Two weeks and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit difference…
I Had A Farm In Africa…
I’m moving tomorrow, on unexpectedly short notice—locally, thank goodness, so my glassware and china only had to be wrapped well enough to make it across town in the back seat of the car.
I’ve moved more than I like to think about, seven times within New York City alone, and the last night in a house or apartment never gets any less strange. Twenty-four, forty-eight hours before, everything was in its usual place; now, stripped of your things, the rooms have their foreignness back. Boxes are stacked, little mountain ranges of boxes, where it was convenient to pack them or where you imagine it will be convenient for the movers; in the meantime, you thread circuitous passes around them.
The last night before moving, I always think of Out Of Africa, when Meryl Karen is sitting in her empty living room, the record player (now, the iPod dock) left for last, by wine and candle light.
How about some Lost haiku? By Jedediah Berry, whose Manual Of Detection site + blog you should check out: crshd:
Lamppost, leap of faith.
How many plane crashes does
It take to get home?
Zoned Out
Last night I inadvertently reenacted the old Soviet joke about going to the wrong apartment in the wrong building in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong city because they all look exactly the same. Mine was a suburban version—though what does one even call the strip-mall sprawl outside small towns, where there’s little -urb to be sub- to? Anyhow, I missed my exit and had to turn around in the Lowes parking lot to get to the Whole Foods parking lot. Yep.
These non-places do not happen by accident. They are not mistakes. They are the result of laws that allow almost no possibility of deviation from specified lane widths, numbers of parking spaces, building set-backs from highways, drainage capacities, height restrictions. It would be illegal in most places—or require special permits and favors—to build a traditional New England small town, or, God forbid, for a town to develop into a city.
What is it doing to us to spend the time we do in such non-places, the weird between-ness of parking lots and intersections, sitting in traffic, eyes skipping over headlights and windshields, iTuned in to our own soundtrack, on the way to somewhere else?
Today I went for a run in the nineteenth century.
Today was my first time voting outside New York City since the days when Bill Clinton had yet to read Vox. Ah, those massive NYC machines (the voting gizmos, not the parties); the little switches and enormous levers—now that’s voting. Steampunk voting!
This afternoon the polls were quiet, the poll workers all incredibly chipper. Out in front, a lone, soggy Coakley supporter held his sign high.
(ridiculous Boston Globe pollwatcher reports via The Awl: Wonkette)
Heart of summer in the dead of winter.
London plane, outside the Smith College Museum of Art
Local Heroes
Northampton gets a shout-out in Brian Kitely’s new novel The River-Gods, which NPR’s Alan Cheuse digs.
Over on Salon, Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners makes Laura Miller’s (odd) list of the decade’s best books.
The Pioneer Valley—“arguably the most author-saturated, book-cherishing, literature-celebrating place in the nation.”
It hadn’t quite registered with me that the decade ends in three weeks, until articles evaluating it started to drop. This is it? Have we even settled whether to call it the oughts or the naught[ie]s? I’m as delighted as the next first-worlder by the digital marvels it’s let us take for granted, but culturally I feel we’ve barely caught up to where we were before the hanging chads (tea partiers would doubtless have a different interpretation).
