Nap Resistance and why I can't get the lyrics to "Yellow Submarine" straight.

I'm a terrible singer. It's unfortunate. I'm surrounded by great musicians and singers. My wife's family are pretty professional when it comes to folk music, and my mother in law is a classically-trained pianist and composer, with perfect pitch. But me? I've been told that the note I sing is lovely, just lovely.

Still, I have a baby, and if you could hear the screaming next to me right now, it would only attest to the fact that babies don't just fall asleep by themselves. They need to be rocked back and forth, and sung to. I can handle the latter, but for the former, I'm a lost cause. This is made worse by the fact that all the science says singing to your baby is best. So what to do?

I grit my teeth, and I sing my note. And since I can't remember lyrics to save myself, I sing a new song every time the baby goes to sleep. And for some odd reason it always comes out sounding like Yellow Submarine:

"Go to sleeeeeeep / little girrrrrrrrl. // Go to sleee-eee-eeep, / sweeetie piiiiiiieee. // Sleepy sleeeeeep, / little sleeeeeeep, / sleepy giiii-ii-iirl, / beddy bye."

Did it work? Judge thusly:

Let's Boogie

So Mondays in the Baby Michel household have started to become days in which is scheduled a trip to the local YMCA. At first this meant Baby Boot Camp, until it was decided that SAHD had had enough of both the tiny little camouflage outfits (no, not really) and the painful days of recuperating as his legs, abdomen and ego took pretty heavy bruisings (seriously: women who just gave birth should not be able to be that physically active. Ugh.)

Baby Boot Camp thus gave way to Baby Boogie. What is Baby Boogie? I don't know if there's an official line, but as far as I can tell, it's the Park Slope baby version of pit-fighting. At the appointed hour (two pm.) between five and fifteen people arrive, each with a child between two months and one year of age. We all gather on a big blue mat (the field of play), in a circle. The coordinator/ref then opens the proceedings with a ritual chant that involves clapping and naming the contestants (and goes something like: "we welcome [insert baby name here] yes indeed, yes indeed, yes indeed. We welcome [baby name] yes indeed, we're so-oh glad you're here.") Then the ref dumps a big pile of implements on the floor (rattles, tambourines, egg shakers, clappers, etc) and all the kids crawl into the middle, grab something, and begin to whack everything around them with it.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is awesome (well, except for the chanting. It is an odd thing to sit in a circle and chant baby names, and it feels an awful lot like that scene in the movie "Babies" where all the San Francisco mothers start chanting "the earth is our mother and she will take care of us" and the little baby, Hattie, gets up and tries to leave). It's awesome to see a bunch of babies just crashing into each other (I mean, as much as parents will let them) for some unstructured time. And it's awesome to see the nervous parents letting the babies interact, a little unsure what will actually happen (is little Mathilda going in for a kiss or a bite? Do we interfere? Wait and see?)

And Aki loves it. She gets so excited by the bevy of babies wandering around and making noise with the noisemakers that she tries to crawl at them. Which is also awesome. Because she totally cannot crawl yet, not even a little. Then she puts her head down in frustration and begins to weep. Which is less awesome. But still! In a few months, she'll be up and about. And grabbing things. And teething.

And then, baby pit-fighting participants? Beware.

Been Thinking A Lot Today

What with my baby's birth I've been giving a lot of thought to the future. It suddenly seems like less of a remote possibility and more of an actuality — I want Aki to grow up, to be a child, and a teenager, and an adult, and (predictably enough, I'm sure) I wonder and worry about what that world is going to be like. I'm not talking about environmental apocalypse. Alien races will enslave us and purify our air with their advanced technology before things can get too bad on that front.

But I wonder, specifically about what it means to live in a world that's so super-connected, and how it's going to affect her, as a child and as an adult. The world we're in is vastly different than the one my parents grew up in. It's vastly different than the one we were in fifteen years ago. What's the world going to be like five years from now? Or thirty?

So: a tryptic of essays, for your consideration, in order of erudition.

First: a primer on Ray Kurzweil from Time Magazine, by Lev Grossman. I tend to like Grossman's writing, but Time Magazine just dumbs the hell out of everything they publish. It's a perfect read if you don't know who Kurzweil is, or what he's about, but the best part of this is the Time-bot's choice of auto-links peppered through the article. Ironically demonstrative!

Second: a refutation of Kurzweil, sort of. Brian Christian has an axe to grind, and he does it with with wit, in first-person narrative. If the first article had me looking up books by Kurzweil, this had me reconsidering my rush.

And last, an article that puts the above two, and my last post, into some perspective. you just can't beat the NYRB for erudition. If anything helps point out where we're going, it's a clear eye toward where we've been, and where we are.

The last two articles, especially, are long but worth it. Hope you enjoy!

On Boredom

When I think about Aki growing up, and the things that were foundational for me, one that I want most for her is time to be bored. I don’t mean that pervasive sense of purposelessness or ennui that seems to get confused with boredom, though I’m sure that she’ll have plenty of that. I mean the kind of boredom that comes from long stretches of unorganized time.

When I was young, I often had nothing to do. My periods of structured time were largely limited. I played soccer one year, baseball another, but they were both summer leagues, and we were too young to be truly competitive. During school I was allowed a few hours of entertainment: maybe half an hour of videogames or an hour of television. I had homework of course, which may have taken me an hour when I cared to do it with any real attention, which was rare. Other than that, all I had to occupy my time was my friends, my surroundings, and whatever we could find to do. I remember hours playing with G.I. Joe toys and riding bikes. I remember sitting on lawns and discovering that it only took an hour or two to find a four-leaf clover.

These days, its almost the reverse. I flit from activity to activity constantly soaking in or producing information. I spend enormous amounts of time online, reading books, magazines, journals, watching tv shows or movies, listening to the radio, to music, playing with my phone, playing games, reading reviews of things I don’t have time to watch, or read, or play.

Nowadays I end up scheduling time away from media, and it’s space I cherish— exercising without headphones, meditating, taking a walk to the grocery store with Aki and leaving my phone behind.

Human intelligence, I believe, is born out of a particular and peculiar non-computer-like ability to synthesize new information out of all that we take in. We learn by studying and repeating, but we create new things — we demonstrate and innovate our learning — by combining disparate elements to make new things that never were. This is what writers do, but it’s also what engineers and architects do. It’s what all creative people do.

But we need time to enact that synthesis. To be creative means setting aside time without input, to allow our brains to cull through what we know, and make interesting new ideas. But that seems to be something that, at the moment, we’re tempted not to give ourselves, and we’re scared to give it to our children. I worry about the pressure to raise Aki in an environment where we’re tempted to rush her from charter school to dance class to chess class to music lessons, filling every second of her day until bedtime, because we fear that otherwise she won’t be competitive.

But more than that, I worry about the toys, the games and computers and phones which already eat up so much of my day, and I want to raise her so that she has some space away from it. I want her to develop the ability to resist their temptation: to value contemplation and solace, and down-time. I worry about it for her, because I feel like I don’t get enough of it myself. And I don’t have the courage to throw out all my shiny toys, to raise Aki in a house without these things. Perhaps someday.

Also, just so this post doesn't end up entirely depressing, this afternoon she grabbed the bottle from me and shoved the nipple straight into her nose. We both looked surprised.

Continuing

Well, so first, for those of you reading this on the facebooks or on rss feeds, I went ahead and redesigned the blog. Since it's not really about travel anymore, I thought the name, look, and little poem-let at the top needed changing. So there.

Okay, then. Back to SAHD-dom. This week we discovered growth spurts. Growth spurts involve more feeding and less sleeping (except for the SAHD, who just gets less of both). Luckily, GTWM (Goes To Work Mom) figured out a good solution to the Great Milk-Supply Problem Of Last Week, and now I text the exact amounts baby goes through for each feeding, so she can adjust. Hooray technology!

Growth spurts presage both physical and mental developments. In this case, she has started trying to sit up a little more, and no longer cries right off when she gets Tummy Time™. In fact, she seems to enjoy it a bit, which means we're that much closer to the dreaded crawling, in which we're going to have to figure out what to do with the cat box. By "we," I mean "me." I really don't want her to figure out anything about the cat box.

Seriously, this is the one fear that haunts my nightmares. I'm going to turn around for a minute, and suddenly find her halfway through the little cover flap, joyfully putting everything she can into her mouth. I think the reason I'm so worried is that, of all the pregnancy info that washed over us last year, the one thing that really stuck with me is that cat litter carries a bacteria that will give a pregnant woman a slight cold, and then KILL THE BABY. Aaaah! Why do we have that in the house? Because we love our cat, that's why. And we have so far failed to toilet train it.

But thankfully, we're still at least a month or two from this dreaded development. She's on her way to sitting up, which is awesome. And when she starts locomoting, well, I'll have something else to write about, won't I.

SAHD-dom, the Second Week

Well, week-two of being the SAHD begins. It's been interesting -- after a fairly uneventful second half of the week, the weekend brought a brand-new baby: up all night, and feeding all the time. I thought it might be stress from the bottle/breast switchback, but that might be my stress more than hers.

I also thought the feeding all the time had something to do with the bottle being easier to drink from (requires less work to get a similar amount, etc) than the breast. But it may actually be a growth spurt: she just went through her entire day's bottle ration, and we still have one more feeding before mom gets back. Yikes. Also she hasn't really napped today. Which sucks. Because it means taht this blog won't be spell-checked, and most of my other work for the day won't get done.

This is like the moment on the SAHD roller coaster where we crest that first big hill: it's been calm for a little while, and suddenly, I don't think it's going to be calm for a long, long time. I'll let you know later this week how that turns out.

Holy Snow Day

Day three of being a Stay-At-Home-Dad (SAHD) has turned into a snow day. This means that I'm putting off plans for the mile-long walk up to the main-branch public library, and the slightly shorter walk to haul laundry to the laundromat. I was all excited to see if I could get these things done, by my lonesome, with the baby strapped to me, but adding in the trudge through snow (slippery snow!) and I'm going to call that too much for the first week of SAHD-dom. Call me a wuss, if you like.

So, day one was pretty much nonstop crying and sleeping, as we adjusted to the non-presence of mom for the bulk of daylight hours. Baby Aki held up as best as a three-month-old can, trying to smile, but then bursting into tears because she was hungry and didn't like the bottle. But she drank. Tears streamed silently down her cheeks as she did it, but she drank. Then she slept, mostly just exhausted from the crying.

Day two, we were visited by Friend, Neighbor, and Professional Baby Whisperer Georgia, who taught me the magic of warming the milk by running it under water (since la leche league said to never warm the bottle on the stove, and since all my info on baby-rearing comes from these movies I was just using milk from the fridge*) and behold! There was no crying! So the day went very smoothly, except for the fact that now that she was enjoying the milk, she was drinking a lot of it. We went through twice as much, which is to say, twice as much as K is pumping. Oops!

Soon, though. Soon, this will all be working smoothly. She'll have all the milk she needs, she'll eat it regularly, I'll have figured out how to carry both her and the laundry (or the groceries) through the mean-streets of Park Slope without running into rival mommy-gang territory, and all will be well.

Then she'll learn to crawl.

*that is to say, mother's milk. Not, like, whole milk.

Judd Apatow is Caden Cotard

So I just finally watched Funny People last night, and it struck me that Judd Apatow's movie is much more Meta than Charlie Kaufman has ever managed to achieve. I realize that I'm not necessarily saying anything new: a lot was made out of the fact that he got aging lazy sell-out millionaire comedian Adam Sandler to play aging lazy sell-out millionaire comedian George Simmons. But beyond that, with few exeptions, almost every character in the movie plays some version of themselves.

Actually, given that Jason Schwartzman's big breakout in Rushmore happened all the way back in 1998, it would have been slightly more appropriate for him to play a former child actor who made the rare transition into an adult career, but with that exception, you have characters/actors like Leo/Jonah Hill -- a talented scene-stealer looking for a big break played by a talented scene-stealer who got his break from the director who is currently directing the movie that he's in. In fact, most of the movie involves people playing either themselves or versions of their public personas to the degree that once you try sussing it all out you're liable to wonder if RZA may have actually worked at a deli. It's goofy.

Then you get to the casting of someone like Eric Bana as the handsome foil / Australian husband, which is even more meta if you've watched enough Apatow movies to remember the conversation that Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill had in Apatow's last film about the awesomeness of the movie Munich. How much did that conversation influence the casting? It makes my head hurt.

Embabied

So I'm knee-deep in a whole set of New Year's resolutions which sort of snuck up on me. I haven't really done the NYRes thing for a while, and when I did do it, it was always half-hearted at best. The reason being that I figure 1) I'm pretty happy with my life, and 2) when I'm not, it's not worth waiting until the calendar changes to switch things up.

What happened is this: in October of this past year, my wife and I became embabied. She's gorgeous and we do all the typical parent things, i.e. get excited when she opens her eyes, get excited when her poop changes color, then put her down for a bit and hope she sleeps while we frantically try to clean/cook/launder/pee/pay bills/work/read all in the five spare minutes we weren't cooing over our mini-us.

It didn't take long (okay it took a while) to figure out that my general unorganized-ness just wasn't going to work for this experience. Nor was my general lack of physical well-being. Nor was my habit of having a drink to help me relax every night. All these realizations hit somewhere in December, when New Life responsibilities and Old Life habits collided into each other and fell down, dropping everything they were carrying.

So I'm in the midst of a giant life-organizing overhaul with a little help. One of the things I'd like to do is start typing here (by here I mean the website, not the facebooks, where the website auto-posts) more often. So I'm gonna. Whee! Tell your friends.

now here's a pic of the newest addition:

New York Story

Today on the subway I watched a gigantic homeless man, who actually wore an actual cardboard sign around his neck, stagger up the train car shaking his cup and hollering “spare change.” This happens all the time, but this time, when he got about halfway up the train he stopped. There were about thirty grade-school kids all wearing blue shirts — a summer camp on a field trip. They were laughing and playing patty-cake. The homeless man stopped, turned around, and hustled to the other end of the car with his back to the kids, and his head down. He exited at the next stop. It was totally heartbreaking.

New York Experience

So last night some friends and I went to the Bell House for a trivia night. It was put on by the fine folks over at Stuff You Should Know, and hosted by a man called the "Quizmonster.”

The gimick? The SYSK folks were competing against everyone with an all-star trivia team that included Christopher McCulloch (creater of the Venture Brothers) Joe Randazzo (editor of The Onion) Wyatt Cenac, Ira Glass, and John Hodgman!

We sat one table over from the superstars. I got a free shirt, and J. Hodgman was kind enough to sign it. I mentioned that I’d written a (fairly favorable) review of his latest book, and he asked if he owed me anything. Thus the shirt-note.

Who won? Our team didn’t, but neither did the superstars. The table behind us, named “Choad the Wet Sprocket” cleaned everyone’s clocks.

Drive, Ride, Walk.

Lately I’ve wanted to walk. Down from Park Slope past the cemetery into Sunset Park or further into Bay Ridge’s Chinatown, or north up to Williamsburg. Across the park to the east or over the bridge and up into midtown. I’d walk to the Bronx if I could. To Yonkers. With this much city there’s always more to see, and even on my daily treks (to the laundromat, the hardware store, to get groceries) everything is always changing.

But I fall in love with the city when I’m in a cab. With the windows rolled down, zooming over the bridge or along the water, at night, staring at the lights on the buildings, I feel like the whole city is min, mine to watch and wonder at.

Last night K & her work friends decided to go out: a beer garden in Gowanus then the Bell House to meet up with more friends. Katie came in a car and wanted to keep drinking so when we decided to find a karaoke bar in Bay Ridge, and when it turned out no one else could drive Katie’s stick-shift Acura, she handed me the keys. We shot down Fourth ave., which I love, because the lights are timed: 14th street, 23rd, 34th, 44th, 62nd. Then a hard left up to 8th ave. and a perfect first-shot parallel park into the last open space. Driving in the city can make me fill like a God.

Being driven around can make me feel like an emperor. But at the end of the night, after the drinking and singing, when we all decided to take cabs home, I walked out to 8th and stared north as far as I could up the avenue. Forty-eight blocks north and two blocks west was my apartment. What would it be like to walk? What would I see at two, or three, or four in the morning?

It pleases me to feel like a God, to be treated like a king. But walking — walking makes me feel like a traveller, like a citizen. Walking takes me into New York like a seed in the loam of the city.

Fundamentally Distracted

"But fundamentally, The New Yorker is something you want to sit with and not be distracted by. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience. The Web is fundamentally a distracted experience."
— Blake Eskin, Web Editor, The New Yorker

I haven't tried to read anything on a Kindle. I've played with an Ipad (no, I won't capitalize it that stupid way) for about fifteen minutes in the store — enough to flip several pages on Winnie The Pooh, play a video game, and watch a short video.

My wife thinks I have an internet addiction, and I'll admit to reading a good dozen magazines, blogs, and web comics on a regular (daily) basis, including Achewood, The A.V. Club, XKCD, Dresden Codak, Slate, Silliman's Blog, and The New York Times

I also subscribe to paper editions of The New Yorker and Harper’s magazines (which I don’t read on line) as well as New York Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer (which I do). I write for The Brooklyn Rail and often advertise my articles on the web, but when I read it, I read it in paper format. And only once in my life have I tried to read a book on my computer. It's called The Story of Don Miff and, though you can now buy a print-on-demand copy on Amazon, at the time it was unavailable anywhere. I made it roughly 1/3 of the way through, on my laptop, before I gave up.

Blake Eskin and this ad both make a pretty good point — and it’s a point that, as far as I can tell, the Ipad, with its games and movies, doesn’t address. And that is that reading a book or a magazine is, in many ways, a very different experience than reading online. When I get my new copy of the NYRB, or New Yorker, in the mail, I will often read it cover-to-cover before the next issue arrives. Sometimes I zip through it, and sometimes it sits around for several days. Sometimes I get busy and don’t read it all the way through, but when I do, there’s a sense of satisfaction, of having really read the magazine.

I don’t do that with Slate, or with AV Club, or any of the other online magazines. I don’t think I even could, and I honestly don’t know what that would look like. The problem, for me, is two-fold. One is that the online editions of most magazines, with their archives, and blogs, and endless updates, are more or less impossible to fully read. The profusion of information is the point of on-line media. The other is that most online magazines now include profusions of hyperlinks (much like this post) and even if they didn’t, they often discuss subjects that I don’t know much about, and the temptation for me to launch off on a quest of, say, the history of the Knights Templar, or who built the Brooklyn Bridge is irresistible.

I don’t know much about the Kindle. I don’t know its browsing capabilities, or whether you can play video games on it. But if you can’t — if it’s just trying to be a book — that might be a good thing. That might, oddly, become its advantage over the Ipad. People will probably, at least at first, buy a lot of books (among other things) on the Ipad. But if trying to read on it is anything like trying to read on a laptop, then they might not get through very many of those books. And they might stop buying books so much, favoring instead more distraction-friendly activities.

Because, honestly, this post is only 650 words long, and how many times have you already clicked away, following links? How would it be if you were trying to read a 50,000 word novel?

Ever since I read Matthew Crawford’s book on the value of physical (vs theoretical) work — especially repair work — I’ve looked for opportunities to fix things. My wife and I rent, and since we moved to NYC and gave up the car, most of the stuff we own is not all that complicated, or hard to figure out (not that I could figure out a car anyhow. Those things are complicated!).

So what to do? I poked around a bit when one of the range igniters on our stove got disconnected, and I spent some time reattaching one of the window balances in our bedroom, when the window wouldn’t stay up. But otherwise, there’s nothing much in the house that fits that sweet spot of being both fixable, and not so overly complicated that I couldn’t/shouldn’t touch it (when the gas line stopped working to one of the stove’s ranges, I just called the super and he fixed it).

Except the vacuum.

Vacuum cleaners are interesting machines. They aren’t complicated at all — they’re basically just a motor attached to some tubes that draws air in and deposits it (and the dirt) into a bag or plastic container. They aren’t yet (the ones I have access to anyway) overly computerized, but when they break most people still just chuck them out and get new ones. This means that I wasn’t surprised the other day to find a relatively new-looking hand vacuum sitting outside someone’s apartment, in the free-if-you-want-it zone between fence and curb.

What’s most fun about opening up a broken machine is you never really know what’s gone wrong, or how to fix it. So (at the behest of friends and spouse) after carefully inspecting this little street-find for bedbugs and other unwanted critters, I went ahead and took it home and opened it up.

At first, the problem seemed to be pretty simple: when I turned it on, the brush wouldn’t roll, and the belt that turned the brush was missing. I went to the store and bought a package of two new belts (cost: $6) and some new bags for good measure, and came home. But when I put the belt in, I noticed that it still wasn’t spinning, and I was smelling a burning rubber smell, as well. Uh oh.

So I went back and pulled the whole thing as apart as I could get it. Then I started fiddling around. I got it mostly apart, and (with it unplugged, of course!) put my fingers in the rotor and started trying to spin it. Sure enough, it was stuck. I felt around, and found something rubber that seemed loose. A few seconds later, out popped the old belt, which had gotten sucked up in the motor’s fan when it broke. Voilà! I put it all back together, put on the bag, and swept up the carpet.

Okay, but so I fixed a little vacuum cleaner, so what? Well, Crawford would say that I spent a little time engaged in my environment, not as its master (or more rudely as the helpless baby that demands all objects serve me) but as its servant — understanding the “needs” of the machine, and bending my own will to solve its problems. Through this, I’m able to develop some humility and also be a more useful part of my environment.

That’s all fine and good, but mostly I like the feeling of success — a real, solid I-made-something-right kind of success. The kind that people might only get close to when solving video game puzzles anymore. Plus, I got a working vacuum cleaner for $6. Nice!

In Defense of Trash

Everyone needs both Serious Literature and Trash. Confucius said that. Or Sarah Bernhart. I’m not sure. But it was said, and it was true.

Lately, I’ve been drowning myself in a sea of serious literature, and I kind of forgot to read any real trash... so earlier this past weekend, when my neighborhood started playing a new season of its favorite fairweather game, Leave A Big Box of Books By Your Front Door for People to Take, I grabbed Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver — a monstrous brick of 17/18th c. steampunk (or maybe coalpunk?) that is, apparently, only the first in a trilogy.

It’s absolutely awful. It’s mostly written in modern English, but Stephenson keeps throwing in the occasional olde spellinge: “phant’sy” to let us know it’s that time period, and then quickly follows it with an anachronism (“he’ll have to ‘get in line’ as they say in New Amster- I mean New York”) to let us know that it’s not our version of that time period. But I love it. I’m hardly 60 of the 900+ pages in so far, and I don’t want to stop reading. It’s ambitious as hell, lovely and crazy, and weird, and not at all careful about what it’s doing. It reminds me of the best and worst of Orson Scott Card, or Douglas Adams — the ride is wild and that’s the only point. Awesome.

And it’s deliberately overwhelming in the best way — here’s a list of phrases the main character finds on a set of proto-computer punch-cards (all spelling and capitalization preserved):

Noah’s Ark; Treaties terminating wars; Membranophones (e.g. mirlitons); The notion of a classless society; The pharynx and its outgrowths; Drawing instruments (e.g., T-squares); The skepticism of Pyrrhon of Elis; Requirements for valid maritime insurance contracts; The Kamakura bakufu; The fallacy of Assertion without Knowledge; Agates; Rules governing the determination of questions of fact in Roman civil courts; Mummification; Sunspots; The sex organs of bryophites (e.g., liverwort); Euclidean geometry—homotheties and similitudes; Pantomime; The Election & Reign of Rudolf of Hapsburg; Testes; Nonsymmetrical dyadic relations; the Investiture Controversy; Phosphorus; Traditional impotence remedies; the Arminian heresy...

Wonderful! It reads like one of those lists of topics “discussed” in the Believer magazine, only gone terribly, terribly awry. My heart skips a beat hoping that all of these things will show up in this endless, crazy, book. I’ll let you know.

Which leads me to an overwhelming question: where is trash poetry? I’m not talking about pretentious crap, or amateur high school bloodletting. I mean where’s the lowbrow poetry, the poetry that’s not aiming for readers somewhere on the far horizon of time? Where’s the modern version of the great, terrible, popular murder ballads and limericks and, heck, I don’t know, the sci-fi poems? The vampire/werewolf/romance love poems? The superhero poems?

I think poemtry is suffering — has been suffering — from a decidedly over-literaturization of itself. Or, more likely, I think I just don’t know where all that stuff is, because my local bookstore is a little bit pretentious, and Amazon doesn’t care enough about poetry to separate it into subgenres. But I do know this: I’ve been reading a lot of really great poetry for a while now, and my brain is full. I think I need some enjoyable trash poetry to read. I think I’d find that pretty refreshing. So if you know where any is, send it my way.

About Time

It’s getting within shouting distance of Spring, which means that there’s rain instead of snow currently tapping at the windowpane behind me, and I’m starting to get itchy about spending all day in the 10x40 ft space we’re calling our home. One thing about being in New York is that there’s several lifetimes of things worth seeing. And since this is, ostensibly, a travelogue, or at least it started out as one, and I’m committed to keeping it that way, I want to get out and see more of the city.

On Saturday K. and I got up bright and early and, after a couple false starts and a long detour at one of my favorite coffee shops we trekked out to the Queens Museum of Art, by the old 1939 (& 1964) World’s Fair fairgrounds.


The fairgrounds are way out past the Laguardia airport, in a big green field. It’s pretty empty looking— though both the old and new Mets’ stadium, and the Billy Jean King Tennis center (site of the U.S. Open) are out there, so that’s more a product of the season than any real abandonment. Both the stadiums and tennis center are right next to the subway stop, and the fairgrounds/museum are set back a bit, on a long, mall-style field, as you can see:


View Larger Map


There’s not much left from the fair: a giant steel statue of the world, and a couple once grand-looking buildings made of concrete, that look like the past’s idea of the future. But the museum is a real hidden treasure — the centerpiece of the museum is a scale model of all five boroughs that takes up a huge space. It was built, apparently, in 1939, and for a time they thought it might be used for city planning. They’ve done a fairly good job keeping up with all the changes since then (the twin towers are still standing in that little world, but I think there are plans to recreate the memorial, once the real one is finished) and K. and I had fun finding our little street (our building was nearly impossible to locate) and K’s workplace (a little easier) and NYU (fairly simple) etc. To give a sense of scale, the twin towers, by far the tallest actual buildings in the room, were about ten or eleven inches high. The model was about fifty feet east to west, and longer north to south. They even had little planes on strings taking off and landing at LaGuardia (not JFK, however, which seems like the opposite of my experience).

What I noticed about the map was just how much of New York there is to explore. Good thing Spring is coming.

Here’s some pics:

Oh Noes

So, I agreed, somewhat innocently to write this review of a Glenn Beck book for the Brooklyn Rail. I gave the book the benefit of the doubt, and the review isn't a total pan, but it's also not two thumbs up (and you should buy that book).

But it was a funny experience, reading it. For one, though I carried the thing several times on my long bus trips up to Syracuse and back, I had the hardest time opening it up in public. I generally try not to care what strangers think about me, but it felt like opening up a Glenn Beck book in the middle of a bus station was asking for crazy people to wander up and begin ranting about my choice of reading material. So, mostly, I only read it at home.

Now that I'm done with it, I'm left trying to figure out what to do with the thing. It's not thick enough to help me reach the top shelf, or heavy enough to hold open a door. I'd put it on the curb, but who wants that kind of Karma? Sure, we have a little apartment-style webber, but that brings up too many bad associations. So, it's currently tucked into a corner on my bookshelf, awaiting the moment when I finally decide to sneak out in the middle of the night and huck it into a neighbor's trash can.

But then, the other day I get a notice that a package is waiting for me at the Post Office. A package? I'm not expecting anything. I troop on down, and find a slim little package from Simon & Schuster addressed to "Chris Michel, Reviewer" -- ohhh, I'm on a list! I'm starting to get books unsolicited! What fun! What little prize awaits me? I hustle home and tear open the pull-tabs, to discover, this monstrosity. Oh wait, sorry, no. I mean this monstrosity. Gaaaah! Now what do I do?