Oh Beautiful For Spacious Skies

Take me to Grant's Tomb! Grant's Tomb, I say!

I always get a kick out of how in old films, everyone wants to visit Grant's Tomb. Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, on leave in On the Town. Gary Cooper, fresh from Vermont in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town.

I once read that in the years before air conditioning, families used to picnic at the tomb to take advantage of the breeze coming in off the Hudson. I'd like to see those families. I'd like to picnic at Grant's Tomb, circa 1942.

I've been there once before. A few years back I got off the bus near the tomb, and saw a woman walk by with a hat tilted on her head and seams in her stockings. A finger weave and perfect lipstick. I looked back towards the Tomb, and suddenly I had stepped into 1942. They were filming The Good Shepherd, using the tomb as a backdrop, with all the cars, costumes, and props that went with that bygone era.

So I sat and watched the extras go by. Hitting the same marks, over an over, a moment in history recreated, the past on repeat, until it was time to break for dinner.

I entertain all sorts of these time travel fantasies. I have mental plane tickets booked to different eras all over this country. San Francisco, 1905. Chicago, 1893. Hawaii, 1866. Or 1977. Ft. Lauderdale, 1957.

I mean, come on though, who wouldn't?

Sunday Zen

Blinks

• The Lady's Murder
  Beautifully illustrated short story by artist Eliza Frye. (via kfan)


• Compulsory Reading
  Alison Bechdel's illustrated essay on the perils of compulsory reading lists. (via Maud)


• Film adaptation of Magnus Mills' short story "The Good Cop"
  The Husband and I are huge Magnus Mills fans. In a way, he's somewhat of a male version of Shirley Jackson, only where she uses creepy psychology as a starting point, he uses creepy bureaucracy.


• Chips off the old block
  I've come across two people over the course of my reading life who can make rocks sound interesting: Joan Didion is one, and now Bill Braine is the other.


• Ways We're Saving Money
  And I do mean "we."

The Secret Love Child of Jeff Buckley and Arthur Lee

Ladies and Gentlemen, Apollo Run.

The Lottery at 60

I had no idea when I started off my recent kick of reading and re-reading Shirley Jackson that the 60th anniversary of the original publication of "The Lottery" in the New Yorker was right around the corner. Tomorrow, in fact.

If you haven't read Shirley Jackson, you're missing out. Before you dive in though, be forewarned that she thinks human beings are horrible. And she likes to dwell in female neuroses. Carrie Frye looks at it this way:

Like most of Salinger, "Bananafish" can be read as a flat rejection of psychology's ability to ever explain the mysterious self, whereas Jackson seems to have embraced the field, as if she used its concepts and terminology as a jumping-off point for her art.

Happy Birthday, Lottery. You still totally freak me out.

(For those of you who prefer your literature in late 1960s televised form, here you go.)

Mythical Creatures

Saturday morning a package arrived in the mail. Jess's mix, just in time for me to jump the D train to Coney Island. An hour and a half to the Mermaid Parade.

A VERITABLE SEA BOSSY
Nearly everybody has heard about the Sea-Horse, but not so many have heard of the Sea-Cow. [...] These gentle creatures do not live like other fish, but graze along the meadows of the sea, very much like our own Jerseys in land pastures, and quite as harmless. Some think that these Sea-Cows are what have given rise to the popular stories about mermaids, for our Sea Bossy is a true milk-giver, and when, with her nursing baby clasped to her breast, she rises partly out of the water, she looks not wholly unlike a human being.

"Berlin 2 Mix. Only 7 in circulation!" She had no idea how fitting it was for New York.

Or maybe she did. Maybe she anticipated two French girls sharing lipstick across my knee to Miss Kittin. The National's "Secret Meeting" playing while a man nearby tells his date that he named his son after William Blake and a woman audibly sucks her teeth. That moment of relief when the train breaks out onto the Manhattan Bridge, and everyone shifts in their seats -- Brian Eno. And Kings of Convenience, for the breeze tapping the windows at the lonely local stations in New Utrecht and Bensonhurst.

Maybe she had New York in the back of her head. But Berlin she delivered. Down in the subway I can hear das U-Bahn. As we travel south, I see hints of the east.

It's mythical: my New York painted up temporarily as her Berlin. And I'm both in awe, and slightly disappointed to realize the truth. Like mistaking a manatee for a mermaid.

(text from the 1883 omnibook The Beautiful, The Wonderful, and The Wise)

Sunday Zen

Blinks

• Someone's in the Kitchen With Ignatius J. Reilly
  I don't think it's possible for me to dislike anything Elizabeth Kiem writes. This is completely lovely and awesome.


• Field Tested Books
  We had this notion that somehow through experimentation we could identify how our perception of a book is affected by the place where we read it. Or maybe the other way around.


• At Narrative, Conversations You Have At Twenty
  Maud just totally made me blush.


• Survival tips for the Middle Ages
  Little-known fact: I have a pocket-sized SOS survival guide tucked away in my bedside table. You know, just in case. I don't think, however, that it factors in the need for a smallpox vaccination.


• Things My Boss Has Said
  We've all had one at some point.

Things You Can Tell About Me By My Junk Mail

I once bought something affordable from Design Within Reach, which now entitles me to receive monthly pictures of all the other things I can't afford.

I gave money to Oxfam, and they have since spent more than what I gave them on sending me mail.

I have not renewed my subscription to the New Yorker.

I still have not renewed my subscription to the New Yorker.

Have I considered renewing my subscription to the New Yorker? No.

My company wants me to stay fit. Harlem needs my support. I have at least once apparently been to Lincoln Center.

My college doesn't think I gave them enough money the first time around.

Most comfortingly, a place in the Pinelawn Memorial Park and Garden Mausoleums is mine if I want it.