Reading about New York

First posted March 19, 2014.

Most of the nonfiction I read falls into the memoir category, with an emphasis on travel. But one of my favorites is Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a book for book lovers. If you haven’t read it, buy it now. It’s short and you’ll read it so quickly you’ll wish it were longer. I’ve read it a couple times and love all of the essays, but one of my favorites is called “My Odd Shelf”.

It’s about Fadiman’s obsession with polar exploration and the collection of books she has built centering on it. You can read a little of it in this review, but the concept is a simple one: many of us voracious readers have a niche topic which fascinates us, one that the general population wouldn’t understand. I have a few of them – favorite authors that I’ve read almost everything by, girls’ mysteries stories with a focus on Nancy Drew and books about Nancy Drew, and fairy tales. But I’m starting to build a small collection which could be called “Books about NYC that I haven’t finished reading yet.” Not quite like Fadiman’s collection. Oh well.

The only book in this collection that I did finish is called My First New York: Early Adventures in the Big City, and I gave it away. It’s a collection of essays from New York Magazine by notables from all fields about what New York was like when they first arrived, whenever it was. I saw it on the ubiquitous New York tables at bookstores and museums and finally gave in and bought it. It was, like Ex Libris, a quick read, but a good one.

Another “saw it everywhere” purchase was New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter, which offers snapshots of the history of this city in diary entries from New York residents throughout the city’s existence. I’ve dipped into it, but have yet to read more than 40 or so pages. What I’ve read, though, was fascinating!

When I graduated college I was given The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn as a gift. It traces the history of each section of the borough I’ve lived in since moving to New York, and while I’ve read up on some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, I have yet to read all of it.

Not strictly about New York, but my friend gave me a copy of To Marry an English Lord, the book that inspired “Downton Abbey”, and while I’ve only read about three-quarters of it, I was struck by how many of the American heiresses in it were from New York society, and by the portrait of that society it painted.

A book that is useful for this blog: the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: New York City 2014, given to me by the fabulous Allie Singer. Once the weather’s a little nicer I’m going to use it to plan adventures in parts of the city I haven’t had the chance to explore yet.

On my to-be-purchased list: Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve seen it in the Met bookstore (where else) and my fascination with museums means I will eventually get around to buying it.

What’s on your odd shelf? What books do you buy faster than you can read them? And what books about New York should I add to my read-eventually pile?

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First Blogiversary

The older I get, the more I look for markers of the passage of time. When you’re in school, the rhythm of the academic calendar provides you with important dates and milestones, but when you’ve finished college and are working, you have to come up with those markers on your own. I think these are very personal for people – birthdays, wedding anniversaries, etc. For me, in July I often think of the summer program I did in high school where I met one of my best friends – we’ve now known each other for nine years. In late August and early September, I think about moving to New York and starting my job. And now, in early September, I think about when I started writing this blog, just about one year (and exactly one hundred posts) ago.

I’d thought about starting it for months. I had a few blog post ideas and sample posts written, but it wasn’t until I sat in Washington Square Park and wrote about the end of summer that I was ready to start sharing my writing with the internet. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started the blog in September. After seventeen years of school, it doesn’t matter that I’ve been out of school for years now – September still feels very much like a fresh start. I’m already thinking of what new project I should begin, now that summer’s almost over.

A year is a long time. I’ve learned how to be more disciplined so that turning out two posts every week doesn’t sound daunting, but I’m still learning how to craft the posts to make them more interesting. I’m still trying to make taking photos a regular part of my life so that I’ll always have something to illustrate a post. I’ve shared a lot of stories and outings, but I want to write better, to really take you with me when I walk through a park in Brooklyn or sit in a café in Manhattan or take a train along the Hudson.

A New York blog I follow called Tracy’s New York Life recently did a post on one hundred and one things she’s done or that have happened to her since moving to New York. I’ve done a number of the things on her list, and many more, since I moved to this city four years ago. I’ve written blogs posts about a lot of them. I want to keep pushing myself to explore and to take every opportunity I’m offered, because here’s the thing: New York is special. At any given time, the number of things I could be doing here is infinite. I don’t want my life to be ruled by a fear of missing out, because as I’ve said, sometimes you just need a quiet night at home. But taking advantage of things you can do or see only in New York is just smart when you live here.

So. A hundred posts in a year. The word document where I write these posts is nearing 50,000 words – I’m sure no one is surprised to learn I’m verbose. Thank you to those of you who have been reading since the beginning, and thanks to everyone who has joined along the way. Thanks to all the people I know in real life, and thanks to those of you (still small in number, I believe) who have come across my blog on Tumblr or the Toast or elsewhere and started following it. It’s a lot easier to get myself in front of the keyboard each week knowing there are people out there reading this!

There’s a couple of polls below, to give me a better picture of who you are and how you’re reading this. But please, if you’ve been lurking, take this as an opportunity to come out of hiding! Post a comment and tell me what you’ve enjoyed reading, and what you’d like more of. If there’s a place in New York you especially love or you’ve always wanted to go, tell me about it! I’d love to check it out and write about it.

 

Lazy writing, or, forgetting the details

Sometimes I write these posts in a bit of a hurry. Life is busy, time gets away from me, and it’s the night I’m supposed to post and I have nothing written yet. When I first started the blog (almost a year ago!), I had a few entries in the bank, which was an excellent plan. I also had a list of topics I might someday write about. The bank is now empty, and while there are a few items still on the list, mostly I come up with new topics on the spot. Often, now, they’re timely: I write about something I just did or just heard about.

But when rushing to get something written, sometimes I summarize instead of really taking time to show what an experience was like. So, without further ado, five details that got left out of recent blog posts!

1.       The Empire State Building. On my recent trip up the Empire State Building, I found that while we didn’t stand around waiting in line for very long, it did take some time to get to the top. This was partly because, in order to accommodate the lines that are usually there, there are some hallways you have to walk through. Some of these hallways have rope barricades that zigzag back and forth. These are surely very practical when there are a bunch of people, but for us they were like low hurdles: after zigzagging a couple times, we just started hopping over them. On the way out, we had almost made it the elevators when someone told us we couldn’t go that way – and pointed us to the gift shop instead. Of course. They did have a pretty neat 4D puzzle of NYC there, though!

2.       Summer Streets. (Coming up this Saturday, 8/9, and next, 8/16) When I went to Summer Streets a couple years ago, my roommate ended up on rollerblades because the bike line was too long. What I didn’t mention was how we procured those rollerblades. Around Astor Place, she hopped on the subway to make her way up to 42^nd where we thought there was a skate rental. I biked up to meet her there and along the way happened upon the skate rental, somewhere in the 30s. I guessed (wrongly) at her rollerblade size, checked out a pair, hung them over my handlebars, and met her up at 42^nd. It’d been years since she rollerbladed, but she gamely put on the too-large blades and whizzed down the dark Park Ave tunnel ramp at Grand Central – and didn’t get hurt!

3.       Freestyle Love Supreme. Early on in the show, the beatboxer set up the beat in an unusual way. While beatboxing, he started miming out… something. What he was doing, we couldn’t quite tell. At one point he seemed to be pulling a heart out of a body (or maybe he was putting one in?), and then a helicopter came by, and then he seemed to have a soundboard that he was messing with. I honestly have no idea what was supposed to be happening, but the noises and gestures he was making were funny, so we all laughed, despite being confused.

4.       King Lear in Central Park. Lear’s fool was wonderful. He was so angry when Cordelia was sent away, and he chastises the king but also supports him. There was so much thought behind every line of his and every action, and my heart broke a little for him, watching him watch his king fall apart. The show runs till August 17, so if tragedy is up your alley, check it out!

5.       Getting lost in NYC. Easiest way to get lost: Let someone else navigate. If I’ve decided that I’m not making the directional decisions and I stop paying attention to where I am, it’s a lot easier for me to get turned around. I once walked around Prospect Park with a friend, before I’d spent much time there, and when we found ourselves back where we’d started I realized my sense of direction had utterly failed me – but I still had a lovely walk.

Going forward I hope to be a little less lazy and a little more detail-oriented with these posts, but I’m making no promises! Any posts or stories you’d like a few more details about?

Springtime in NYC: Don’t blink or you’ll miss it

Here in New York we’ve officially taken a left turn from “Is it spring yet?” into “Should I put the air conditioner in the window now?” territory. In just a few weeks we’ve entered the world of not needing to wear a jacket at night and leaving the ceiling fans on at all times. God forbid I fall asleep under my quilt, because I willwake up sweaty and uncomfortable.

This is my problem with springtime: it’s too short. If I’m going to have to deal with seasonal allergies and sporadic rainfall, can’t I at least get a month where the high temperature is seventy-five and the low is sixty? We’ve already left that high temp in the dust, and we’re only halfway into May! And as you might remember, winter dragged things out for an obscenely long time.  

I don’t mean to be ungrateful – I’ve already had some really beautiful days outside, and sitting on the terrace at my office during lunch is one of my greatest summertime pleasures – but I’m just not built for warm weather. I get sluggish and crabby. I like choosingto wear shorts, not feeling I have to do it or overheat when wearing jeans. I’d also prefer to never again sit down on a bench in shorts and burn my legs, but we can’t get everything we want.

On Tuesday I had some friends over and one of them helped me put my air conditioner in the window. Yes, I gave in. It was, as always, a harrowing ordeal, and I live in fear that it will somehow fall out of the window and onto someone. It’s a mostly irrational fear (I’m resisting looking up statistics about how often it happens) and if it did fall, it’d hit the garbage cans, not the sidewalk, but try telling me that when we were maneuvering it around on the sill.

Anyway, it’s now successfully installed and I can use it to keep the air circulating through my apartment. Of course, today it was cooler, so I might not even need to turn the AC on. NYC weather, I officially give up on you.

In other news, my first piece for the Toast is up here! It’s about some of my favorite Louisa May Alcott characters, from the books Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom.

Edited to add: I hit publish on this, and then looked at the weather forecast for the next week. Temps no higher than 72 and no lower than 58. So maybe we’re going to get some spring weather after all. Guess I could’ve waited a little longer on the whole air conditioner rant…

Have I mentioned that I love travel writing?

I’ve been thinking a lot about travel writing lately. Part of it is figuring out what kind of stuff to write about on this blog, part of it is that I have some travel coming up soon, and most of it is that I just love travel writing. My travel reading falls into four major categories: guide books for trips I’m going to take (mostly skimmed), books by Bill Bryson, books by Frances Mayes, and books about American women (usually in their twenties or thirties) moving to Paris.

NB: I’ve never even been to Paris, and I’d probably go back to London again before going there, and yet I’ve read four books that fit that category. Oops? (For the record, these are the four.)

Thinking about my love of Bill Bryson and my emerging fondness for Frances Mayes really clarified for me what I’m looking for in travel writing. I’ve read four Bill Bryson titles (Notes from a Small Island was my first, and is my favorite) and two Frances Mayes (I’m about to finally read Under the Tuscan Sun), and they are two distinctly different experiences.

 I’ve read Mayes’s A Year in the World twice, but I can only remember a handful of moments from it. Her writing is beautifully descriptive; last year at one point I was desperately craving a trip and had nothing planned, so I reread  A Year in the World and felt like I was there, for each adventure she described. I got lost in the details, totally immersed, and that’s exactly what I wanted. It’s like taking a trip, except cheaper and not really. But I’m looking forward to reading Under the Tuscan Sun and getting a glimpse of Tuscany.

I’ve just reread Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island and am halfway through a reread of I’m a Stranger Here Myself, his book about living in the US after twenty years in the UK. If you haven’t read anything by him, go do it, but the main thing to know is that Bill Bryson is funny, and his stories are a mix of anecdotes given a comedic slant and strange and interesting facts about the places he describes. I might not always remember all the ins and outs of his travels, but usually a few stick in my mind. When I read Bill Bryson’s books, it’s like hearing a good story a second time from a friend: you remember most of the twists but that just makes it better. In these books, some of his references are dated now – and not always PC – but a lot of what he talks about holds up.

I’m a unfortunately little too wedded to factual (sometimes overly factual) reporting in my writing to imitate Bill Bryson. He has a way of telling you something that you’re pretty sure did not happen quite the way he tells it but instead is a perfect send up of how that situation might go down. In I’m a Stranger Here Myself, he talks about calling a government hotline to try to get his wife’s social security number and how the official on the other end wouldn’t give it to him, but did, when asked, tell him that baking soda would get that strawberry pop stain right out of his t-shirt. I’m reasonably sure this did not actually happen, but the way he describes it is hilarious. Then again, maybe it did happen and Bill Bryson has more interesting interactions with strangers than the rest of us do.

He’s also just funnier than I’ll ever be, and I can accept that.

I also may never be able to travel the world quite like Frances Mayes does, and I’m pretty sure I’ll never own a house in Tuscany, but I can sit somewhere  beautiful and describe the sights and sounds and smells. Her writing builds a scene for us to step into, and I can aspire to that. It’s easier to do when I’m writing in the moment, though; if I try to recreate it afterwards, the details have already faded, or I never noticed them to begin with. The only drawback to that kind of writing is that it tends to bring out my earnest side. It’s hard to be snarky about a beautiful day in the park, but I’ll try!

Here and there I’ve picked up travel story collections, from The Best American Travel Writing 2000 (edited by Bill Bryson) to Female Nomad and Friends (edited by Rita Golden Gelman), and I’m always looking for recommendations for writers to check out – especially if they fit one of the categories I’ve described, or if they’re totally different. I’d love to hear about books by American women in their twenties or thirties who go anywhere besides Paris, because I’ve only found a handful of those. What should I check out? And what do you look for in your travel writing?

PS My first piece for the Toast goes live on Wednesday, May 14. I’ll link to it in Thursday’s post, but in the meantime if any Toasties find their way here, welcome!

Reading about New York

Most of the nonfiction I read falls into the memoir category, with an emphasis on travel. But one of my favorites is Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a book for book lovers. If you haven’t read it, buy it now. It’s short and you’ll read it so quickly you’ll wish it were longer. I’ve read it a couple times and love all of the essays, but one of my favorites is called “My Odd Shelf”.

It’s about Fadiman’s obsession with polar exploration and the collection of books she has built centering on it. You can read a little of it in this review, but the concept is a simple one: many of us voracious readers have a niche topic which fascinates us, one that the general population wouldn’t understand. I have a few of them – favorite authors that I’ve read almost everything by, girls’ mysteries stories with a focus on Nancy Drew and books about Nancy Drew, and fairy tales. But I’m starting to build a small collection which could be called “Books about NYC that I haven’t finished reading yet.” Not quite like Fadiman’s collection. Oh well.

The only book in this collection that I did finish is called My First New York: Early Adventures in the Big City, and I gave it away. It’s a collection of essays from New York Magazine by notables from all fields about what New York was like when they first arrived, whenever it was. I saw it on the ubiquitous New York tables at bookstores and museums and finally gave in and bought it. It was, like Ex Libris, a quick read, but a good one.

Another “saw it everywhere” purchase was New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter, which offers snapshots of the history of this city in diary entries from New York residents throughout the city’s existence. I’ve dipped into it, but have yet to read more than 40 or so pages. What I’ve read, though, was fascinating!

When I graduated college I was given The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn as a gift. It traces the history of each section of the borough I’ve lived in since moving to New York, and while I’ve read up on some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, I have yet to read all of it.

Not strictly about New York, but my friend gave me a copy of To Marry an English Lord, the book that inspired “Downton Abbey”, and while I’ve only read about three-quarters of it, I was struck by how many of the American heiresses in it were from New York society, and by the portrait of that society it painted.

A book that should be useful for this blog: the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: New York City 2014, given to me by the fabulous Allie Singer. Once the weather’s a little nicer I’m going to use it to plan adventures in parts of the city I haven’t had the chance to explore yet.

On my to-be-purchased list: Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve seen it in the Met bookstore (where else) and my fascination with museums means I will eventually get around to buying it.

What’s on your odd shelf? What books do you buy faster than you can read them? And what books about New York should I add to my read-eventually pile?

Six months and fifty posts

This is my fiftieth post on this blog! Since I started it on September 7, it’s been just about exactly six months of blogging regularly. In that time I have written about pretty much every interesting thing I have ever done in New York, so I guess it’s time to move on to something new.

Okay, not really. But I’ve written about a lot of things I’ve done, so clearly I need to go check out more places around the city. There are many, many museums I’ve yet to set foot in, neighborhoods I’ve never explored, and parks I’ve never gotten lost in. Thank goodness it’s almost springtime and I totally will want to spend time outside soon. There’s no way we’ll get more snow this month, right? Right?

Before I started this blog, I wasn’t writing very much. Now I write every week, usually multiple times a week. I’ve even started writing occasional posts for F’ed in Park Slope, and I’ve picked back up a fiction project I stalled out on. In the last month or so, I’ve started pitching pieces elsewhere and had one accepted (more on that when it’s published!). I haven’t had this kind of discipline or drive with my writing since college, and really, since before college. I’m excited about writing again, and I hope to keep moving forward.

So thanks to everyone who’s reading this! Thanks especially to everyone who has commented, here or on Facebook or in real life and told me you’re enjoying my posts. You’ve helped me stay on track and stay motivated, and I’m so grateful to you! The goal for this blog has always been for it to appeal to both readers in New York who might go out and do the things I mention and to readers outside New York who want to live vicariously or create a list of things to check out the next time they visit.

Have I succeeded? This is your official invitation to come out of the woodwork and let me know what you’d like to see more of! More write-ups of places you can check out any time, or more about current exhibits and shows? More reviews of things I’ve done or gone to? More slice-of-life posts? Or something else entirely? Any and all suggestions – including specific topics! – welcome.

Let me know in the comments! And thanks for reading!

On writing in cafés

It’s NaNoWriMo season, so it’s the perfect time to talk about writing in NYC. While I may not be participating in the massive dash to 50,000 words by November 30, I’ve been adding to my own personal word count with this blog. I’ve been writing most of these posts by hand, either in parks or cafés. I’m writing this one (or at least, I wrote the initial draft of it) with an empty hot cocoa cup next to me, across the table from one of my writing buddies, in a café near our offices.

I only recently, with this blog project, switched to longhand. I’ve been a computer writer since seventh grade, when I wrote a (short, derivative) novel longhand and then became a really good typist typing it up. Except for my journal, I’ve embraced typing and never looked back, until now.

In this café I can see from my table ten people using laptops. It’s a big café, so I’m sure there are more. Odds are good that many of them are students, and maybe they’re getting some work done. I was sometimes productive in college…and sometimes I was watching puppy cam.

When I’m writing on my laptop, there are so many distractions. The internet is full of things just waiting for me to read them, and even if I turn it off (or forget to get the password for the wifi), there are other things to distract me. I can jump from project to project, or I can get caught up in rereading in the name of “editing”.  When I write by hand, I have limited space to cross things out, skipping around to start something new feels stupid, and I only have myself (and my writing buddies) as distractions.

And when I type a piece up, I actually do edit. At least a little. Typos are banished!

There’s also something satisfying about creating a tangible record. The internet may end up being forever (probably not) while this notebook may get lost or trashed sometime in my lifetime, but there’s something special about this physical object that I’ve manually filled with my thoughts.

Since writing the draft of this post a month or two ago, I’ve filled up the notebook I mentioned entirely and begun writing in another notebook. But I’ve also written some of the last few posts on the computer at home, saving my notebook for writing away from home,  whether it be in Prospect Park or just at a café with a writing buddy. There’s probably something profound about the differences between my writing when it’s done way rather than the other, but I’m too tired this week to come up with something clever to say about it.

This concludes my bird walk from regularly scheduled musings about NYC—except for the observation that while this may not have said much about NYC, much of it was in fact “noted” (written down in a notebook) in New York. You’re welcome.