Waiting for the Street Sweepers

On Sunday night I was fortunate to find a parking space on 107th Street, yards from leafy Riverside Drive and down the block from Broadway and West End Avenue. The space -- so close to where I'd be staying for the night -- was a surprise, and free.( Isn't this what we mean by gratuitous?) The only condition, so far as I could discern, was that my comfortably wedged-in vehicle had to be moved from this sanguine-spurring spot between the hours of 9:30 and 11 a.m. Monday, to permit and facilitate the cleaning of that northern side of this east-west street. (Manhattan's street grid is eminently logical.) Being neurotic (now, we like to call it OCD; for a decade or so it was anal-retentive), I checked the sign about parking permission at least three and four times and surveyed other cars to confirm further the legitimacy of this piece of vehicular real estate. A car in back of mine seemed to have one of those anti-theft attached to the steering wheel. So Nineties, I thought. Things looked safe and secure, but I'm not naive. Gotham is surely not free of all crime, nor is your hometown. I was very tired, so awoke as late as I could Monday. Blaring sunshine and body clock had votes on this matter. I purchased a Times and read part of the lead story on the Zimmerman acquittal and realized the demonstration I had encountered Sunday evening on First Avenue might have been the same one that converged later onto Times Square, as pictured. I was hungry. A bagel shop on Broadway looked appealing. I went in. Long lines. Slow progress. It was already 9:10. I pictured my car being ticketed and towed. I left. I went up the street to the Manchester Diner. I started to order a bagel but grew more nervous about that concept we call time. Just give me a corn muffin, please. And a tea. Breakfast tea. With cream. no sugar. I walked to my car. still there. Everything fine. But already people were moving cars to the opposite side of the street. A few may have been sitting double-parked in their vehicles. The promised furnace heat was only simmering at this hour. Picture a stream of cars lining up double-parked on the non-street-sweeper side of 107th Street. Perhaps influenced by the Times story and current events, I mused to myself about law. We pay attention to  -- or ignore -- laws as they suit us, do we not? There is obviously a social compact here. I am fairly certain double-parking in New York City is illegal. Imagine if your car was curbside and had to get out but was blocked by a double-parked car. But I did not see such cars ticketed. (Maybe they are, all the time. I don't know. I suspect these folks -- some perhaps paid to do so -- jockeying the cars are ready to move them.) And does the city want hundreds or even thousands of cars driving around during the street-cleaning times? What purpose would that serve? I dutifully moved my car to the opposite side, near but not blocking a driveway. I rolled my windows down. I ate my corn muffin, crumbs falling all over me. Who made this corn muffin? Where? When? How many were made? I drank my morning tea, as is my wont at home. Sitting here, you hardly hear the traffic in back, on Broadway, or anywhere else. Hardly any cars come down 107th. I perform my Times fetish ritual of reading all the articles on the front page, if nothing else. I browse through some of the Sports section. A disembodied hose is watering the plants at the base of a tree to my left. I do not want to get sprayed and close my window. The watering over, I reopen my window. I put the paper down and close my eyes. Starlings. Sparrows. No sirens. The road in front, which is the Riverside Drive before Riverside Drive, is quiet. Am I in the country? Where did all the sound go to? A hint of a breeze. Be mindful of breathing. And breathing out. As suggested by Thich Nhat Hanh. Offer myself and the world the hint of a smile. Try to smile. Try to hear your breathing. Feel it. Be it. Open your eyes. Turn the car on. Close the windows. Put on the AC. Turn right and follow Riverside Drive all the up to the Cross-Bronx. A brand-new vista offering the GWB and the Palisades. A brand-new road. Just for me.

break fast, slowly

Upon reflection, breakfast is my favorite meal. This from a guy who sermonizes on the value and importance of communal eating. This from one who loftily pontificates on the tribal need for family interaction around one table, even if voices and views are discordant.

Breakfast involves ritual. Breakfast tea with milk, exactly three slices of Heidelberg Baking Company bread, preferably Cracked Wheat, with Earth Balance buttery spread, one slice with Welch's grape jelly.

I typically read from The New Yorker or the New York Times, one from several days ago.

I take my time.

Time takes me.

Ad Newseam

"I read the news today, oh boy . . . "

I've been a news junkie ever since grade school, or grammar school, as we called it, loving what was then termed Current Events as my favorite subject. The afternoon Stamford Advocate would be delivered the same precise time every day, it seemed. 4:26. My father came home from the shop at precisely the same time every day, 4:14. My brother and I would listen for the soft thwinnnk of the Advocate being placed between the screen door and the front door of our apartment in the William C. Ward Homes. The Projects. Jack and I would race to the door, open it, and fight to surrender the paper to my father, to place it, as if it were an offering, on our dad's footstool. An unspoken protocol prohibited grabbing and reading the paper before Dad had had first dibs. Then Jack and I would wait like cats to pounce on the paper when Dad would casually finish each section and place it on the footstool. As much as I was a news junkie, let's be honest: Jack and I both were vying for the fiercely coveted second section: Sports.

I went on to work as a copy editor at a daily, from September 1976 to February or March 1979. Great atmosphere: surly, hard-boiled, intense, witty, competitive. Filled with characters. Smart folks. Hard-working. Competent. Whiskey bottles kept in drawers. The ring of Teletype machines. Headlines written by hand. Something strange on desks: VDTs, or video display terminals. We did not think of them as computers or PCs. I even obnoxiously smoked a cigar on the rim sometimes and for fun wore one of those vinyl newspaperman visors seen in movies.

News junkie.

Now, I wonder. News? Hard to take. I don't mean just the string of endless tragedies. That's always been part of the news game. No, I mean something like this: 1984. LIES ARE TRUTH. WAR IS PEACE. That sort of Orwellian nightmare. Maybe, in my mind it started with the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 [was it 2004] that discredited John Kerry's reputation as a hero through lies and distortion. Forget about whether you supported him or the Vietnam War. It was the fact that "the media," "the press," now saw fit to give lies the same footing as truth. Rumor got the same attention as news. We'd been Drudged. Tabloided. McPapered. Under some sort of perversion of the Fairness Doctrine, every crackpot theory got equal play with reason and sobriety. And it only got wackier. Want a war? Enter: the media passing along unsubstantiated hysteria perpetrated by the government about alleged "weapons of mass destruction" and "terrorism." The so-called august New York Times, a year later, 2004, apologized to its readers for abdicating its role of healthy skeptic. The tease was on A1. The rest of the story was buried on A17 or wherever. You can look it up. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut [met him, with my son, Ethan; another story, another time] would put it. Vaccines. Creationism. Global warming. Birthers. Bailout. Stimulus. You name it. LIES ARE TRUTH. News? What's that? Whatever works to grab attention. This is not whining or whingeing that "my take," my perspective, is getting short shrift. No, it is lamenting that utter quackery and poppycock share the front pages with sober renderings and analyses of complex issues.

Hard to take.

It's enough to shut off the news, whether online or in print or on TV -- as I do when I'm at camp.

Ad newseam.

Of course, that raises the solipsistic question about care, concern, and commitment about the State of Affairs, as if "knowing the facts" itself is a power, is a tool of democracy. (It should be.) As if carrying the burden of knowledge was a redemptive gesture.

It should be.

Is it?

Is that day gone, as gone as the idyllic image of the 1950s described above?

unlocking the doors

After I parked at the Wegmans [yeah, I miss that apostrophe too], I decided not to press the lock activator on the key fob for the 2006 Honda Civic. Why lock it? It is an insidious habit. What is there to take? Why is it so important? What is so scary in suburban DeWitt, aside from its suburbanness? My act of civic bravery, or common sense, was not based on the fact that it is not my car (my wife's). It was a statement, a statement not clearly articulated. What was in there, besides some CDs? (Oh, what about that nifty portable battery charger? Hunh? Hunh?) Sure, "they" could steal maps and insurance cards. Good luck with that. We never seem to have the right maps, so welcome to 'em. Who are "they" anyway? And why would "they" single out this car? Are they on a crime spree? Were they waiting just for me? How many of them are "they"? What are their eating and sleeping habits?

I looked at the headlines of The Post-Standard and The New York Times. Too ominous. I decided not to buy a Sunday paper, though I was grateful that my browsing informed me of an interfaith event tomorrow at the Zen Center for the people in Japan. I'd like to go. Will "they" be there?

I bought five-seed four-grain bread, or is it four-seed five-grain, sliced. I used self service. I inserted a five-dollar bill and got seventy-five cents of change. The prompts on the computer screen assume plastic or something else. I used neither paper nor plastic. I decided not to wear the sunglasses I had worn over my regular glasses on the way in. Way too dorky.

Miraculously, I found the car fairly easily and was pleased to find the door unlocked. Still. Thinking this might be worth a blog post, I had written "unlocked" on the church bulletin shortly after exiting the unlocked car. You can move this paragraph closer to the top if you prefer. I had thought "unlocked" might be a nice metaphorical theme to follow, to muse about. Now I'm either not so sure or too lazy or both.

Maybe it's just the rusty taste of fraudulence in my mouth, maybe that's what's putting me off from pondering on and on, like they sing in The Journey song. Fraudulence about what? C'mon. Locking your car door in DeWitt, New York? Give me a break. Puhleez. What's the big deal?

Ever hear this one: fear knocked on the door, faith answered. Do I have that right? Maybe it's fear locked the door. I opened it. Faith was there. No. I'm not sure it is either one. On Cayman Brac most, maybe nearly everyone, keeps the doors unlocked: house, car, truck. Doors unlocked. The Doors were a good band, but they were more unhinged than unlocked.

everybody's special

Quote from The New York Times of January 6, 2011:

" 'The dirty little secret is that the largest special interests are us -- the vast majority of U.S. taxpayers,' the report said. 'Virtually all of us benefit from certain exclusions from income, deductions from income or tax credits.' " [I wonder if the actual report had the serial comma before "or tax credits." You can check here if you have the time. Not surprisingly, it is not a concise report.]

The report referred to above is from the National Tax Advocate's office. Nina E. Olson is the I.R.S.'s national taxpayer advocate.

I did not even know Nina was our I.R.S. ombudsman, or ombudswoman. Did you?

Hi, Nina.

You saying we're all special?

Awww.

Your point is well taken, Ms. Olson. I've said it before: everyone is all for reform until it affects him or her personally; then it is somebody else's problem, somebody else's profligate ways.

the affective effect of affectation

In the Tuesday, June 22, 2010, print edition of The New York Times, the newspaper announced that Arthur S. Brisbane had been named the paper's next public editor, or ombudsman, for a three-year term.

Bravo, Mr. Brisbane.

The article in The New York Times said:

"Mr. Brisbane, who is the grandson of the legendary Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane, said he expected to tackle a wide variety of subjects during his three-year term, including the affect on The Times's journalistic standards of publishing articles for the Web on tight deadlines." [emphasis impertinently added]

Mr. Brisbane may want to begin by tackling the person who ran off with The Times's style manual, or at least the page that covers affect versus effect.

[Note: Well, maybe Mr. Brisbane did tackle the appropriate editor. Somebody did. Immediately after I posted this, I checked the Permalink, as The Times calls it, to the original story. Someone had corrected the word, to good effect, at least for the permanent online version. Fair is fair. Bravo to The Times for making things right. I might have looked like a persnickety fool who was wrong if I did not check that Permalink. This is restorative. It is refreshing to learn that someone saw this and fixed it. It affects me positively, but it certainly does not impact me! Insert emoticon of your choice.]

as if, or not

I'm scratching my head over the term "anosognosia," not as if I could pronounce it.

But, yes, denial or unawareness of a disability.

Or denial or unawareness of problems, or tragedy.

Yes, I can see where it's pandemic.

This from the Times:

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Maybe it’s an effective strategy for dealing with life. Not dealing with it.

David Dunning, in his book “Self-Insight,” calls the Dunning-Kruger Effect “the anosognosia of everyday life.”[10] When I first heard the word “anosognosia,” I had to look it up. Here’s one definition:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. [11]

Dunning‘s juxtaposition of anosognosia with everyday life is a surprising and suggestive turn of phrase. After all, anosognosia comes originally from the world of neurology and is the name of a specific neurological disorder.

When people use the phrase, "it's a disease of denial," I think: doesn't everyone do that with every disease, and with death, to some extent?

Just thought I'd share this.

Cheers.

creativity. change. evolution

"When I draw and paint, the essential thing is not to know what I do, or else I cannot come to what I see."

-- Avigdor Arikha, 1929-2010

This is also true in writing.

And living, too.

coffee and . . .

When I was a child, I heard my mother refer to some friends getting together for "coffee and...."

I think this is a New York City-area expression.

I hated it when I first heard it. My young child's very direct mind demanded resolution and completeness. I wanted the phrase to complete itself, subject and predicate, or at least noun and noun to complete a noun phrase.

"Coffee and what, Mom?"

"Coffee and whatever. Cheese danish. Bagel. Anything."

"So why don't they just say that?"

"I don't know."

As one who spends many of his working hours at local coffeehouses, such as Freedom of Espresso, on Solar Street in Syracuse (and sometimes on Pearl Street or less frequently in Fayetteville), I now understand a little bit about "coffee and...."

For me, the "and" isn't just pastries, though Freedom of Espresso's rugula with cinnamon are my favorites. The "and" involves community, wi-fi connection, networking, atmosphere, ambiance, human connection, aroma, chatter, townsquareneity, solitude, neighborhood, potential, mood, context.

A New York Times article about Bread Stuy, a coffeehouse in Brooklyn, offers two relevant comments.

"A coffee shop like Bread-Stuy offers a space where that [a sense of community] can quote-unquote brew," says Jonathan Landau.

And Mark Pendergrast, author of "Uncommon Grounds," a history of coffee, speaks of "solitude in company" to describe a coffeehouse's public space that allows sharing and community in ways similar to the tavern of old or the soda fountain of the 1950s.

"Human beings are social creatures, and we've become less and less social," said Pendergrast. "We spend more and more time in front of our computers or our televisions, and we go to our work and we come home."

I for one sometimes work, typically with my laptop, at a coffeehouse. At least for part of the day, to leave my home office, "to blow the stink off," to use another of my mother's expressions. At a coffeehouse, I can enjoy both solitude as well as company.

And if I were in Quincy, Massachusetts, or Braintree, Massachusetts, I'd surely be a regular at the Coffee Break Cafe. I say that even though I've yet to taste their fine coffee. I can declare this loyalty because I've already received their fine hospitality, on behalf of my brother. They get it.

The coffee at a coffeehouse (more often tea for me) and the pastries are just part of it.

Works for me.

I'm Just Wild About Harry

The New York Times Room for Debate blog asked people about books they'd discard, and books they could not live without. That sort of thing.

Someone who signed his name as "Harry" wrote this:

I Am the Book

There was a time, and it was quite a long time, in which I amassed books. What the wise heads nod are good books, daring books, deep books, great books. I read some, merely read from others. Some entered my bloodstream, others were a bore, but I kept on building my paper empire. Now, the question is not which ones to discard, since I’m the book, complete with spine and gray frontispiece, that will be discarded or remaindered, as the case may be, before very long. (Imagination dead. Imagine.) I once joked to a friend that my goal was to be the best-read skull in the ossuary. To an acquaintance who asked me if I read for pleasure, I replied by asking him if, as a devout Catholic, he prayed for pleasure. Between those extremities I’ve run my course as a reader. Now pious, now insolent; now real, now sham. One day soon, I’ll select the best of my books, and lay them out, for my grave clothes.

— Harry

I was bowled over by this. Knocked me out. In the wake of my own recent posting about books read in 2009, it made me ponder books and self and life and death.

Thanks, Harry. Whoever you are.

Arbitrary Obituary Somnolence (AOS)

Late on Sunday nights I used to loll myself to sleep sometimes by reading the wedding announcements in the Times. It was mindless entertainment highlighted by the fact that in many ways it was always about the same people, the same clubs, the same lineage, the same celebrity-mongering, the same square-jawed celebration of power, prestige, and position (3P).

Last night, not having yet gotten to that section, I browsed the obituaries at the end of Section A.

You learn things.

A finely written obit is an art.

It tells a story.

I learned about Marty Forscher and Shelby Singleton.

The paid obits are another story (other stories): more heart-braking (stopping the heart) as well as heart-breaking, less objective, more celebratory.

Still, you learn things.

I saw the name "Chast": two paid obits for Elizabeth Chast, 97, and thought of Roz Chast, one of my favorite cartoonists in The New Yorker.

Sure enough, Roz Chast is listed as one of the survivors.

Condolences.

This is probably a tiresome and old-fogey thing to say, but I don't think you find information like that by browsing the Internet. Granted, you find different information.

But I don't think I would have ever made such obituary discoveries with my laptop on my lap in bed. No, there's something about droopy eyes, paper curling downward or slipping out of your grip, and reading the last dregs of Section A.

A Buried Truth

Headline, The New York Times, Sunday, October 11, 2009:

'Number of Unclaimed Bodies Increases as Families Can't Afford Burials'

To be honest, aren't there two sorts of readers: those who will read an article like that and those who won't?

(Well, maybe there are three kinds of readers: those who do a little bit of both. I skimmed it. Scanned? What's the diff?)

Clotheslined

I was clotheslined by an article on clotheslines (that's hard to say; it gives one a syntactical lisp; also, how do you like my use of the same word as a verb and as a noun?).

Using a clothesline saves energy, the kind of energy consumed by dryers and their high-temperature swirling and tumbling.

Using a clothesline to dry your clothes also has the potential to offend neighbors who view the airing of one's formerly dirty laundry as unsightly and unseemly (undies! bras! T-shirts! Y-fronts! seminally stained satin semantics!). There goes the formerly lily-white neighborhood, some say, fearing a splash of rainbowed raiment and a bust of their unbrassiered real-estate booty.

I am old enough to remember our backyard clothesline, one that twirled like an umbrella. It worked fine. Ironic, isn't it? The Fifties, remembered as so prim and white and monolithic and orderly and righteous, were really sloppy and multicolored and raggedy, the era's clothes flapping in the wind or in the hot summer sun for all the world to see -- unlike the decade's private lives and private thoughts.

There is a semantic delight to all this, one that The Laughorist is always wordie wordiliciously keen to share with his or her readers:

wind energy drying devices.

That's the term some local legislators are using to legislate in favor of clotheslines.

Yes, indeed. A clothesline is a wind-energy drying device [hyphen added by Mr. Redactor].

Luscious Luddite Lassitude

Ah, the joys of a news blackout. . . .

Many a summer I indulged in a self-imposed blackout of any news while vacationing on Brantingham Lake, in New York, in the Adirondacks. For me it cooled the fever of obsessive-compulsive attention to world events, the kind of fever that feeds the illusion that says, "This level of attention actually influences the course of events," which is not only a fallacy and nonsense but hubris of the silliest sort. Anyway, the blackout, which got to be a bit of a family-tolerated game (averting my eyes from newsstand headlines when in Lowville, or almost clapping my ears to avoid hearing anything about the baseball strike of '94 [was it '94?] on the radio in a store in Old Forge), did seem to recharge my batteries -- but not cure the obsession.

However, the tragedy of a so-called news blackout is that it is a joy, a respite, a sane retreat, a Luddite pleasure, only for news junkies.

When the vast majority of the population delights in willful ignorance or obtuse one-sidedness -- in other words when a news blackout is the daily norm -- there is no joy in Muddville or Topeka or Pittsburgh or Skaneateles or Solvay or Encino or Hibbing or Bemidji or Greenwich or Syracuse or Pittsburg or Manhattan or Springfield or Darien or Saint Louis or Collegeville or Stamford or Warner Robins or Scranton or Wilkes-Barre or Portland or Los Gatos or San Francisco or Crawford or Honolulu or Salem or Erie or Conklin or Santa Barbara or Albany or Otisco or Kalamazoo or Flint or New Canaan or Bismarck or Dickinson or Mott or Phoenix or Santa Fe or Del Rio or Bridgeport or Kirkville or Kirkwood.

"All the news that's fit to miss."

Driven to Distraction (i.e., Distinction)

Holy mother of mackerels!

I tried this interactive texting-while-driving video game at The New York Times website and almost jumped out my second-floor window it was so frustrating:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/19/technology/20090719-driving-game.html?hp

I don't know if the game will work for you if you're not registered with nytimes.com (easy to do), but let me tell you. It's great to be old. Meaning: texting and driving is not on my radar screen, or in my toolkit, or part of my skill set. Not anytime soon.

Yikes!

Bar none? Mais, non! Bar all.

You may've missed this, but the bar code turned 35 on June 26.

Yup.

I gleaned some cool facts about the bar code from The New York Times:

-- it has 30 black and 29 white bars (how poetic, minimalist, and elegant: who ever thinks of the white bars? Hunh? You just thought the white parts were blank spaces, didn't you? I did.)

-- George J. Laurer, an I.B.M. engineer, led the team that developed the bar code (Laurer, now 84, praises its three great qualities: cheap, needed, and reliable.)

-- It was first used for a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum (67 cents)

-- Bar codes are scanned about 10 billion (with a B) times a day.

-- A committee of reviewers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommended only one change to the initial design: change the font of the numbers below the bar code.

-- Neither I.B.M. nor its developers patented the bar code. GS 1, a nonprofit, gets a minimal annual fee from manufacturers to cover costs of overseeing the bar code's international standards.

-- UPC stands for Universal Product Code.

-- Bar codes cost a half-cent each.

The New York Times breaks down each component of the UPC is a very informative graphic.

The bar code pictured above is from the front page of The New York Times.

Happy Bloomsday!

Celebrate the splendor of this ordinary day with its shining artifacts and web of words and motions and emotions.

Yes, Happy Bloomsday.

A fine Bloomsday-related remembrance by Colum McCann here.

Zen Living

I saw this quote in a New York Times obituary for Andrea (Andy) Mead Lawrence, who died at 76. She had won two gold medals as a skier in the 1948 Winter Olympics.

"There are few times in our lives where we become the thing we're doing."

A true Zen observation.

Grass-Mud Mutterings

Speaking of censorship, as I did a few posts ago, have you heard about the grass-mud horse?

The New York Times tells us that grass-mud horse in Chinese sounds a lot like an unmentionable obscenity.

Consequently, millions of Chinese have flooded the Internet with blog posts and YouTube videos about the mythical grass-mud horse (which also was called the mud-grass horse in The Times article; is the mud-grass horse just as obscene, or worse?). They flooded the Internet with stuff on this invented creature to test the limits of authoritarian censorship. Censorship had the inadvertent effect of spawning creativity.

I mention this because my previous post discussed a different sort of censorship, one imposed by monetary authority.

In China there's a pro-democracy group called Charter08. The Times article notes that someone wryly suggested changing the group's name to the ubiquitous Wang. Since Wang is so common, like Smith, it would be terribly hard for the authorities to excise all instances of Wang on the Internet.

Incidentally, with Google and Yahoo and other search engines, it would not be hard for you to do a little research and therefore find out exactly how naughty a pun grass-mud horse is, something The New York Times did not touch with a 10-foot Pole (or a 6-foot Swede either).

Above the Fold

In doing research on website (I prefer the one word, instead of web site, or Web site, both of which I feel will soon look as archaic as tele-phone or tele-vision) content writing, I was pleased to learn the term "above the fold" has new life. Above the fold. It comes from the world of newspapers. The top news items are above the folded portion of the front page (don't think tabloid, though; well, think tabloid all you want, if that's what you need to stir up excitement, fear, and panic, not necessarily in that order). Above the fold. I used to work with a textbook editor who would ask about obituaries in The New York Times. When someone famous died, he'd call out from the row of cubicles in back of me, "Was it above the fold?" in referring to the front-page obituary. (Whom was he referring to in that era? Richard Burton? Maybe.) John D. noted how rare it was for the Times to put any obit above the fold. (I can't recall if Updike's was.) Regarding websites, the meaning is much the same, but digitalized as it were: information captured on one screen at the resolution your computer is set at, without any scrolling down on the part of the reader, user, visitor, audience, etc. Above the fold is an expression rich in meaning, conjuring metaphors financial, erotic, biological, psychological, historical, chronological, sporting, physical, metaphysical, informational, categorical, theological, semantic, and musical. Connotations, denotations, and illustrations also abound in the world of fashion, clothing, and tailoring; or baking; or sheep-herding.

Any others?