Sarah Wrote That

Enormous Exuberance At The Last Minute

Reading Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute this weekend, I was amused in light of recent discussions by her willingness to use exclamation points. Some of them seem ironic and Internet-y (which I think she would appreciate—a medium military in origin, propagating OMGs and long cats), others as exuberant as Whitman. She’s as exuberant about sentences as about people; she knows how to twist context and jumble us up along with her. What is one to do, at last, with sentences packed this tightly semi non-sequiturs but marvel:

I wanted to stop and admire the long beach. I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York. There aren’t many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges. But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring. I had decided to run.

Which she does, until she gets to her childhood neighborhood, where people trump her plan and she stays for a couple of weeks.

continue reading Enormous Exuberance At The Last Minute

More On The Blizzard Of 1888

Looking up Broadway toward the old post office in what’s now City Hall Park. There’s something about seeing recognizable locations so completely different.. something very chilly, and I don’t mean the weather. Then as now everyone is wearing black.

“Some AccuWeather.com meteorologists have even been referring to the storm as a ‘snowicane’ rather than a blizzard,” reports AccuWeather.com, “in order to express the fierce extent of the snow and wind expected from the storm.”

Because ‘blizzard’ clearly can’t convey the extent of snow and wind that confronts us.

‘Blizzard’ is such an awesome word—the punch of the ‘b,’ the white-out fuzz of the double ‘z’… Blizzards were the best parts of the Little House series, when they got to play word games by the potbellied stove and had to go between buildings by rope. Also: starvation! Blizzards will kick your a**! We have Blizzard of 1888 to thank for buried utility cables in New York City:

English teachers of America, where did we go wrong? How can anyone pass up an opportunity to say ‘blizzard’? Say it today!

(AccuWeather quote via)

“If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well [...] that was just 100 times more important than anything else.”

- Deborah Kenny via Bob Herbert

Update: this and this

“I think you should wear skirts more. You look really good in skirts.”

- Harry (the one who Met Sally)

While I don’t unreservedly love this film as I once did, this is such a well-written line of dialogue, and it does so much work.

At the end of an afternoon outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry and Sally are in the Temple of Dendur. He’s enticed her into speaking in a silly voice, and, still in accent, asked if she would like to see a movie with him that night. She asks the question back and he shakes his head. “Not to repeat, to answer,” he says, still in the silly voice. Turns out, she already has a date for that night. “I was going to tell you about it,” she says, “but I don’t know I just… I felt strange…[] because we’ve been spending so much time together.”

Without missing a beat, Harry asks what she’s going to wear—brilliant (from his point of view). It directs the subject away from his feelings—which we may be starting to suspect—and puts him back in charge of the conversation. It’s a power move, a way of possessing Sally and getting in a compliment before the guy she’s going on the date with has a chance to, but it’s also still praise. To us, it’s sexual enough to confirm, yep, he’s interested, but it’s such tempered admiration—she’s not wearing a skirt when he says it—that it’s almost brotherly. Sally has just shown their friendship’s limits. In his way, Harry is responding by inviting her to further intimacy, and accepting that he’s not eligible for a romantic relationship with her. Sally is hesitatingly pleased, with that inimitable Meg Ryan expression.

In the next scene, she’s wearing a skirt, helping him redecorate his (ridiculously large) apartment, and the pattern for many a hopeful, enabling friendship has been laid out.

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald (of course).

This week I’ve been editing one story about a newcomer to New York and writing a new story about a different woman, years later, slowly realizing that her image of her life there is far from the actual city or her actual life. New York, the newbie and the hardened careerist are all such well-trodden ground; I hope mine are particular enough to make the stories unique. With the city a real actor as well, there’s the double challenge of getting it right but saying something new.

Rockefeller Center, August 2001

I was trying to remember what it was like, coming to the city for the first time on my own. Dizzying. Cold, this time of year, windy; nowhere to sit down without buying something to eat or drink.

In a way, Fitzgerald got it backwards: can one ever see the city for the first time, anymore? Most of us who come to New York already have so many semi-mythical versions of it that instead, at first, we are hyper aware of the fact of perceiving it—I’m in New York!—and less aware of what, exactly, we’re perceiving. Plus the sheer sensory overload, before you’re used to it. Forget peripheral vision for a while. When I’m new to a place my sense of scale and perspective is completely off. Those early days come back to me in El Greco elongation, in splotches of Hopper color, at weird skews, snatches of people and architectural detail detached like Chagall’s flying goats from silly encumbrances such as gravity.

Wall Street, 1998

I was there for a job interview in the old New York Central building, which from where I was standing on Forty-fifth Street after arriving by a too-early train seemed far less squat than I later realized it is. I sat in the L.A. Coffee Shop feeling a little sick to my stomach until it was time to go upstairs. Most of the rest of the day I spent there and in a second interview across midtown, in tiny rooms that were stuffed with binders of financial data. By the time I caught a train home it was well after dark.

Hudson Line, 1990s

Very little about my early interactions did anything to confirm that the aesthetic bliss of arrival had any bearing on the kind of life I would lead there. Petty tyranny, back-office cruelty, naïve ambition, impatience, boredom and drunkenness. But I was certain! Hope and even expectation for what I would achieve, be a part of and experience fused indivisibly with anxiety lest none of it come to pass, and suspicion that I’d come to late to the party, that all around me was evidence that the best had already happened, and I would only ever be able to guess how it had been.

That receded pretty quickly. Instead, now, occasionally, there’s retrieving that first, sharp intensity—as Joan Didion wrote, “was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.”

Cadman Plaza, 1997

“No matter what the modernists say—or do—there is no getting away from the fact that a Corinthian column is a swell thing.”

- pseudonymous New Yorker critic T-Square in 1927, quoted in the Times’ always awesome Streetscapes column, this edition concerning 711 Fifth Avenue, the 1926 headquarters of the brand-new National Broadcasting Company.

T-Square really needs to be an architect-turned-rapper.

Visualization of patterns from 210 million public Facebook profiles:

Looking at the network of US cities, it’s been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster.

Even New York: