There isn’t a lot sea-faring about South Street Seaport, other than the museum ships you can visit. It’s no longer an active port, the old fish market is now a shopping development and conference centre, the cobbled streets are lined with outlets like Body Shop and Benetton. But elements linger – including the Seamen’s Church Institute where we had our wedding.
The room where I waited nervously, increasingly nervously, for the forty minutes before the ceremony, was the Knitting Room. There, well-meaning women come to knit hats and scarves to send to sailors who are out at sea over Christmas. So there I was in my dress and bright blue boa (M tweaking it to get it to sit right) surrounded by walls piled high with coloured balls of wool. C was waiting with Z just as nervously, I’m sure, in the “seafarers’ club” across the corridor, which when not accommodating grooms in their last few moments of bachelorhood has no doubt seen many a knees-up for old salts. That makes the venue sound, as I think I’d mentioned before, more fusty than it is.
The little chapel downstairs has a model ship hanging to one side above the altar. It was jam-packed with people so that I gasped a bit when we walked in (phew, they all came, and omigod there are so many!). The reception just after the ceremony was in a room full of more ships. One was called Sea-Witch – I felt an affinity with it given that the fantastical land I’d conjoured as a 10-year-old was called Sea-Wich. (Yes spelled like that. Mode of travel to reach it – take a flying tiger up the golden steps). And the main party was in the upstairs “Top Deck” with glass walls overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and East River…so still with a sea presence. I named each of the tables after a seabird, illustrated with a bright photo so that in case they didn’t already, people could learn what their bird looks like. A mix of my and C’s university friends were on Blue-footed Booby. My work people were on Magnificent Frigatebird, and his were spread out between Laughing Gull and Elegant Tern. Some of my Writers Studio people were on Imperial Shag. Etc.
We stayed in a hotel close by, with a little balcony from which we could see the last people clearing up the party flotsam and jetsam then switching off the lights. Next morning as we walked in bright sunshine along the river we were greeted by a Venezuelan selling tickets for helicopter rides over the city – tourism being one of the main industries that has replaced the shipping and fishing. It seemed to make his day when we told him that we had got married the evening before, and we carried on our way with his shouts of felicidades following us.
Then it was joining up with a gaggle of friends and family – S tellingly still in her yellow wedding outfit and high heels – for a walk down the High Line and a jazz brunch at the Garage. During the meal M dug out from a plastic bag the teddy bear I’d had as a child, which she’d brought over from England. I had no idea he was still in existence. He hardly is. He has one eye, an eclectic spread of patches and none of his original fur, and stuffing coming out of his stomach. That prompted many a joke about what C has in store – “well, if that’s the state of her teddy bear…”
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We haven’t honeymooned but instead have been making the most, in-between work, of pre-baby time in the city. There was a 4-borough day starting at home in Astoria then getting the subway through Manhattan down to Coney Island and Brighton Beach for strolling and hotdogs, followed by a Puerto-Rican meal with V and W at Willie's Steak House in the Bronx. C and I had pictured a salsa-club with tables elevated around a big round dance floor, instead the scene was more that of a family dining room with a stage at one end where a traditional band serenaded us as we and our predominantly older fellow diners ate – the livelier latin jazz nights are Wednesdays apparently. There was G’s two-year birthday party in Washington Heights. There was some rather bad but for that reason still amusing comedy at the Laugh Lounge on Lower East Side to celebrate our one (eventful) year anniversary. And quieter weekend days at home watching films and procrastinating over filling in the hundreds of forms for my green card application.
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Over the past two weekends we went to intensive childbirth and newborn care classes in Soho. Intensive as in cramming the classes into three sessions rather than over several weeks, not classes on intensive childbirth – though the childbirth’s guaranteed to be intensive too in ways that no number of classes could ever predict or prepare us for fully. They’re run by a nurse from St Vincent’s Hospital. She has worked there for 25 years and not surprisingly has been active in the campaign to keep it open – it's on the verge of a second bankruptcy and has been going through a series of buyout/restructuring negotiations. Luckily it looks at the moment like it’s going to survive. That’s a relief for me too, because that is where I’m supposed to be giving birth.
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Meanwhile my bump’s been getting progressively bigger. One the one hand being pregnant is such an animal-like experience, bearing and giving birth to children being something that females of all species, at least all mammals, share. At times recently I’ve felt like a big bear. Especially when I’m wrapped up in my winter grey duffle coat that’s now very tight round the belly. Watching the rather graphic videos of birthing women at the classes last weekend made both C and I, for some reason, think of cows. On the other hand it’s so human, in an emotional sense. Is that because we are the only species, at least think we’re the only species, that’s so conscious of where we have come from and the fact we’re going to die? At my 32-week sonogram last Monday we were startled by how vivid C’s father’s characteristics were in the little face that appeared on the screen. We were startled by the vividness both of the 3D images those machines can produce, and the vividness of the likeness. Here are the genes of a man I never met, and of C’s mother who I never met – I wish I could have known both of them – and of so many other people too going back in time, being mixed with my own and carried in me into a new life.
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Astoria isn’t exactly a leafy borough, nor an architecturally appealing one. There’s not a lot of green space and the new buildings that are going up with much clanging and banging despite the downturn are tall identikit apartment buildings. They overshadow the row-houses squatting between them, which themselves, for the most part, are not exciting to look at. But there are more trees around than I’d realized at first, and because of the urban surroundings they stand out. There are fig trees brought over by Greeks, magnolias, and a tree just outside our living room and balcony that I’ve become captivated by. A pregnancy-enhanced attachment? When we moved here in November I thought it could be an evergreen because it still had dark green leaves. But then they quickly turned deep orange and fell. Now in March they are growing back again, pale green at the moment and accompanied by sprigs of tiny white flowers. I must find out from P and P downstairs what kind of tree it is. Just as I want to find out more about the birds that hang out in it. A few minutes ago there was a parrot-like bright red one singing his heart out. Maybe there’s an unrealized twitcher in me. “Birds of Astoria – exploits of an urban ornithologist,” I can see a best-seller brewing.
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I’ve never been much of a bath-person, too quickly I start thinking of things I want to do when I get out. But now with my big belly and a back that’s started grumbling as a result of it they’ve rapidly become more appealing. Lying in our blue bath tub the other day piled high with bubbles I suddenly remembered my sister P and I having baths at our grandparents’ house when we were children. It was a narrow, olive green bathtub. We sat opposite each other with the wire soap wrack across the middle like a bridge between us, carrying my grandmother’s pumice stone, my grandfather’s pumice stone and a big bar of soap.
I’ve been having lots of strong place-associations. I’ll be doing something very mundane, like washing up or walking to work, and will picture a place from my past. A traffic jam on a road in Kingston, in South West London. K and I sheltering from monsoon rain with some street-sellers just to the South of the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok.
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The fragility and arbitrariness of creating a life seems inadequate next to the enormity of it. Or as C put it so much better than I ever could in a poem, “An accident like the universe”.
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We found ourselves having a “What is God?” conversation the other day. Then I riffed in my diary that I am content to believe not in some omnipotent creator but the fact that life itself is a miracle, potent enough without some higher being. If we need a God or Gods in various forms to remind us of that, so be it, but too often they steal the show, become a distraction.
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At a talk at CUNY by the author of “The Prison and the American Imagination” I learned that Eastern State Penitentiary, at the time it opened in 1829, was the largest building in the world. It had running water before the White House. And people went on guided tours (they still can). The idea was that an extensive prison system though which criminals could be reformed through solitary confinement and then re-inserted into society reflected the post-Independence ideal of a citizen, and was so much more humane than the barbaric treatment of criminals in Europe and elsewhere.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
New York missive no 66 - Pussy willow
The city and the wedding
Well there are so many things I want to put here but rather than wait till they’re all written and posting at once I’ll post bit by bit…
Flower market on 28th Street
Along 28th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, P and I went in search of bunches of pussy willow and tall glass vases to hold them. That block is where all the flower shops are. It’s lined with wholesalers that brim with ferns, orchids, spring bulbs, and florists’ accessories like ribbons, coloured glass pebbles, and most recently, made-in-China gauze butterflies and feathered bird ornaments. And bunches of pussy willow. I’d passed them standing along the sidewalk like echoes of forest on my way to work in the morning. I hadn’t yet fixed any flower arrangements for the wedding other than primroses in blue pots on the dining tables and decided that big bunches of pussy willow in the chapel would be perfect.
We got there late in the day though, around 4pm. Some of the florists had already packed up for the day. Their dusty windows revealed bundled-up piles of branches or were enclosed behind metal shopfronts. We wandered into one that was bursting with perfect-looking blossoms to discover that all the flowers were made of silk. We found some boxes of pussy willow in one shop, but they seemed too tired and spindly. We tried a shop with orchids outside but they only sold hothouse plants. Then the orchid seller said the place we needed was just around the corner, on 6th Ave.
That too was closed but next door was International Garden Inc. On a high shelf there were tall slanted glasses, and in the back of the room, the pussy willow we’d been looking for. While next to us the finishing touches were put on a huge red funeral carriage bouquet with “I love you Dad” inscribed across the middle, we negotiated a price to hire four of the vases for the day, have them delivered to the venue full of pussy willow branches and picked up the next day.
That may sound like much ado about pussy willow but it became one of the most special features of the wedding. Its dark branches holding their catkins cast proud shadows against the wall at the back of the chapel. They were a subject of much interest to 2-year-old G before the ceremony began. After the ceremony they accompanied the guests upstairs and stood in strong, stretching clusters in the place where people put presents and poems. (We’d asked guests to bring poems, which were collected in a big china bowl and will be stuck into an eclectic wedding anthology of poets ranging from John Donne to Odgen Nash, Emily Dickinson to friends of C and I -particularly C’s English-teaching friends - who wrote their own for the occasion).
C and I returned home on the Sunday afternoon to find our bed had been turned by P and Al into a two-poster, with lettered balloons spelling “Just Married” laid out across the sheets. The pillars on either side of the bed were created by big bunches of pussy willow.
Friday, February 12, 2010
New York missive no 65 - Patience and Fortitude, the lions
I learned the other day that the two lions outside the 5th Ave New York Public Library (see NY missive no. 63) are called Patience and Fortitude.
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At the prenatal yoga class a group of expectant mums maneuvers and breathes deeply with their bellies of different sizes, releasing all the blockages that build up during the day between them and their babies who wait patiently for birth. No hurry.
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In an increasingly complex world it becomes more and more important to be simple. Otherwise you just blur, for yourself and others. That’s where Bush had the benefit over Obama (simplicity can be dangerous).
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Never did I think I’d see the day when I’d be busily making wedding plans. There’s only a week to go now, with the pending arrival of friends, parents and sisters (this lucky kid is going to have three aunts: one in the Swiss mountains, one in San Francisco, one in the Dominican Republic). My brain’s been getting a bit addled with to-do lists but the whole process has involved plenty of laughter and learning, bringing together people from across the city to help create an event.
There’s Grace from Table Tables in South Street Seaport with whom we’ve concocted a British (small eats) and Dominican (main course) menu. Sarah the Brooklyn-based photographer. The people from Omonia café in Astoria, who made the cake that featured in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and are also making ours on a somewhat smaller scale. Gabriela the DJ. David who is conducting the ceremony: we met with him today and suddenly the occasion feels whole. And the miracle-working Nelly in Flushing, who with a few weeks notice is making me a dress that will fit me and my expanding belly, with fabric I tracked down one lunchtime in the garment district.
Through all of this I’m learning about relationships too of course. The wonder of a a complete commitment to respect another person for who they are, share with them and love them. And how, far from being confining in anyway, when those feelings work in both directions it is liberating. C and I have compressed encountering each other, getting to know each other, pregnancy, moving in together, engagement and marriage into less than a year…with childbirth and a whole new journey to embark on in May. We could be frazzled by this emotional roller-coaster but instead it's somehow made us steadier, there's a strong quiet calmness beneath it all.
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We recently saw “Note by Note,” a documentary about the Steinway piano factory in Astoria, with an ecclectic bunch of people at the Astoria Historical Society. The society shares its building with a funeral parlour. And in the room next door to ours a Weight-Watchers meeting was underway. Despite the quirky surroundings it was well worth going. The documentary was fascinating and beautifully filmed, an elegy to the kind of craftsmanship that involves ten stages or more spread out over a year, each involving a different person or group of people with precise skills passed down from previous workers, to create a piano. The workers interviewed had the same kind of now-rare pride in their careful work that Nelly clearly has making and mending clothes, in the studio where she has been working for over twenty years.
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My pregnancy hasn’t come accompanied by cravings, quite, but yes by a hankering for certain foods (which, this being America, I go and get and eat): oatmeal, Kit-Kats, coconut juice, leek and potato soup.
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In the introduction to a New Yorker photo series of veterans of the civil rights movement, David Remnick says that Obama, talking about the relationship between their struggle and his own campaigning, rejected any direct comparison but added, “they are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement…there is a voice that is best captured by King, which says that we, as African-Americans, are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union – which is a very optimistic story, in the end. It is fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries…There’s no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries – that sense that, through the deliverance of the least of the these, the society as a whole is better."
A belief in the possibility of the perfection of the union can be used for harmful ends, when driven by a sense of American exceptionalism. But at the same time it creates an environment of striving optimism and energy, one of the reasons why when C pointed out today that I’m clearly not a US-bashing European, I agreed.
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Baby-to-be was kicking a bit less these past few weeks, to the point at which I wondered if he’s ok. Then a couple of days ago the flutters began again, bringing smiles of delight and relief. And I wondered, how much of his character has been formed by now? Can babies have depressions in the womb, sink into a funk for a bit then pull themselves up again?
***********************************************************
In London in December C was startled to see British ancestors watching him from sepia photographs in the bathroom. “How can I do what I need to do with them looking on?” he asked. Good point. Is a downstairs bathroom really the right place for them?
***********************************************************
At the prenatal yoga class a group of expectant mums maneuvers and breathes deeply with their bellies of different sizes, releasing all the blockages that build up during the day between them and their babies who wait patiently for birth. No hurry.
***********************************************************
In an increasingly complex world it becomes more and more important to be simple. Otherwise you just blur, for yourself and others. That’s where Bush had the benefit over Obama (simplicity can be dangerous).
***********************************************************
Never did I think I’d see the day when I’d be busily making wedding plans. There’s only a week to go now, with the pending arrival of friends, parents and sisters (this lucky kid is going to have three aunts: one in the Swiss mountains, one in San Francisco, one in the Dominican Republic). My brain’s been getting a bit addled with to-do lists but the whole process has involved plenty of laughter and learning, bringing together people from across the city to help create an event.
There’s Grace from Table Tables in South Street Seaport with whom we’ve concocted a British (small eats) and Dominican (main course) menu. Sarah the Brooklyn-based photographer. The people from Omonia café in Astoria, who made the cake that featured in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and are also making ours on a somewhat smaller scale. Gabriela the DJ. David who is conducting the ceremony: we met with him today and suddenly the occasion feels whole. And the miracle-working Nelly in Flushing, who with a few weeks notice is making me a dress that will fit me and my expanding belly, with fabric I tracked down one lunchtime in the garment district.
Through all of this I’m learning about relationships too of course. The wonder of a a complete commitment to respect another person for who they are, share with them and love them. And how, far from being confining in anyway, when those feelings work in both directions it is liberating. C and I have compressed encountering each other, getting to know each other, pregnancy, moving in together, engagement and marriage into less than a year…with childbirth and a whole new journey to embark on in May. We could be frazzled by this emotional roller-coaster but instead it's somehow made us steadier, there's a strong quiet calmness beneath it all.
***********************************************************
We recently saw “Note by Note,” a documentary about the Steinway piano factory in Astoria, with an ecclectic bunch of people at the Astoria Historical Society. The society shares its building with a funeral parlour. And in the room next door to ours a Weight-Watchers meeting was underway. Despite the quirky surroundings it was well worth going. The documentary was fascinating and beautifully filmed, an elegy to the kind of craftsmanship that involves ten stages or more spread out over a year, each involving a different person or group of people with precise skills passed down from previous workers, to create a piano. The workers interviewed had the same kind of now-rare pride in their careful work that Nelly clearly has making and mending clothes, in the studio where she has been working for over twenty years.
***********************************************************
My pregnancy hasn’t come accompanied by cravings, quite, but yes by a hankering for certain foods (which, this being America, I go and get and eat): oatmeal, Kit-Kats, coconut juice, leek and potato soup.
***********************************************************
In the introduction to a New Yorker photo series of veterans of the civil rights movement, David Remnick says that Obama, talking about the relationship between their struggle and his own campaigning, rejected any direct comparison but added, “they are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement…there is a voice that is best captured by King, which says that we, as African-Americans, are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union – which is a very optimistic story, in the end. It is fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries…There’s no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries – that sense that, through the deliverance of the least of the these, the society as a whole is better."
A belief in the possibility of the perfection of the union can be used for harmful ends, when driven by a sense of American exceptionalism. But at the same time it creates an environment of striving optimism and energy, one of the reasons why when C pointed out today that I’m clearly not a US-bashing European, I agreed.
***********************************************************
Baby-to-be was kicking a bit less these past few weeks, to the point at which I wondered if he’s ok. Then a couple of days ago the flutters began again, bringing smiles of delight and relief. And I wondered, how much of his character has been formed by now? Can babies have depressions in the womb, sink into a funk for a bit then pull themselves up again?
***********************************************************
In London in December C was startled to see British ancestors watching him from sepia photographs in the bathroom. “How can I do what I need to do with them looking on?” he asked. Good point. Is a downstairs bathroom really the right place for them?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
New York missive no 64 - Self Reliance, Through the Children's Gate, The Road
A bit of Sunday philosophizing, while it rains a January rain outside…
Various things I’ve been reading recently have carried the message that one’s self is the only thing, the only belief, that a person can rely on. One of them is Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self reliance." It was included along with Obama’s inauguration address in a little blue book that CA gave us as an engagement present – apparently Emerson’s thinking is a big influence on Obama. In it, Emerson says things like “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” and “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
What a relief to think the truth lies right here inside me. But how scary too. What if “I” am wrong? (Though the answer to that would be that there is no right or wrong, just true and false, so that’s ok). More importantly, then, how does that “I" interact selflessly with others? Because aren’t most of the world’s problems a result of “I’s” interacting selfishly with others? How do you (I!) prevent self reliance and self awareness from becoming blind individualism? Perhaps it’s by knowing that what the self really needs and wants is a) not very much and b) not very different from what other people need and want.
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Emerson’s essay also talks about how independent minds will contradict themselves, apparently changing positions. But, he says, “of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance…The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency…” Zadie Smith picks up this idea in her new book of essays “Changing my mind,” in which she apparently (have only read a review) praises Obama’s “flexibility of voice." She says his example demonstrates that “each man must be true to his selves, plural.” That could be disconcerting, and even imply weakness, were it not read in the context of Emerson’s reassurance that apparently disparate ideas are solidly consistent if they flow from a mind (will, whatever) that is being totally true to itself. In politics though, can anyone remain true to themselves?
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Other bits of reading recently, enabled in large part by aeroplane journeys (over the holiday) and subway journeys (to and fro work)...
Adam Gopnik’s "Through the Children’s Gate". Would I have picked that book up at the airport, a memoir about bringing up children in New York, were I not about to be doing just that? Albeit in rather different circumstances and for now in the singular rather than plural. The book is gently and entertainingly written with beautiful passages, such as the description of parents worrying how to “make the children fly” in a kindergarten production of Peter Pan. “The willingness of New York parents is bracing compared with the aloofness of French parents [Gopnik’s previous memoir is about his family’s time living in Paris], or even of earlier generations of American parents. They will do anything to make their children fly…” After much deliberation and consideration of potentially dangerous stunts, the solution is to shrink the city…to have a miniature night-time London on the stage that the children can swoop over.
What was portrayed too often in the book as “New York,” though, was just a slither of New York. A wealthy Upper East-Siders, “made-it”, literary New York. Which is all very well. The book is a personal memoir so was only meant to capture a microcosm (and who can capture any more than that in this city?). I just felt that the beating hearts and shrieks and laughs of kids being brought up all over New York in all different kinds of circumstances were muffled. As if there was a soundproof barrier between them and the comfortable lives described.
Cormack McCarthy’s "The Road", a rather less entertaining read. Ug. What is all the fuss about? The images, or more like image – man and boy travel down road through post-apocalyptic but still-threatening landscape that, oh my, will look great on a big screen – is powerful and has stayed with me. But the intentionally monotonous rhythm of the words lulled me into a numbness. I guess that numbness is McCarthy’s achievement. One stranger on the subway, a young guy with his girlfriend, saw me reading it and asked what I thought. I told him. “Oh really? My friend LOVED it and told me I HAVE to read it, that it was the most AWESOME book he'd ever read,” he said. And then a couple of days later a middle-aged woman sitting next to me said “Oh my God. You’re reading THAT. I couldn’t bear it. Do keep reading it though.” And I did.
And two self-helpsy new-yearsy books. For the New York Women Social Entrepreneurs bookclub I read Dave Pollard’s "Finding the Sweet Spot", about creating and nurturing sustainable enterprises. The key “take” from that was that the sweet spot (where you’ll be fulfilled in work) lies at the point where your “gifts,” (what you’re better at than most others), your “passion” (what inspires you) and “purpose” (what’s actually needed in the world), intersect. I’m not, for now, creating a social enterprise, but feel that if I make my book come off in the next couple of years I’ll be pretty close to that sweet spot, and to generating new ones. I’m also dipping into Eckhart Tolle’s "The Power of Now" which so many millions have read before me. How wise to let past and future dissolve and to live fully-present in the present, unencumbered by a chatting mind...now to put it into practice.
Various things I’ve been reading recently have carried the message that one’s self is the only thing, the only belief, that a person can rely on. One of them is Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self reliance." It was included along with Obama’s inauguration address in a little blue book that CA gave us as an engagement present – apparently Emerson’s thinking is a big influence on Obama. In it, Emerson says things like “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” and “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
What a relief to think the truth lies right here inside me. But how scary too. What if “I” am wrong? (Though the answer to that would be that there is no right or wrong, just true and false, so that’s ok). More importantly, then, how does that “I" interact selflessly with others? Because aren’t most of the world’s problems a result of “I’s” interacting selfishly with others? How do you (I!) prevent self reliance and self awareness from becoming blind individualism? Perhaps it’s by knowing that what the self really needs and wants is a) not very much and b) not very different from what other people need and want.
***************************************************
Emerson’s essay also talks about how independent minds will contradict themselves, apparently changing positions. But, he says, “of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance…The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency…” Zadie Smith picks up this idea in her new book of essays “Changing my mind,” in which she apparently (have only read a review) praises Obama’s “flexibility of voice." She says his example demonstrates that “each man must be true to his selves, plural.” That could be disconcerting, and even imply weakness, were it not read in the context of Emerson’s reassurance that apparently disparate ideas are solidly consistent if they flow from a mind (will, whatever) that is being totally true to itself. In politics though, can anyone remain true to themselves?
***************************************************
Other bits of reading recently, enabled in large part by aeroplane journeys (over the holiday) and subway journeys (to and fro work)...
Adam Gopnik’s "Through the Children’s Gate". Would I have picked that book up at the airport, a memoir about bringing up children in New York, were I not about to be doing just that? Albeit in rather different circumstances and for now in the singular rather than plural. The book is gently and entertainingly written with beautiful passages, such as the description of parents worrying how to “make the children fly” in a kindergarten production of Peter Pan. “The willingness of New York parents is bracing compared with the aloofness of French parents [Gopnik’s previous memoir is about his family’s time living in Paris], or even of earlier generations of American parents. They will do anything to make their children fly…” After much deliberation and consideration of potentially dangerous stunts, the solution is to shrink the city…to have a miniature night-time London on the stage that the children can swoop over.
What was portrayed too often in the book as “New York,” though, was just a slither of New York. A wealthy Upper East-Siders, “made-it”, literary New York. Which is all very well. The book is a personal memoir so was only meant to capture a microcosm (and who can capture any more than that in this city?). I just felt that the beating hearts and shrieks and laughs of kids being brought up all over New York in all different kinds of circumstances were muffled. As if there was a soundproof barrier between them and the comfortable lives described.
Cormack McCarthy’s "The Road", a rather less entertaining read. Ug. What is all the fuss about? The images, or more like image – man and boy travel down road through post-apocalyptic but still-threatening landscape that, oh my, will look great on a big screen – is powerful and has stayed with me. But the intentionally monotonous rhythm of the words lulled me into a numbness. I guess that numbness is McCarthy’s achievement. One stranger on the subway, a young guy with his girlfriend, saw me reading it and asked what I thought. I told him. “Oh really? My friend LOVED it and told me I HAVE to read it, that it was the most AWESOME book he'd ever read,” he said. And then a couple of days later a middle-aged woman sitting next to me said “Oh my God. You’re reading THAT. I couldn’t bear it. Do keep reading it though.” And I did.
And two self-helpsy new-yearsy books. For the New York Women Social Entrepreneurs bookclub I read Dave Pollard’s "Finding the Sweet Spot", about creating and nurturing sustainable enterprises. The key “take” from that was that the sweet spot (where you’ll be fulfilled in work) lies at the point where your “gifts,” (what you’re better at than most others), your “passion” (what inspires you) and “purpose” (what’s actually needed in the world), intersect. I’m not, for now, creating a social enterprise, but feel that if I make my book come off in the next couple of years I’ll be pretty close to that sweet spot, and to generating new ones. I’m also dipping into Eckhart Tolle’s "The Power of Now" which so many millions have read before me. How wise to let past and future dissolve and to live fully-present in the present, unencumbered by a chatting mind...now to put it into practice.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
New York missive no 63 - Lima, 10 years later
I spent a tranquil Sunday after Christmas wandering the quiet end-of-holiday streets of central Santiago, before getting a plane back to NYC that evening. In the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombiana I came across a magnificent quipu, a complicated mass of threads and knots used by the Incas to store information about the empire – census data, weather conditions, the location of villages etc. It was fanned out in a dramatic circle for the purpose of the exhibit. Here’s what they look like. The precise meanings of those knots has yet to be deciphered, their significance lost along with the Incas themselves.
That quipu, the multicoloured Inca cloths called cumbi, and the huge geometrically designed weavings that C and I saw today at a MOMA exhibition on Bahaus, reminded me how I’m intrigued by thread as a material. In weavings, in clothes, in tapestries in quipu, wherever. One of the labels at the Bauhaus exhibition mentioned that the “inherent quality of materials” was central to the movement. What are the inherent qualities of thread? Ancient and practical come to mind…but then compared with wood and stone it’s not ancient at all. Human. Story-telling. Strong.
*******************************************
Earlier that day in Santiago I’d seen two kids playing by a fountain outside La Moneda. Children give us hope…I thought momentarily…and then they become adults. But determined not to succumb to cynicism I carried the thought through. Ok they become adults. But as children, they enable adults to see through a child’s mind again, which is no bad thing. Probably the key to sanity. And concern for their children’s future makes adults act far better than they would otherwise.
*******************************************
Back in Lima again after 10 years away. Last time I was there as a free-wheeling inquisitive 22 year-old. This time I was walking down the same streets as a 32-year-old soon-to-be-mother, acutely aware of the passing of time, how things change and don’t change. I decided to see if the woman whose house I lived in back in 1999 was still there (A, the mother of the poet Antonio Cisneros). We had lost touch several years ago. I passed the small Amnesty office where I used to work, crossed over to the familiar street, not remembering the exact house number but knowing I’d recognize it. A couple of blocks along I saw a huge new housing development, one of hundreds that are springing up all over Miraflores…that’s it, oh well, I thought, the house has gone. Then there it was, teetering on the edge of the new development. I peered through the window and everything was exactly the same. Dark wooden polished floors. A gold-rimmed mirror on one wall. Carefully-placed photographs of family members in frames on old furniture. One of AC’s grandchildren answered the doorbell when I rang and she brought AC to the door. She was older, so much older. Her memory was hazy and she only partly remembered me. But the wonderful thing was that she was there. Another thing that I found was still there was a small plate that I’d given to my friend AL’s mum before leaving. “Mira,” she said, and showed me the plate propped up in a display cabinet. Both those mothers seem to emanate security and keeping things in place. Eeek, can I have that in me?!
*******************************************
I was spoilt over Christmas, joining M and D on a boat around Cape Horn. On board we watched a feature documentary on Shackleton's second mission to the Antarctic. The mission failed in that he never accomplished his goal of crossing the continent. It succeeded in that he achieved his revised goal of keeping all his men alive. That was after the most staggering feats of endurance(which ironically is the name of the ship they’d had to abandon when it got trapped in the ice). Aside from wondering whether the equivalent group of people today could have survived what those men did, it made me think that human resilience to the cruelty of nature is so much stronger than our resilience to the cruelty of humans. What a strange, self-destructive species we are. What other species would conceive of things like concentration camps, gulags and torture?
*******************************************
What was going to be a very simple wedding – a quick trip to City Hall – has somewhat grown. We still want to keep it smallish and personal though. The first couple of evenings I was back C and I went hunting for a venue. There was the Foundry – a converted metal foundry that I’d thought could be a cool, wow-factor industrial space. It was dingy and disappointing. It felt like somewhere that is presented as a cool, wow-factor industrial space and has the prices to match but falls far short of actually being it. There was the Waters Edge, a restaurant on East River. It has impressive views of Manhattan but felt a bit like a wedding-factory and too tackily glitzy. And then there was the fabulous Seaman’s Church Institute near South Street Seaport, with its calm modern chapel, its gallery full of model ships and the “top deck” space for the party with glass walls overlooking Brooklyn Bridge. Venue found. Six weeks or so to fix everything else…nothing like a deadline.
That quipu, the multicoloured Inca cloths called cumbi, and the huge geometrically designed weavings that C and I saw today at a MOMA exhibition on Bahaus, reminded me how I’m intrigued by thread as a material. In weavings, in clothes, in tapestries in quipu, wherever. One of the labels at the Bauhaus exhibition mentioned that the “inherent quality of materials” was central to the movement. What are the inherent qualities of thread? Ancient and practical come to mind…but then compared with wood and stone it’s not ancient at all. Human. Story-telling. Strong.
*******************************************
Earlier that day in Santiago I’d seen two kids playing by a fountain outside La Moneda. Children give us hope…I thought momentarily…and then they become adults. But determined not to succumb to cynicism I carried the thought through. Ok they become adults. But as children, they enable adults to see through a child’s mind again, which is no bad thing. Probably the key to sanity. And concern for their children’s future makes adults act far better than they would otherwise.
*******************************************
Back in Lima again after 10 years away. Last time I was there as a free-wheeling inquisitive 22 year-old. This time I was walking down the same streets as a 32-year-old soon-to-be-mother, acutely aware of the passing of time, how things change and don’t change. I decided to see if the woman whose house I lived in back in 1999 was still there (A, the mother of the poet Antonio Cisneros). We had lost touch several years ago. I passed the small Amnesty office where I used to work, crossed over to the familiar street, not remembering the exact house number but knowing I’d recognize it. A couple of blocks along I saw a huge new housing development, one of hundreds that are springing up all over Miraflores…that’s it, oh well, I thought, the house has gone. Then there it was, teetering on the edge of the new development. I peered through the window and everything was exactly the same. Dark wooden polished floors. A gold-rimmed mirror on one wall. Carefully-placed photographs of family members in frames on old furniture. One of AC’s grandchildren answered the doorbell when I rang and she brought AC to the door. She was older, so much older. Her memory was hazy and she only partly remembered me. But the wonderful thing was that she was there. Another thing that I found was still there was a small plate that I’d given to my friend AL’s mum before leaving. “Mira,” she said, and showed me the plate propped up in a display cabinet. Both those mothers seem to emanate security and keeping things in place. Eeek, can I have that in me?!
*******************************************
I was spoilt over Christmas, joining M and D on a boat around Cape Horn. On board we watched a feature documentary on Shackleton's second mission to the Antarctic. The mission failed in that he never accomplished his goal of crossing the continent. It succeeded in that he achieved his revised goal of keeping all his men alive. That was after the most staggering feats of endurance(which ironically is the name of the ship they’d had to abandon when it got trapped in the ice). Aside from wondering whether the equivalent group of people today could have survived what those men did, it made me think that human resilience to the cruelty of nature is so much stronger than our resilience to the cruelty of humans. What a strange, self-destructive species we are. What other species would conceive of things like concentration camps, gulags and torture?
*******************************************
What was going to be a very simple wedding – a quick trip to City Hall – has somewhat grown. We still want to keep it smallish and personal though. The first couple of evenings I was back C and I went hunting for a venue. There was the Foundry – a converted metal foundry that I’d thought could be a cool, wow-factor industrial space. It was dingy and disappointing. It felt like somewhere that is presented as a cool, wow-factor industrial space and has the prices to match but falls far short of actually being it. There was the Waters Edge, a restaurant on East River. It has impressive views of Manhattan but felt a bit like a wedding-factory and too tackily glitzy. And then there was the fabulous Seaman’s Church Institute near South Street Seaport, with its calm modern chapel, its gallery full of model ships and the “top deck” space for the party with glass walls overlooking Brooklyn Bridge. Venue found. Six weeks or so to fix everything else…nothing like a deadline.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
New York missive no 62 - New life
The stone lions outside New York public library are rather refined compared to the thick-set ones in Trafalgar Square. Their haunches stick up high and their faces have poise. They look as if at any moment they could spring off their pedestals and go for a stroll down Fifth Ave.
***************************************************
In the middle of the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza was a plump woman wearing purple leggings and a tight-fitting orange sweater. She didn’t look like an ice skater. But there she was, gliding, twirling, slicing, so graceful in her element.
***************************************************
A fabulous poem from WS craft class, by Robinson Jeffers
Cremation
It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame – besides, I
am used to it.
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.
***************************************************
I shouldn’t have poems about death on my mind at the moment though, as I’m four months pregnant. It’s funny how this is such a common experience but still such an utterly magical one. Things that I felt I was juggling and not focusing on before have in a bizarre way become easier, like everything has settled into a calmer place. Come mid-May that calm will of course be disrupted by small-hours baby cries but that’s ok. And while I say some things have become easier to get done, that’s not to say extreme absent-mindedness isn’t one of my side effects. The other day I found a dish-cloth that I’d left, for some reason, in the fridge door. And I keep wandering around our apartment looking for things I put down just a minute ago. I say “our apartment” – C and I moved to Astoria a couple of weeks ago having found after a couple of day’s hunting a rare thing: SPACE near the city that we can afford, just about.
I’ve had amusing moments like standing in the elevator at work with two other people, thinking to myself “little do you know there are actually four of us in here” (kind of). And speaking to a monosyllabic woman at the health insurance company in order to “authorize” my pregnancy. Wasn’t it a bit late for any kind of authorization? And who was the health company to be authorizing it or not? “Name?”, she asked, “Date of birth?”, “Place of delivery?” (as if talking about a Fedex package), then, “normal pregnancy?”, “normal birth?” (as if I could know that yet).
I've also had a bizarrely intense fascination with living things, especially in the early stages through a haze of queasiness. Like watching squirrels in Union Square, or flocks of tiny birds on the High Line. I intend not to overload Ewiny with yumsy-mumsy things though, instead just bring this new experience into the mix. Nor do I intend to post any sonogram images, which seems to be the new fad on Facebook.
C and I are wondering how many other Dominican-American-British kids there are. However many, there’s a high chance they’re in New York.
***************************************************
My other bit of life-changing news is that C and I are now engaged, after a highly romantic proposal in a little hut, by a lake, in Central Park surrounded by Autumn leaves.
***************************************************
In the middle of the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza was a plump woman wearing purple leggings and a tight-fitting orange sweater. She didn’t look like an ice skater. But there she was, gliding, twirling, slicing, so graceful in her element.
***************************************************
A fabulous poem from WS craft class, by Robinson Jeffers
Cremation
It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame – besides, I
am used to it.
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.
***************************************************
I shouldn’t have poems about death on my mind at the moment though, as I’m four months pregnant. It’s funny how this is such a common experience but still such an utterly magical one. Things that I felt I was juggling and not focusing on before have in a bizarre way become easier, like everything has settled into a calmer place. Come mid-May that calm will of course be disrupted by small-hours baby cries but that’s ok. And while I say some things have become easier to get done, that’s not to say extreme absent-mindedness isn’t one of my side effects. The other day I found a dish-cloth that I’d left, for some reason, in the fridge door. And I keep wandering around our apartment looking for things I put down just a minute ago. I say “our apartment” – C and I moved to Astoria a couple of weeks ago having found after a couple of day’s hunting a rare thing: SPACE near the city that we can afford, just about.
I’ve had amusing moments like standing in the elevator at work with two other people, thinking to myself “little do you know there are actually four of us in here” (kind of). And speaking to a monosyllabic woman at the health insurance company in order to “authorize” my pregnancy. Wasn’t it a bit late for any kind of authorization? And who was the health company to be authorizing it or not? “Name?”, she asked, “Date of birth?”, “Place of delivery?” (as if talking about a Fedex package), then, “normal pregnancy?”, “normal birth?” (as if I could know that yet).
I've also had a bizarrely intense fascination with living things, especially in the early stages through a haze of queasiness. Like watching squirrels in Union Square, or flocks of tiny birds on the High Line. I intend not to overload Ewiny with yumsy-mumsy things though, instead just bring this new experience into the mix. Nor do I intend to post any sonogram images, which seems to be the new fad on Facebook.
C and I are wondering how many other Dominican-American-British kids there are. However many, there’s a high chance they’re in New York.
***************************************************
My other bit of life-changing news is that C and I are now engaged, after a highly romantic proposal in a little hut, by a lake, in Central Park surrounded by Autumn leaves.
Friday, October 16, 2009
New York missive no 61 - Taking Amartya Sen's seat
New York is the man on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 50th Street saying his evening prayers on a little rug laid out by the food cart where he sells kebabs, a torrent of workers and shoppers passing him by.
*****************************************
At a discussion on human rights and detention last week at Columbia University with Sir Nigel Rodley, Scott Horton, Peter Rosenblum and others, David Fathi of Human Rights Watch began his talk with some statistics. In the US, 2.4 million people are in prison on a given day. That’s 762 people per 100,000. By comparison, in the UK 152 people per 100,000 are in prison, in Canada 116, and in Japan, 63.
During the questions I asked about the implications of the increasing privatization of the prison system. Rodley first emphasized that any level of privatization does not absolve the state of its responsibilities. Then he added that “all my instincts tell me that outsourcing of this fundamental role of government is to be avoided.”
Fathi concisely summarized the main problems with prison privatization. The profit-motive means private centers will always be looking for ways to minimize costs, including by reducing staff and training – hence it’s not surprising that a higher number of abuses take place in private than in state-run facilities. There is a serious lack of transparency around private prison firms – for example they are not usually subject to federal and state freedom of information legislation. And the “consumer choice” argument – that private systems improve standards because customers can reject products or services for better ones – doesn’t exactly apply to prisoners.
*************************************************
On a rather lighter, or at least more entertaining note than the detention discussion, I heard Pedro Almodóvar holding forth for a couple of hours last Saturday at the Lincoln Center. He was talking about his “history of cinema” with the New York Film Festival Director Richard Peña, interspersing the conversation with clips from his and his mentors’ films.
The audience was in fits of laughter half the time but cruelty did still crop up. “Legitimate cruelty is unfortunately part of our work” (as directors), he said. The first he clip he showed was from Cassavetes’ Opening Night, when Gena Rowlands, playing an actress called Myrtle, is blind-drunk before the curtain raises on the opening night of the play she’s starring in, Second Woman. She’s stumbling along the backstage corridors, collapsing from time to time on the floor. The camera sways and crashes with her. The play’s Director, acted by Ben Gazzara, walks slowly behind her, watching. He does not lift a finger to help and gets angry when another character tries to. That scene epitomized, Almodóvar said, the way in which directors, despite being “everything” to their actors – father, shrink, teacher, confidante, lover etc. – ultimately have to leave the actors to work through their challenges and problems alone. And I’ve worked with plenty of actresses whose problems are much bigger than their talent, he added.
**************************************************
That was quite a weekend of New York it’s-all-at-your-fingertips culture. The previous night L and I saw the Peruvian criollo / música negra singer Eva Ayllón at Queens Theater in the park (right out in Flushing, in the park next to the eerie huge steel globe donated by US Steel for the World Fair).
Ayllón’s compatriot, the singer Zambo Cavero, had died earlier that day and she was clearly emotionally distraught by it. Her singing was beautiful but at one point she staggered offstage leaving the cajón and guitar players to their own improvised devices until she remerged. She’s getting on in years and god knows how she held out through the second two-hour concert that was starting soon after ours ended.
The concert made me more excited than I already am about going back to Lima in December, ten years after I lived there. Seems I’m susceptible to falling in love with cities.
***************************************************
Well I never. I’m so often looking for adventure “elsewhere”, restlessly wondering what lies just round the corner, or in another part of town, or on the other side of the planet. And a miraculous adventure turns up right here, close to me as it can be. To be continued...
***************************************************
I embarrassed myself at the Carnegie Council the other day. Amartya Sen was giving a breakfast talk on his new book The Idea of Justice. I arrived a bit late, so the room was already full of people sitting at round white-clothed tables laden with orange juice and croissants, and Sen was in full flow. The woman who showed me in to the room whispered, “there’s one spare chair you can sit in, over there by the podium”. Right under Sen’s nose. I had no choice but to stride out through the room to the table next to him. Once there I spotted another vacant chair, less directly in front of him. So as subtly as possible I sat in it, started listening attentively, and attempted to ignore the (mostly elderly) disapproving faces staring at me.
Then I realized that I was sitting in Sen’s chair. Cheeky upstart with the guts to sit in the Nobel prize-winning economist’s seat, I could feel those faces thinking. Oh well, I was stuck. Luckily the event closed with a Q&A and Sen didn’t need to reclaim his seat. And at least I was in a good position to apologise to him afterwards – he was most gracious.
In his talk, Sen mentioned that the Idea of Justice draws on Adam Smith’s book the Theory of Moral Sentiments, written 17 years before Wealth of Nations and marking its 250th anniversary this year. Smith talked about the dangers that parochialism poses to justice. In other words the fact that confining discussion of a particular issue within a small society can lead to dangerous parochialism, and in turn, to injustice. Instead what is needed is scrutiny from a distance. Or to quote Smith, "The eyes of the rest of mankind must be invoked to understand whether a punishment appears equitable." This scrutiny said Sen, “may be useful for practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in Taliban Afghanistan; selective abortion of female fetuses in China, Korea, and parts of India; and plentiful use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter the United States….”
He continued:
"It is important, however, to recognize that to listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking the 'impartial spectator' in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not require us to be respectful of every argument that may come from abroad. That would be absurd. We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments, sometimes even all of them, and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a given country or culture.
The interdependence of reasoning is part of the ground on which Martin Luther King Jr. said in 'The Letter from Birmingham Jail' in April 1963: 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
***************************************************
I’ve had a rarely, for me, un-exploratory week off work – a combination of working in cafés on my book proposal (so work of sorts) and pottering around the city. What bliss to be out and about in the city on weekdays. Especially in West Village, which can be heaving at the weekends yet is remarkably tranquil during the week. And elsewhere: on Wednesday I went up to the top North East corner of Central Park and walked down to Columbus Circle – the whole top section of the park was an oasis of calm.
The café-sitting has meant eavesdropping some interesting conversations. For example the guy this morning, talking on his phone: “How many bones do you get for that?...And how big are the bones? Two inches, three inches across? Ok, well get one of the big ones and one of the small ones. Oh ok. Well get a mixed bag of…ah, how much are those? How much? Nah…just get the bones…And like, a pumpkin to put them in.”
The pumpkin bit broke the spell somewhat…implying the whole thing had something to do with Halloween.
***************************************************
Just before and after paying avid attention to that conversation I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times article on conceptual art, by Dennis Dutton of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It made a lot of sense, I thought. “Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why…” he said. The point being that conceptual art – Damien Hirst’s preserved sharks or his new medicine cabinets for example – depends “not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.” So it’s unlikely to withstand the test of time: future generations are unlikely to “get” it and if they do, it will no doubt seem rather dated, more a “historical curiosity” than a work of art.
*****************************************
At a discussion on human rights and detention last week at Columbia University with Sir Nigel Rodley, Scott Horton, Peter Rosenblum and others, David Fathi of Human Rights Watch began his talk with some statistics. In the US, 2.4 million people are in prison on a given day. That’s 762 people per 100,000. By comparison, in the UK 152 people per 100,000 are in prison, in Canada 116, and in Japan, 63.
During the questions I asked about the implications of the increasing privatization of the prison system. Rodley first emphasized that any level of privatization does not absolve the state of its responsibilities. Then he added that “all my instincts tell me that outsourcing of this fundamental role of government is to be avoided.”
Fathi concisely summarized the main problems with prison privatization. The profit-motive means private centers will always be looking for ways to minimize costs, including by reducing staff and training – hence it’s not surprising that a higher number of abuses take place in private than in state-run facilities. There is a serious lack of transparency around private prison firms – for example they are not usually subject to federal and state freedom of information legislation. And the “consumer choice” argument – that private systems improve standards because customers can reject products or services for better ones – doesn’t exactly apply to prisoners.
*************************************************
On a rather lighter, or at least more entertaining note than the detention discussion, I heard Pedro Almodóvar holding forth for a couple of hours last Saturday at the Lincoln Center. He was talking about his “history of cinema” with the New York Film Festival Director Richard Peña, interspersing the conversation with clips from his and his mentors’ films.
The audience was in fits of laughter half the time but cruelty did still crop up. “Legitimate cruelty is unfortunately part of our work” (as directors), he said. The first he clip he showed was from Cassavetes’ Opening Night, when Gena Rowlands, playing an actress called Myrtle, is blind-drunk before the curtain raises on the opening night of the play she’s starring in, Second Woman. She’s stumbling along the backstage corridors, collapsing from time to time on the floor. The camera sways and crashes with her. The play’s Director, acted by Ben Gazzara, walks slowly behind her, watching. He does not lift a finger to help and gets angry when another character tries to. That scene epitomized, Almodóvar said, the way in which directors, despite being “everything” to their actors – father, shrink, teacher, confidante, lover etc. – ultimately have to leave the actors to work through their challenges and problems alone. And I’ve worked with plenty of actresses whose problems are much bigger than their talent, he added.
**************************************************
That was quite a weekend of New York it’s-all-at-your-fingertips culture. The previous night L and I saw the Peruvian criollo / música negra singer Eva Ayllón at Queens Theater in the park (right out in Flushing, in the park next to the eerie huge steel globe donated by US Steel for the World Fair).
Ayllón’s compatriot, the singer Zambo Cavero, had died earlier that day and she was clearly emotionally distraught by it. Her singing was beautiful but at one point she staggered offstage leaving the cajón and guitar players to their own improvised devices until she remerged. She’s getting on in years and god knows how she held out through the second two-hour concert that was starting soon after ours ended.
The concert made me more excited than I already am about going back to Lima in December, ten years after I lived there. Seems I’m susceptible to falling in love with cities.
***************************************************
Well I never. I’m so often looking for adventure “elsewhere”, restlessly wondering what lies just round the corner, or in another part of town, or on the other side of the planet. And a miraculous adventure turns up right here, close to me as it can be. To be continued...
***************************************************
I embarrassed myself at the Carnegie Council the other day. Amartya Sen was giving a breakfast talk on his new book The Idea of Justice. I arrived a bit late, so the room was already full of people sitting at round white-clothed tables laden with orange juice and croissants, and Sen was in full flow. The woman who showed me in to the room whispered, “there’s one spare chair you can sit in, over there by the podium”. Right under Sen’s nose. I had no choice but to stride out through the room to the table next to him. Once there I spotted another vacant chair, less directly in front of him. So as subtly as possible I sat in it, started listening attentively, and attempted to ignore the (mostly elderly) disapproving faces staring at me.
Then I realized that I was sitting in Sen’s chair. Cheeky upstart with the guts to sit in the Nobel prize-winning economist’s seat, I could feel those faces thinking. Oh well, I was stuck. Luckily the event closed with a Q&A and Sen didn’t need to reclaim his seat. And at least I was in a good position to apologise to him afterwards – he was most gracious.
In his talk, Sen mentioned that the Idea of Justice draws on Adam Smith’s book the Theory of Moral Sentiments, written 17 years before Wealth of Nations and marking its 250th anniversary this year. Smith talked about the dangers that parochialism poses to justice. In other words the fact that confining discussion of a particular issue within a small society can lead to dangerous parochialism, and in turn, to injustice. Instead what is needed is scrutiny from a distance. Or to quote Smith, "The eyes of the rest of mankind must be invoked to understand whether a punishment appears equitable." This scrutiny said Sen, “may be useful for practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in Taliban Afghanistan; selective abortion of female fetuses in China, Korea, and parts of India; and plentiful use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter the United States….”
He continued:
"It is important, however, to recognize that to listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking the 'impartial spectator' in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not require us to be respectful of every argument that may come from abroad. That would be absurd. We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments, sometimes even all of them, and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a given country or culture.
The interdependence of reasoning is part of the ground on which Martin Luther King Jr. said in 'The Letter from Birmingham Jail' in April 1963: 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'"
***************************************************
I’ve had a rarely, for me, un-exploratory week off work – a combination of working in cafés on my book proposal (so work of sorts) and pottering around the city. What bliss to be out and about in the city on weekdays. Especially in West Village, which can be heaving at the weekends yet is remarkably tranquil during the week. And elsewhere: on Wednesday I went up to the top North East corner of Central Park and walked down to Columbus Circle – the whole top section of the park was an oasis of calm.
The café-sitting has meant eavesdropping some interesting conversations. For example the guy this morning, talking on his phone: “How many bones do you get for that?...And how big are the bones? Two inches, three inches across? Ok, well get one of the big ones and one of the small ones. Oh ok. Well get a mixed bag of…ah, how much are those? How much? Nah…just get the bones…And like, a pumpkin to put them in.”
The pumpkin bit broke the spell somewhat…implying the whole thing had something to do with Halloween.
***************************************************
Just before and after paying avid attention to that conversation I was reading an opinion piece in the New York Times article on conceptual art, by Dennis Dutton of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. It made a lot of sense, I thought. “Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why…” he said. The point being that conceptual art – Damien Hirst’s preserved sharks or his new medicine cabinets for example – depends “not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.” So it’s unlikely to withstand the test of time: future generations are unlikely to “get” it and if they do, it will no doubt seem rather dated, more a “historical curiosity” than a work of art.
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