The New Rambler

First, a quick programming note: apologies to all of those whose comments were held for moderation until just now. My spam program was, unbeknownst to me, set up in the most aggressive fashion possible, and for some reason I did not receive email notifications of comments and thus did not see them until I logged in. All that should be fixed now, I think.

Earlier today I read Vanessa Bush’s Likely Stories blog post about a project she attempted that involved interviewing white families and their black servants, these many years later, about their experiences — only while she found the white families eager to talk, none of the black servants have been willing to be interviewed. At the time I thought, “Huh,” and contemplated what one could say about that in relation to Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller The Help, which is a novel written in three voices, one that of a young white woman and the other two those of, you guessed it, black servants in the early 1960s. I enjoyed the book but was troubled, as I often am, by wondering if I liked it because I am white, and the narrative is one that allows me to feel superior and enlightened as compared to many whites in the South in the early 1960s. That’s all well and good, but if it doesn’t translate — and sometimes I worry that it doesn’t — into present day anti-racism, then it’s not really doing much good.

This evening, as I was casting about for a topic, I suddenly thought, “Well, of course, Vanessa Bush should interview Annie!” And then I stopped dead, because Annie has been dead for many years now, and because I would guess she would not talk to an interviewer either, whereas my family, I’d guess, would be quite happy to. After all, I am talking to you.

Annie worked for my great grandmother and later for my grandmother. When I knew her, she came to the house one day a week to clean, or to help my grandmother clean, or to clean under the direction (often somewhat confusing to outsiders — “iron the dining room” translates, in my grandmother’s household, to “vacuum the living room”) of my grandmother. As the years went on, they spent less time cleaning and more time fussing about cleaning, but cleaning days always involved lunch, which was always soup and sandwiches.

It’s easy for me to fall into sentimentality about all of this, to think of Annie as a family extension, but I think that way only when I remember her through the eyes of my six or seven or eight year old self. By the time I got to be twelve and thirteen and fourteen, I became more uncomfortable, and I rather dreaded visiting my grandmother during cleaning day, because I began to notice things. I noticed that Annie — whose last name I do not remember, if I ever knew it — always called my grandmother Miz Wallace and me Miz Laura and my mother Miz Judith. I noticed that she nodded a lot. And — and this will seem like the stupidest thing ever — I noticed that she was black.

I knew that, of course, and I could have told you that even when I was younger, but its full import did not come to me until later. I was raised on the Civil Rights movement: my mother’s best friend in high school marched on Washington in 1963, my grandmother had, at one time, a subscription to a newspaper put out by the Black Panthers, and the only time I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime as a child was when there was a special about Martin Luther King Jr. on television. But that was all abstract. I was educated but I was not experienced; I grew up in a very white state and went in the summers to a very white camp. I had ideas about freedom and equality and the brotherhood of man, but when faced with the situation of a black person in what was clearly a subservient role in my own family, I did not know what to do.

I do not think that my family were bad employers or were cruel or unfair in any way, and I don’t think we were quite as crazy as the sort of dysfunctional white family archetype that Bush describes. But if I try to imagine how Annie might have seen us, I fail. I can guess that her feelings must have complicated, a sort of mixture of affection and resentment, love and envy — but I don’t, and won’t ever, know. Maybe I can’t know: maybe those are stories that won’t ever be told. I like to believe that listening to stories helps us to apprehend the world, and that somewhere out there there is a story that would help us all understand, but I’m not sure such a thing exists — perhaps it is one that is yet to be made.

My good friend Greg (whose blog you should all read) decided to start posting five times a week, and for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I decided to join him, at least for the month of March. We both welcome your suggestions for Thursday and Friday themes. I will be blogging in my usual slapdash fashion the rest of the week, while Greg will be more disciplined.

Anyway. In addition to that challenge, I also decided that for the month of March, I would exercise five days a week. That’s not as huge a commitment as it might sound — I already swim three mornings a week, which is as often as our pool is open for lap swimming, which means I have more incentive to go swimming that I’ve had since I left summer camp, since it’s impossible for me to say, when my alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m., “Oh, I’ll go this afternoon” or, when it gets to be afternoon, to say, “Oh, I’ll go tomorrow.” All I have to do to honor this pledge is to exercise some on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or on the weekend. Today was absolutely gorgeous, which made me wish for the umpteenth time that I could run (I am terrible at it, and I have a back problem that means I am not supposed to do high impact activities, although I guess I ignored that when I was taking karate), but instead I went to our little rec center and ran on the elliptical machine for thirty minutes, much to the amusement of the small children who were at their after school program in the adjoining room. I may have to do this elliptical machine bit in the mornings, too.

All of this is a very long preamble to what is supposed to be some commentary on a book, which I shall now commence.

I just last night finished listening to Frank Bruni’s Born Round, which I checked out for my drive to Cheyenne and Denver and Laramie last weekend. In case you missed the New York Times article drawn from the book or the fairly large amount of hype surrounding it, the book is a memoir by the New York Times restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, about his lifelong struggle with his appetite, and how he finally conquered it and managed to eat out in New York City seven nights a week.

I was fascinated by the book. I am by nature and training a memoir reader, and I was pleased to note that until its last section, this chronicle mostly avoided what I think of as the Subtitle Structure Problem — the intense tendency of modern memoirs to take the “I went and did this thing for a year” structure to journalistic excess, wherein the author does something only for the sake of writing the book, and it shows in the way the prose slides into glibness and starts to feel like a feature story in Redbook. There’s a bit of that at the end, as I’ve said, when Bruni starts discussing his efforts to avoid detection as a restaurant critic and especially when he starts describing the various kinds of exercise regimes he tries out. But the first two thirds or so are a lovely, and heartbreaking, and fascinating memoir about food and desire and figuring out who you are and how you will go about handling the world.

Bruni, like many Americans, spends much of his life focused on his body and on wishing it were a different, better body. I said “like most Americans,” but in fact what I mean by that is “like most American women,” because I simply cannot imagine that American men are made to feel that way. Of course, I am not a man, and, more to the point, I am not a gay man, as Bruni is. I listened to the book desperately wanting to read a sociological study or three about gay men and body image. Bruni spends much of the book believing he’ll never have a boyfriend — in fact, that he can’t even look for a boyfriend, because of his body. But surely that can’t be entirely true? If fuckyeahchubbygirls! exists, I’m sure there’s an equivalent aesthetic in gay male culture. But that doesn’t really matter, because Bruni isn’t truly at peace (and how interested I am that I just chose a synonym for dead!) until he has the appearance that he wants to have, one that he largely achieves by relearning to eat and by doing a lot of exercising.

So I listened to this book and thought about how much I love food and thought about the Fat Nutritionist and thought about my shrink telling me that exercise works as an antidepressant and thought about how exercise makes me feel (excellent, although usually not till after I do it) and about how food makes me feel (excellent, unless I become wracked with guilt) and thought about how much I hate how much I think about all of this in relationship to this thing called a body that I use to carry my brain around.

I’m sure it’s Bruni’s book that got me to decide on this exercising more thing. I admire him for what he’s done, but I admire equally Anne Lamott’s friend, whom she said was always a bit overweight “for political reasons.” I hope I can find some happy medium between the two.

I always used to tell people — usually even if they didn’t ask, and mostly they didn’t — that I was giving up watermelon for Lent. I said this in the fond hope that maybe someday someone would recognize it as an allusion to Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, but so far that has not happened, and now, of course, dear readers, I have tipped you off.

I said it jokingly, but in truth, despite being a religious person, I have never been much into giving things up for Lent. My intellectual reason for this is that I am so generally depressed and down on the world that the thought of giving up one of the few things I actually enjoy for forty days sounds like a pretty good way of making a suicide pact. My more mundane reason is that I am essentially lazy and weak of will.

Some years I get ambitious and say that instead of giving up, I am going to add. I am going to read the lectionary lessons every day. I am going to read my way through the Psalms. I am going to do the daily devotions for individuals and families from the Book of Common Prayer every day, or at least every night. I am going to take on some other spiritually uplifting program. I rarely — well, really, never — succeed for very long at any of these. In high school I once decided not to go see Wayne’s World because it was Lent. I think that’s the closest I’ve ever come to actual deprivation.

This year, however, I’m trying to realize that I may need to give up my boots. These are not just any boots. They are boots I bought, at an exorbitant price, at the Fluevog store in SoHo on my New York City vacation last fall. They are boots that I told myself I deserved, because I have wanted some black boots for years and years. They are boots I deserved because I paid for them with cash, as I paid for the rest of my week-long trip to Manhattan and Brooklyn. They are boots I deserved because, dammit, I deserve some things in life, do I not?

Last Thursday, I was in Cheyenne for the Wyoming Library Association Legislative Reception, wherein we librarians invite all our state legislators to come taste our home cooking (or, in my case, a box of goodies from the Meeteetse Chocolatier) in order to tell them how wonderful our libraries are. Of course, I wore my boots. And, because I had a meeting the next morning and the state would be covering my lodging and such, I figured I’d save them money and stay in a cheap motel. I checked out on Friday morning and was sure that I’d put the boots in the trunk of my car. I visited some friends in Denver and Laramie over the next couple of days, and yesterday, when I went to unpack my car, the boots were not there. I put in to a call to the motel, where the receptionist told me that they hadn’t seen anything like that but that there was a “basement store room” that hadn’t been checked yet, and they’d let me know. I haven’t heard back yet.

I did not leave a housekeeping tip on this particular visit. I didn’t have any small bills, and I was in a hurry, and I had barely messed up a thing in the room, and it was a cheap motel, and. . . insert your favorite excuse here. I spent much of yesterday afternoon thinking that this boot incident just Served Me Right, and thinking about how people in Haiti don’t even have houses, and I jolly well don’t need to be whining about boots. Today, having investigated and found that these boots are no longer available in my size, I’ve been considering offering a reward for their return.

Normally, when you give something up for Lent, you get it back on Easter, when we bring the alleluias back into the service, and we move from the penitential cadences of Rite I back to the modern Rite II. My hopes are slim, but I suppose I may get my boots back as well. What I would really like to get, though — not get back, just get in the first place — is the ability not to care so much about so little. And that, if one can have a Lenten wish, is my wish for everyone.

NB This got posted first on my other blog, but I had a request to put it here, too, and so here it is until such time as I can collect my thoughts on everything else that has happened of late.

One of the many unpaid jobs I have had over the years was that of staff writer for an alternative monthly paper in Chicago called Third Coast Press. The first big story I did for them [available as a giant PDF, if you are really interested] was about a couple of studies done by a couple of professors from the University of Chicago and MIT and by the Chicago Urban League concerning race and hiring. The first study [PDF] used just resumes — some sent out with “white” names with addresses in predominantly white neighborhoods, some with “black” names and addresses in predominantly black neighborhoods. You can guess which set of resumes got better responses. The other study [PDF] involved sending white and black candidates, where the blacks were actually better qualified than the whites, to in-person interviews and, once again, the white candidates fared much better. What interested me the most, though, was that it was the largest corporations — the Targets and Wal-Marts and Gaps of the world — that showed the least discrimination in hiring. What all those places had in common was that they had very strict standard hiring procedures, and there were thus fewer opportunities for the interviewer to say, “Oh, you went to Valparaiso? So did my best friend!”

I was thinking about these findings again in the light of the much-discussed Clay Shirky rant wherein Shirky says that women should act more like men — or at any rate adopt more of what he sees as male traits: assertiveness and risk-taking, if you like what Shirky says, or arrogance and outright lying if you don’t.

I live in a state that has the highest disparity in wages between men and women. Wyoming calls itself the Equality State on the strength of having been the first territory to give women the vote, not on anything it has done since. Most initiatives in the state that seek to address that problem are focusing on getting more women into traditionally male professions, most notably the energy industry. While I believe strongly that women should be encouraged to pursue those jobs, I don’t think that getting women into the energy is the solution to wage disparities in the state. Women already hold important jobs as nurses, childcare providers, and teachers. These are all jobs at least as crucial to the functioning of the world as energy industry jobs, but we do not pay them accordingly. Until we do, until we recognize and support the vital work that women do, we will never have any kind of equality.

Shirky is probably right in individual cases: if a candidate in the resume study had lied and given herself a “better” address, she might well have stood a better chance of getting a job. If a woman acts more “male,” that may well help her break into a profession. The tide of assertiveness — or arrogance — will lift those two ships. But when it comes to improving conditions for everybody, which is what I am really interested in, I think Shirky is dead wrong. As long as we treat “lifting people out of poverty” as “getting them better jobs” and “getting more pay for women” as “getting them into traditionally male occupations,” we will never solve the problem of poverty or inequality. There will always be scut jobs that need to be done no matter what kind of economy you live in. I have a good job, and my interests lie not in getting everyone a good job but rather in making everyone’s job good.

My friend Greg probably didn’t mean to send me into an existential tailspin when he tweeted about this column in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier today, but it is the nature of the internet to cause such serendipities — or whatever the negative equivalent of serendipities is — and thus I spent a good portion of the day thinking about academia and my relationship to it.

I don’t think it was intentional on her part, but my mother brought me up in such a way that The Academy was something like the church, or more exactly something like the source of those shadows on the cave that Plato writes about, as read by C.S. Lewis (which brings us back to the church, of course). I don’t think she intended it, but it would be hard to avoid. She holds five degrees — a BA and MA in English acquired before I was born, a PhD in Englished finished shortly after, and an MD and an MS, just for good measure. My father was a Classics professor, and though he died when I was quite young, my early memories of him are set in a fixed location: a dilapidated late Victorian house a block away from a college campus on a hill, the sort with old stone buildings and leaves that crunched underneath your feet in the fall. People from the college were always coming over to the house, and dozens of students stored their bicycles in our barn in the winter. (I wish I had a picture — all the racing bikes that looked so hip in 1979 would look so dated today.)

My father’s direct influence on my life ended when I was five, but his presence never quite left. He was the sort of man who had sayings. Some of these he liked to print onto 3″x5″ cards at his hobby press in Vermont in the summers (“Every silver lining has a cloud”); the rest are things that were repeated to me for many years. “The true purpose of a liberal arts college,” my mother would say, “was, according to your father, to provide a very, very fine education to a very small group of men — by which he meant the faculty.” She also told me that my father believed that once you had written the first sentence of a paper, you were halfway done. It was my recently-deceased great uncle who said there was no point in writing if you couldn’t write like Milton, but it is a sentiment for which I suspect my father might have had sympathy.

I grew up in a house that contained my mother’s books, my father’s books, and the books that had once belonged to a man named Frank Carey, who was also a Classics professor from Enosburg Falls, Vermont, where my father’s family spent every summer. When he died, he left his library to my father, the only other Classicist (or so he believed — someone may well prove him wrong) ever to come from that tiny town. I took with me to college my father’s elementary Greek textbook, my mother’s Latin dictionary, and Frank Carey’s copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The weight of three generations academe (my father was twenty-four years older than my mother, and Frank Carey was a good bit older than my father) was already on my shoulders, quite literally.

I knew I wanted to study Greek in college, and I knew that I would love college. I did both those things, and I do not regret it. I spent four years among old stone buildings, and four years crunching leaves underfoot in the fall, and four years trying to learn some of the things that were in all those books I brought with me. But then, of course, those four years came to an end, and while that eventuality is obvious to anyone who has observed the passing of time, I did not ever quite realize that it was going to happen. And I was utterly unprepared when it did.

I was an okay student, but I was not a star. I got nice comments on some of my work from my professors, but none of them ever encouraged me to go on to graduate school. I have only myself to blame for that. I ended up in an MFA program, not a PhD program, although the MFA is just as terminal, if not more so — terminal in the sense that it leads nowhere. Part of my is grateful that I never went after a PhD; part of me believes I will always be lacking because I failed to do so.

Benton’s Chronicle piece comes too late to serve as advice for me, and I most probably would not have listened to him even if it had not, in part because I had, at age 22 and 23 and 24, no other idea of what to do but more because I had not then, and have still not now, entirely come to understand academia as the god that failed.

Some people raised in particularly strict systems are able, when they come of age, to shuffle off those beliefs like so much snakeskin. But others climb away from them on what Karen Armstrong pictures as a spiral staircase — true, it goes up, but it comes around again and again to the place it was before.

I can see that universities treat humanities graduate students as cheap and easily exploitable labor. I can seee that they have little use for them beyond that. I can see that that very, very fine education for a very small group of men is a sort of upper middle class fantasy world. I can see that the shadow casters in the cave are, ultimately, no more real than the donkey in lion’s clothing that the evil ape tries to pass off as Aslan in The Last Battle. I can see all that, but I still cannot let it go.

A long time ago (nearly ten years ago now!) I quoted Chelsea Cain’s memoir, describing her mother’s reaction to the Vietnam War: “Her identity had been closely wed to what it meant to be an American and when what it meant to be an American suddenly included napalm and mortar fire, her self-concept began to unravel.” My identity has been no less tied to the idea of the academy, and the academy turns out not to be at all what I somehow once thought it to be, and it has indeed caused my self-concept to unravel, and I am not at all sure of just how I can put it back together again.

One of the best meetings I ever moderated — perhaps the best — was for people opposed to attacking Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The group that emerged from that meeting was called Iowans for Peace. I haven’t lived in Iowa since 2003, and I have lost track of much of what is happening there, but they still have a website, and the Iowa City Public Library association database has contact information for them as recently as last April. (How awesome is the ICPL? So awesome that they maintain such a database.)

I was overwhelmed by the anti-war movement that started in 2002 and 2003, opposing the war in Iraq. I had been opposing the war in Iraq since August 1990, when, the day I arrived back in Iowa City after a two year exile in Indianapolis, I attended the founding meeting of a group that called itself Operation U.S. Out. We started the group before the United States invaded Iraq, in January 2001, in a futile attempt to prevent that invasion, and the many years of bombings and sanctions that followed. By the time the US invaded (again) in March of 2003, all I was capable off was bringing vegan chili to the Peace Camp at the University of Iowa one night.

I was engaged in activist groups, on and off, from age 14 to age 30. Part of the reason that I moved to rural Wyoming is that I needed to escape, at least for awhile.

I’m typing this as I listen to the commentary on NPR in the wake of Obama’s speech on Afghanistan. I still can’t quite believe that we went there in the first place — I cannot believe that we cast that stone — and I cannot quite believe that we are still there, and will be for some time to come.

Starting in the late 1960s, Phil Ochs held a series of rallies called The War is Over, based on the premise of his song of the same name. The idea, he thought, was simply that people should declare that the war in Vietnam was over, and that somehow, that will of the people would make it so. That happened, eventually, but not before many more lives were lost, and only a year before Ochs took his own life.

I’d like to believe that the war is over, but it never seems to work that way.

My recipe book was a Christmas present from my grandmother when I was eight years old, which I know because she had me write on a page in the back “This book was gifin to me by Granna Christmas 1983.” I still have the first recipe I wrote in it, on January 15, 1984. I was good at dating things once upon a time. It is the recipe for corn muffins from the back of the Quaker Oats cornmeal canister, and though I don’t make corn muffins using quite the same proportions any more (I add applesauce, for instance, to keep them moister longer), I keep it at the back of the book.

I also keep a great many other things in the book, and this evening, looking for the stuffing recipe my grandmother dictated to me before my twenty-ninth Thanksgiving, for which I decided to abandon my family and cook dinner for my boyfriend (a bad decision, in retrospect, but so it goes), I decided to try to sort through some of the mass of papers that have been shoved into it. Some were obvious keepers — the dittoed recipe for pancakes from my elementary school’s Pancake Day celebration, which I posted last year in a message to all the people on Facebook I went to grade school with ; the lemon-blueberry muffin recipe I love; the salmon with artichoke hearts and other good stuff recipe from my best friend. Others, however, mystify me.

3/4 cu butter
1 1/2 small onion
3 Tbsp parsley
1 1/2 tsp black pepper
3/8 tsp red pepper
3/4 tsp ginger
3/8 cu sherry

It’s my handwriting, to be sure, but there’s no date, no indication of what one is to do with the ingredients. And really. 3/8 cup?

I also have a fairly recent piece of paper (it also bears no date, but it’s written on the back of a page from a George Carlin page a day calendar my cousin gave me a couple years ago, so it can’t be too old), with a series of dates, one circled, and some calculations, and the notation BRING CARDAMOM. As I’m writing this now, it occurs to me that it must be from the evening I was the guest chef at a sadly now closed local restaurant.

One can only assume that

1 gold delicious
1 macintosh or jonathan
peel, chop fine
3/4 cup water
heat low
2 tsp.s honey
2 tsp. brown sugar
1 ” white “

written in my childish handwriting, is the start of some sort of apply dessert (and why, pray tell, did I once favor golden delicious over Macintosh and Jonathan apples?). But what dessert is lost to history.

I spent this Thanksgiving, once again, with local friends, and I contributed the rolls from a 1940s cookbook that start with 1/2 lb. butter and the pumpkin pie recipe that my mother and I invented when I was in third grade. The recipes for both are dutifully entered into my recipe book, some years ago, in the case of the rolls at a time when I was heavily into decorative serifs. I had a lovely time with my friends, as always. We played a variety of dominoes that involves something rather worrisomely called a “Mexican train.” Sharon inadvertently used the term “Community Train” to refer to at one point, and we all adopted the term, with the requisite jokes that one makes in the company of other liberals in Wyoming (“the community train is doubtless the work of one of them community organizers!” “Yup, it’s the ACORN line!” “The public option!”). But there’s no way to make me homesick as quick as food. I’m waiting for my mostly improvised dressing to finish baking, so I can eat it along with some leftovers I brought home from yesterday and some Brussels sprouts I got for myself, since none of my friends like them. My family are all 1400 miles away, but their influence runs heavy in this recipe book, and in my life.

A Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

I’m in the Denver airport, back in Mountain Time, waiting for the last of my three airplanes home, and, as you can perhaps tell from the picture, the sun is shining, which, after several cold and drizzly days in New York, is most welcome. Many people — including many in the East and even some in Wyoming — think I’m crazy for living where I do, and perhaps I am, but I do know this: where I live, it is almost always sunny. I used to have some sort of sunlight therapy lamp, and I sat dutifully in its light, but it simply doesn’t compare to actual sunshine — the sort that streams through the windows and dapples the hills and nearly blinds you when you walk outside. I love the sunshine, and I love the stars at night, and I love the expanse of the sky, and while there are things that would make me give those up, they are few, and none of them have yet come forward.

Yesterday I did in fact visit the Fluevog store and I emerged victorious! Well, it was a victory if you consider handing over large sums of cash for well-made boots that you love and that fit you a victory, which I do, particularly when I’ve been wanting some boots of this sort practically forever. I plan to wear them for at least that long. The craziest part of the thing, though, was not finding boots that fit my oddly long and narrow feet, although that is rare. But the woman who sold them to me? Is from Wyoming. From Lander, specifically, and we knew a handful of the same people in common. It was an excellent Wyoming/New York City moment. Tomorrow I’ll wear my boots to church and, when my friend comments on them, I will say, “Thanks. . . and just guess who sold them to me.” It will be a fine, fine thing.

SoHo was as disappointing as I expected. I first went there in 1990, when I suppose real New Yorkers would tell you it was already going to the dogs, or at any rate the chain stores, but it was not nearly as bad as it is now. I made a quick escape back to the Lower East Side, gathered the rest of my stuff from Jenna’s apartment, had dinner at the Angelina Cafe, and headed to the Radical Reference Google Books shindig, which I’ll write up for my library blog at some point. I haven’t seen any of my RadRef cohort since ALA in 2006, and many of them I’ve never met, so it was great to do so. I only wish I had a teleporter, so I could live all the lives I want to in all the places I want to be.

My father grew up in Brooklyn, but I haven’t really been here since before he died, and I don’t really remember those visits except for one little movie — just a few frames of a ride on a Coney Island rollercoaster in my mind. I haven’t really seen much of it this trip. Today has been a lazy day. So far, I have gotten up, read, talked to a couple of people, snacked, and napped. So it has been a good day. Tonight is the Radical Reference Salon on the Google Books settlement, which I’ll be attending. Before that, I have vague plans about visitng the Fluevog store, which will, I suspect, be an exercise in disappointment about shoe sizes and the gentrification of SoHo, but you never know.

Yesterday I went to visit the Darien Library. I’ll write more about it on lis.dom at some point, but in the meantime, you can see my photos. Many thanks to John for the tour. It was great to see Kate and to meet everyone else and to get a sense of the physical place. I have done a lot more library tourism here than I normally do on vacations — but then, I’m around a lot more libraries than I often am when on vacation.

It has been funny to be in New York in general. I have never lived in the city, but I have been coming here since I was fourteen, when my best friend and I took the train from Iowa to her godparents’ in New Jersey, where she was staying that summer. I spent a week there before leaving for camp, and we went into the city every day. We did the same thing the next summer (except that year we took the bus, which I don’t really recommend, but it was cheap), and then there was a lapse of some years until I came to college and then another lapse between when I last came out (during graduate school, round one, in 2002) and now. I know that I don’t actually know my way around nearly as well as I’d like to think I do, and on this trip, particularly, I know I’ve spent a lot of time looking around in a non-native sort of way. But I look around for a reason. I am always looking for the little bits of the city that I think of as mine — certain subway stops and street corners, and places where things used to be, and new places that might be added to that particular mental movie.

If you live here, I suppose, you have a different sort of movie, a movie that, perhaps, I might someday want. But for now I love the one that runs in my head, rough cut as it is.

Today was all about subways and art and zines and moving to Brooklyn.

I’ve reverted to what I think is probably my natural state and become a night person here on my vacation. My grandmother says you should always go to bed and get up on the same day so that you don’t lose a day in between, and I have been abiding by that idea while I’ve been in New York City. So today I arose at a leisurely hour and ate up the rest of my yogurt and strawberries and most of the rest of my granola (my first host is a) vegan and b) only stays at her place part of the time, so I was trying to use up the non-vegan and spoilable food), and drank a couple stovetop espresso potfuls of Cafe Bustela and checked up on the internet and daydreamed and thought about my day, and, after a couple of hours, I got up and set out on it. I had to stop just a few yards away, though, to take a picture of a a dog in a window.

My first real stop was one subway stop down and a few blocks walk down to Grand Street and Doughnut Plant. I love doughnuts, so when I hear from multiple sources that there are good doughnuts to be had, I have to check them out. And oh my were they good. Well. I only had one. But it was good. It was a creme brulee doughnut — a small, deliciously flakey glazed pastry with a creamy center. So good. I would have bought every other flavor they had, except a) they are expensive and b) I try not to eat a lot of doughnuts. But this one was definitely worth it. No picture — it was much too yummy to stop and photograph.

After that, I headed back up town to the Museum of Modern Art. I managed to graduate from Vassar without ever taking art history, but I love art in general, and I love modern art in particular, and I have not been to MoMA since it was renovated. I was last there for a Jackson Pollack retrospective, and though I didn’t see any Pollack this time around, my response was the same. I walked from gallery to gallery with my jaw dropped, and it dropped a little farther each time I saw something that made me look twice, and then look again and again and again. I don’t really know how to explain the sensation, except that it is so wonderful and so overwhelming that I frequently can’t bear the thought of taking in any more, and yet I don’t want to stop. I had to, though, after about an hour. I stopped in one of their cafes and got some coffee and drank it and stared at the wall until I thought I could look at more things, and then I did, and it happened all over again.

MoMA is expensive — it always has been, so that’s not really a surprise — and I wish I could stay there more than a couple of hours, but I truly can’t take in more than that. Nowadays, in addition to their regular audio tour thingies that you can get on a rented device, you can also listen to all of them via their wifi network on your own wireless device, and so I tried listening to some on my iPod Touch. Only some pieces have commentaries, and they are marked with a little symbol on their sign to let you know. While I appreciate the idea of being able to pick and choose which bits you hear, with the iPod it was kind of inconvenient — I had to keep getting it out, waking it up, and typing in the number of the piece in question. And if you make a mistake typing in the number, there is no delete button — you have to reload the page and start over. After awhile, I gave up on the audio. The pieces are valuable and worthwhile, but my raw reactions were so compelling that after awhile I couldn’t be bothered to go through the rigamarole of dialing up the right clip and playing it.

My next stop was at the Barnard Library to see the zine collection that is run by my friend and first New York City host Jenna. I’ll probably write up more about that and about the other libraries I visited on my librariany blog, so here I’ll just say that it was great to see a collection I’ve heard so much about.

My day concluded with many, many subway rides back to Jenna’s place (1 to S to 6 to V), packing up and cleaning up, and a longer ride on the F out to my friend Meg’s place in Brooklyn, where I’ll be staying for the remainder of my trip. More on that, and more, will follow.