all those plants dreaming away at night.
So much more to say…but rushing (comme toujours!) to a wedding in Puerto Rico. To be continued…
Just noticed on posting this that in blog-entry terms it's EWINY's golden anniversary.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
New York missive no 49 - Where Frederick Douglas landed
“There’s no room in the human rights business for pessimists. We have to be a pessimist of the intellect, but an optimist of the will,” (à la Gramsci), says Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China, in this interview.
And a very different interview which also belongs here...Irish Times has just published this article on the Writers Studio director Philip Schultz. It highlights the irony of his winning the Pulitzer last year for an anthology called "Failure" (based on the "failure" that was his father's life).
Springtime’s coming out onto the streets of New York and with it New Yorkers and tourists in their thousands are coming out onto the streets too, flouncing as-yet-un-sunned bodies of all shapes onto the Christopher Street Pier, cramming into the square by Bleeker playground to scoff overrated Magnolia cupcakes, getting brushed if they're lucky by falling white pear tree blossom (there are lots of blossoming pear trees which is funny because I don't remember them from last year - these ones don't bear pears apparently, which makes me wonder if they can really call themselves pear trees), congregating at sidewalk cafés, photographing each other in front of much-photographed New York symbols – yellow taxis, police cars, jagged skylines. This afternoon I lay for a while in a Sunday sun-daze on the pier. From there the statue of liberty looked, as I scribbled in my diary at the time, like a misshapen missile pointed at a jaunty angle to the sky. Its trajectory was destined to descend somewhere in the Gobi desert. That is to say, off whatever its target may have been.
The previous weekend I ambled further down the river in search of a quiet place to finish reading Last Exit to Brooklyn. (Accomplished, in North Park, a patch of presumably reclaimed land jutting out into the river just North of the World Trade Center site – an incongruously calm place to finish that book with its relentless riff of violence). On the way, in an echo of the Cambria play, I happened to pass the place where Frederick Douglass’ boat came in when he first arrived in New York. A plaque marking the spot is inscribed with a quote from an article he wrote in July 1848, after attending the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls: “Standing as we do on the watchtower of human freedom, we cannot be deterred from an expression of our appreciation of any movement, however humble, to improve and elevate the character and condition of any members of the human family.”
A little girl walked passed me with her Dad towards the river while I was reading the plaque. “That’s the ocean!” she said.
“No, that’s a river,” he replied.
She insisted. “No, it’s the ocean.”
“Well it connects to the ocean, but here it’s a river.”
“It is the ocean.”
I liked her persistence and her foresight.
Weekends have got pretty nocturnal recently – time for a spring-time shift to more diurnal habits, getting out sailing again, venturing on excursions outside the city. There’s been one of Sam’s epic dinner parties that ended with survivors finding themselves on a West Village bar-hop till the early hours, Ji’s Colombian fundraiser in Brooklyn, slam-poetry at Nuyorican Poets Café and last night, many deliciously sweet caipirinhas at D’s…
My bedroom window slides down to close itself unless there’s something stuck in the bottom to hold it open. So I’m using books, different ones depending on how much I want to keep the window open by. Belize Lonely Planet guide for just a little gap of air, Satanic Verses to let in more.
And a very different interview which also belongs here...Irish Times has just published this article on the Writers Studio director Philip Schultz. It highlights the irony of his winning the Pulitzer last year for an anthology called "Failure" (based on the "failure" that was his father's life).
**********************************************************
Springtime’s coming out onto the streets of New York and with it New Yorkers and tourists in their thousands are coming out onto the streets too, flouncing as-yet-un-sunned bodies of all shapes onto the Christopher Street Pier, cramming into the square by Bleeker playground to scoff overrated Magnolia cupcakes, getting brushed if they're lucky by falling white pear tree blossom (there are lots of blossoming pear trees which is funny because I don't remember them from last year - these ones don't bear pears apparently, which makes me wonder if they can really call themselves pear trees), congregating at sidewalk cafés, photographing each other in front of much-photographed New York symbols – yellow taxis, police cars, jagged skylines. This afternoon I lay for a while in a Sunday sun-daze on the pier. From there the statue of liberty looked, as I scribbled in my diary at the time, like a misshapen missile pointed at a jaunty angle to the sky. Its trajectory was destined to descend somewhere in the Gobi desert. That is to say, off whatever its target may have been.
The previous weekend I ambled further down the river in search of a quiet place to finish reading Last Exit to Brooklyn. (Accomplished, in North Park, a patch of presumably reclaimed land jutting out into the river just North of the World Trade Center site – an incongruously calm place to finish that book with its relentless riff of violence). On the way, in an echo of the Cambria play, I happened to pass the place where Frederick Douglass’ boat came in when he first arrived in New York. A plaque marking the spot is inscribed with a quote from an article he wrote in July 1848, after attending the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls: “Standing as we do on the watchtower of human freedom, we cannot be deterred from an expression of our appreciation of any movement, however humble, to improve and elevate the character and condition of any members of the human family.”
A little girl walked passed me with her Dad towards the river while I was reading the plaque. “That’s the ocean!” she said.
“No, that’s a river,” he replied.
She insisted. “No, it’s the ocean.”
“Well it connects to the ocean, but here it’s a river.”
“It is the ocean.”
I liked her persistence and her foresight.
**********************************************************
Weekends have got pretty nocturnal recently – time for a spring-time shift to more diurnal habits, getting out sailing again, venturing on excursions outside the city. There’s been one of Sam’s epic dinner parties that ended with survivors finding themselves on a West Village bar-hop till the early hours, Ji’s Colombian fundraiser in Brooklyn, slam-poetry at Nuyorican Poets Café and last night, many deliciously sweet caipirinhas at D’s…
**********************************************************
My bedroom window slides down to close itself unless there’s something stuck in the bottom to hold it open. So I’m using books, different ones depending on how much I want to keep the window open by. Belize Lonely Planet guide for just a little gap of air, Satanic Verses to let in more.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
New York missive no 48 - Call it Sleep, Great Gatsby
Café frequenters coming and going like ghosts. Some chew on pencil ends, some leaf through pages, some alternate typed sentences with spoonfuls of granola. Look up from your book and the person across the room has gone. Am in Doma, the epitome of a West Village café for people writing, reading, chatting quietly, any upbeat tune followed by a classical one or something peaceful, out of respect for customers trying to think.
New York might have a reputation for ceaseless progress but I’ve been struck by how many people have nostalgia disease. An affection for things past. Not pride in the past, in the way European city inhabitants are proud of their historic monuments, those solid stepping stones of progress (here there’s no need, the evidence of progress is now, everywhere, and it doesn’t always look good). More an anti-progress sense of past. A resistance to the “achievement” that’s meant to define this city. Hence the mourning of markets that make way for high-priced apartment blocks. Hence the fond capture of surviving eccentricities through words, photos and recounted stories, keeping them alive a little bit longer.
Two recently-read New York books are filtering into my days at the moment: Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (don’t really need to preface Great Gatsby with “Fitzgerald’s”, but did so to be fair). Call it Sleep is infused with light – light in the form of “bright brass faucets”, the flame of a “shadowy lamplighter”, the hypnotic brilliance of a shaft of sunlight on East River, light that’s analogous to language and that the child narrator David uses to navigate his experience growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of last century. So I’ve been noticing lights about the place more than usual. Light trickling along subway tracks before a train emerges from a tunnel. Plates of silver light lying on wet pavements after rain. Gold light catching on thousands of windows at sunset.
And then Great Gatsby for various reasons, including its playfully relentless life’s a dream message (echoing so many other life’s-a-dream-messages gone by, “que toda la vida es sueño / y los sueños, sueños son”). For example saw B for the first time in ages last Sunday. I was amused to realise that much of what I’d been feeling was the result of an over-active imagination. The dreams themselves are real though, even if transient. And even if the dreams are transient, the fiction that captures them (in Fitzgerald’s case not mine!) endures.
Mmm, well a little cynical perhaps. There are real things too!
*********************************************************
New York might have a reputation for ceaseless progress but I’ve been struck by how many people have nostalgia disease. An affection for things past. Not pride in the past, in the way European city inhabitants are proud of their historic monuments, those solid stepping stones of progress (here there’s no need, the evidence of progress is now, everywhere, and it doesn’t always look good). More an anti-progress sense of past. A resistance to the “achievement” that’s meant to define this city. Hence the mourning of markets that make way for high-priced apartment blocks. Hence the fond capture of surviving eccentricities through words, photos and recounted stories, keeping them alive a little bit longer.
Two recently-read New York books are filtering into my days at the moment: Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (don’t really need to preface Great Gatsby with “Fitzgerald’s”, but did so to be fair). Call it Sleep is infused with light – light in the form of “bright brass faucets”, the flame of a “shadowy lamplighter”, the hypnotic brilliance of a shaft of sunlight on East River, light that’s analogous to language and that the child narrator David uses to navigate his experience growing up on the Lower East Side at the turn of last century. So I’ve been noticing lights about the place more than usual. Light trickling along subway tracks before a train emerges from a tunnel. Plates of silver light lying on wet pavements after rain. Gold light catching on thousands of windows at sunset.
And then Great Gatsby for various reasons, including its playfully relentless life’s a dream message (echoing so many other life’s-a-dream-messages gone by, “que toda la vida es sueño / y los sueños, sueños son”). For example saw B for the first time in ages last Sunday. I was amused to realise that much of what I’d been feeling was the result of an over-active imagination. The dreams themselves are real though, even if transient. And even if the dreams are transient, the fiction that captures them (in Fitzgerald’s case not mine!) endures.
Mmm, well a little cynical perhaps. There are real things too!
Monday, March 30, 2009
New York missive no 47 - The Cambria
Things overheard out and about recently include “he’s a nice, normal guy, but he carries a small pocket knife” (on W11th), “es una bruja, es una pesada” (in Doma), and “if it’s illegal, I’m in” (outside Fashion Institute of Technology on W27th).
Have been thinking about productivity recently. More than ever, it seems, I’m most productive if I have a tight deadline. So the best sentences I write for my Writers Studio exercises are invariably the last-minute ones that spring up onto the page just before I leave for the class at 5.55 on a Wednesday. Or funding proposals flow so much easier when I just have a couple of hours to work on them. Maybe I should establish a new work-pattern that involves squeezing things I need/want to do into a little last-minute pocket of time where there’s no room for distractions and alternative tasks. Then all the remaining time can be filled with idleness – a place that often births pleasant surprises.
Ch and I saw a fabulous play at the Irish Arts Center last Friday night. For all the following week I was like a boa constrictor slowly digesting a big meal. Called "The Cambria", it was the story of Frederick Douglass’ sea voyage (on the Cambria) to Ireland, following the publication of his autobiography Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, for which slaveowners had put a bounty on his head. With minimal staging and just two actors playing the full cast of characters on board the ship – from holier-than-thou liberal choirmistress to sneering slaveowner, from Frederick Douglas himself to the Captain, for whom the voyage is one of moral discovery – the audience felt like it had been on board too. What theatre’s all about.
**************************************************************
Have been thinking about productivity recently. More than ever, it seems, I’m most productive if I have a tight deadline. So the best sentences I write for my Writers Studio exercises are invariably the last-minute ones that spring up onto the page just before I leave for the class at 5.55 on a Wednesday. Or funding proposals flow so much easier when I just have a couple of hours to work on them. Maybe I should establish a new work-pattern that involves squeezing things I need/want to do into a little last-minute pocket of time where there’s no room for distractions and alternative tasks. Then all the remaining time can be filled with idleness – a place that often births pleasant surprises.
**************************************************************
Ch and I saw a fabulous play at the Irish Arts Center last Friday night. For all the following week I was like a boa constrictor slowly digesting a big meal. Called "The Cambria", it was the story of Frederick Douglass’ sea voyage (on the Cambria) to Ireland, following the publication of his autobiography Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, for which slaveowners had put a bounty on his head. With minimal staging and just two actors playing the full cast of characters on board the ship – from holier-than-thou liberal choirmistress to sneering slaveowner, from Frederick Douglas himself to the Captain, for whom the voyage is one of moral discovery – the audience felt like it had been on board too. What theatre’s all about.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
New York missive no 46 - Paul Auster & an 80s party
On Thursday L, D and I heard Paul Auster giving the Lewis Mumford Lecture at City College’s school of architecture. He called the lecture City of Words. It was in the college’s Great Hall, which has tall stained glass windows hexagoned in delicate greens and blues lined up along its walls. I couldn’t help stealing glances away from the stage to watch the dimming light fall through them: by the end of the lecture, at 7.30ish, it was extinguished.
Light and stained glass windows aside the lecture was good, of course. Auster was a tad lazy in that he didn’t write new words for it. Instead he read old ones in the form of short extracts from his books that captured city experiences. But hey, he is a writer not a speachifier, and the extracts he read merited resuscitation. There was a magical moment as a quiet bell started ringing outside while he read descriptions of homeless people from City of Glass, as if it was his homeless characters acknowledging their presence out on the streets. He read from Moon Palace which I found scarily unfamiliar. I knew K and I had both read it when we were in Madrid but I didn’t remember it at all (omigod how many words have tumbled into my head just to vanish like in quicksand, best not to be thought about…now I realize why EF from the age of six-ish kept little notebooks she jotted thoughts in every time she finished reading something). Yet the Moon Palace extract was also familiar, in that it echoed recent thoughts - like when the narrator/Marco Fogg says “you cannot live without establishing an equilibrium between the inner and outer.” That’s the beauty of literature, an echo chamber for experience.
The extract was from when Marco is living in Central Park. While there he realizes that “once you throw your life to the winds, you will discover things you had never known before, things that cannot be learned under any other circumstances. I was half-dead from hunger, but whenever something good happened to me, I did not attribute it to chance so much as to a special state of mind.”
Well I should be writing a big funding proposal instead of this, but my head is a little fuzzy after an 80s party at SK’s that spiralled into what will no doubt be one of the parties of the year, in the unpredictable and spontaneous way that parties sometimes do. The apartment was rammed with people in ridiculous costumes dancing away, shouting quirky conversations over the music, everyone oozing a love-everyone-mood induced by no more than wine and vodka. So much for recession-gloom…or maybe it was a collective finger-up at recession-gloom.
Light and stained glass windows aside the lecture was good, of course. Auster was a tad lazy in that he didn’t write new words for it. Instead he read old ones in the form of short extracts from his books that captured city experiences. But hey, he is a writer not a speachifier, and the extracts he read merited resuscitation. There was a magical moment as a quiet bell started ringing outside while he read descriptions of homeless people from City of Glass, as if it was his homeless characters acknowledging their presence out on the streets. He read from Moon Palace which I found scarily unfamiliar. I knew K and I had both read it when we were in Madrid but I didn’t remember it at all (omigod how many words have tumbled into my head just to vanish like in quicksand, best not to be thought about…now I realize why EF from the age of six-ish kept little notebooks she jotted thoughts in every time she finished reading something). Yet the Moon Palace extract was also familiar, in that it echoed recent thoughts - like when the narrator/Marco Fogg says “you cannot live without establishing an equilibrium between the inner and outer.” That’s the beauty of literature, an echo chamber for experience.
The extract was from when Marco is living in Central Park. While there he realizes that “once you throw your life to the winds, you will discover things you had never known before, things that cannot be learned under any other circumstances. I was half-dead from hunger, but whenever something good happened to me, I did not attribute it to chance so much as to a special state of mind.”
Well I should be writing a big funding proposal instead of this, but my head is a little fuzzy after an 80s party at SK’s that spiralled into what will no doubt be one of the parties of the year, in the unpredictable and spontaneous way that parties sometimes do. The apartment was rammed with people in ridiculous costumes dancing away, shouting quirky conversations over the music, everyone oozing a love-everyone-mood induced by no more than wine and vodka. So much for recession-gloom…or maybe it was a collective finger-up at recession-gloom.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
New York missive no 45 - Uptown moments, David Foster Wallace
Am digesting lots of sushi and a blowfish saki. JB and I just went for a meal at a Japanese restaurant in mid-town following a consultation at the UN. Very Japanese, in that at first we were led to the upper floor even though there wasn’t a single person eating there, and then to the far right-hand corner of the upper floor, presumably because we didn’t blend in with the clientele downstairs. We manoeuvred our way back down though.
So before they’re layered over with more downtown images I’ll record some of my uptown moments (not that I won’t be still be going up there sometimes!). There was the first McCain-Obama debate in the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Its walls were draped in history in the form of photographs of jazz musicians who had played there, and the auditorium thrilled with the flush of history in the making.
There was a night of music, when Ch, Sa, L and I had planned to go to Smoke jazz bar but found it full for the first session. Instead we went (through a friend of L’s Mum), to a free Brahms concert performed by Russian musicians in an old hall somewhere in the W 70s. The violinist and pianist both had paunches and ill-fitting suits. They gave their brows dramatic mops with handkerchiefs between each movement. The pianist’s pile of hair flopped about as he swayed on his piano stool. The page-turner was a teenage boy with a prominent red polo logo on his shirt. There were quite a few fur coats, big hair-dos and smartly turned-out Russian children in the audience. Yet these visual details were just a merry accompaniment to the music itself, deep and dreamy and oh such a relaxing way to spend the first part of a Saturday night. That was followed by wine at the French Roast on the corner near there (I had thought the one on 6th Ave and 11th was the only one, so was disappointed to discover it’s not unique). Sa then headed home to his Thai lover and Ch headed home to sleep as she was running a half-marathon next day, and L and I went back to Smoke to catch the last set. It was a celebration of the drummer Jimmy Cobb’s 80th birthday. He played, and played good - after all he was the drummer on most of the Miles Davis albums - but this was clearly the third and final set. At midnight on the dot he and the band laid down their drumsticks and trumpets and made a beeline for the bar.
Other uptown things...English conversation classes with mother tongue Spanish-speakers from Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico in Washington Heights (an excuse for me to practice Spanish as much as help their English)…a fascinating talk at New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series…and a stunning walk one morning down from 145th, after turning up at the swimming pool in Riverbank State Park to find it closed (oh where oh where are the good big open and affordable Manhattan swimming pools?!). The sun was just rising as I walked through Harlem, gently kissing quiet streets awake.
I've come across several examples of privatization-of-public functions gone crazy recently. Which is a little ironic in the midst of a financial crisis in which companies are being bailed out and bought out by governments all over the place, though both are symptoms of blind faith in the market. For example in Dan Baum’s new book about New Orleans he apparently describes how “the Superdome turns into a Dantean circle of hell. The coroner can’t figure out why no one is bringing in bodies. Soldiers aren’t allowed to pick them up; neither are state police. Eventually an outside contractor arrives, and the coroner says bitterly: “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans for a week and a half so the feds can sign a private contract.” Or there’s the court case underway at the moment in Pennsylvania. Two judges have pleaded guilty to taking over $2.6 million in kickbacks from two private youth detention centers in return for sending teenagers there - some of them for minor, first-time offenses. Apparently one of the judges sentenced over 5,000 juveniles since the kickback scheme started in 2003. Everyday I’m immersed in cases of business behaving badly. It’s easy to become a bit numbed by them, to let my sense of outrage get worn down at the edges, until a case like that electroshocks it back to life again.
A strange, intense appreciation has come over me, naff as that may sound. An overwhelming sense of privilege and being awed by the tiniest things.
Is it because Spring’s coming? (Albeit in fits and starts via the occasional disruptive snowstorm, like last weekend's which is now melting in heavy splashes from scaffolding and windowsills).
Is it because of the crisis-recession-downturn-or-whatever-we-like-or-dare-to-call-it? Out for dinner with PK the other night we got into talking about how "it" is making us reassess priorities and value the things we have. Which of course was easy for us to say, who still have jobs, and who had just emerged from hearing Jesseye Norman speaking at Carnegie Hall (she’s as charismatic a talker as she is singer, her conversation sparkling with vivid anecdotes). I doubt most people who have lost their jobs, houses, healthcare, pensions, or all of those are savouring a reassessment of priorities, they’re in a dark place living day to day.
The downturn has also birthed a new breed of guilt-quickly-transformed-to justification for spending. Several times recently I’ve heard myself and others rationalizing carrying on as usual, deciding to eat out, have an extra glass of wine rather than spending more cautiously and saving, either on the basis that “we may as well enjoy it while it lasts”, or on the basis that doing so will support the economy, keeping small businesses and shops alive.
But back to the intense appreciation feeling. It was echoed in a speech I read this morning over coffee (back at Mojo’s again, yay!) – David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address. I’m no longer surprised in this city when I find echoes and reflections between things I see, hear and read: the frequency of interactions means it’s inevitable there’ll be connections between some of them. And alertness to connections is a kind of survival strategy too, weaving patterns and logic through what could seem disconnected sequences of events.
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience,” Wallace says. And, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness…if you really learn how to pay attention…It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation [he had just described a stressful trip to the supermarket in cinematic detail] as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital T-True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.” (His "try" there a tiny but such a loaded word). The speech throws open window upon window upon window of possibilities. I guess you could sum his message up as, "it's all in the attitude." But in the most profound and liberating, and challenging, of ways.
So before they’re layered over with more downtown images I’ll record some of my uptown moments (not that I won’t be still be going up there sometimes!). There was the first McCain-Obama debate in the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Its walls were draped in history in the form of photographs of jazz musicians who had played there, and the auditorium thrilled with the flush of history in the making.
There was a night of music, when Ch, Sa, L and I had planned to go to Smoke jazz bar but found it full for the first session. Instead we went (through a friend of L’s Mum), to a free Brahms concert performed by Russian musicians in an old hall somewhere in the W 70s. The violinist and pianist both had paunches and ill-fitting suits. They gave their brows dramatic mops with handkerchiefs between each movement. The pianist’s pile of hair flopped about as he swayed on his piano stool. The page-turner was a teenage boy with a prominent red polo logo on his shirt. There were quite a few fur coats, big hair-dos and smartly turned-out Russian children in the audience. Yet these visual details were just a merry accompaniment to the music itself, deep and dreamy and oh such a relaxing way to spend the first part of a Saturday night. That was followed by wine at the French Roast on the corner near there (I had thought the one on 6th Ave and 11th was the only one, so was disappointed to discover it’s not unique). Sa then headed home to his Thai lover and Ch headed home to sleep as she was running a half-marathon next day, and L and I went back to Smoke to catch the last set. It was a celebration of the drummer Jimmy Cobb’s 80th birthday. He played, and played good - after all he was the drummer on most of the Miles Davis albums - but this was clearly the third and final set. At midnight on the dot he and the band laid down their drumsticks and trumpets and made a beeline for the bar.
Other uptown things...English conversation classes with mother tongue Spanish-speakers from Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico in Washington Heights (an excuse for me to practice Spanish as much as help their English)…a fascinating talk at New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series…and a stunning walk one morning down from 145th, after turning up at the swimming pool in Riverbank State Park to find it closed (oh where oh where are the good big open and affordable Manhattan swimming pools?!). The sun was just rising as I walked through Harlem, gently kissing quiet streets awake.
**************************************************************
I've come across several examples of privatization-of-public functions gone crazy recently. Which is a little ironic in the midst of a financial crisis in which companies are being bailed out and bought out by governments all over the place, though both are symptoms of blind faith in the market. For example in Dan Baum’s new book about New Orleans he apparently describes how “the Superdome turns into a Dantean circle of hell. The coroner can’t figure out why no one is bringing in bodies. Soldiers aren’t allowed to pick them up; neither are state police. Eventually an outside contractor arrives, and the coroner says bitterly: “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans for a week and a half so the feds can sign a private contract.” Or there’s the court case underway at the moment in Pennsylvania. Two judges have pleaded guilty to taking over $2.6 million in kickbacks from two private youth detention centers in return for sending teenagers there - some of them for minor, first-time offenses. Apparently one of the judges sentenced over 5,000 juveniles since the kickback scheme started in 2003. Everyday I’m immersed in cases of business behaving badly. It’s easy to become a bit numbed by them, to let my sense of outrage get worn down at the edges, until a case like that electroshocks it back to life again.
**************************************************************
A strange, intense appreciation has come over me, naff as that may sound. An overwhelming sense of privilege and being awed by the tiniest things.
Is it because Spring’s coming? (Albeit in fits and starts via the occasional disruptive snowstorm, like last weekend's which is now melting in heavy splashes from scaffolding and windowsills).
Is it because of the crisis-recession-downturn-or-whatever-we-like-or-dare-to-call-it? Out for dinner with PK the other night we got into talking about how "it" is making us reassess priorities and value the things we have. Which of course was easy for us to say, who still have jobs, and who had just emerged from hearing Jesseye Norman speaking at Carnegie Hall (she’s as charismatic a talker as she is singer, her conversation sparkling with vivid anecdotes). I doubt most people who have lost their jobs, houses, healthcare, pensions, or all of those are savouring a reassessment of priorities, they’re in a dark place living day to day.
The downturn has also birthed a new breed of guilt-quickly-transformed-to justification for spending. Several times recently I’ve heard myself and others rationalizing carrying on as usual, deciding to eat out, have an extra glass of wine rather than spending more cautiously and saving, either on the basis that “we may as well enjoy it while it lasts”, or on the basis that doing so will support the economy, keeping small businesses and shops alive.
But back to the intense appreciation feeling. It was echoed in a speech I read this morning over coffee (back at Mojo’s again, yay!) – David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address. I’m no longer surprised in this city when I find echoes and reflections between things I see, hear and read: the frequency of interactions means it’s inevitable there’ll be connections between some of them. And alertness to connections is a kind of survival strategy too, weaving patterns and logic through what could seem disconnected sequences of events.
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience,” Wallace says. And, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness…if you really learn how to pay attention…It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation [he had just described a stressful trip to the supermarket in cinematic detail] as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital T-True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.” (His "try" there a tiny but such a loaded word). The speech throws open window upon window upon window of possibilities. I guess you could sum his message up as, "it's all in the attitude." But in the most profound and liberating, and challenging, of ways.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
New York missive no 44 - Word bites
Look at the length of some of these blog entries. Some of the paragraphs within them even. Long. No wonder I’m postponing a plunge into Twitter-land with its 140 character-limit on “Tweets”. Not that I’m adverse to short sentences. In fact I love them. I just feel that channeling all our communication through sound-bitey bursts can’t but fragment our already fragmented thought-processes. Give me a lengthy New Yorker article any-day. Oh and the time to read it in please. Of course, even though I haven’t taken the plunge Twitter has started lapping at the edges of my world, and before long might just suck me in. There’s a merging of medium / media going on. Just now I was reading last week’s Sunday New York Times magazine, still sitting bereft as Sunday supplements often do, on my kitchen table. One of the front pieces was called “Being There – The subtle art of the Facebook update.” And then over the page was “A successful failure – How an image went from e-card to Twitter icon.” No doubt that article in turn provoked a flurry of Twitters.
Am sitting in an 80% packed up apartment. The remaining not-quite-throw-away-able nor packable 20% of random odds and ends has prompted procrastination…and will no doubt still be there till right at the last minute tomorrow when it gets stuffed together in a random odds and ends box. I’m moving back to West Village. It didn’t take long for downtown to lure me back.
Am sitting in an 80% packed up apartment. The remaining not-quite-throw-away-able nor packable 20% of random odds and ends has prompted procrastination…and will no doubt still be there till right at the last minute tomorrow when it gets stuffed together in a random odds and ends box. I’m moving back to West Village. It didn’t take long for downtown to lure me back.
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