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.