Photos

India Is Everything


For Christmas in 2007, about a year and a half after we met, I gave James this Lonely Planet guide to India, which we both very much wanted to visit. The book was an investment and a promise, a pledge and a challenge. But through the next five years, as other journeys and interests took up our lives, it sat on a shelf, quietly waiting. 

Then it came time to plan our honeymoon, and there was never any doubt where we were going.

A screen at the Qutb Minar complex in south Delhi 

James did nearly all of the planning here, and deserves all of the credit. We started in Delhi, in the "Mughal North" -- so called because many of the ancient buildings were built by the Mughal emperors . . .


. . . including this one, built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz, near Agra (where we went next). Twenty-two thousand people labored for twenty-one years on the Taj. Shah Jahan intended to build a black mausoleum that was otherwise identical to the Taj Mahal across the river from it, but his son Aurangzeb felt that he was spending too much time and money on buildings, so he imprisoned his father until his death here . . .


. . . in the Agra Fort, in an apartment with a view of the Taj. We learned incredible history like this over and over again in India -- of Akbar, Shah Jahan's grandfather, who established tolerance between Muslims and Hindus (before Aurangzeb threw it away), and the process of Independence and Partition, so very human and complicated -- and it made me angry with my world history classes in school, because why were we so big on Europeans when Indian history was just as awesome? Why didn't we learn about this too? 

These forts are astonishing structures -- huge castles that outdo any European fortresses I know of in scale and impact. The Agra Fort here was specially designed to withstand attack by an enemy who would be riding elephants, including a sloped, walled entranceway where defenders could pour boiling oil on invaders, and then roll boulders down the ramp if the oil didn't work. 


From Agra, we went to Jaipur, stopping along the way at the Chand Baori stepwell, which movie-loving readers might recognize from The Dark Knight Rises.


We splurged on the services of several drivers for most of our time in India -- a true luxury, as we didn't have to worry about catching trains or hauling baggage. (On the other hand, we often felt a little isolated from daily life, and Indian highways are the closest thing to a living game of Super Mario Kart I ever hope to experience in real life.) Nearly all of the trucks were painted with wonderful colors and designs. I asked one of our drivers why they were so decorated, and he said basically, "Why not?" -- and indeed, our solid American trucks and buses feel very boring and impersonal by comparison. 



Outside Jaipur, we visited the Amber and Jaigarh Forts, finding our way from one to the other through an open tunnel with monkeys watching us from overhead. (I told James, "This is what a honeymoon should be! Adventure plus monkeys!") In the city, we marveled at the decoration of the City Palace, including these peacocks.


We spent a lovely night at the Deogarh Mahal -- a former maharaja's palace, now converted into a luxury hotel straight out of a fantasy novel. We scrambled over the flat roofs taking pictures, saw a Rajasthani dance performance in the courtyard here, and walked the narrow, twisting streets outside, purchasing a number of shawls from a kind shopkeeper who promised to feed us dinner the next time we came to town.


One of our most unexpected and delightful excursions was a two-hour train ride through the Rajasthani mountains, which our driver arranged for us. A little wizened man with a kettle poured us tiny disposable cups of chai (hot, delicious, sweet Indian spiced milk tea that I could happily drink at every meal for the rest of my life), for the grand price of ten rupee each (about twenty cents).


More monkeys at a train stop. I never got tired of seeing them.


From there, we went to Udaipur, the "Venice of the East" for its location on the banks of Lake Pichola. (The Lake Palace Hotel here appeared in the film Octopussy, which played every night at half the restaurants in town.) This was likely our favorite city in India, as we loved the winding streets and views of the lake, and a wonderful vegan restaurant called Millets of Mewar, where we went for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over the three days we were in town.


In the city garden, this group of tourists stopped James and me and asked us to pose for pictures with them. This happened over and over again in India, pretty much everywhere we went, and especially with groups of schoolchildren or teenagers. (It is weird to think how many people's vacation photos I appear in.) I asked these ladies if I could take a picture of them minus me, because I was madly jealous of all the gorgeous saris, shalwar kameezes, tunics, and other clothes I saw on women throughout the country, but I rarely had the opportunity to take photos of said clothing with permission. As with the trucks, the brightness puts our Western neutrals to shame. 


From Udaipur, we flew to Mumbai, which I also really liked.... While we did not see a great deal of the enormous city, what we did see felt like New York to me, crowded and cosmopolitan, a mix of old architecture and new structures, tradition and the cutting edge, and as everywhere in India, the enormous contrast between rich and poor. This is the city's laundry center, where (according to our tour guide, whose hand you can see here) nearly all the laundry that is sent out for washing is still hand-scrubbed, hung, and ironed. Note the skyscrapers standing just beyond.

The ironies of this contrast are further explored in Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, a nonfiction book I read on the trip, which I cannot recommend highly enough as a portrait of a community, an exploration of the causes and effects of poverty, and an extraordinary work of reportage and writing. It is set in a slum near the Mumbai airport in 2008, and I found myself constantly thinking of the people in the book while we were in the city -- wishing almost that I might run into them and find out what happened next in their lives.

The other book about India I would recommend enormously, both as historical context and just as a wonderful read, is Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, by Alex von Tunzelmann. It traces the causes of the British withdrawal, the thrill of Independence, and the disaster of Partition through five fascinating figures:  Dickie Mountbatten, the British envoy; his wife Edwina, who was arguably more competent; Jawaharlal Nehru, who had an intense affair with Edwina in the midst of becoming India's first prime minister; Mohandas Gandhi, who comes off terribly; and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. I kept leaning over to James to tell him fascinating facts I was learning -- such as the fact that Pakistan is a made-up name, as before Partition, there were no people called "Pakis." Rather, it was an acronym for the northwestern, mostly Muslim regions of India selected for the country: Punjab, Afghania Province, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. Illuminating, no? And it reminded me how much the history we take as settled fact is in fact made of people's choices, like the ones our leaders decide every day...


After our tour of Mumbai, we went to see a delightfully ridiculous Bollywood film called Dhoom 3, which was Moulin Rouge meets The Prestige via Bad Boys. We couldn't understand any of the Hindi dialogue, but this mostly wasn't a problem. (Sample dialogue for the Americans: EVIL BANKER: "Who's robbing my bank?" BLONDE FEMALE COP: "It's a thief, sir.")


This was taken at Elephanta Island -- a historic site about six miles off the coast of Mumbai (with no elephants, for the record) -- and the litter was unfortunately very typical of everywhere we went in India. . . .


But then, so was the wonder I felt on seeing this, also on Elephanta -- a relief sculpture of the god Shiva, deep in a cave, radiating peace, and carved in the sixth century A.D. -- easily one of the oldest, most awe-inspiring places I've ever been. If we ever return to India, as we hope to do someday, I want to visit more sculpture caves like this.

 

Always good advice. 

From Mumbai, we flew to Kerala, the state at the southwestern tip of the subcontinent known as "God's Own Country" -- and if you told me the Garden of Eden was located there, I would believe you. We stayed for three nights at a cardamom plantation in the mountains near Thekkady.


One day we took a three-hour nature trek through the Periyar Nature Reserve, where we saw this mama and baby elephant feeding in the wild. We also saw an awesome demonstration of kalaripayattu, which thrilled me especially, as it's the martial art that Ash Mistry learns in The Savage Fortress and The City of Death.



Then we descended to the coast, where we spent a delicious night on a houseboat in the backwaters. I got up at six a.m. and watched the sun rise from our deck, along with thousands of talkative waterbirds.

On our last leg of the trip, we went to Mysore, where we visited the palace and zoo, and stayed in another palace, the Lalitha Mahal:

 Yeah, I could eat breakfast here every morning.

And our last activity of the journey was visiting a friend's digital animation company in Bangalore -- on the nineteenth floor of an anonymous office building, the lights off and the windows covered in shades, three hundred animators at rows of flatscreen computers carefully sculpting a nose here, a gesture there. That, too, is India.

As a honeymoon, it was not the easiest:  I have never been on a trip that thrust my extreme privilege as a white American, and how easy I do have it, and how intractable the world's problems are, so much in my face over and over again. I keep turning those issues over back in my New York bubble -- where we have so little history, comparatively; where I can drink the water -- and I am not sure where to start. But as a personal experience, I learned so much, and did so much, and rested and read so much, and saw so much, so that I felt sometimes like nothing but a pair of eyes -- and ate so much, as oh my goodness, the food, the FOOD -- we have no sense of how to cook vegetables here, really, and I could also happily eat Indian food (especially Southern) at every meal for the rest of my life. And I haven't mentioned the tea plantations or the security, the cement advertisements or the languages, the milk scammers in Mumbai or James's obsession with Shantaram, the ways in which their environmental adaptations are ahead of ours, our wonderful friends in Delhi or the boat ride in Udaipur or praying in a temple and all the other monkeys we saw . . .

It was everything I hoped it would be -- a wonderful, challenging trip that stretched my mind in the best ways. And I am so very grateful for it, and for the husband who planned it; and everything goes on. 

"I Sing the Mighty Power of God," by Isaac Watts


We sang this today in church, and I very much liked the simplicity of both its theology and expression. The words are by Isaac Watts, from Divine and Moral Songs for Children, 1713; a "one-man quartet" version is here.

I sing the mighty power of God, 
  that made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad, 
  and built the lofty skies.
I sing the wisdom that ordained 
  the sun to rule the day;
The moon shines full at God’s command, 
  and all the stars obey.

I sing the goodness of the Lord, 
  who filled the earth with food,
Who formed the creatures through the Word, 
  and then pronounced them good.
Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed, 
  where’er I turn my eye,
If I survey the ground I tread, 
  or gaze upon the sky.

There’s not a plant or flower below, 
  but makes Thy glories known,
And clouds arise, and tempests blow, 
  by order from Thy throne;
While all that borrows life from Thee 
  is ever in Thy care;
And everywhere that we can be, 
  Thou, God art present there.

Southeast Asia in the Autumn: Editors' Boot Camp

For the first two weeks of November, I was on the other side of the Earth, first for five days in Singapore, then for seven in Thailand. This will be the first of, I think, five posts about my experiences.


I went to Singapore to teach at an Editors' Boot Camp, which the National Arts Council sponsored as part of the Singapore Writers' Festival. My co-instructor was the excellent Francesca Main of Picador Books UK -- an adult-books editor who was just as passionate about the art and craft of editing as I am, resulting in three good days of sharing our knowledge with the Malay and Singaporean editors in attendance, and learning from them in turn. Case in point: The Singaporean publishing industry does not have two things that completely change the publishing equation when compared to the US & UK:
  • Agents. This makes sense when you consider that Singapore has four official languages (English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil) for a population of just over five million, which greatly fragments the publishing market, which in turn makes it difficult for an agent to build a living out of 15% commissions. Thus most manuscripts in Singapore are submitted directly to the publishers.
  • Amazon.com and the Kindle. They do have e-books, which can be purchased through the website www.ilovebooks.com, among others. But the 900-pound gorilla that has so transformed the US and UK publishing industries hasn't yet established a Singaporean outpost. 
What they DO have:
  • Diversity. This is a "duh" statement given the country's languages and population, but coming from U.S. publishing, it was a pleasure to see so many editors from such diverse backgrounds gathered in one place:  Muslims, Malays, native-Chinese speakers, expatriates . . .
  • Energy. Not only were the editors eager to learn, but the government was eager to support the country's publishing efforts, as evidenced by the existence of the course itself. 
  • Creativity. I was really impressed by the wide-ranging and beautifully designed lists of small publishers like Epigram Books, Monsoon Books, and Marshall Cavendish (which is very different from the MC we have here).
Four observations I offered in class, which I rarely have occasion to offer in my courses for writers:
  • Authors and manuscripts are published most successfully when they are a good fit with the editor's values, the house's values, and the market's values. That is:  The editor values what the book accomplishes artistically, and knows how to help the author maximize its intellectual intentions and emotional effects; the house can successfully connect the book with its audience, because it's an audience the house already values and knows how to reach; and the market recognizes the worth of the book and embraces it. The market's values are endlessly created and recreated, because it doesn't know what it wants until that desire has been offered to it. But an editor's and house's values can usually be seen in what they've published in the past.
  • Having recently seen, and really liked, the film of Cloud Atlas, I finally read the New Yorker article about its making, and I was greatly struck by this quote from Lana Wachowski:  "The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies. So as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modeled." (Those of us who must deal with comp titles would also observe that originality has a highly mixed sales record.) 
  • Much of being an editor is dealing with negative space:  what is not there at present and should be. 
  • Editors have a close-to-inexhaustible faith in the perfectability of manuscripts:  that they can and will get better, with the application of the right combination of insight, imagination, time, and elbow grease. We acquire this faith through seeing the process happen over and over again, for a wide array of writers and projects. It is a much harder faith for writers to keep, given that they usually don't have the opportunity to see any process but their own, and they're so deeply personally invested in that and the outcome (whereas we editors get to have a little more distance from both).

Thanks very much to Francesca (pictured to my right above), to the writers and editors in our class, and to the National Arts Council for making the trip possible!

Taking a Stand for Standing

So in the last few months, I have become a standing-desk devotee. My interest in the subject started with articles like this one, which pretty much say that anyone with a computer is doomed to die early from sitting in front of it, and then increased with the apostolism of authors I admire. My excellent (and extremely health-conscious) fiance began talking about it, and I then followed his lead in putting my laptop on various high surfaces in our apartment when I was working--the kitchen counter, a tall dresser. After I got used to the sensation of standing for so long, I came to like it . . . for an hour or two, anyway, at which point I'd sit down for an hour or two in turn. But the variety was fun. 

And now I have two standing desks, at work and at home! Here's the work version:   
 

Yes, indeed, that is the extremely advanced standing-desk technology of two cardboard boxes attached to each other, with a mousepad on one and my keyboard on the other. The keyboard is now right at the angle of my elbows, so typing is very comfortable, and my computer screen conveniently tilts up so I can see it easily. I made a side handle out of packing tape so it's easy to whisk it out of the way. I try to follow the policy that if I'm doing e-mail, I have to stand up, while if I'm doing editorial work, it's OK to be sitting down. Other times I just follow an hour-up, hour-down policy. It's gotten to the point that if I do sit for more than an hour or so, I start to feel antsy, and back on my feet I go. (I've also come to mind standing on the subway much less than before.)

At home James and I really did get actual technology involved, as well as some homemade gimcrackery::


We found the treadmill on Craigslist for $80 (it almost cost more to rent a moving van to get it home), and then, as the handles were inconveniently low, we rigged up the temporary solution you see here until we can figure out how to build a permanent frame. The result is more at James's height than it is mine, but it's still effective for us both. James can walk and work for three hours at a time at low speeds; I remain more task- and hour-oriented. Either way, we both enjoy having a little more of a head start on outwalking Death.  

See This: "Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective"


The Guggenheim Museum in New York right now has an extraordinary exhibit called "Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective." Ms. Dijkstra is a Dutch photographer who takes large-format pictures of human beings at moments of change and transition, and their humanity is so much on display, so rich and beautiful and specific and true, that these single images feel like entire character studies. She specializes in pictures of children and teenagers, like this one above. . . . The instability of the way this boy is standing, his slightness and off-centeredness; the vulnerability established by his near-nakedness and his size vs. the endless sea behind him; his watchful gaze, not fully trusting or warming to the photographer -- and rightly, as she's caught so much of him; and the promise of the man inside him, learning how to look strong, how much of himself he should give away:  I find this image (and nearly every other picture in the show) both wonderful and heartbreaking in its ability to see and capture all of that. I want to read novels about all of her people.

The show included five video installations that likewise focus on individuals, in locations ranging from a dance club to an art museum, against simple backgrounds, so their actions and words speak for themselves. This one, for instance, "Ruth Drawing Picasso," was nearly six minutes of a single shot of a girl making her own sketch of a Picasso painting (this visitor-shot excerpt is just 42 seconds):

And as boring as that may sound, the film kept me fascinated for all six minutes, simply because it felt so wonderfully rare and fresh to do nothing but look at another human being for a sustained period of time, as Ms. Dijkstra does. More than that, Ruth doesn't seem self-conscious about being watched, as many of the kids in the dance-club videos do (and as I always do on camera); she sighs, draws a line, scratches it out, gropes for a pencil, looks around at her friends, looks up at the painting and down at her paper again, draws another line. . . . It's such an honest portrait of the creative process, and of a human being in general, that I felt my heart warm toward Ruth for all of her particularities, including those I recognized in myself. Thus the exhibition did what the best art (to me) always does:  It made me love the world more, and the people in it, in all of our vulnerable, pained, ephemeral glory, and made me feel thankful we're all here together -- with Ms. Dijkstra and her camera to capture us.

At the Guggenheim, Fifth Avenue and 89th St., through October 8.

How I Spent My February Vacation

Thanks to the magic of frequent-flyer miles and my good friend Donna Freitas, I ran away to Barcelona! If you'd like to see pictures, you can check them out here.

(The lovely thing about the Internet for vacation photos:  I can enthuse about Gaudi and goofy Catalan words for as long as I like, and you can ignore me as much as you like. We both win!)

A brief video of a brooch I would not want to wear, from the Dali museum in Figueras:


And, for the hell of it, another video of some food I did actually eat. The restaurant was called the "Buffet Giratorio," which I found delightful. It was amazingly hypnotic just to sit there and watch it go by.


(These video selections, and this post as a whole, are brought to you by my jetlag. Also my smartphone, which is why the quality is not great.)

I read Bossypants by Tina Fey, a short biography of the aforementioned Gaudi, and about 150 pages of The Art of Fielding on the trip. The Gaudi biography was disappointing, because I wanted it to go inside his head and explain his bravery and vision and imagination, and it's well-nigh impossible to do that with a genius. But Bossypants is terrific about all the joys and contradictions of being a woman in the modern age, even if (especially if, I suppose) you're as awesome as Tina Fey, and it's hilarious as well.

The business part of the trip:  Donna is the author of this also thoroughly delightful book, coming out in June, edited by moi. It is exactly the book I would have wanted to read as a preteenager obsessed with gymnastics, and our "business" consisted of discussing the fact that not one but TWO Newbery Medal winners have now blurbed it. Yay!



If you'd like to win a galley of it, let's see -- tell me what international city you'd most like to run away to and why, and I will do a random drawing before the end of the month.

Now it is back to work for me. Here is wishing you unexpected joys like mosaic-covered dragons and all-you-can-eat raw fish on conveyor belts wherever you are.

A Walk Up Greene Street, with a Little SoHo History and Class Warfare Thrown In

Second in a series on the fascinations of wandering New York.

We had another lovely day here in New York on Sunday, so I decided to go back to Occupy Wall Street and donate some apples -- redistribution of income at work! I arrived right at lunchtime, and was impressed by the pasta and salad the protesters were serving to anyone who wanted a bite. It was just as nice a meal as those offered by the soup kitchen that my church runs (Sundays at 2 p.m. in the church basement, should you need a bite), and all prepared without a real kitchen, as far as I could tell. I also saw the library, full of books on all subjects for all ages:


I missed seeing Screwy Decimal, but she has a picture of the children's library sign specifically. 

A block north stands the Freedom Tower, also known as One World Trade Center. It will be the tallest building in the United States when it's completed, at 1,776 feet. I don't feel particularly enthusiastic about this, nor do most New Yorkers that I know (who are not Larry Silverstein). But Mr. Silverstein must needs be satisfied, and so up it goes:

 

From there I walked north to SoHo. "SoHo" is an abbreviation for "South of Houston Street" (the street is pronounced "How-ston," not "Hew-ston," for anyone who wishes to sound like a local), and roughly covers the area between Houston Street to the north, the Bowery to the east, Canal Street to the south, and the Avenue of the Americas to the west. It has been through many, many iterations as a neighborhood, beginning in the Victorian era, when most of its famous cast-iron buildings were constructed:

 

As manufacturing moved out throughout the twentieth century, artists moved in, spreading south from Greenwich Village and taking over the light-filled lofts for studio space and cooperatives (that link is worth reading if you're interested in nutty artists or New York history):

  

Where artists go, galleries open; where galleries open, rich people come; and where rich people come, luxury shops follow. And as a result, forty years after Fluxhouse closed, Soho is one of the best neighborhoods in New York to shop for European clothes and modern furniture design -- if you're in the 1%, as the good stuff doesn't come cheap. I loved these coffee-cup sculptures, each one bigger than my head, at Adriani & Rossi (a mere $250 each):

  

Across the street was a doubled reminder of the neighborhood's origins:  a sign over the receiving door of the long-gone Baker Brush Company, presumably from when brushes were manufactured in SoHo; and a piece of fascinating street art over it -- a totem-like collage face: 

 

At the corner at 89 Grand Street stood Ingo Maurer, a lovely lighting design store. Wouldn't it be fun to have this exploding-dishes chandelier over your table at a dinner party? It would make your guests feel like anything could happen.

 

More street art on the next block:

 

And in an alcove in front of an empty storefront:  a carefully arranged pile of plastic and some sheets, meaning that this is probably someone's bed.


That someone sleeps on the sidewalk on the same street as a $250 coffee cup sculpture, or this Gaga-worthy fur coat at Isabel Marant, is the same kind of injustice that has led the Occupy Wall Street protests to exist.

 

At the same time, I confess I love the goofiness of this coat (and the chandelier, and the coffee cups) -- not as something I'd wear or need to own myself, but as a beautiful thing that gives delight. So I don't really want all these things to go away. . . . Only for that sleeper on the sidewalk, and everyone, to have proper housing, and a job, and regular meals, and medical care, before a woman actually spends over a thousand dollars on a coat that makes her resemble a yak.

How to solve this problem equitably, I do not know.

So. More haunting graffiti, on the base of a lamppost:

 

And just like Crosby Street, Greene Street is paved mostly in brick:


Right across the street from Isabel Marant is one of my favorite places to window shop:  SICIS Next Art, an Italian furniture maker that is frankly, joyously crazy -- the interior-design equivalent of Agatha Ruiz de la Prada.

 

My favorite thing I've ever seen there was a mosaic bathtub shaped like a high heel, where the bather sat in the toe and water poured down the arch.

At 107 Greene is another favorite place to browse -- the Taschen bookstore. Taschen makes gloriously nutso, beautiful, and huge art books. (Also art-porn collections, should that be your thing.) I go there to marvel at the specs of their books -- the size of the bindings, the quality of the paper, how no expense is spared in foil or glossiness or embossing. The shop functions almost like a book museum, as you can see:


Magda Sayeg likes to wrap things in knitting. You can see her work right now outside the Apple Store (currently undergoing renovation) at the corner of Prince & Greene. 


There's also a knitted bicycle at the base of Greene Street, outside the ACNE clothing store. (Yes, that's the brand's real name; it stands for Ambition to Create Novel Expression, and it's a Swedish line. Presumably they didn't know what it meant in English.)

If you look up from the tricycle, you can see another wonderful piece of art, the marvelous trompe-l'oeil ironwork at 112 Prince Street:


And here's the view back down Greene St. from Houston -- which you all know how to pronounce now, yes? Yes.


I really enjoyed doing this -- the walk, the pictures, the sheer pleasure of looking for and at beautiful and interesting things, all on a sunny, crisp autumn afternoon. Thank you for sharing my stroll!

A Walk Up Crosby Street

When it comes to subways in New York, I've always been an orange line commuter: the F for the eight years I lived in Park Slope, and the B for the last 2.75 years in Prospect Heights. But this summer, I've discovered the pleasures of the big yellow Q train from Brooklyn to Manhattan. First I get to cross the Manhattan Bridge on the southern tracks, allowing a much better view of the Brooklyn Bridge:


(image stolen from this nice blog here, as I failed to take such a picture this morning)

And then, after I get off at Canal Street, the first stop in Manhattan, I get to walk up Crosby Street, one block over from Broadway, and I never fail to see something interesting. For instance:

The window of De Vera Objects at 1 Crosby, featuring a small statue wearing a gorgeous dress made out of paper:


Across the street, above Jil Sander, some watchful mannequins:


A glimpse into the garden and windows of Imperial Number Nine.

Just outside the Vespa shop at 13 Crosby, provoking dreams of Roman Holidays:


The Saturdays NYC Surf Shop and Espresso Bar (not kidding) at number 31:

A view of the brick street itself, many times patched, which makes me think about all the years and vehicles and changes those bricks have seen:


At the corner of Broome and Crosby, the multilevel parking platforms that I never fail to find fascinating, especially if I’m lucky enough to be there when they’re taking a car down; not to mention a very New York skyscraper, billboard, and water tower:


Some wonderful artistic graffiti by New Yorkers who walk at night:


The window at All Saints, a UK clothing chain at 512 Broadway, filled with Singer sewing machines:


In the lobby of the very posh Crosby Street Hotel, a giant head made of joined letters (which is what my head feels like some days). They do a glorious afternoon tea here, though I find it a little too posh and formal to be cozy.

And then I turn left at the corner of Prince St. and walk over to Broadway and go to work, inspired by the diversity and energy of the city and all its beautiful things.

If You Like It, Then There's Only One Thing You Should Do.

So last Saturday morning, James and I decided to go for a run around Prospect Park, as we often do on weekends. We got dressed in our running clothes, and I noticed he was wearing a jacket over his long-sleeved shirt and exercise pants. "Aren't you going to be hot in that?" I asked, since it was sunny and the temperature was in the fifties.

"I can just tie it around my waist," he said.

I shrugged, and we locked up the apartment and set out for the park. We stretched on the plaza just behind the farmers' market, then ran along the north side of the park with our respective iPods. (That day I was listening to the greatest hits of Bruce Springsteen: "Badlands," "Thunder Road," "Hungry Heart.") I was still transitioning back to running outside after the winter's treadmills, so I was determined to complete a whole loop without stopping to walk.

One of my very favorite places on Earth

As we ran down the west side hill, James said, "You know, I think we should take this cross-country route my brother showed me." I said sure, and we turned left on the road that cut east through the park above the lake. As we approached the first bend, he said, "Let's go up this hill."

I said, "No, I want to do the whole loop."

He said, "You really should see the view from the top."

I said, "No, I've seen it before, come on."

He said, "It's a shortcut, just trust me on this." (Which I didn't, because I've been running around the park for at least as long as he has, and I knew that running up Lookout Hill was no shortcut.)

But we went up the hill, with me grumbling at climbing the stairs. ("It's good for our glutes!" James said.) The path switchbacked to the west, and I said, "You do realize that we're going backwards now, right? Not the direction we want to be going?" He just nodded and encouraged me to keep running. We went over a terrace and ended up at the circle on top of Lookout Hill, the highest point in the park. I figured we'd go round the circle and run back down to continue the loop.

But as we started around to the left, a man in Victorian dress and spectacles hailed me: "Hello, fair lady!" Cheerful greetings from people in eccentric costumes are not that unusual in New York, so I figured he was some kind of actor doing street theatre in the park, and stopped to hear what he had to say. James slowed down alongside me. The man in costume pulled out a scroll and read from it: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of . . . more fortune!" And he went on to deliver a speech liberally laced with Jane Austen quotes, all demonstrating his avarice. He ended by suggesting that we speak to his friend a little farther on, "Though I warn you--the stupidity with which he was favored by nature guards his courtship from any charms."

I felt both delighted and deeply confused by this turn of events, so I looked at James and said, "Do you know anything about this?" It was his turn to shrug. The next man, in similar costume and with a similar scroll, offered a similar speech, including "In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love -- myself."

About midway through this fine peroration on his own charms, my brain started thinking, This has to be what I think it is. Is it? Oh my, is it really? This gentleman concluded by looking around for an additional list of his good qualities. James held up a scroll of his own and said, "Is this it?" The man examined it and said, "No, I think you should read this one."

And James did, quite nervously and sweetly. I won't share everything he said, but he got down on one knee (as mandated by my favorite movie), and he also invoked one of my favorite descriptions of marriage of all time, from John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women, in saying that he hoped it's what we might have as well:
On the contrary, when each of the two persons, instead of being a nothing, is a something; when they are attached to one another, and are not too much unlike to begin with; the constant partaking in the same things, assisted by their sympathy, draws out the latent capacities of each for being interested in the things which were at first interesting only to the other; and works a gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters to one another, partly by the insensible modification of each, but more by a real enriching of the two natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of the other in addition to its own . . . When the two persons both care for great objects, and are a help and encouragement to each other in whatever regards these, the minor matters on which their tastes may differ are not all-important to them; and there is a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring character, more likely than anything else to make it, through the whole of life, a greater pleasure to each to give pleasure to the other, than to receive it. . . . What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them -- so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and being led in the path of development -- I will not attempt to describe.
And with such a prospect before me, dear reader, I said yes!

James gave me his late mother's engagement/wedding ring, which was just my size; and the last week has been a flurry of informing friends and family, accepting congratulations, and starting conversations about dates and locations for the grand party we hope to throw for those same friends and family. (I'm from the Midwest, he's from the Bay Area, and we live in New York, so we have the entire United States open to us.) The two gentlemen in costume were friends of James's, unknown to me; James wrote the scripts with all the Jane Austen references to please me, featuring characters with defects (greed and vanity) that would highlight his own suit in turn--"classic literary foils," he says. He rented the costumes for them from a shop in Midtown.

Mr. Avarice and Mr. Vanity

And James had to wear the jacket because it carried both his proposal and the ring! (I've forgiven him for making me run up the hill.)

My Weasley and me

Thank you for your good wishes, all!

The Weirdest Christmas Hiatus Post Ever

*
Yes, normally I'm so driven I literally have Ambition** coming out of my armpits.**** But as of today, I am off for two weeks' vacation in California, Missouri, and Iowa, seeing many dear friends and family. I hope to get some good thinking and writing time in while I'm gone, so I may post again******, but in case I do not: I wish all of you readers a wonderful and blessed winter-solstice season, filled with all the things you love best, and I'll see you in 2009. Happy holidays!*******
____________________________
* I swear this is a real scent of deodorant and the photo has not been Photoshopped.
** Though it's still not the funniest scent name for a deodorant I've ever seen; that would be "Sweet Surrender" from Lady Speed Stick. A deodorant that shares a name with a Sarah McLachlan song*** -- good lord.
*** Admittedly, "Possession" would be worse. Though maybe not "Ice Cream."
**** I confess I bought this product solely for the opportunity to say that. But actually, Ambition doesn't smell very pleasant, and I've moved on to Wild Freesia.*****
***** I am laughing even writing this because this has to be the epitome of bloggy oversharing/navel-gazing. (Ooh look! Bellybutton lint!) But I trust you all will forgive me.
****** I finished Twilight, and I have some things to say about that.
******* And God bless us, every one.

My Man in Black

If you'll permit me a brief little proud personal post, here's my boyfriend James singing "Ring of Fire" last night with his class from the Brooklyn Guitar School (video and occasional voice accompaniment by me):



James is a professional video director and editor, and he gives wonderful gifts -- for instance, these two videos for birthdays past, one from 2006 and one for this year. (And yes, those are the real celebrities.)



The signoff line in the one above kills me -- the perfect example of someone living up to his own cliche.



(James got me to walk in front of the greenscreen for this one by telling me he needed to test out the focus depth of his camera. I do still trust him -- just not with a greenscreen.)

Lastly, I uploaded some photos from Election Night at Rockefeller Center and randomness throughout the year to my Facebook account.

More New York City Coolness

Since you were interested in New York City activities . . .

James and I rode bikes down to the Brooklyn shore for his birthday recently. Here I am with the Verrazano-Narrows bridge (the one for which I crashed the Marathon).

On that same jaunt, we randomly found a Norwegian festival in a Bay Ridge park. Here James poses with a Viking ship.

Self-portrait in a multilayered mirror, taken at the Olafur Eliasson exhibit at P.S. 1 last Saturday. I highly recommend both that exhibit and its MoMA half for beauty, simplicity, and elegance. It's closing soon, so go! Go!
Finally, Angela Gheorghiu performs in Prospect Park in Brooklyn last night as part of the Metropolitan Opera's "Met in the Parks" program. It was a gorgeous evening, 75 and sunny, and New Yorkers covered the south end of the Long Meadow to picnic and see Ms. Gheorghiu, her husband Roberto Alagna, and the Met Orchestra and Chorus perform selections from The Pearl Fishers, La Traviata, Il Trovatore, Nabucco, and others. After a ten-song program, the couple did, I think, eight encores, which was a bit much -- but as they included "Nessun dorma" from Turandot (surely one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever) and "O Sole Mio" from Trovatore (yes? they also turned it around and sang "It's Now or Never" by Elvis, which, I had never realized, uses the "Sole Mio" melody), I cannot complain.

Hooray for New York!

Welcome to the Neighborhood


My thought process on seeing this yesterday:
  1. Oh wow -- ninjas live in Park Slope!
  2. But wait -- the true ninja would never advertise his or her whereabouts so crudely. Therefore, ninjas do not live in Park Slope.
  3. But the true ninja would know that his or her enemies would think that the true ninja would never advertise his or her whereabouts so crudely. Thus the true ninja might go ahead and advertise his or her whereabouts in just that fashion to lull the enemies into a relaxed stupor and slay them. Therefore, ninjas live in Park Slope.
  4. But the enemies would know that the true ninja would know that the enemies would think that the true ninja would never advertise his or her whereabouts so crudely. Therefore, the enemies would not fall for the ploy; therefore, the true ninja would not make such a ploy; therefore, the sign-writer is lying, and ninjas do not live in Park Slope.
  5. But the true ninja would know that the enemies would know . . .
  6. Ad infinitum.
  7. Perhaps the ninja's enemies marked his or her house so that other enemies would know where the ninja lives and kill the ninja on behalf of the first enemies.
  8. Or perhaps it's actually the first enemies' house and the ninja marked it so that the second enemies would kill the first enemies.
  9. Or perhaps it's a decoy house to draw out all the enemies, and the ninja actually lives next door.
  10. The Ninja Next Door: Now there's a title for a picture book.
  11. Perhaps the Staten Island ninja has moved to Brooklyn!
  12. Perhaps a ninja is behind me right now.
  13. (And as you're reading this, one could be behind you.)
  14. . . .
  15. . . .
  16. . . .
  17. Perhaps I should stay away from that street.

One More HP Interview


This quarter's Carleton College Voice includes an interview with me by the lovely Danny LaChance '01. The picture above was an outtake from my photo shoot with the equally lovely Metin Oner at the Cloisters.

The hat I'm wearing in the picture on the Carleton page has been lost to me, alas -- a sincere "alas" there, as I really loved that hat: pink wool, with a flower. So I'm grateful to have a good picture of me in it, and grateful to Carleton for the nice attention.

ETA, 3/26/08: When I was writing up this post last night, I forgot to mention what I was really excited to talk about in the interview: mechanics -- that is, punctuation, capitalization, spacing. As my authors can attest, I am mildly obsessed with these things, because, as Isaac Babel said, "No steel can pierce the heart of man as icily as a full stop placed at the right moment." I think of that cold breath in the middle of Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," how you hear the futility of human ambitions and the silence of all the ages in the pause before "Nothing beside remains." Or, closer to home, in our incredible In the Shadow of the Ark by Anne Provoost -- the Noah's Ark story told from the point of view of a girl who stows away on the boat -- one polytheistic character eventually comes to accept Noah's Unnameable and singular god, and we signified that change by making "him" (in reference to God) uppercase when that character talked about Him: the tiniest of differences conveying this entire shift in the character's philosophy. I love this kind of stuff, and I was thrilled to get to talk about that in relation to HP, where much thought and discussion went into capping Cloak vs. Wand and Stone or the right circumstances for a colon vs. a semicolon. . . . While I do try to move faster than this, I admit that like Oscar Wilde, I can spend all morning putting in a comma, and all afternoon taking it out again.

A Grave in Green-Wood


I was going to post just the picture of this gravestone -- seen in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on Saturday -- under the headline "A Tale to Be Told," as I imagined everything from deep depression to outright madness to marvelous (sane) round-the-world adventures for Mrs. Cunningham. (The adventures would have been disapproved of by her scandalized Victorian family, hence the "troubled soul.") But the wonders of Google revealed the true tale, so I leave it to you: You can enjoy your own speculations, or you can click here.

Green-Wood makes a lovely day out for New Yorkers, by the way; the landscape is beautiful, the atmosphere peaceful, and the grave markers and names as varied and interesting as New Yorkers themselves. (Though I must say I didn't see anything to equal my favorite epitaph, spied on a gravestone in Edinburgh, Scotland: "She lived respected, and died regretted." That is a good life.)

Sunday Afternoon on the Coast of La Lac Michigan

A few weekends ago I went to visit my friend KTBB in Chicago, where we spent a lovely Sunday at the Art Institute. There we saw George Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte":


Or as I kept thinking when I was in the room with it:
Sunday
By the blue purple yellow red water
On the green purple yellow red grass
Let us pass . . .

Or also: dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot-dot


In another room, we found, I must say, the fattest baby Jesus I have ever seen in my life, the son of an equally rotund Virgin Mary. I forget who the artist was, but -- living up to stereotype -- he was a medieval German.

The Art Institute also has a wonderful Matisse collection. Matisse is my favorite artist, and I'm always on the lookout for images of this room:


The carpet and red curtains recur here, as you can see:


and the furniture, draperies, and carpet also come up in The Inattentive Reader at the Tate Gallery and Interior with a Violin Case at MoMA. I hope very much this room is preserved in Nice somewhere. . . . If you ever see any other images of it, let me know.

Art museums always make me want to take artistic-seeming shots of my own, like these pictures of a perfect stranger looking at a map and his digital camera:





The afternoon ended, unexpectedly but delightfully, with tea at American Girl Place. Say what you will about the evils of Pleasant Company, they do a bang-up afternoon tea, complete with champagne, many delicious sandwiches, scones, and our very own doll on loan:

To paraphrase Sondheim again:
There are worse things than staring at the pictures
while you're visiting your best friend
having tea in corporate girldom
in the city of Chicago
on a Sunday . . .