Catching up

The Subway Chronicles
Edited by Jacquelin Cangro
2006

The Chronicles and I got off on the wrong foot when the editor, in her introduction, referred several times to "euphemisms" for the New York City subway when I think she meant "metaphors." As far as I know, the subway doesn't require a euphemism. It's not like it's death.

But some of the essays -- all of them about the New York subway, with cameos by the Paris Metro and Moscow's subway -- made up for the intro. Favorites are by Francine Prose ("A Breakup Story"), Robert Lanham ("Straphanger Doppelganger"), Calvin Trillin ("What's the Good Word?"), Colson Whitehead ("Subway) and Jonathan Lethem ("Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn). Whitehead and Lethem's pieces were exceprts from other works, though, so I'm not sure they count.

Others were tedious, like one that retraced the author's travels as a child. I read about how he could sit up front by an open window in some trains, and in other trains the window didn't open, but up to four people could sit by it and watch, and so that made it still a good train. And there were different ways to get to Coney Island. That one might have worked better as a shorter piece.

It's hot or miss, but the book provides several perspectives: short-term and longtime New York transplants, young people who grew up in New York and never left (or not for long), and older people who remember a fairly young subway system.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Marisha Pessl
2006

This starts out smart in sort of the same way that Mean Girls was smart, only smarter. And then it gets smarter still -- with a bit of a mystery where these seemingly quirky facts come together as something more sinister.

Pessl has does a lot of clever things. For instance, her narrator is a highly intelligent senior in high school who cites sources term paper style throughout the novel. She manages to keep clever from becoming cloying, even though this is clearly a Big Trendy Book.

It's hard to get into the plot without giving too much of the mystery away, but there's a professor father and his daughter who travel around the country as he goes from guest teaching post to guest teaching post and obscure universities. There's a teacher and the popular crowd, known as "the bluebloods" whom she's close to.

And anyway, it's great fun to read.

If you lived here, you could have a picnic whenever you wanted to.

This is out of order, because the one above is from Sunday, and this is from Monday. But I like Sunday's so much more. These trees should get it together. I don't think it's necessary to be leafless yet.

This costume freaks me out every time.

This is Charles. I was by the Rite Aid, and he said, "Take my picture." I tried to take one of us together, but I couldn't get it right.

I took a picture of decay with my Canon at the light rail stop, so I think that makes me edgy. This was taken after I got on the train, before it started moving.

This is from Wednesday. Make sure to put out your cigarette before you get in the elevator.

It's funnel-like.

The distorted door in the background makes this photo for me.

Maybe I could use a paint job. Or a washing. Maybe.

From Greenmount Cemetery, overlooking the city. This is from Saturday.

My favorite thing about this photo is how I cropped it, so I'm not that impressed with it. At least there's still time to take a better one today.

And all I bought was a small butternut squash.

I am the mighty fire hydrant, and I stand apart from my obsolete friends -- the newspaper box and the mailbox. Just try to put a fire out with me. Just try.

The new haircut got a little damaged in the rain between Bella and the bus and the bus and home.

My, what big leaves you have

Hey there, lettuce, it's probably about time to eat you. You're looking a little oversized.

The early fall reading into more Spinoza

Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction
by Henry E. Allison
1987

The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind
by Rebecca Goldstein
1989

For me, reading philosophy is like Algebra I (OK, philosophy really is part geometry, and it has a lot to do with mathematic principles in general, but speaking personally ...), if I miss a little in the beginning the whole foundation is off and I'm left wondering how I got from there to here. And that's how I felt with Benedict de Spinoza, which is an academic text. (By the way, I finished with a D -- and it was probably a pity D -- in seventh-grade algebra and had to repeat it in eighth grade, and nothing has been so confusing to me since. Also, I have never since spent class drawing pictures of Michael Jordan in pencil on the desk.)

So Goldstein's Spinoza (and Plato, I guess) novel, The Late Summer Passion, if a little didactic was helpful in making things clear. She focuses on the love angle. For Spinoza, an object is good because we love it. We do not love it because it's good. Also, there are no real decisions. Things happen because they are the next logical course in a string of events that go on into eternity. And if you think like that, then life is a dull proposition.

Eva Mueller, a professor of philosophy and our protagonist, does think like Spinoza, and her existence is impersonal. Until she studies Spinoza's The Ethics with a 20-year-old student who likes the human condition and sparks fly and she's all confused.

Then there's a bunch of stuff about World War II. (Eva is German, and a long time ago she had a crazy Jewish lover, so maybe that's why she turned off life. It's also a bit Sophie's Choice. Blond woman, crazy angry Jewish lover, etc.)

We're never told where Eva's university is, but it's pretty clearly set in Ithaca, and I assume it's Cornell cause Rebecca Goldstein is an Ivy League kind of woman. And one night, a distraught Eva goes to the bar at 3 a.m. There are few places in the U.S. where you can go to the bar at 3 a.m., and Google leads me to believe that Ithaca is not one of them (1 a.m. closing time, it seems). So maybe it's not an annoying departure from reality but the book is actually set in another college town famous for its gorges. Yeah, it must be that.

Mother, prostitute. zine editor, performer, Suckdog

Drugs are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir
by Lisa Crystal Carver
2005

Lisa Carver's had some fucked up things happen to her and she's done some maybe fucked up things, and she writes about them. But she doesn't romanticize them, and she also doesn't dwell on them. And in with all that sad stuff before she had a kid and before she grew up a bit, she had some good times, and she'll tell you about that, too.

As a performer and song-writer, she probably has no talent, but she and her friends still record stuff and still go on the road and tour. And they get popular in the DIY underground. It's inspiring to see people just go out and do something that's fun, even though they don't even know how to do it. Most of us sit around as kids making up songs, sometimes epic songs that last all day, and then grow out of it when we realize they're no good. It takes something to not only not stop, but record and distribute that.

Oh, and for a little bit she's a prostitute (in a brothel) cause she needs the money and she always wanted to do it anyway. Mostly, that goes well, and she has to stop cause she likes her job too much (not the sex but the taking on of several personas).

Drugs are Nice (Don't be fooled by the title, there aren't many drugs. It's taken from the title of one of her songs performed as part of Suckdog.) could be called an autobiography because Carver became well-known as the creator of the zine Rollerderby and had done something besides a lot of drugs pre-memoir, unlike most thirtysomething memoir-ists.

Reading Carver won't make you feel as cheap as reading someone like Augusten Burroughs.

American city

American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
1997

"These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who'd never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured."

The Swede, like Updike's Rabbit, is a former star high school athlete. Like Rabbit, he loses a child, though unlike Rabbit, not through the child's death. He's an upper-class Rabbit, though, someone who thinks he's got it under control. And the thing is, even when the Swede doesn't have everything under control and when he knows he doesn't, the he still kind of does.

It doesn't make up a huge part of the story, but as the Swede's life unfolds, so does his the life of his hometown, Newark (the one in N.J.), also the site of The Plot Against America.

The Plot's present-day action (circa World War II) has working- and middle-class Jewish families in the city. By American Pastoral, they've pulled out, with the Swede keeping his glove factory there but moving toward moving that out, too.

So what about Newark? It's a city of 280,00, and I've only seen it from Amtrak. And from there it looks like Wilmington, which pretty much looks like Baltimore, only with an Omaha skyline.

Philip Roth shows me a little bit of what Newark at least once was, with people riding buses and raising families and sometimes hanging on. And he's led me to find a glimpse of what it could be:

A New Arc: A botched city on the cusp of a renaissance (from The Wall Street Journal).
The New City (from Esquire, PDF).

True story

I wanted to link to A.M. Homes' 2004 New Yorker piece on meeting her birth parents, "The Mistress's Daughter," because it was the first of her writing that I read. But almost two years later, I can't find it online. So here she is in December 2004 talking about it on NPR.

An expanded version of The New Yorker piece is due out as a book in April.