DIARY
I’m going to give an account of New York these last two months by place instead of by time. It’s an easier way to remember.
Our apartment is subletted from our friend Miranda. It is located on the fourth-floor of a rent-controlled building in the neighborhood of Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, specifically two blocks from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It is a one bedroom.
When we first arrived here, we had to resort to the inflatable matress, but it had sprung a leak and over the next several weeks stayed inflated from several hours to a rough minute. In the end, we entirely stopped bothering to inflate it. Sleep was difficult, and for a number of days we’d have strange dream. We often woke up after six hours, grouchy, and the floor was hardwood. After a few weeks, out mattresses were delivered, courtesy of mom and Bill, and we were melted into supported sleep. A couple weeks later, the bed frame arrived, a metal frame with curlicues from Ikea, courtesy of dad J. Jess assembled it that day, making it with the sheet set from my brother and our Sari comforter. I discovered that I absolutely melt under satin.
Next to our bed, we set our Tiffany lamp, where it glows, floral and lovely. We bought She Hate Me and School Daze, but in the mess of these few months, we’ve only seen the first. It isn’t wonderful. We also received in the mail the first season of the O.C., which Jess has thoroughly addicted me to. We watched the whole mess in a couple weeks, with heavy addiction resulting from the mid-season Oliver episodes. We immediately ordered the second season, with its intense Trey epoch. Now we watch, one by one, season three on TV. We’ve also watched Garden State, which we liked.
In the main room / kitchen, looking out the kitchen window, one can see the Empire State Building, which lights up different colors every night. One can also climb out the two main windows and sit on the fire escape. I like this, and through all of September, I’d climb out with a reading assignment and a cup of coffee and sit and read for hours. I’d listen to Steven Sufjam’s Great Lakes State which both Matt and Lisa got for me, and read.
Inside, bookshelves from Ikea. Our bookshelves are filled to the brink, which is problematic, given my continuing perchases for class. So far, they are Peasants and Other Short Stories by Anton Chekov, Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant, The Cheneysville Incident by David Bradley, Swann’s Way by Proust, and the Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. But there are more, all of the time. I’ve been trying to finish my extended read of the Bible, but with other readings, I’ve gotten lost, entangled among the epistles, just moments from the Revelation. Cookbooks that Jess has used so far more than I (she’s making a roast right now). My stack of my first readings, with comments scratched upon them.
On the opposite wall, she has assembled a hutch above the radiator, and this is essential, because our non-parishables have nowhere else to go. For the first several weeks we spent here, boxes were stacked upon boxes, all aclutter. And Jess has scrubbed cannisters with flour, rice, and sugar inside. Our wine kit that my grandma Coyne got us has been frequently used; the wedding wine is down to a single bottle, I think. And we have our contraptions, which are fun and make life cozy: the coffee maker, the iced tea maker, the toaster oven, and right now, the crock pot.
On top of our cabinets is the food processor, the breadmaker, the popcorn maker, the electric griddles, and the steamer. Jess got a blender with a WalMart Gift Certificate. And we have, in addition to Jess’ table from Chicago, a small coffee tanble that we also got from Ikea, and a futon that serves as both a couch and a guest bed. I’m sitting at the computers in the corner. During our first week here, we relied heavily upon Skeletor vs. Beastman to keep ourselves sane.
Last week, in this very room, Matt and Bruce came to visit us. They liked the place. They’re getting a place of their own on Classon. They’re not quite neighbors, but nor are they a long walk either. Clinton Hill. A week before that, we threw a ghost-story party, though Daniel from my Lit Seminar was the only attendee. He read a creepy story about a doppleganger, and I read one of Lovecraft’s most flambuoyantly overwritten stories. Jess suggested we put on the red light and read in its glare. The next day, Gemma came over, and we went out to lunch at a South African place on DeKalb, than walked through the farmer’s market on Washington Park before perambulating through Fort Greene park.
We try to clean our place comprehensively once a week, and succeed roughly every other week. When my reading demands special concentration, I’ll pour my coffee and sit at the main table and maybe put on headphones to block out the noise. It is very noisy at night; we’re one block from the Queens-Brooklyn expressway. Looking out our window, one looks into the backyard gardens of the next several houses over, past the expressway, down into the Brooklyn Navy Yard (this month, Gravitane, 28, the pictures at the top and background are all the Brooklyn Navy Yard).
And mostly it has been a solitary experience for Jess and I in this apartment. We like it. We’ve seen neighbors once or twice. Normally, it’s one of us or both, but rarely anyone else. Our bathroom is small. There are no screens in any of the windows, meaning a few months ago, flies discovered our apartment. It’s too cold out now. You can see the Empire State Building out of our bathroom. On different nights, the building is different colors. Tonight it is molten red with a golden spire.
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Our apartment. Our apartment is a rather dingy walk-up between Myrtle St. and Flushing Rd. It seems no matter how far I go, I’ll always be close to Flushing… The stairs aren’t bad, unless you’re carrying something particularly heavy, or making many trips. We’ve passed the residents in our rent-controlled building, and they mostly seem to be elderly or young artists. Once, when we were coming back on a drizzly night, my key broke in the door. She managed to fish the shards out, and from that day on, we shared keys for two weeks before getting copies made.
Our neighborhood is Fort Greene, which I will talk about in more detail later on. On rainy, cold, and/or tired weekends, we’ll typically walk to a restaurant on Myrtle for dinner. We’ve eaten Crown Pizza this way, and New York style (still, objectively speaking, inferior to Chicago style), Thai, and McDonalds at a dingy little dive where all of the lettuce on our burgers was wilted. One block from us, the Projets start, but they’re not as depressing as I’m used to Projects being, and even their name, “the Walt Whitman Homes” are a little hopeful. There’s a supermarket besides the Projects, the Bravo Supermarket, and this is where Jess and I do our day-to-day shopping. Cans are recycled for five cents in New York. Personally, I prefer the ten cent deposit… I know in the end it makes little difference, but it just seems there should be a more substantial payback for dragging your empty pop cans around. Our greater neighborhood encompasses Fort Greene Park, Clinton Hill, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, all of which I’ll talk about in more detail in later posts.
Except we’ve passed through the Fort Greene Park Farmers Market on several occasions, and it’s always noisy and fresh smelling, and there really is no shortcut up to DeKalb St., where we catch the subway, a fifteen minute walk for me, or twelve by taking all shortcuts. About a month ago, I bought a portable CD player (my last one broke, after just ten years of service) and using the rechargable batteries Sam got me, I’d listen to music on my fast walk to and from the subway in the morning. First, I was listening profusely to Michigan: the Great Lakes State by Sufjam Stevens. Then, the second-to-last track of NIN’s With Teeth. Then, The Beekeeper, Martha’s Foolish Ginger, and Goodbye Pisces by Tori Amos. And now, a song called Trance off a “rave soundtrack” that is more accurately described as short, distilled bursts of House pop.
Church has been a strange experience. I must confess I’ve missed as many Sundays as I’ve made, at least. Nowhere is particularly convenient, in time or place. There’s one tolerable neighborhood possibility: Queen of All Saints is a fifteen minute walk and offers Mass at 10:15 AM. If I want to go, that is when I go.
On Labor Day weekend, on Labor Day itself, I rode the Q out to Coney Island, walked between the tents and boardwalk, ate a knish, and read C.S. Lewis. I met Jess and she waited while I looked at the nation’s last remaining sideshow. Then, we lay in the sand on the beach on the Atlantic ocean. It was a cold day, and the sun set.
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In Manhattan. On the 21st of September, I officially brought to a close both Year 27 as well as the Fourth Cycle. From work, I rode the subway south to City Hall, walked through the Financial District, with its weird, twisting, automobile-unfriendly streets and shadows down to Battery Park, where I watched the sun set. Then, I walked in a bolt up Broadway, making the Village in less than an hour, and made my seminar. After class, I stopped at Spain, a bar, for free sausaches and chips and $3 Buds, not a bad deal for New York. Then I walked along Broadway from eleven to one. I called Jess from Times Square. I passed through Columbia Circle. I stopped for breakfast for an hour at a restaurant on the Upper West Side, around eightieth street. And walked on north through Morningside Highes, Washington Heights, many paths and between parks to Inwood, and crossed into the Bronx, and took the subway home, getting back after the sun had risen, somewhere around seven AM.
The weekend of Labor Day, Jess and I had walked from our apartment down to the hulking remnants of the Navy Yard, many being refitted for new use, and from there, along Flushing to downtown Brooklyn. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and Jess saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. We continued on to City Wall, walked down Broadway first to Ground Zero and then on to Battery Park where we looked at the Sphere. We were going to go to liberty island, but the line was impossibly long and cost $12 per person. So instead, we took the Staten Island ferry. On the ride out, we ate from our sack lunches. On the ride back, we hung out the westerly windows and watched Liberty Island drift by and the Battery approach. By the time we finally got home, we were exhausted. That was Sunday.
One day, Jess walked down to Soho on her own, and explored most of lower Broadway. One night, we met up with Peter and Amy and Matt and we went to a bar on Houston, then onto a karaoke bar in Alphabet City, where we all sang, and I slaughtered Grand Funk Railroad’s Some Kind of Wonderful. One day, Jess and I walked to Thompkins Square Park and sat and talked for awhile. Another time we went there to hear a concert of Indian music and jumped the fences and dozed in the trees. This was late September… before we had met Peter at a French restaurant where Jess and Peter had gotten unlimited mimosas as part of a brunch deal, while I had two Bloody Mary’s. This was the day when I got my new diskman and we finally got our keys recopied. Twice, I’ve wound up in Alphabet City on my own, typically wandering to Yaffa’s for coffee and reading purposes. We also met Maria for dinner there once, and we talked and ate and Jess got a set of sunglasses.
We’ve wound up in the vicinity of Third and Fourth and St. Mark’s place quite often. On one of our first adventures here, Jess explained to me the history of Cooper Union and why its students were so weird. As a New School student, I have access to Cooper Union’s library.
I haven’t spent much time in the West Village, on the other hand, but on the day when I’d first hand out my writing (the first 23 chapters of Urbantasm), I walked through the jagged, narrow, angled streets back there and got a fifth of Rye, and sipped it in coke along the Hudson river while I wrote notes on my classmates’ writing.
Greenwich Village itself… everything seems to converge on Union Square. This is where I’ve ended up reading on the uncomfortable benches on several occasions… where I spent the anxious two hours before my first writing critique, and where just today a girl indignantly wished me a “good life” when I refused to sign a petition for her cause. There’s a Virgin Megastore, and a screen above which I had been convinced displayed the national deficit, but which Jess confirmed actually displays the time of the day. Hmmm. I don’t know. South of here one block is the Riviera theater, where we saw the 40-Year Old Virgin. South of here one block is the Strand, a massive used book store, where I can typically find books I am unable to find anywhere else, though one of my teacher’s despises the place because it’s not exactly productive of royalties. Then University Place, with a bowling alley I haven’t been to but want to, down to Washington Square park, which I’ve strolled once or twice, and the News Bar. I feel more like the New Bar adopted me than vice versa. It’s a coffee shop, often quite crowded, except they have three TV screens that constantly blast the news in silence with closed-captions and a rack of many magazines along the wall. I just like the feel of the place; it’s good for reading. University Place is also where I met first Jessica, then later Reinhardt and Cecilia for the Sox-Astros game that was the longest in World Series history. The streets weren’t empty, but were probably closer than I’ll ever see them. I love University Place for its narrowness, it wetness and lights, and for all the florists that bring it quite bursts of color. Of course, down at the end is Washington Square Arch.
Fifth Avenue that far south isn’t anything special. The main New School building is there… ugly. My first experience there was registering during Orientation, getting a vaccination, and so forth. Now, it’s where I work my second job, tutoring writing, which is fun, stressful, and improvisational. It’s where I’ve met Allie and Christopher and Jeremy and Marissa, among others, and Megan, my boss, and I’ve liked it so far, even though we are all crammed into a space barely the size of my apartment.
Then, there’s the 13th Street Building, where I use (and abuse) New School’s high-speed internet and free printing. I used to spend hours on end there. Now I only go over when I’ve something to print for class. During Orientation there was a comic act for us. This is the site of the Jazz School, and where I would’ve had Meditation Classes if I hadn’t cancelled due to work conflict. It’s where I stumbled the one morning I was involved in Katrina Relief.
The center of most academic motion has been the 12th Street Building. My Workshop with Helen Schulman has been a rigorous and character-driven, and my seminar with Jeff Allen has been rigorous and not. They’re both very worthwhile, and all the more because of their conspicuous differences.
The workshop is structured like so: each weekend three of us bring in writing samples which we read for the following week. Each week, we evaluate the samples, starting with broad questions of character and direction, and zeroing in on prose. The writer is not allowed to comment or ask questions until the very end. It can be a very frustrating process, and inevitably many suggestions are not suitable for the development of each work, but this frustration is en route to a more effective revision, especially when the writer has a well-defined direction for the work. In the days after our reading, we meet with Helen to further discuss the work. From here we plot our direction. In this class I’ve met many friends, including Scott, Reinhardt, Christine, Marco, Tommy, Brian, and others…
The seminar is more relaxed than the workshop, although the readings are intimidating in-and-of themselves. We started slow with two-hundred pages worth of stories by Anton Chekhov and the same from Mavis Gallant. The Cheneysville Incident was touch, but highly worthwhile. I think that Proust will murder my soul. Fifty pages describing his bedroom and a kiss from his mother. Four hundred pages to go… but Jeff is one of the few to possess a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, and is also a native of Chicago’s South Shore. In this class, I’ve picked up friends as Daniel and Bernie, and through them, Erica and Joe and others…
And of course, I’m starting to really know people from my classes. There are hopes that there will be a New York social circle that will keep these two years from being a total exercise in solitude.
I’m also attending a Saturday morning workshop with Frederic Tuten on alternative fiction. His course is rich and enjoyable, and it’s more often given to rumination than discussion, but that’s fine. Storytelling is an old form of didacticism, but in today’s free-market of ideas (not to say that anyting goes) it is out of vogue. I like this storytelling. It’s fresh and I learn a lot from it.
And then there’s the Writers Colloquia, where visiting writers give readings. On the 5th Floor, typically. I’ve attended readings by Patricia McCormick, Julia Slavin, th release of Best American Poetry (in Tishman Auditorium, modeled on the human ear), Carolyn MacCullough, Jill Ciment, Alexander Hemon, Josip Novakovich, Susan Mitchell, which was glorious, Jonathan Safran Foer, which was enlightening, and at which I won a copy of his book, and the Future Press Reading. There’ve also been two MFA student readings, with beer and wine and pizza. I’ve seen my friend Timothy at each of these. At the most recent, this last Thursday, Jess came and met most of my New School friends, and we heard Erica read a gorgeous story called The Cajun.
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Moving north; midtown.
My first job is at Facts on File on 31st between Sixth and Seventh. There is a man on the corner with a coffee stand who I get a coffee and bagel from for $2.40 on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. He has my order memorized, and on some days, gives me a free donut. There’s an overpriced diner with good food next to the job, with the beautiful name of the Cosmic Diner. Then, my job is on the 17th floor of a building with a chronic leaking problem that has ruined several of the company’s computers. I hyperlink for the company. I’ve created blurbs for their ‘This Month in History’ section, and have hyperlinked their History of Cold-War Politics and Encyclopedia of Chemistry databases. I’m currently working on the Dictionary of Biology database. The work, at its best, is very educational and fascinating. At its worst, I still have my music and my coffee.
Just north a few blocks is the theater where Jess and I saw Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, the inspiration for our costumes. Just a few blocks north of this is Times Square where we walked around in the night that was so brightly lit that it didn’t seem to be night at all. It is clear why thye call this the crossroads of the world. And one day we walked north from here and met Jess’ friend Dr. Noble and her husband at noon, and they took us to the Guggenheim.
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Moving north; uptown.
When we went to the Guggenheim on the Upper East Side, we went to the top and worked our way down, studying the Russian Painters. When we got to the bottom we walked through a portion of Central Park, past the Met, and on down to a diner where they graciously treated us to dinner.
On the other side of the Park, and far north, I once met Jess and Peter and Amy for dinner and TV. After my colloquium, I took the subway express up to 125th, and walked south along unknown roads to Morningside Park. I walked through the park, which is one of the most gorgeous small urban parks I’ve ever seen, with statified brick buildings leaning over terraces on either side, a huge pond, but best, huge hill with grass and rocks and willows. When I arrived at Amy’s we watched Gilmour Girls and Supernatural, and it was late when Jess and I got home.
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These things are out of order, but I believe I’ve touched on most of the main events, and this brings me up to the present.
The last three months have truly been my greatest adventure to date.
END OF POST.