Category Archives: NOC

Via Bookslut, Richard Gehr interviews the awesome Roz Chast for The Comics Journal:

GEHR: Where did your work ethic come from?

CHAST: Um, do I have one? Probably from not being an heiress.

Already widely linked, and even parodied, Jonathan Franzen’s op ed piece, adapted from a commencement address, is still highly linkable. Franzen’s like/love distinction reminds me of another excellent piece from the Times, Russell Baker’s “Why Being Serious Is Hard.” (My clipping of Baker’s column has, alas, gone missing.) Baker made a similar distinction between passionate commitment to something, even to the point of looking silly (“being serious”), and merely going along with the flow (“being solemn”).

Two trip reports of illicit underground (sewers, subways, and steam tunnels) explorations of New York by Steve Duncan and Erling Kagge offer different perspectives. Jacki Lyden’s long piece for Weekend ATC is relatively straightforward, albeit with a dose of Radiolab sound effects. Alan Feuer’s diary for the New York Times, on the other hand, takes a hard left turn midway. The story turns into the story of the documentors of the project.

Wednesday, 12:15 a.m.
114 Delancey Street, Manhattan

…there are problems: the entourage has gotten too large. Everyone wants to go into the subways: me and a photographer from The Times; Jacki and an NPR producer; Andrew the videographer; even Will Hunt, the spotter. There were four of us in the sewers; now there are eight. What, I think, has happened to the intimate expedition?

Steve senses the concern and hastily announces that he, Andrew and Erling will go ahead; the rest of us can follow at a distance. I fail to see the point in exploring without the “explorers.” I confront Steve, tell him this is useless. Is this an expedition, or a media event? Disillusioned, I leave.

4:03 a.m.
West 181st Street, Manhattan

From home, I e-mail Steve and Erling: “I understand why you guys wanted to publicize this poetic adventure. … Unfortunately, the thing that wanted to be publicized was slowed down and rendered moot by the distracting number of people you brought in.” I add that it’s become impossible to describe two men on a journey when, in fact, a media army — with sound booms, cameras, video equipment — is in tow. I wish them well, offer no hard feelings.

3:32 p.m.
620 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan

An e-mail and an epiphany. The epiphany: When Ernest Shackleton went to the South Pole in the early 1900s, he himself documented the journey in a diary. Not so, in 2010, in media-soaked New York, where, it dawns on me, the crowd of chroniclers is fitting in its own way.

Another twist in Feuer’s version of the story that is more This American Life than The Gray Lady is the abrupt end to their visit with the woman known as Brooklyn, dweller in the Amtrak tunnel: B.K., her boyfriend, shows up and throws the whole lot of them out.

I’m uncomfortable with Lyden’s lack of reciprocal acknowledgment that another reporter and photographer were accompanying the urban spelunkers.

At any rate, the naturalist in me finds it interesting that one of Duncan and Kagge’s routes follows Tibbetts Brook through the Bronx, a waterway long ago confined underground by pavement.

Via The Morning News, Cornelia Dean visits a conference of the North American Sea Glass Association.

(With some help from Leta.)

• William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies and several other books less well-remembered. No matter, he received a Booker and Nobel for his work.
• William Goldman writes screenplays, including the magically popular The Princess Bride and the Penelope Ann Miller vehicle Year of the Comet. He is the source of the catchphrase “Nobody knows anything.”
• James Goldman made the stage play The Lion in Winter and collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on Follies and Evening Primrose.

Still confused about the Goldmans? It’s not surprising: they’re brothers.

A few weeks ago, Bas Bleu retraced the track of a bicycle trip she took across France 30 years ago, this time en voiture. I’m reading her reports completely out of order, chronologically and geographically, but I don’t think it matters. You could pick up the thread with her in Bordeaux, perhaps.

Oh, dear: Samuel G. Bailey is suing Paramount Pictures and other entities, claiming that a screenplay of his was plagiarized in the making of the 2006 film Dreamgirls, as Melissa Castro reports. The story doesn’t indicate whether Tom Eyen is also named in the suit.

David Pogue prepares for a panel on taxicab technology, and along the way figures out something that I never quite understood: the difference between New York’s medallion cabs and “black car” services:

There’s a good reason why there’s no still no wireless way to let taxi drivers know you want a cab. Or, rather, a bad reason.

In the 1970′s, New York made a deal with the taxi drivers and the “black car” drivers. The rule: Black cars aren’t allowed to pick up passengers spontaneously hailing on the street; those people are for the yellow cabs only. On the other hand, in New York, you can’t call ahead for a yellow cab; that would eat into the black cars’ business.

There are, in fact, smartphone apps that let you summon a cab to your position, like TaxiMagic for the iPhone. But they can’t call cabs in New York. Why? Because summoning a taxi like this is against the law. That’s not hailing; it’s prearrangement, and that’s the domain of the black cars.

I don’t know. If I were the taxi union, I’d argue that the definition of “hailing” has to change with the times. Surely sending out an “I’m here! Come pick me up” signal, by Taxi Magic, text message or whatever, is little more than a modern-day version of sticking your arm out at the curb.

I also didn’t know that there are three times as many black cars as medallion cabs, but this makes sense when you consider the particular political-economic pressures that have affected the supply of medallions over the years.

Via Arts & Letters Daily, Stuart Jeffries explores the recent population explosion of bangs, and in passing visits a small town in Québec (named for what I think of as a feature of landscape architecture), Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!

“Cut out all those exclamation marks,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald. “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.”

Very nice profile of sui generis cartoonist Lynda Barry by Christopher Borrelli for the Chicago Tribune. The richest praise is from fellow cartoonist Chris Ware:

“…just as Charles Schultz created the first sympathetic cartoon character in Charlie Brown, Lynda was the first cartoonist to write fiction from the inside out—she trusted herself to close her eyes and dive down within herself and see what she came up with. We’d still be trying to find ways into stories with pictures if she hadn’t.”

I read with dismay that Barry has discontinued her weekly Ernie Pook’s Comeek, but then again the local free weekly stopped running decent cartoons before that.

Bill Bryson is the guy who writes the humorous travel books; Bill Buford used to edit Granta; Bill Bruford was the drummer for Yes. Bruford is the Brit; Bryson, although a resident of the U.K. for a time, is from Iowa.

Google Maps’ search features have become more forgiving, so that a state-by-state search for thoroughfares named Gorsline turns up usable results:

• Gorsline Street, Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York (I’ve visited here once)
• Gorsline Street, Rochester, New York
• Gorsline Road, Prince Edward, Ontario, on a peninsula across the lake from Rochester
• Gorsline Road, Battle Creek, Michigan
• Gorsline Drive, El Cajon, California, outside San Diego

Each one is a concrete tracing of someplace that my ancestors and family have passed through.

Via The Morning News: Michael Bloomberg can’t be bothered to take the local IRT and change at 59th Street. Good graphics.

Via kottke.org, Heather and Andrew draw a story map for the attendees at their wedding.

How did I miss this for so long?

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