- Putting every New Yorker on paper.
Artist Jason Polan has an ambitious goal: to sketch all 8.3 million people in the city. He captures his unsuspecting subjects eating pizza, riding the subway, catching a train.
Hmm. I wonder if I’m anywhere in his sketchbook. [via]
- Looking for another reason not to like “textbook sociopath” Ayn Rand? Apparently she was a big admirer of certain serial killers. [via]
- Roger Ebert: class act. [via]
- It’s not a “late fee,” it’s just money you owe if you don’t bring back the DVD on time.
- And finally, a great interview with Ursula K. Le Guin about the Google Book Settlement and why she’s opted out:
I’m part of the technological age whether I want to be or not, and mostly I enjoy it very much. I’m not protesting technology — how stupid would that be? Writers against Computers, or something? I’m protesting against a corporation being allowed to rewrite the rules of copyright and the laws of my country — and in doing so, to wreck the whole idea of that limitless electronic Public Library.
I think the Google Library could do a lot of good. I think the way Google is going about it will do a lot of harm. [via]
new york
Monday various
- Rats. I missed my chance to put in a request for my very own space shuttle. I wonder if those free engines are still available, though… [via]
- Ever wonder what the U.S. would look like with 50 states of roughly equal population? I’m amused to discover that I’d be working out of state if I continued to live across the border in Long Island. [via]
- Meanwhile, I have read none of the bestselling books in New York City. (Though Under the Dome is sitting in my e-reader, waiting.) Maybe Long Island should secede. [via]
- How did I not know Meat Loaf used to be a Motown artist?
- And fianlly, John Scalzi discusses the pros and cons of being killed by various sci-fi creatures. Of the Alien movies he says:
It’s a perfect killing machine, like a shark or Simon Cowell, so at least you know you’re being killed by the best; nothing says “party” like a chest burster.
Oh, THAT snowpocalypse!
It snowed a whole lot here today, and is in fact still snowing, with no sign of letting up any time soon. The photo up above is from about nine o’clock this morning. I wouldn’t want to guess at how much snow has fallen throughout the day since then, but we’ve had to shovel and snowblow the driveway and path several times just to keep it clear.
Our office closed at noon today, but I’d already decided by around seven not to go in at all. The entire Long Island contingent (all three of us) stayed home, though my father braved the railroads and snow to get to his job. He said it actually wasn’t that bad, though even he came home early, since I think it was the uncertainty of rush hour that everyone was most afraid of. There’s no telling right now what will happen tomorrow, but I suspect I’ll be pulling on my boots and going in to the office. An unexpected snow day is a lot of fun, but there’s only so many of them to go around.
Besides shoveling and playing in the snow with the dog, I didn’t do a whole lot. I wrote a little bit, finished editing what I think is the last story for Kaleidotrope‘s April issue, and watched last night’s episode of Lost. I also watched Moon, which arrived this afternoon from Netflix. I really enjoyed it. It’s a small, quiet piece of science fiction, but it’s atmospheric and Sam Rockwell’s really quite good in it. It was actually kind of nice to have the option of watching a movie in the middle of the day.
Right now, I may watch a little something else or read a little, but then I think it’s time for bed. Despite my snow day, I was actually up a little earlier than usual, deliberating about whether or not I should go into work. Though I was home all day, I’m still kind of sleepy.
Wednesday various
- This could be interesting: apparently Redbox is looking to install DVD rental kiosks at libraries. As a librarian at the link above writes:
Unfortunately I think Redbox will only target libraries in large cities and wouldn’t bother with a small town like mine. It would be a great service to the community, but probably not enough profit to make it interesting for them.
Where it could do some good — that is, by generating foot traffic and providing DVDs to libraries that couldn’t otherwise afford them — Redbox likely won’t be interested, but will instead focus on locations where they might actually do some harm — by charging for what are now free rentals, and by sharing only a tiny percentage of that charge with the libraries. If nothing else, though, I think it suggests that Redbox understands the precariousness of its existence; as online streaming becomes the dominant industry model, it will need to seek out more and new rental locations to survive.
- There are two ways to look at this: the first, “Obama cancels moon mission,” makes for a quick and easy soundbite. But the second, “Obama scraps Bush’s wildly empty promise and redirects funding to more important areas” is probably more accurate. Still, it’s a shame we’re not going back to the moon any time in the near future.
- I’m not sure all of the titles on the Oddest Book Title of the Year award longlist are really that odd, but what library would be complete without Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, Map-based Comparative Genomics in Legumes, or Planet Asthma: Art and Acitivty Book?
- An interesting article by A.O. Scott on Smoking in ‘Avatar’ and the Limits of Boundaries on Ratings.
- And finally, there have got to be easier ways to get around New York [via]:
Falling Man
Now I’m calling all citizens from all over the world
This is Captain America calling
I bailed you out when you were down on your knees
So will you catch me now I’m falling — The Kinks, “Catch Me Now I’m Falling”
It’s not like I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about September 11. We live in a world so permeated by what happened that day — and moreover by the less fortunate aftershocks — that not thinking about it is all but impossible. (Though even Rudy “a Noun, a Verb, 9/11” Giuliani seems to be trying.) It’s just that I haven’t gone out of my way to relive those events, the way it felt that morning and in the immediate aftermath. I haven’t watched the documentaries or the interviews with survivors, or read any of the countless books written about the attacks. (The closest I’ve come is recently watching Spike Lee’s masterful 25th Hour, in which, as Roger Ebert notes, “the shadow of 9/11 hangs over [everything].”) I haven’t avoided it, but it occurs to me I also haven’t sought it out.
I wasn’t in New York at the time. In fact, it wasn’t until after noon that I learned that anything had happened. I wandered into a now defunct arcade in downtown State College, PA, and heard about the attacks on the radio. In retrospect, it seems incredible that I remained unaware for those first few hours, especially since the rest of the day was spent in frantic phone calls and watching the news. I remember being overwhelmed by it all, not knowing what to say or how to say it, and being just blindsided with grief*.
It’s maybe no wonder that I’ve avoided those movies and books.
Still, last week I read (and I’d say largely enjoyed) Don DeLillo’s 2007 book Falling Man, which right off the bat throws you back into that bright September morning:
It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under the cars.
The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.
The “he” there is Keith Neudecker, and the rest of the story plays out over the next few years against the backdrop of his estranged marriage to Lianne. It’s in many respects a modest, day-to-day domestic drama, and I think it bothered some critics — notably Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times — that it wasn’t a more ambitious, more definitive 9/11 book. But is such a thing even possible? That day, and more importantly our fumbling and failed attempts to make sense of it, are never far from the center of DeLillo’s book. It’s not as panoramic or expansive as his novel Underworld, it’s true, but I think the sheer enormity and immediacy of the 9/11 attacks would make that kind of book difficult to write, much less read.
So this isn’t the definitive book on the subject, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t full of some terrific writing:
She wanted to disbelieve. She was an infidel in current geopolitical parlance. She remembered how her father, how Jack’s face went bright and hot, appearing to buzz with electric current after a day in the sun. Look around us, out there, up there, ocean, sky, night, and she thought about this, over coffee and toast, how he believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light. Jack was an architect, an artist, a sad man, she thought, for much of his life, and it was the kind of sadness that yearns for something intangible and vast, the one solace that might dissolve his paltry misfortune.
I think my pleasure in the book came precisely because it isn’t the definitive book on the subject, because instead of trying to make sense of it all, it simply lets us watch others trying to make sense of it all. And that, in the end, may be the best any of us can do.
* None of it personal, thankfully. None of the family or friends I had in New York were at the World Trade Center that morning.