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.