The Year in: Bathrooms

Bathrooms that I know and love, from the East Village and Williamsburg. See if you can match the bathroom to the coffee shop/bar/venue!

The Year in: Vampires

Part I

It all started in January (years are like that). It was a cold morning and the office was nearly dead. The only other people there when I arrived were a couple marketing types who seem to relish getting in when everyone else is still asleep. Music was coming from one of their desks; something fresh and young-sounding, with a hint of the exotic. "What is it?" I asked.

"The new Vampire Weekend," he said. I had never heard of the band, but chalked that up to the fact that I am not a marketing type.


He lent me the cd. The album hadn't been released yet, so it was just a promo copy - no pictures, no lyrics sheet, no liner notes. Nothing to give me an idea of the band's aesthetic. There was a brief piece of publicity from Rolling Stone on the back cover: “Guaranteed to make you at least forty percent happier than when you put it on”—an ominous promise of renewed life, of resurrection.

I have to admit that without any knowledge of the band, I was briefly seduced by the music. There was something rejuvenating about it - I attributed it to the lively West African guitar riffs and Caribbean rhythms the (very American-sounding) band members drew on. It all seemed innocent enough at first.

[to be continued]

New School Occupied by Students

Last night, students from the New School and other city colleges occupied the University's library at 5th Avenue and 14th Street in order to protest the policies of president Bob Kerrey, a former senator and governor of Nebraska and Navy SEAL during the Vietnam War. On December 10, Kerrey received a vote of no confidence from the New School faculty because of mismanagement, evidenced by his handling of a recent university budget crisis, and by the fact that he has gone through five provosts during his eight-year tenure.


After a day-long sit-in, police cut off access to the library. While a group of protesting students remained inside, a crowd gathered outside in solidarity. Some received periodic updates from the group inside via textmessage, which they transmitted to the crowd.


At about 11:45 pm, Bob Kerrey exited the library, escorted by police. Students shouted for Kerrey to resign as he made his way to his townhouse on 11th Street, which was also guarded by police.



This morning, the library had re-opened in time for students to continue working on final papers. A maintenance worker began repairing a window on the side of the building that had been broken last night during the occupation.

Jousting Monkey; Post-Box Cinderella

Tah-Poozie, Greenwich Avenue.

West Village.

Keep on Moving it On

Last night, after looking over the accumulated notes and drafts for an essay I spent far too long writing, I could not escape the feeling that I had written the same thing over and over again, circling back over the same thoughts page after page and month after month.

I recently started a new job. My employer, a book dealer, is paying me to construct a narrative out of his family's papers - the snapshots, videos, certificates, cards a letters a family piles up during its first hundred years in the United States. At lunch on my first day of work, I was talking to one of the girls who helps run the book dealership when something she said off-hand made me realize that her father is a poet and professor who had interviewed me for a job just the week before. (Incidentally, the job with the poet would have involved sorting through some things - mostly manuscripts and books of poetry and accumulated correspondence - that still lay in boxes after his recent move.)

Taking a bus out of Manhattan about a month ago, having left the familiar circuits of downtown, we passed through a remote northern section of Harlem. It is a neighborhood I almost never visit. One building after another looked strange, out of place, inexplicable, and yet captivating. How had I never seen these places? I suddenly had a vision of a rat in a maze, the floors of which are made of sand, so that with each navigation of the maze (it is a small maze), the rat unwittingly digs deeper into the floor, while the walls, which were at first low enough that the rat could see over them if he had looked, quickly become so high that the rat forgets there is a way out of his downward spiral.

Just now, I was looking back through an essay by Emerson to find some quote I half-remembered. I hoped it would recapitulate a point I wanted to make about faith and science. I was unsuccessful. Instead I found this:

A character is like an acrostic or an Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, thought I mean it not and see it not.

These were the circles my thoughts had been running in when I heard about Odetta's death. My memory jumped to the evening of October 19, when I saw Odetta perform at Hudson Studios on West 26th Street. Before she took the stage, I had in mind pictures of the folk singer from the 1960s, so I was momentarily stunned by the shrunken, stooped women who sat in front of me, wrapped in shawls and furs, with something of a fortune teller's aspect. But there was no woodenness there - there was no looking back, for her. The first notes out of her mouth obliterated that other Odetta, the one in the black-and-white photographs I remembered. Her voice lifted up and carried high over her head the weights of a lifetime. It was only when she arrived at the chorus of that first song - "If you can't walk, crawl!" - that I realized she was seated in a wheelchair.

Some people in the audience seemed able to view her only through the prism of those former Odettas. "Isn't she amazing," I heard people say, "just imagine her in 196-..." As if now she were only the shadow of some more real presence that had already passed from view, instead of an accumulation and realization of all those former presences - the highest point on a rising spiral.

This was one of her last performances. She had hoped to sing at Barack Obama's inauguration. But I think something of Odetta's spirit - still lifting up, still looking beyond - will be there when we begin that new cycle.

A Friendly Face on the Street

Somewhere on 5th Avenue.

Buried Fruit

While doing some research on the history of travel, I opened a book in the New York Public Library only to find its pages fall open naturally, revealing a scrap of paper on which had been written a red X. Of what kind of pirate, I wondered, might this be the work? What sentence did this sign announce, and who would execute it? And was it intended for me or had I intercepted it by accident? For of course this ominous mark reminded me of the scrap of paper that sets in motion the plot of Treasure Island, although I had not thought of that book since I first read it in fifth grade.


But then I remembered that it is not a red X that the blind pirate Pew hands to Billy Bones, but a black dot. I could not recall any more of the novel's plot. The only thing that came back to me of that first reading was my initial impression of the book's complexity, of how the many story lines fit together to create a dense but perfectly balanced space. This impression of compact complexity led me, in response to some class assignment, to compare the structure of the novel to a pomegranate; a dense web run through with red seams - a red the color of rubies and of blood - that still carried a scent of tropical climates. Each character was a seed, seeds bundled together in sections to create individual story lines, and together the segments constituted the complete fruit - the complete text, as it were.


I'm skeptical, now, about how apt the pomegranate metaphor is, but I realize that its impression indelibly linked Treasure Island in my mind with an image of crisscrossed red lines.


Not daring to remove the slip of paper, I replaced the book on the shelf. I'll never know who received the sentence next. For myself, I know each of us is a marked man, and I'll be ready for my fateful meeting whenever it comes.

Smoking Negatively; Paper Tunnel; Door to Nowhere

More from the New York County Clerk Office.

A PDF in a Glass Case

Inspired by a live taping of the radio show 'Selected Shorts' which I attended last night, I started re-reading Ed Park's novel Personal Days, which came out in May. In addition to being unsettlingly funny, it perfectly captures the details of a mundane office job. Consequently, as I realized yesterday with a bit of horror for Ed, the book's technological details will probably be hopelessly obsolete in a few decades. The constant references to emails, software error messages, Power Point, pdfs - it won't be long before even the mention of one of these innovations evokes a chortle. Nothing dates an era as surely as its technology. Imagine reading a book, today, where a large portion of the action hinges on the idiosyncrasies of eight-track recorders or one of those first personal computers that no one knows how to use anymore.


The 'Selected Shorts' episode (which will air this Saturday and Sunday) was hosted by Ed and his fellow Believer editor Heidi Julavits. For some reason, they mentioned that they had originally intended to call their magazine The Balloonist. As with so many things, this inevitably put me in mind of Monty Python, and a skit on the golden age of ballooning in particular. As the skit points out, the hot-air balloon was once the height of technological innovation. But technological leaps forward are not always accompanied by scientific understanding. The Montgolfier brothers, who built the first manned hot air balloon 1783, were initially inspired by smoke in their father's paper factory lifting small scraps into the air. Throughout their balloon-building career, the brothers remained convinced that it was the smoke that lifted things, as opposed to the hot air. As a result, early balloon rides could be hard on the lungs.


I spent a large part of today in front of a microfilm reader in the New York County Clerk office on Chambers Street, looking at hand-written immigration records from the turn of the century. How many people today ever use microfilm? Most technologies pass into obsolescence, but others are completely forgotten. After people stop using email, it may not take many more decades before people forget what email was - before they forget that it was ever an innovation in the real world. That is my secret hope for Personal Days - that someday in the future one of its readers will come across a passage about QWERTY keyboards or cd drives and see it not as a laughably retro reference, but as the techno-babble of some forgotten era. On that day the novel will pass from very good period fiction to very good science fiction.

When Times are Good, People Eat Pizza

If you want to know what Williamsburg looked like on Election Night, here are some pictures of the largely aimless crowd that gathered at the corner of North 7th Street and Bedford Avenue (or, the Nexus of the Universe).

It was about 2 am, and I was on my way home when I ran into a German friend outside of Anna Maria Pizza. What's going on here?, I asked him. It's you Americans, he said, you don't know how to deal with change.

This was just before a guy with an English bull terrier draped across his shoulders starting chanting "Suck my cock!" to the police, for reasons that remained unclear.


For a bigger picture of election night in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, read my story for the Greenpoint Gazette. Then read my other story for the Greenpoint Gazette.

A Visit to the Old Office (letter)

Dear J----,

Stopped by the office the other day to find it quite literally on fire (I’ve been saying for months that that plastic cigarette tray out front should be replaced), and you “gone for quite some time” as the—in this case—appropriately named Fidelity put it. Strangely, she was the only one at the front desk, and there was a pile of checks sitting next to your computer.

Luckily, Bishop from the studio next door had a hose handy and was able to put out the flames before they got anywhere near the magazines. What he was doing with a hose, I can’t say—it looked like they were working on a pretty typical photo shoot, with six-foot-tall models in stilettos and white silk blouses, the kind you see hanging around there all the time. You should really know how to handle a hose, J----, for moments like this. Hose handling is an essential skill for any young office manager. I can hear you saying that I should have given you some training in that area before I passed the position over to you, but one can only foresee so many things, and I wash my hands of the whole affair at this point.

Anyway, I didn’t write to lecture you about checks lying around, just to say that I found the new issue of The Sophist you said had come in for me, so thanks. Just one thing still on the way for me (I cancelled the shipment of Montecristos, don’t worry)—a book, Imaginary Portraits. Just call me when it comes in. I’ll probably be around the corner drinking tea at The Labyrinth, working on the Henry Irving article.

Best,
AD

McCain's Six-pack

"Joe the Plumber," the imaginary American John McCain invoked repeatedly in last night's debate, is a poorly disguised euphemism for another, more familiar euphemism. The fact that John McCain's stand-in for every American is a beer-guzzling schmo from Nowheresville, who doesn't understand sentences with more than one dependent clause, is disturbing and insulting enough. Watching him in last night's debate made me feel that he was trying to apologize for - at the same time that he was trying to erase - the fact that he is a rich guy who will stay rich, and I am (each of us is, really) a poor guy forever holding a greasy wrench; to say that actually he admired you and I precisely because we do all the ugly things that he never has to do; to demonstrate that somehow this class drama he was inserting us into didn't at all invalidate his patronizing pander.

But...a plumber?

In John McCain's America, you and I are just people who fix the thing he shits in.

The Unintended Gift

The episode of Bruckner's coin, related in the previous post, reminded me of a similar story I heard about the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte:
For his coronation as emperor of France, Napoleon ordered a crown to be made of pure gold, in the shape of one of those laurel wreaths given to athletic champions in ancient times. The artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey, who designed the garments for the ceremony, presented the crown to the emperor at his coronation, but as he did, a single gold leaf broke off the wreath. Napoleon gave the leaf to Isabey, who preserved it in the cover of a snuff box for the rest of his life.

Life Under Glass

In high school I attended a Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsal of a symphony by Anton Bruckner. The writer of the orchestra's program notes usually gave a brief introduction to these rehearsals. "Bruckner takes his time with themes," the lecturer advised before this rehearsal, "but once you accept the leisurely pace, it's easy to enjoy the motifs as they unfold."

I've been reminded of this lecture and Bruckner's seemingly endless, meandering exposition while re-reading W.G. Sebald's novel, The Rings of Saturn. Where Bruckner's meanderings are harmonic, Sebald's lead from one seemingly unrelated subject to another: Thomas Browne; the herring fishermen of Lowestoft on England's southeast shore; the Chinese dowager empress Tz'u-hsi; the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne; slave laborers in the Congo - all pass before the reader in a distant, slowly metamorphosing pageant. One is almost surprised Bruckner does not make his appearance at some point in the procession.

Sebald calls up again and again an image of life frozen in observation throughout The Rings of Saturn, like one of the recurring themes in Bruckner's symphony. Tz'u-hsi stands ensconced behind the windows of her palace, Sebald recounts, and sees the workers in the distant fields and gardens as though they were flies trapped in a jamjar. A visitor at Swinburne's dinner table can not escape the feeling that the aging poet greatly resembles some strange bug, patiently munching its food beneath a glass case. The narrator gazes from the window of an airplane over Europe at the infinite creations of man below him and is met with a great, lifeless stillness, as if recognizing an ever-expanding bee colony only by the honeycombs they had built.

These scenes put me in mind of a painting I always found disturbing when encountered in grade-school books: Joseph Wright of Derby's Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, painted in 1768. The canvas was meant to depict the revelation of Enlightenment science. But seen today, the bird fluttering beneath the glass might stand for the passing away of that very society of which it is the victim: a society entranced by an experimental science still in its half-theatrical infancy.

Of course, Sebald presents the motif of life caught behind glass in the very first (long) paragraph of the book, when the convalescing narrator peers at dusk from his hospital window and recognizes nothing alive or familiar in the maze of the city below him. But as with Bruckner, the theme must be encountered several times before its importance is appreciated.

Bruckner, reputedly a simple man who enjoyed few things better than a glass of beer, once expressed his thankfulness to the conductor Hans Richter during a rehearsal of the Fourth Symphony by earnestly pressing a coin into his hand, onstage, immediately after the the baton was dropped. "Drink a glass to my health," the composer entreated. Richter wore the coin on his watch chain for the rest of his life.
The coin was a Maria Theresa thaler, named after the Austrian empress who died in 1780. Amazingly, the thaler has been in continuous circulation since its first minting in 1741. At various times it was used as currency as far afield as the United States, Ethiopia, and India, and is still used in the Middle East, recalling in its strange endurance the coins found in ancient burial sites as described by Thomas Browne in his Urn Burial, and which, as Sebald relates, preserved in Browne's view something of the undying soul of the humans who made them.

From the Correspondence of the Author

"Dear [editor/girlfriend/trusted high-school buddy],

or maybe

Hey [editor/gf/trusted hs bf]!

The [story/article/novel] is going well, thanks for asking. Did you get a chance to read that excerpt I sent you? I think it gives a good idea of what I want to do with the whole thing.

My only concern is the tone, or maybe the word choice. Or diction. Basically I'm unsure of the VOICE here. Why the short, choppy sentences? Why the repetition??

This is how everybody writes now. Why do I have to write that way? It's so AMERICAN. It's so H.S. Thompson. Isn't there something else?

What happened to long sentences, unpacked metaphors, density, elegance, linearity?What happened to invisible European form? What happened to NOT writing yourself into everything you write? Why do we always have to be destroying the [short story/essay/novel] form? It keeps coming back, doesn't it?

Anyway I am not a paranoid schizophrenic, so I don't think I should have to write like one. Why is everyone (editor, girlfriend, trusted HS BF) trying to make me write like a paranoid schizophrenic?

If you do not receive an immediate response to this email, it is because I am off sharpening a quill pen somewhere.

Best,

A.J.D.

or maybe

later,

a"

Propellers of Inspiration

My fan is very old. It may be from the 1960s or 50s, or earlier. Where modern fans employ elaborate grates to keep even a pen from reaching through to the moving blades, my fan has only four squiggly metal abstractions of protectors. The squiggles seem intended to suggest the motion (which one can't quite see while the fan is on--which is whenever I'm home, in the summer) of the blades behind them. Having been bred on modern fans, it now appears inevitable that at some point I would misinterpret the interpretive protectors and injure myself on this machine designed to ease my discomfort. And this is precisely what I did, about five minutes ago, while trying to move the fan. (For anyone who thinks this post departs from the usual subjects of the blog, I would argue that, to the extent this blog has a subject, it is always, secretly, about me moving things around my apartment.) I sliced the tip of the middle finder on my left hand, which makes this post more difficult than any other post I've written. Needless to say, I did not turn the fan off before trying to move it.
A few days ago, I read in Bookforum that Nicholson Baker is coming out with a new book about the lead-up to World War II, how the war could have been avoided, and, in Baker's view, why it should have been. The book is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Put another way, Baker's book is about how our misreading (in his view) of certain signs lead to (in his view) an avoidable, mechanized shedding of human blood.
I had to read another book by Nicholson Baker for a writing class in my final year of college. To the extent that this blog has an initial inspiration, it is that class. The book was The Mezzanine, whose central theme (as much as it has one) is "the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects," especially "propellers or desk fans." The narrator announces his obsession on the novel's very first page (in a footnote): "I love [how fans] will glint steadily in certain places in the grayness of their rotation; the curve of each fan blade picks up the light for an instant on the circuit and then hands it off to its successor."
I seem to stand at a strange intersection between these two books of Baker's. Hopefully my finger will not find itself at a similar intersection between the blades of my fan anytime soon.

Living With Boxes (Three Metaphors)

I. (It's Not The) End of the World

[Invitation for a party that never happened]

"A long time ago, when we were young and naive and the winking lights of Bushwick Avenue filled our sight long after the bodegas were closed, this is how we viewed our (then-new) neighborhood. The walls of our building were unfinished and the nearest movie store didn't even carry Herzog's Nosferatu. Looking back, I wonder at how we survived those first harrowing weeks. But survive we did. One could even say (thought the evidence is dubious) that, for a time, we thrived. Alas, we thrive no longer. So we move on, inevitably dispersing the empire eastward. And in our process of ceasing to thrive we learned that, in fact, this not The End of the World."

II. Packing

I found a place a few stops further on the subway, on the border between Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and Ridgewood, in Queens. I packed my books in liquor boxes. That looks like a very sharp metaphor, so I will leave it alone for the moment, to avoid injuring myself.
During a recent trip out of town I met a dog with the singular name of Arrow. Her singularity increased in my view when I found she was named after the dog Arrow in the movie The Point. The movie tells a bedtime story about a town where everyone is born with a point--literally--on their head. When a boy without a point is born in the town, he is banished (along with the faithful Arrow) to the wastes of the Pointless Forest, and told not to return until he has one.

Anyone who has seen The Point knows its story balances on the idea that one man's Pointless Forest is another man's Ridgewood, Queens. I thought about that, and packed my books into liquor boxes.

III. Arrival

For the past year, a page ripped from a German magazine hung above my desk. It says "Andreus Leikaufs Bilder handeln nich vom Boxen und vom Jazz auch nicht." I don't know what this means. Above the text is an image of a green and black painting of a desk. Inscribed in the middle of the desk are the words "NOW WORK!" When I took the page down from the wall I found a cockroach had made its home on the wall behind it.