There is something special about pen and paper, and type on high-quality paper, what is more deeply satisfying than reading words in a clean font on finely made paper when the writing is carefully crafted – indeed lovingly crafted – and why this especial joy has captured the best of our minds.
Words on screens don’t touch us in the same way. It is, for want of a better way to describe it, why one sees the religious faithful among us reading and praying from books, or portions of the Bible, the Torah, the Book of Common Prayer (check out this wonderful essay about the BCP by James Wood, which was recently in the New Yorker http://nyr.kr/QWjfp7,) in the most private conversation with their personal God and NOT from the screen of an iPhone or a Kindle or a Nook or a tablet. Or why the sensitive secular among us wouldn’t think of reading if it means abandoning our totems: our bound books by Herman Melville, David Foster Wallace and Mary Morris.
All of which is to say that not a single one of a dozen people we heard read at the Melville’s Moby-Dick Reading Marathon on Saturday (Nov. 17) chose to read their portion of the legendary tale (a taste of mine, from Chapter 73, “Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him:” From Stubb: “Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump- do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs”) from anything but a bound book, meaning one with black type on medium- to top-grade paper (although it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone among the one hundred and sixty readers who this past weekend joined in the Moby-Dick marathon read from a small type, worn paper classic for sentimental reasons, because reading a good story is one of the most intimate acts – and a computer is anything but intimate.)
Running for Your Life: What About Those Five-Finger Shoes
Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living
Want to get a sense of why – suddenly – New York City became America’s largest urban evacuation zone.
The sad, moving spectacle of Breezy Point, the Rockaways, and the Jersey Shore (yes, the Sitch and Snook as spokescharacters) aside, look at the view to New York Harbor and Lady Liberty while walking/running on 23rd Street in Brooklyn between Seventh and Sixth avenues. It’s the most dramatic vantage that I know of to illustrate how low the lowlands are at the sea and why Red Hook and the Gowanus stand a chance of being permanently inundated if water levels continue to rise as they have in recent years.
What also strikes me is how Brooklyn – unlike a second lowlands place, New Orleans, which, of course, has fewer options, chose Green-Wood Cemetery, the highest ground – for its final resting place (see the Athena monument, at right, waving at her distant sister, Lady Liberty).
Suddenly homes on the hill in New York City have even more reason to be more expensive than their weight in gold.
Running for Your Life: My Next Marathon – Reading Moby-Dick
Running for Your Life: How Does It Feel to Be Mitt Romney?
You live in a bubble your whole adult life only to find yourself in a seemingly impermeable bubble within that bubble for ten long months since the Iowa caucuses in January, a bubble that was suddenly pierced November 6th when even Fox News called the election against you, and Mitt, you decided to stay in your bubble, the original one, for what must have been close to an hour, trapped in a narrative that I swear to God that only you and Karl Rove still believed in, otherwise you would have conceded, Mitt, humbly accepted your fate before you did.
Which, alas, is still the case: that you’re not able to come to grips with what happened to you on Election Day 2012. Mitt is milling around, not yet mulling his options. To be Mitt Romney these dark days in November is to be like a lone survivor in a landscape laid waste by a nuclear explosion, where nothing that is left standing bears any resemblance to your expectations.
This Mitt is not John McCain, he is not John Kerry, he is not Bob Dole. Or Walter Mondale. We won’t be seeing Mitt Romney because he’s not leaving that original bubble of his, the one reserved for the uber-wealthy. Mitt won’t be taking a seat across from me on the subway (not that McCain or Kerry or Dole or Mondale will either . . .) or be reading a Kindle at a bus stop, waiting for the cross-town.
The truth is, given my life being what it is, a relatively ordinary one, I can’t for the life of me imagine what it’s like for Mitt Romney. I wonder, in a year, will I even remember his name. At this moment it is the one thing he has going for him. How can you forget a name like Mitt?
Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living
Which, alas, is still the case: that you’re not able to come to grips with what happened to you on Election Day 2012. Mitt is milling around, not yet mulling his options. To be Mitt Romney these dark days in November is to be like a lone survivor in a landscape laid waste by a nuclear explosion, where nothing that is left standing bears any resemblance to your expectations.
This Mitt is not John McCain, he is not John Kerry, he is not Bob Dole. Or Walter Mondale. We won’t be seeing Mitt Romney because he’s not leaving that original bubble of his, the one reserved for the uber-wealthy. Mitt won’t be taking a seat across from me on the subway (not that McCain or Kerry or Dole or Mondale will either . . .) or be reading a Kindle at a bus stop, waiting for the cross-town.
The truth is, given my life being what it is, a relatively ordinary one, I can’t for the life of me imagine what it’s like for Mitt Romney. I wonder, in a year, will I even remember his name. At this moment it is the one thing he has going for him. How can you forget a name like Mitt?
Running for Your Life: The Perils of Coastal Living
Running for Your Life: Running to Work
When I came to New York City in late 1988 from North Bay, Ontario, I expected, in fact sought out, excitement. A lifelong Canadian, I'd never lived for any length of time in a place the size of Toronto, much less New York.
So, yeah, I went to shows, restaurants, ran in Central Park, and openly gaped at the skyscrapers in Midtown. Eventually I would find work in one of them. Since 1997 I've been pretty much steadily employed with New York-based newspapers.
What I hadn't bargained for was excitement of a different sort. It doesn't mean that I haven't found a way to adjust to the fact that NYC is a terrorist target (I was coming out of a subway entrance in the World Trade Center neighborhood during the second air terrorist attack, and consider myself a survivor of the events of that day, and most recently I served in the emergency press crew during Superstorm Sandy, working to make sure that news from the near-epicenter of the storm made it out to readers).
On Halloween, faced with no public transportation to my Midtown skyscaper workplace in the storm's aftermath I duct-taped a string bag with a change of clothes to my back, and, in my jogging gear, ran the 9-plus miles to work and arrived as close to my everyday arrival time as ever. When I walked to the building security desk I made the peculiar request of borrowing a pair of scissors so that I could cut open my duct tape bag enclosure because I'd made it so snug that I'd not been able to slip it over my head.
The woman rent-a-cop asked me how far I'd walked, and her colleague (with the scissors) immediately corrected her, saying, no, that I'd actually ran the distance, which I'd explained was likely about nine miles from my Brooklyn neighborhood.
She stared at me as if a chimpanzee, not a human being, was standing before her.
That night I ran home to Brooklyn, and it was my scariest Halloween since I was a kid. My office tower is at Sixth Avenue and West 47th Street, and I was in good form, running south on Eighth Avenue. Then at 27th Street, the lights were out. It was cloudy, so the night sky offered little help. For a few blocks I ran behind a man who was wearing a penlight on a head band and carrying a little flashlight. He eventually veered off on a sidestreet and I was alone in the dark. I slowed down to a light jog, but didn't stop. For blocks I could barely make out the uneven pavement and curb cuts. At 14th Street, a gaggle of rubberneckers were looking at the ripped-back facade of an apartment building. Some people above and below Canal Street had gathered before harsh light powered by rattling generators. Mostly, it was pitch black and bizarrely empty of people.
Finally, and gratefully, I jogged to the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian crosswalk. It was about 9 p.m. and black as coal as I made my way up the wooden walkway that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn. You can't imagine what it felt like to see the bright, twinkling lights of my home borough. When I saw them, I picked up my pace and made my way home as fast as my feet would carry me.
Next: Running for Your Life: How Does It Feel to Be Mitt Romney?
So, yeah, I went to shows, restaurants, ran in Central Park, and openly gaped at the skyscrapers in Midtown. Eventually I would find work in one of them. Since 1997 I've been pretty much steadily employed with New York-based newspapers.
What I hadn't bargained for was excitement of a different sort. It doesn't mean that I haven't found a way to adjust to the fact that NYC is a terrorist target (I was coming out of a subway entrance in the World Trade Center neighborhood during the second air terrorist attack, and consider myself a survivor of the events of that day, and most recently I served in the emergency press crew during Superstorm Sandy, working to make sure that news from the near-epicenter of the storm made it out to readers).
On Halloween, faced with no public transportation to my Midtown skyscaper workplace in the storm's aftermath I duct-taped a string bag with a change of clothes to my back, and, in my jogging gear, ran the 9-plus miles to work and arrived as close to my everyday arrival time as ever. When I walked to the building security desk I made the peculiar request of borrowing a pair of scissors so that I could cut open my duct tape bag enclosure because I'd made it so snug that I'd not been able to slip it over my head.
The woman rent-a-cop asked me how far I'd walked, and her colleague (with the scissors) immediately corrected her, saying, no, that I'd actually ran the distance, which I'd explained was likely about nine miles from my Brooklyn neighborhood.
She stared at me as if a chimpanzee, not a human being, was standing before her.
That night I ran home to Brooklyn, and it was my scariest Halloween since I was a kid. My office tower is at Sixth Avenue and West 47th Street, and I was in good form, running south on Eighth Avenue. Then at 27th Street, the lights were out. It was cloudy, so the night sky offered little help. For a few blocks I ran behind a man who was wearing a penlight on a head band and carrying a little flashlight. He eventually veered off on a sidestreet and I was alone in the dark. I slowed down to a light jog, but didn't stop. For blocks I could barely make out the uneven pavement and curb cuts. At 14th Street, a gaggle of rubberneckers were looking at the ripped-back facade of an apartment building. Some people above and below Canal Street had gathered before harsh light powered by rattling generators. Mostly, it was pitch black and bizarrely empty of people.
Finally, and gratefully, I jogged to the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian crosswalk. It was about 9 p.m. and black as coal as I made my way up the wooden walkway that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn. You can't imagine what it felt like to see the bright, twinkling lights of my home borough. When I saw them, I picked up my pace and made my way home as fast as my feet would carry me.
Next: Running for Your Life: How Does It Feel to Be Mitt Romney?
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