Fabulous Complexity
Last weekend, relatives came to town and we went to the
Bodies Exhibition at South Street Seaport. Let me tell you, folks: this was nothing short of awesome.
The exhibit was well put together, moving deliberately and carefully through the various systems of the body, and working up in complexity. You could look at individual bones in cross section or at particular joints, and only then move on to see a whole skeleton put together. From there, you might go see a skeleton with deep muscles attached, and so on and so forth. I left with a
far better understanding of human anatomy--and a far greater appreciation of it, too. It's truly amazing how round the ball in the shoulder joint is; how complicated our neural networks are; how fractal-like our blood vessels are.
The best part of the wholly-excellent exhibition, in my opinion, was the section on the circulatory system. Via a remarkable process whereby a cadaver's blood vessels are injected with some strong substance while the rest of the body is dissolved away, one ends up with displays of full-body blood vessels without any body to get in the way. It is TRULY awesome. The lungs are permeated by millions of tiny little blood vessels, as are the kidneys; the ankle has very, very few blood vessels flowing through it indeed; the artery on the inner thigh is absolutely huge. It's fascinating. Having seen how the bones and muscles fit together, this emphatically showed what was flowing
through them in a way that you simply can't show by normal drawings or even dissections.
A few thoughts:
1. The brain is such a mystery! The Bodies exhibition devoted a whole room to the brain, and I couldn't help but think: yeah, the midbrain? I can see how that works. But the cerebellum? Nope. Here we have eight or ten different brains, whole, in vivisection, with chunks removed, etc--and they all look exactly the same. There are no moving parts, no (macroscopic) tubes carrying information or fluids or both. You can
see how a muscle works, how the heart works, how neural impulses move through the body, how joints turn, even how the pituitary gland and medulla oblongata manage to do things. But the cerebellum, where we do our higher-order thinking and processing of an awful lot of sensory data, is just a mystery. It's just wrinkly grey stuff. Awesome.
2. It's strange but true that internal defects or illnesses are viscerally gross-looking. There seems to be no obvious reason for this. Why should a cancerous prostate, a clogged artery, smoke-weakened lungs, a stroke-stricken brain, or a cirrhotic liver
look gross? Two hypotheses present themselves. First, maybe the world in which I've grown up has been sufficiently affected by knowledge of what sick body parts look like that our concept of the grotesque has been changed to reflect the idea that these things are gross. In other words, we have learned to think of certain shapes, textures, and colors as yucky because we have seen that they reflect sickness in the human body. Alternatively, to paraphrase a suggestion from Zq, maybe we can attribute this reaction to an inherent appreciation of symmetry and pattern. Cancers, nodules, lopsided shrunkenness or engorgement, and uneven coloration all offend against a human desire for predictability and pattern in the world. (I point out here that I think the first explanation here is more plausible, while the second rings truer when I think about the
experience of seeing, in the final room of the exhibition, the malformed and diseased body parts. I certainly
felt like my reaction and that of those around me was visceral in a pre-existing and reasonably unconditioned way.)
3. If you want to argue that there's a God, there's no better way then to go to an exhibition like this. People are
so complex, and the way all our parts fit together is absolutely amazing. It is as nearly inconceivable that we could have evolved to be so fabulously complicated as it is that the gods might have created us so.
How come I have to find these things out from a British newspaper?
Today's news flash:
Texas arrests people for drinking in bars. I mean, is this not a bit over-the-top?
If you click on that link and read the article, you'll notice that the primary justification for this has to do with the prevention of driving under the influence. Two immediate reactions: 1. Wrongful arrest! 2. Thought police!
First, as the fellow in the telegraph article points out, there's no guaranteeing that any particular drunk bargoer is planning to drive home. What if I was going to take a cab? Or be a passenger in the car of my sober friend? Or bike home? Or have my husband come pick me up? Or walk?
Moreover, though, even if I was planning to drive home drunkly (a think which, like the police, I suspect most of these people
are planning to do), my
future plans are not enough to justify my arrest. Now, to be fair, the 2200 unfortunate Texans arrested so far haven't been arrested for DUI; they've been arrested for public intoxication. Well, okay, so I grant the legality. I merely state that the justification doesn't square with the action. Insofar as it's true that this is a part of a campaign against drunk driving--and, given that that's what everybody is saying, I believe that it is--it is a campaign aimed at the
intention to drive drunk. That may be legal here, but it also goes against the spirit of innocent-until-proven-guilty, and I don't like it.
Finally, to justify this law on other, self-preservationist grounds (like protecting a drunkard from jumping off a balcony into a pool, only to miss) is stupid. The point of
public intoxication laws is that there may be some public good associated with enforced sobriety. For example, barring public drunkenness in the streets weighs an individual's rights over his own body and what he imbibes against a community's desire to sleep soundly at night and not have its houses pissed upon. This is a reasonable public good, it seems to me; it is, at least a plausible public good. On these grounds, we might even grant the (silly!) idea that, because sober people cannot drive drunk, nobody ought ever to be drunk in a bar. But we would be hard-pressed to think that the government has any right to keep me from getting drunk when I am alone in my own home--even though I may do myriad stupid things. If I have a swimming pool in my back yard and a balcony on the third story of my house, the government is no more allowed to arrest me for drunkenness than if I live in a padded room where I could not possibly bring myself to any kind of accidental harm. This is the idea of a man's home being his castle; the idea behind
the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Georgia v. Randolph; and the idea behind an American government dedicated to protecting individual rights.
So: the spate of arrests are no good on the grounds of protecting individuals from themselves. They're a bad way to prevent drunk driving (not a
poor way--they might be very effective--but a
bad way--they're not-quite-evil) because they punish you before you've ever committed the crime, and because it's quite possible that you never planned to do so in the first place. And finally, they're a silly way to prevent public intoxication. After all, the clear intention (and the clear good) of public intoxication laws has very little to do with people who are drinking indoors in a bar, even if it is a public space. We have such laws to protect people, property, and eardrums--all of which are doing fine if people are sitting in bars and drinking. And if they are standing in bars, shouting, and fighting--well, then the bartenders call the cops anyway.
It's Like Ken Burns... But So Not.
This weekend,
Zq and I went to see
CSA: the Confederate States of America at the IFC. (The IFC = the Independent Film Center in the Village.) I thought the movie was good; it definitely took me out of my comfort zone, and it was sufficiently thought-provoking that I left wanting to know more about the alternative world that filmmaker Kevin Willmott had imagined. Post-movie conversation also brought Zq and I around to discussions of the unconscionable gloss that Native American history gets in basically all American education, which was interesting. (I should point out that that discussion was a non-obvious, if direct, consequence of watching the movie.)
By way of a short summary: CSA is a Ken Burns-like mockumentary put out by the (fictitious) British Broadcasting Service and viewed as if on TV. The movie itself is interrupted by commercials for everything from life insurance to restaurants, while the program itself features talking heads arguing about the significance of the various "historical" events portrayed. Violins play heart-twanging music as soldiers fight for home and family; a narrator with an English accent walks us through crucial events in our nation's history; copious documents are shown, quoted, described, and even revered as the film goes on.
The twist, of course, is that the South won the Civil War (erm, that is, "the War of Northern Aggression"--which is what one of my teachers in North Florida indeed called it).
Most reviewers
think Willmott's effort is successful. I think they're right. The movie is enjoyable, if a bit uncomfortable at times; I especially liked the skill with which Willmott integrated real footage, quotes, and facts, with contrived ones. Did Lincoln say that he'd save the union without setting any slaves free, if he could? Yes. Did Oliver Wendell Holmes have a relative of the same last name who advocated making Christianity official? I don't think so, but I'm not sure. Did we build a wall separating ourselves from Canada? Obviously not. But it is in these questions, and in the more subtle allusions to this or that public official, this or that world event, that CSA is most successful. Little details that are merely glossed over--headlines in the newspapers strewn around in old video footage, for example--hold great richness and make the film a kind of scavenger hunt.
But reviewers get it wrong when they suggest that CSA presents a coherent alternative history. Indeed, as a "what-if" statement, the movie is not very convincing. This is not damning; precisely what I liked was finding the implausible parallels between Willmott's alternative world and my own real world. After all, is it likely that we'd have erected a "cotton curtain" between ourselves and Canada, instead of an Iron Curtain in Europe? Is it likely that there would still have been a Great Depression in 1929 after 65 years of a very different economic system here in the States? Is it likely that Willmott's world, like ours, would produce a Pacific Theater of War in the 40's (even as, apparently, it failed to produce a European war), and that this would in turn give us the iconic image of the raising of the (Confederate) flag at Iwo Jima? Or that, lacking a Cold War, Willmott's America would still manage to put a man on the moon in the '60's, giving us that other iconic image of man-in-spacesuit, next to flag-on-moon?
Of course not. But I can't help thinking that CSA is not about constructing a
likely alternative world. It is rather about constructing a
parallel alternative world. Indeed, it is, in some ways, really the story of several isolated incidents that define our national history: What if we were a slaveholding country at the end of the civil war? What if we were a slaveholding country when the stock market crashed? What if we were a slaveholding country on VJ day, when Nixon ran against Kennedy (happens in the Confederacy, too), when Kennedy was shot, when Elvis invented rock 'n roll? And what if we still held slaves today? (This last question is disturbingly answered, in large part, by the many sometimes-too-close-to-truth-for-comfort "commercials" that interrupt the "broadcast" that we are watching.)
In the end, Willmott reimagines these events in often very interesting ways. They are nonetheless poorly connected, however; would there ever have been a Kennedy in the first place in a world where Boston was burnt to the ground in the Civil War, and in which nearly all whites were slaveowners? It seems, ahem, less than likely.
A bigger problem, though, is that ultimately Willmott fails to make much of a social point. It is tempting to think that this is not so big a failing after all; to be sure, millions of movies "fail" after this fashion simply because they have no great social ambitions in the first place. And, as I say, CSA remains an interesting and thought-provoking film without this element: I left the film wondering what modern-day Europe looked like in Willmott's imaginings, and trying to reconstruct it from the clues he gave. I was interested and engaged by the quotes he used, and the question of how many of them were real (which, indeed, could turn into real social commentary if in fact it turns out that the most unlikely of them are real--but it doesn't).
I also left the film a bit unsettled, however. CSA is treading on sensitive ground here, and it's an uncertain laughter that grips the audience at suggestions that Long Island has been turned into a reservation for Jews or that Canada is home to everything from extraordinarily successful (integrated) Olympic teams to Mark Twain to jazz music. And the discomfort is far more palpable when the film hits the black-white race issue head-on. Is it funny that the grinning white kid holding the fried chicken is a "breast man?" Even when he's eating it at the Coon Chicken Inn? Even when he's being served by a black woman? Even in a world where blacks are slaves? I can't help but admire the impressive spoof on a "Cops" commercial (this time for a show called "Runaway," however); it's exactly spot-on, completely believable as an artifact of our modern era--but that fact is precisely what is discomforting. "Cops" commercials look exactly like this because (to state the obvious) this is how they look: white officers wrestle black criminals to the ground, talk meanly at them, treat them inhumanely.
But the "Runaway" ad is really the only instance of strong social commentary here. To be sure, other moments catch us staring into the same is-it-okay-to-laugh? headlights, but they don't really make us reflect on the similarities between our world and the one depicted (which is Willmott's stated aim, after all). A pharmaceutical ad for a happy-drug to keep one's "chattel" from being difficult or trying to run away is funny because of its resemblance to the frightening, ask-your-doctor-to-give-you-this-drug, you-should-never-be-unhappy-or-uncomfortable antidepressant ads today, and it's uncomfortable because of the continued presence of slavery, the idea that you'd give it to your "servants" (a common euphemism in the imagined Confederacy) to keep them from causing trouble, and the closing one-liner, "ask your veterinarian about it today." But this seems almost gratuitous. It's disturbing not because it makes you think about how effed-up our world really is, or how unfair, or how racist, but rather because racist provocation was included in order to
make it disturbing. I certainly left CSA having felt many, many times that the world depicted was a bad, bad, bad world--but it hardly told me much about the world in which I live now. As a result, the alternative history has to work very hard to make CSA worth the offense it gives.
As I say, I think it succeeds. And I think, moreover, CSA's most gratuitously uncomfortable moments are tempered (practically--not that they necessarily should be) by the fact that Willmott was explicitly trying to make a film that shows us, in his words, that "in many ways, the South did win the Civil War. Maybe not on the battlefield, but they won the peace. They won the fight for their way of life." We all know that Willmott is
trying to tell us something about the world today, and that it is a thing that is both critical and emphatically anti-racist.
But Willmott doesn't manage to say this thing. The movie took me out of my comfort zone by breaking taboos, not by revealing some of the worst facets of our country (which are very real, I hasten to add). That doesn't make CSA a failure by any means--and I do recommend it--but it is worth pointing out. Much of the most objectionable material is included for the purpose (or at least with the primary effect) of making interesting and parallel fictitious history, not in order to make a point or make us think very critically about that material on its own. It would be easy to leave this film with a thank-God-we-didn't-collaborate-with-Hitler, thank-God-we've-done-away-with-slavery, thank-God-it-was-
us-who-invented-Jazz kind of attitude. I think it would be much harder to leave with the insight that Hey! That world looks a lot like this one! for any essentially race-related reasons. Indeed, the continued existence of slavery is nigh-on the only feature which makes our world look
different from the one in the movie--and insofar as Willmott's world resembles our own, it's because the cinematography is the same, because the pharmaceuticals are similar, because small-budget ads are equally stupid, because they've also put a man on the moon, because Washington is a founding father, and because the White House looks the same.
As an alternative history, then, CSA provokes speculation. And as an alternative history of an American Confederacy, it gestures at questions of racial inequities and our own inglorious past. It fails, however, to give us much of a thesis about (or even much of a lens through which to view) these questions, and it's not even very good at provoking conversations on these issues.
All that said, CSA's parallel history very clever, and it is as a result a reasonably good film. If you're lucky enough to have something like the IFC where you live, go see it (and let me know if you hated it, or loved it, or you think it
is strong social commentary, or you otherwise think I'm full of it with this review).
Dates, Establishment, and the Tourist Exchange
When I was 16, I landed in Dublin at about 8 am St. Patrick's Day morning, much to the chagrin (and, I think, the surprise) of my high school teachers, who had hoped to bring us on an educational tour of England and Ireland. They were stymied, for a bit at least, by the parade, the free-flowing Guinness, the blocked-off streets, and the newfound liberty of their otherwise unaccompanied charges. We had a grand time.
I mention this only because I feel it gives me a certain amount of credence when I say that there is nothing in the world quite like the New York St. Patrick's Day parade.
Police from as far away as Canada and from what must've been nearly every county in New York (as well as groups from Connecticut and New Jersey, among others) were on hand to march. There were extraordinary numbers of pipes and drums and literally thousands of people in kilts (because, after all, Scotland and Ireland are really just exactly the same, aren't they? I mean, who can tell two different islands whose inhabitants speak very differently inflected forms of English apart from one another?). There was such a crush of people around the parade route (where I went during lunch) that at one point I was bracing (hard) against a wall so as not to be either caught up in the flow or trampled. And, of course, there were neverending hordes of Irish-Americans marching under the banners of, among others, "The Bronx Gaelic Society," "The Ancient Order of Hibernians" (established:
1836, making them truly ancient indeed), "Brooklyn Irish League," and such IRA-friendly-sounding names as "The Independent Irishmen" and the "Irish Republicans of America." And of course there were, conservatively, two million spectators.
All of this leads to an interesting question. Dublin's St. Pat's parade (established:
1996, for all you who thought this was a celebration with long and storied Irish origins) drew "
hundreds of thousands of people" this year. From my own experience, I would suggest that a hefty proportion of these were Americans. New York's parade, by contrast, is populated by----you guessed it--people from Ireland, to judge by the accents on the street today. Not exclusively by people from Ireland, but a fair number of them were certainly mingled in among those two million spectators.
So here's the question: netting tourists over the week surrounding St. Patrick's day, do we send more people to Ireland, or do they send more people here? And, relatedly, does more money flow from us to them in this week, or from them to us? (Okay, two questions.)
Of course, contrary to the belief of some Americans who seem to fetishize the Irish (and don't get me wrong--I absolutely
loved Ireland, but I think we have a rather ridiculously romanticized notion of the place and its people nonetheless), it isn't crazy that "real" Irish--that is, people who actually live there or who hold Irish citizenship--might come to the Big Apple for their St. Patrick's day holidays. After all, we've got the biggest celebration in the world here. And remember how Dublin's parade is a product of the 1990s? Well, New York's celebrations date back to
1756, making it the second oldest official civic celebration of the holiday anywhere in the world (and predating the Declaration of Independence by 20 years, much to the surprise of those of us who think of Irish immigration as a product of the mid-19th century).
Where was oldest civic celebration of St. Pat's Day, you ask? Also in the US, in
Boston, Massachusetts, where popular recognition of the holiday dates back to 1737--and where March 17 is also celebrated as the officially observed
Evacuation Day, which conveniently gives the population the day off from work and school without the need to deal with the sticky issue of publicly recognizing what is, technically at least, a religious holiday.
we're all the same in the eyes of the traffic cops
Question: What do Purim, Diwali, Holy Thursday, January 2nd, the Feast of the Assumption, Idul-Adha, and Lincoln's Birthday all have in common?
Answer: They are all New York City parking holidays.
On most days, New York City has alternate side parking. This is not quite what it sounds; one may park on both sides of the street for most of every day---but for three hours, usually in the middle of the working day, one side or the other is off-limits (for street cleaning, we are told). This effectively means that most people who park on the street have to move their car from one side to the other every night.
But not today! Interrupting my regular-scheduled radio programming of BBC Newshour this morning--sadly a fairly sensationalist treatment of the news, I confess--was the New York City Radio Announcer, who assured me that alternate-side parking was suspended today "because of the holiday." "What holiday?" I thought. "Is it a federal holiday? Is it a religious holiday? And if so, whose religious holiday?"
Leave it to New Yorkers to be more concerned about where their cars go than about who's celebrating what and why.
Today is Purim. Happy Purim! Eat some Hamentaschen, drink some wine (or whatever), and think of me on Easter Sunday. (What's that you say? Easter Sunday is NOT a parking holiday!?! But Holy Thursday and Good Friday ARE?
What? The logic is baffling.)
Mars!
For those of you who haven't noticed, there now exists
Google Mars. This is awesome. I take it as some great testament to mankind that we can map other planets, hurl ourselves through space,
find liquid water on Saturn's moons, and
speculate intelligently about life in the rest of the universe. But Q points out to me an interesting fact: if we count the ocean floor as mappable (which we should), then we now have better maps of Mars than we do of Earth. Mars, conveniently with
out liquid water, is easily mapped by satellites with high-resolution cameras. But Earth is different. We have clouds and haze and fluids that interfere; hover long enough over New York and you can get a good picture on a clear day, to be sure, but no amount of hovering is going to show you land features in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This may well mean that we can tell each other more about the geological history, volcanic features, and plate tectonics of other planets than we can of our own Earth where these questions matter so much for practical reasons like that of tsunami prediction.
If we apply the Socratic injunction to "know thyself" on a rather grander scale than Socrates himself was thinking, then we might conclude that we'd do better to invest our resources into Earth studies than into grand schemes for space exploration. And, indeed, there's a lot of work to be done here--an infinite amount, perhaps--in order to understand our own world and, in the process, to benefit human life. It would be an undeniably good thing to have reliable early warnings of major earthly disasters, after all.
But I cannot get past the idea that cosmology, astronomy, and space exploration all get at fundamental questions about the nature and development of our universe that really oughtn't be pushed aside. This is non-obvious; one very smart coworker asks me, more or less, "Who cares?" He is not convinced that there is any point in the study of history, on an earthly or (especially) on a cosmic scale (since such histories, he maintains, don't even tell us about our own families, values, or cultures). He is all the more unconvinced that there is any reason to invest in understanding the mechanisms which govern very large objects--that is, objects and systems that are far larger than anything sensible on a human scale. What good is it, he asks, to know how big the universe is, or why red giants turn into white dwarfs, or how relativity curves spacetime?
It's a valid point. But it is also a point that calls into question the study of everything from particle physics to English literature, archaeology, and philosophy. Much of what we study--indeed, much of what we do, even if we don't "study" anything in any formal sense--is not instrumental. People have an unusual fondness for understanding; two-year-olds never shut up when asking "Why this? Why that? Why, why, why?" And the truth is, we very often discover that such investigations ultimately do help us get along in the world in very instrumental and useful ways.
But even if they don't, I think the asking is worthwhile if only for the possibility of some greater understanding. And it is not a good enough criticism, I suspect, to ask why we should desire understanding
per se in the first place; such a desire seems quintessentially human to me, and not a question of "should" so much as a question of "must." In investigations of modern Mars and ancient Rome alike, I think what is going on is an attempt both to understand and to construct for ourselves our place in the world. We want to know where we come from, who we belong to, how we got here, how we work, what "our" culture is and how it developed. And, I dare say, we people want to have answers perhaps even more than we want to have
right answers. Whether our stories place us in "the Western philosophical and literary tradition"; or whether they posit God, or gods, or evolution, or some combination thereof; or whether they tell us about the fundamental forces holding our atoms together or blowing them apart; we spend an inordinate amount of time investigating and retelling about where we belong in the order of things. And when we don't know, we still find reasons: the river flooded because the river gods made it to do so; the Earth is held up by Atlas, or tortoises, or is floating in some liquid; we got fire from Promethius. This is very odd.
But then, we like order and classifications. Our brains are designed to find patterns, and so we find them--even when they aren't really there. It's no surprise that we want to order ourselves and our place in the world, too.
What is surprising, perhaps, is that sometimes we manage to figure out natural order that really
is there. That's where, for me, the whole "testament to mankind" thing comes in. I think we do that here on Earth with really quite surprising frequency. But it's all the more impressive an endeavor if we've managed to derive natural laws that work on a universe-sized scale, rather than merely an Earth-sized scale. Einstein trumps Newton any day.
And for all you English lit and philosophy types out there (and I include myself here): the prospect of floating around in space is awesome in the literal, non-colloquial sense of the word--the sort of brush with grandness that, I suspect, cannot but help to inspire such froofy things (and, yes, I say that with sarcasm) as poetry and the kind of wild philosophical speculations in which there may be great richness indeed.
as if with treasure-map in hand
One of the first people I spoke to after moving to New York was a Russian woman who lives in my building. She came in with grocery bags as I was retrieving my mail, and I (outsider that I was) thought to ask her where the grocery store was. "I go to the organic vegetable mart, just three blocks down," she answered.
"On Second Ave?" I asked.
"Of course!" she replied in a thickly accented English. "Everything's on Second Ave!"
This, my friends, sums up something strange and wonderful about New York. Everything
is on Second Avenue. And everything, equally, is on First Avenue. And Tenth Avenue. And Seventh Avenue. Except for purposes of catching a train or getting to the Port Authority, there is no reason to walk cross-town here, no reason to leave the comfort of your Avenue with anything like quotidian regularity. All normal needs, from new socks to take-out Thai food, exist within a few blocks up- or downtown. Indeed, why would one explore the next block over, much less the next neighborhood over or--gasp!--the next
borough over? What wonders could those places possibly hold that could not be gotten two blocks uptown?
As I say, it is a strange and wonderful thing to have everything at one's fingertips like this--but it is, too, a temptation to a kind of cosmopolitan parochialism. We live in this big and varied city, and yet we only ever see the few blocks on our avenue, the small radius containing convenient lunch spots near the office, the walk to and from the bus stop or the subway, and the occasional sports arena, national monument, or performing arts center.
With that in mind, a couple of weekends ago I took the subway into the heart of the Bronx and wandered around among buildings that looked nothing like mine, streets filled with privately-owned cars (unheard of!), and above-ground "subway" trains. This was for no other reason than that I had never been to the Bronx, and had certainly not wandered there on foot. It is a place that is so very near to me in my Manhattan apartment, and yet so far from it that it seems impossibly unlikely that any of my fellow apartment-dwellers will have gone there in the last year for more than a Yankees game.
But now I am exploring New York anew, drawn out by a scavenger hunt forced upon me by the city's library system. For you see, I have been taken in by Philip Pullman's
His Dark Materials trilogy, and by extension, by Milton's
Paradise Lost and
Paradise Regained, and by Susan Cooper's
Dark is Rising sequence (which, ironically, I own and have safely left in Florida lest it get lost on my hopefully-parepatetic post-collegiate journey). But the NYPL tells me that these books are all perpetually checked-out, or lost, or on hold, or in transit. Yet I continue to devour these stories at the rate of one a day; and as a result, every day I am reduced to figuring out which of the library's 85 branches holds a copy of the next book on-shelf, and which of
those few libraries is open until at least 7pm (or, better yet, 8). And then the journey begins: Sunday night, I found myself in Greenwich Village; yesterday it was Brooklyn; today I will be going to the Bronx.
And it occured to me, today, that I could, of course, pick up more than one book at a time. If the Mott Haven Branch where I am going today happens to have
three of Cooper's books, then I can grab them all and fill in the gaps when I come to them. There is no need to go every day, book by book, to find the next of my texts. It is silly to hurry off every day to a new and sometimes hard-to-find location if I could save myself the effort.
But I am discovering that I love this forced exploration. It is not aimless wandering: I have a destination, a goal. Yet these excursions are not quite event-oriented, either; I pop into the library for 10 minutes at most, find my book, and leave--and then there I am, with all the time I could want, in Crown Heights or the East Village or Harlem or Parkchester.
Of course I want to get home and read. But I also like the idea that, while I
cannot get
The Subtle Knife for free on Second Avenue in Manhattan's Upper East Side, I
can get it in New York--and I know wherefrom.
Last weekend, relatives came to town and we went to the Bodies Exhibition at South Street Seaport. Let me tell you, folks: this was nothing short of awesome.
