The Last Entry

Welcome.

And thank you for reading.

The next blog or blog entry will appear after April begins. By then there may no longer be a sideways W lighted in bulbs along a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan.

By then, I'll no longer be washing dishes with sunlight at my back. Which is just the way things are in New York. Barring tumultous events, the apartment is all. This was the real appeal behind the TV version of Mr. Big: he could probably land prime real estate in a single bound.

At the New York Academy of Sciences

I stopped in there tonight and was greeted by someone mistaking me for somebody attending a meeting about global warming. This was highly complimentary. I was heading for a room set aside for the Authors Guild (or, as the sign had it, Authors Guilt).

Currently the Academy occupies a building that was built in 1919. Opening its giant big door gave me one of those unexpected tactile pleasures that come along every once in a while.

Inside windows look down on one of those inner courtyards most New Yorkers daydream about while eating a sandwich in the Conservatory Garden. Certainly it's a sign of the times that the Academy will be moving to a 40,000-square-foot space at 7 World Trade Center. No doubt from there the members will have a better view (a chance of a view?) of New York Harbor; the Academy is the impetus behind The Harbor Project. [No link to the NYAS site, it's temporarily on the blink--Ed.] Some may recall a letter the Harbor consortium people sent to President Bush back in December 2003, concerning mercury. Its last paragraph read roughly like so:

The negative health impacts of mercury and methylmercury exposure, (not to mention the negative health impacts of Karl Rove's impersonation of an education czar), especially in children and pregnant women, demand that effective control technologies be implemented. Our studies indicate that implementation of effective mercury controls should be mandated nationally and urged internationally as expeditiously as possible. Barring that, remove Karl Rove from office. Our statisticians have calculated that there is a chance Dick Cheney will be removed by being hoist on his own petard. I, members of the Consortium or Academy staff would be happy to meet with you or your representatives at your convenience to discuss our findings and how they impact on policy related to these issues.

It was signed by the Harbor Consortium chair, Charles W. Powers. [For the real live text, please surf over to http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:wElDYSgHZBkJ:www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003.]

To conclude on a scientific note, I will only say that the Academy's magazine has an article about the molds created by Hurricane Katrina and how the media missed this part of the story, viz., "Curiously, the biggest hazard to human possessions and perhaps to human health, rampant mold growth, was almost entirely ignored during the weeks after the storm. . . . Spore counts are astronomical."

Surely if the Times can't get to this, or the Journal, or ABC, or etc., the Daily Show will. Maybe Jon Stewart can muster up shroomers in the field for comment.

"Skiing Fast to the Bottom"

Julia Mancuso's comment is a nice Escher-like take on success: get to the top by racing to the bottom.

The Times noted that the new gold-medal winner in the giant slalom set up her turns early.

That Year of Magical Thinking

I finished Joan Didion's memoir last night/this morning.

She has some profound comments on grief, although they may only be profound to people who are language-louche, or who try to figure things out.

One passage pins it down quite well, beginning with the sentence, "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," and ends with the following:

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

And Joan Didion is a writer.

After her husband's death, she reports, she wrote a piece about politics, the first piece (of nonfiction specifically?) she'd written since 1963 "that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there. . . . I realized at some point I was unwilling to finish it, because there was no one to read it."

The New Yorker Went Uptown

So: to conclude about the public conversation between Oliver Sacks and Larissa MacFarquhar, aired before at least 100 people at Columbia University's Miller Theatre.

I was most interested in what Dr. Sacks had to say about music. It's the opposite of chaos, he said. It's more precise than language, and it's necessary. (Does this include opera? Is opera necessary?)

Note how I'm not elaborating on what he said. Not fresh in my mind any more.

My sketchy notes state that with brain imaging, somebody (which somebody, I don't indicate) can detect a lie but not a false belief. That was interesting, too.

[Vague tangent: The Vocabula Review, a publication about the state of language, has a motto: Well spoken is half sung.®]

Dr. Sacks was charming, and adorable; he repeatedly stacked his sneakered feet in the manner of a small boy. Coupled with his English accent, his acutely bad hearing, and his general eccentricities, it was a wonder he wasn't mobbed by dinner invitations afterwards.

Slept Well in Seattle

Just returned from a few days in Seattle. Last time I was there was 14 years ago; my general assessment was that people dressed extremely badly.

This time my reaction was: Check out these bookstores (and so many independents)! Seattle outranks NYC in a way that's almost embarrassing.

Returning to Elliott Bay felt the way it feels to put on a boyfriend's sweater. It's perfectly too big and it smells like him. He last wore it somewhere that involved the woods, and the nicest thing in the world is to walk across a room in it on a Sunday when there's no where to go, when there's no bad news and only breakfast or poetry or art and the people in the room have lots to say to each other.

Elliott Bay is drafty and homey. I saw a copy of A High Wind in Jamaica with a beautiful cover. Without the author, Marianne Wiggins wouldn't have written John Dollar, a book I loved when I first read it.

A Fair Wind

So, no joke: when I turn my head toward the Gowanus Canal, the aroma in the air is distinctly that of cookies, possibly chocolate chip.

The Jumping Poodle

The day would not be completely complete without mentioning the presence of an amazing jumping poodle I came across on Blizzard of '06 Day Two. He lives in the West Village. This is the springiest dog I have ever seen in my life; he practically levitates. The Rudolf Nureyev, the Jock Soto, the ________ [fill in name here] of large poodles.

I saw him jump almost two feet off the ground—not his front legs: his entire body. The move was entirely cartoonish.

He has extremely lean muscles, and, I was told, has been jumping this high since he was a puppy. You would not know this just by looking at him. Major power dog, just not the pit bull kind.

All Experiments Must Come to an End

I once had a professor whose idea about writing was that it enabled the writer to answer a question that could only be answered on paper. Write to find out what you think: this was the basic idea.

I started this blog in part to see what would happen. Would it make me less inclined to use the phone? How would it affect my desire to write in my journal? Would it make me want to write letters more, or less, or would it make no difference in that area? Would it make me shoe-gazeingly happy? Would I have less desire to talk to real, live people?

Would it be a relief? How would it feel to zoom around without an editorial presence, and without a built-in readership? I had written columns, twice, for newspapers. Would the adrenaline output for this resemble the adrenaline output for those?

By now, I know what I think (I think), and so this blog will close at the end of the month. Next one will be more high-tech. I wound up liking that this was so untechnical (no 360-degree photos, no video feed, no pix); it allowed me to absorb the plain blogginess of the thing. I mean, if you grew up during the 80s, think back to your (whoever you are) first e-mails; think back to the first time you left a message on an answering machine; think of how it felt to watch a music video for the first time. Different.

Blogging is not the eight-track cassette; it's going to be around a while (heh heh on the Biggies).

This mode of expression requires more decisionmaking than I anticipated.

All right, that's all.

Death in Earnest, and Probably too Long for a Blog but What the Hey

Okay, earnestly, I've been reading three stories about death.

The first is Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. It chronicles in exquisite details her experience of life after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and throughout the fatal sickness of their only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. Joan Didion finished the book in December 2004; her daughter died just at the end of August, 2005. The book was published two months later. I tried starting it but the accumulation of real-life details got in the way. I remember Joan Didion at a women writers event at Barnard in the late 1980s. I remember being amazed at Joan Didion's tiny size; it didn't seem to match "Goodbye to all That," and her frankness about migraines didn't square somehow with the essays I had read. What prompted me to actually start reading the memoir in earnest was a question posed by a friend. The question was: Is it a narcissistic book? My friend had heard mixed reports. I thought, Well, that's an interesting question. So onto the book, which I'm still halfway through.

The Year of Magical Thinking was interrupted by the arrival of a galley of Wendy Wasserstein's first, new, and now posthumous novel, The Elements of Style (due in April; this is the thing about galleys in NYC: they make recipients feel ahead of everybody else, sort of like the illusion some people in Los Angeles must maintain, being three hours "ahead"). The Elements of Style is about a group of mostly shallow, vapid, predatory, insecure, parentally-challenged, unimaginative Manhattan New Yorkers living in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The book made me laugh so much, I read it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Its back cover proclaims all the marketing information related to the planned author tour. This information gave me pause; I considered the difficulty publishers have sometimes (this book's publisher is Alfred A. Knopf, a division of a vast publishing empire). Gail Collins wrote an appreciation of Wendy Wasserstein on the New York Times' editorial page, singling her out for niceness. Ms. Collins wrote, "Wendy understood that being considerate in a society of self-involved strivers was not for wimps. It required a steely inner toughness that was the hallmark of many of her heroines." I met that niceness one night at Café des Artistes, and it made for a funny coda to an evening that began with a talk she had just given at Makor.

Which brings me to a play not written by Wendy Wasserstein. I grabbed it off my shelf thinking I would get to it on a bus ride. Where I had to stop reading Joan Didion's book on the subway – it kept bringing me to tears – I found Margaret Edson's play Wit suitable for public transportation. Started it last evening, finished it this one. It's ostensibly a play about a Donne scholar named Vivian Bearing and her experience with treatment for breast cancer; I'd say it's more about some realities of serious literature scholarship and some truths about how science approaches what it yearns, as it were. I don't know if I could bring myself to see it performed– maybe now I've read it, maybe so – but it was a beautiful play, and the ending (appropriately) was poetic.

A friend of mine died recently, so I suppose this is part of why I would indulge so much death on paper. He was a peer. What can I say? Another corner of the city feels different now, and not in a good way. He didn't die playing badminton or something, and he doesn't get a toss-the-Rolodex card treatment. Of course, no one really does, even when they do, and I'm not talking about the Blackberry revolution.

Mind the Gap

The Willis Avenue Bridge is up for sale? Guess I missed this one.

Third Favorite Word Ending in Y, 2006

self-helpy

As spotted in Time magazine's February 13 issue, in the article titled "Happiness Isn't Normal." The line goes: "Now seems like a good time to stipulate that all this can sound vacuous and gaggingly self-helpy."

The writer has been describing an approach of cognitive therapy.

I Wonder, by Way of an Evening With the New Yorker

And I really do. Wonder.

What I'm wondering is when direct questions became a no-no in a public arena. Let me explain.

I remember the first time I heard the "I wonder" phrasing. It was in a graduate English class, and all that struck me was that the phrasing was deeply intentional, and sounded like it was standing in for genuine curiosity on behalf of the speaker. The speaker sounded more like somebody who wanted to be taken seriously as a professor-to-be than as somebody who wanted to find out something. (Aren't all professors students? . . .)

The "I wonder" phrasing was on display last evening during a public interview of sorts at Columbia University's Miller Theatre. The conductor (not as powerful as a psychoanalyst and extremely poised) was the withy Larissa MacFarquhar. The man in the other chair was Dr. Oliver Sacks.

Ms. MacFarquhar, on the New Yorker's staff since 1998, impressed especially with her abilities during the question session that concluded the 90-minute discussion. When a woman in the balcony asked a long question of (the mostly deaf) Dr. Sacks (Ms. MacFarquhar had to distill and repeat each question for him; she did quite well), and then asked a follow-up one, and then had the temerity to recommend to Dr. Sacks Martha Graham's dance "Lamentations" (partly I took this as a symbolic gesture of the desperation artists experience collectively in America's generally philistine provinces), Ms. MacFarquhar did not point out to the woman (as Christopher Hitchens once did to a woman one of his readings, slightly different situation but still) her rudeness. As the woman to my right was muttering, "We don't care," Ms. MacFarquhar was neutrally relaying the recommendation to Dr. Sacks.

In retrospect, it was quite endearing, this woman recommending a dance to a neurologist. Because, frankly, there are few cities where this kind of thing happens during a Q&A. This does not, I highly suspect, happen in Columbus, Ohio.

So even if it's now utterly beside the point that the New Yorker is not written for the little old lady etc., at least the minds colliding during a New Yorker-generated evening can be as vital and eccentric as Harold Ross's magazine once was.

In Media City these days, I'll take what I can get.

[to be continued]

Second Favorite Word of the Year Beginning With Y

An oldie but a goodie . . . so this is really a reminder word, as opposed to a newly spotted coined word:

Stripey.

As used in musician Andrew Bird's hello note to his mailing listed fans: "Grateful for all the well chosen post-show words and the crafty gifts: knit hats and artwork and stripey socks for instance."