We’re going back to the city again today, for more dental work. I’m hoping to make this a quickie, just in on Tuesday and back out to Long Island on Thursday. The fast-spreading Omicron variety of COVID, now very much a presence in NYC, has Emily worried, but she’s coming along to keep me company.
Last time, the dentist explained that tomorrow was the first available appointment–because the insurance wouldn’t allow one any sooner. It’s truly amazing just how much control, large and petty, these insurance companies exert over our lives.
Dinner: unknown
Entertainment: Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God on Netflix.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, I lived on East 26th Street in Manhattan. That’s on the edge of a neighborhood known as “Kip’s Bay,” named for the pre-Revolutionary Era landholder Jacobus Kip. His estate “covered one hundred and fifty acres” of “meadow, woodland and stream” and extended eastward to a rocky indentation of the East River known for its shape as Turtle Bay, or alternatively as Kip’s Bay.
By the 1930s, when the Federal Writers’ Project put together a guide to New York City, the writers had termed much of the district “a slum.” Most of the bay had been filled in long before, and the guide reported that “El trains of the Second and Third Avenue lines thunder by constantly,” while “an endless, noisy procession of trucks” stormed over First Avenue.
During my time there, the neighborhood was a sort of Nowhere Ville—not so different in that from the area I had previously occupied, Boerum Hill in Brooklyn. (If there is a hill there, I never found it; I guess the name-givers had to pretend that the area adjacent to Carroll Gardens had some sort of distinguishing trait.)
But back to East 26th Street: My apartment there was a one-bedroom affair at the top of a four-floor walk-up. Few friends ever visited me, for obvious reasons.
On my walk home from a doctor’s appointment today, I passed by the old building. The neighborhood hasn’t really changed much. The laundromat that used to be downstairs is now a “Brazilian” beauty parlor. Two doors down, there’s a “Tipsy Scoop Barlour” specializing in “liquor-infused ice cream.” On nearby Third Avenue, the D’Agostino’s supermarket is still in place although a bit gussied up with newish plate glass windows. And the liquor store where I once got a $10 bottle of Famous Grouse scotch (on sale as a promotion) also remains. But the bars and restaurants that line Third Avenue have all changed hands or gone out of business.
Also not very far away is Gramercy Park and the tony neighborhood that shares its name. I’m sure that Gramercy retains its share of the Beautiful People, just as it did when Mayor James Harper (one of the founders of publisher Harper & Brothers) lived there in the 1840s, or when Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish was there in the 1890s. A singular aspect of the area is the exclusive and privately owned park to which only nearby residents are allowed keys. Such a shame that the dog-walkers allow their charges to foul the surrounding sidewalks!
New York will never change—and it’s in a constant state of change. The builders are still throwing up new high-rise structures in the area, particularly along 23rd Street. But will anyone choose to live in the new buildings? That matter is no closer to resolution now than it was in the year 2020, when the COVID pandemic began.
Dinner: Croque-Monsieur sandwiches, red-pepper soup, and a green salad.
Entertainment: an episode of Britbox’ policier Shetland.
A dramatic storm in the early morning hours included startling lightning and thunder. It woke me, but, I’m happy to say, Emily slept through it.
At the time, I wasn’t aware of lots of wind but there must have been some: Glancing out the window now, I can see another large oak tree has split open and fallen into the front yard. Where will the destruction end?
The tree service guy—a “Certified Arborist” no less—came by a few days ago to make an estimate on how much he’d charge to remove storm-damaged trees and limbs. (Horrifying numbers.) He said that the type of wind here has changed—nowadays, we get swirling, tornado-like winds that whip trees around in ways they aren’t prepared for. And these winds are very selective: They’ll break trees apart on one property and leave the next-door lot totally undisturbed.
I went back to sleep after the storm and dreamed that I was working in a detention facility for teenage offenders. In the dream, I have some Acetone or paint thinner, which I intend to use on a project, not sure just what. One of the boys asks if he can have some, and I pour out a bit into a jar for him. It seems the stuff can be used as invisible ink—and that’s what he intends, in a letter to someone. I say, hey, that can be traced back to me! I wash the outside of my bottle, hoping to remove fingerprints, and decide that I should get rid of the bottle.
I must be watching too many streaming-video crime dramas. They seem to be infecting my dreams.
We’ll be going back to the city again tomorrow. Emily has yet another dentist appointment on Wednesday, and I have an appointment with a neurologist on Thursday. I had a seizure a few years back, and it seems I must check in with her every so often in order to keep my Rx coming. She’ll probably send me to the NYU lab to have blood taken….
The weatherman predicts more gusting wind and a bit of rain for today. On Wednesday, there’s a 60% chance of snow here, perhaps an inch, but if temps remain in the upper 30s, even that may not happen.
Dinner: an omelet, green beans, and a baked potato. All modest offerings in order to empty out the larder.
Entertainment: final episodes of Netflix’ “The Imposters.” It’s an entertaining series about a bunch of grifters, but there are a very large number of episodes. In recent times we’ve also enjoyed the intricate Martin Scorsese kids’ movie “Hugo”; the 1976 François Truffaut flick “Small Change,” which is also about kids and their mostly innocent adventures; and the mysterious, 1990 Icelandic film “The Juniper Tree,” which is loosely based on a Brothers Grimm tale and features budding star Björk.
It’s a grim period. Most of the oak trees in our neighborhood have shed their leaves—but our yard guys haven’t yet come to blow and rake them away. So an inch-thick cover of brown coats the landscape. Meanwhile, as I have already noted, several trees in our yard were decapitated or broken during a mid-November windstorm. The gimpy near-dead still haunt our property, like wounded soldiers from a recently lost war.
And it’s cold—maybe seeming to be colder than it really is, thanks to the deep darkness that descends around 4:30 p.m.
I finished reading Colm Tóibín’s The Magician—an engaging fictional life of Thomas Mann—-then having nothing better at hand, I re-read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. The latter work is—more than I remembered—a bit like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, as it features an exposé of the grime and exploitation behind the scenes at fancy Paris restaurants, circa 1933.
“The dirt in the Hotel X…was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches….Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered—a secret vein of dirt, running through the great garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body. Apart from the dirt, the patron swindled the customers wholeheartedly….In spite of all this, the Hotel X was one of the dozen most expensive hotels in Paris, and the customers paid startling prices.”
In Paris, after a period of near starvation, Orwell finds a job as a plongeur, or restaurant dishwasher. Later, back in London, awaiting a gig as a tutor, Orwell falls in with the ranks of the homeless. Their rootless, exhausting lives are neither worse nor much better than the lives of Paris’ occasional laborers.
What leavens Orwell’s account are his descriptions of Paris and London characters. His Paris confrere Boris hangs out with fellow Russian expats, shares his meagre funds with Orwell, and in between periods of absolute destitution, enjoys a riotous, often-sodden bacchanalia of a life.
Among London’s tramps, Orwell meets Paddy, who becomes a pal for a couple of weeks. “He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp and the best way of getting a free meal….His ignorance was limitless and appalling. He once asked me, for instance, whether Napoleon lived before Jesus Christ or after.”
Orwell reports on the relative merits of various places where tramps can get a bed for a night. Most are awful, and those who try to sleep out of doors risk being arrested by the police as “vagbonds.” But compared with other options he has described, jail may not be so bad. Near the book’s end he tells us that one chum, Bozo, had been sentenced to 14 days in Wandsworth prison for begging. “I do not suppose prison worries him very much,” says the author.
Dinner: cheese omelettes, pumpkin bread, and green beans.
Entertainment: episodes of Ashes to Ashes on Britbox and Gentefied on Netflix.
Thanksgiving is a holiday more or less created during the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as a way to stimulate American consumer spending. In the 1940s, economists worried that, with the end of World War II, the economy could slide back into the Great Depression.
(Abraham Lincoln had declared a day of Thanksgiving in 1863, hoping to foster reconciliation of the Civil War antagonists. But Lincoln’s proclamation never mentioned the Pilgrims, the Indians, turkey, pumpkin pie, etc. of today’s myth.)
Midwestern and Southern agribusiness benefitted from the sale of turkeys, suddenly heralded as the national bird in place of the warlike American eagle. The New England economy, still flat since the collapse of the region’s textile industry, got a boost from the sale of the previously unheralded and profoundly sour cranberry. Batista’s Cuban sugar industry got a gift as well, as every kind of sticky treat joined the new feast’s menu.
All the stuff about the Pilgrims and the Indians—that’s just pablum for school children. Every holiday requires dramatis personae, whether Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, or the Halloween ghost.
In fact the Wampanoag Indians did save the starving Pilgrims, who had little notion of how to cultivate the sandy Plymouth plantation soil. Such English staples as sweet peas and barley were hardly suited for the area. The Indians’ reward for their dietary gifts: smallpox, years of a slow, unfolding genocide, and the theft of their lands.
Within 50 years, the English colonists would come to outnumber the Native Americans and friction led to the devastating King Philip’s War. The head of one chieftain, Metacomet, better known as King Philip, was mounted on a pike outside Plymouth Colony as a warning.
The Indians had their own revenge, though they may not have appreciated it: the obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that plague the food-obsessed Americans today.
Our Thanksgiving treat: We’re now out at our house, discovering that a number of large oak trees were apparently decapitated while we were away during a November 14 windstorm. The damage is quite startling…and has been waiting for us while we were in the city enduring days of dentistry and other bits of medicinal displeasure. Now, we’ll have to find somebody to come and cut down at least two trees and trim the injured limbs off of a couple of others. Always something.
Dinner: a slimmed-down Thanksgiving meal consisting of packaged ham, microwaved Kabocha squash, salad, and cookies.
I toss and turn amid visions of bewhiskered men thronging the city sidewalks. Everyone has a beard but me. I know that I must grow one—but worry that my face will fail to produce a respectable growth.
The bearded men are menacing. No one is recognizable.
When I wake up, I realize that the beards in my dreams are no more than the COVID-prevention face masks that you’re supposed to wear. In fact, many unmasked people are walking around the city streets. That’s even more worrying.
I’ve visited the dentist, my GP, and a urologist. I have another serious dentist visit upcoming on Monday, when I am supposed to get a root canal and have a temporary crown replaced with a permanent one. Emily spent hours at her dentist, also getting crowns. She has visited her GP and must go back there again in December.
Surely we will begin to see NYC not as “fun city,” in the much-derided words of onetime Mayor John Lindsay—but as a site of annoying, painful doctor visits and Rx pick-ups.
I am also plagued with anxiety…mostly that I am going to forget something. (It’s not that my memory is bad; I don’t really have that problem yet.)
It’s all little stuff. If I have one appointment scheduled for, say, Thursday, I fret that I will somehow be late or miss the appointment altogether. A single item on the mental to-do list weighs like a nightmare on the brain. Oh, I must remember to get cranberries and cornbread mix—but WHEN will I have time for that? And Thanksgiving is ONLY SEVEN DAYS AWAY!!
I discussed this anxiety with my doctor. He assures me that I am not alone. The pandemic has also led to an epidemic of worry among the general population. You can try drugs or meditation, it seems.
After my GP visit, I went to a nearby Whole Foods to get a bagel and a few hard-to-find items such as dried shiitake mushrooms. When I went to the seating area to scarf down the bagel, a small female security guard asked to see my proof of vaccination. This made my day! I whipped out the iPhone and showed her my recently downloaded New York Excelsior Pass. It was the first time I’d gotten to use it. And, despite my anxiety, it worked!
Dinner: Braised chicken with lemon and olives.
Entertainment: The Scientology-inspired movie The Master.
“The time in bed was more work than rest,” writes Nick Paumgarten in a recent New Yorkerarticle.
I often feel that way—the result probably of my grueling, sweaty-sheet-inducing dreams, which make me want to get up and get out of bed and drag the comb across my head.
But if I get up, I need a nap.
Paumgarten’s article is about how these days, many people say they frequently feel tired and wonder how they might get more energy. The article is a fairly deep dive into the science of humans’ metabolic system, with little visits to the research of Columbia University behavioral-medicine doctors, California cardiologists, and blast-from-the-past psychic frontiersmen like Franz Mesmer and orgone box inventor Wilhelm Reich.
You remember Reich, no? His orgone accumulator drew Age of Aquarius public attention because it was said to enhance orgasms, among other things. He was around in the 1950s, when such sex talk was scorned and drew the attention of our very own Torquemada, a.k.a. J. Edgar Hoover. Reich was ultimately jailed for shipping orgone boxes across state lines and died in the federal pen in 1957.
Anyway, anyway.
Emily and I are back in Gotham, experiencing our very own Inquisition at the hands of a variety of dentists and physicians. Between us we have something like ten appointments scheduled near term. The dentist appointments—which feature numerous fillings, crown-fittings and root canals—are particularly pressing since my former employer, now wearing the guise of S&P Global, recently announced in an 8-point-type form letter that they were canceling our dental insurance.
The other day, I walked over to my Eighth Avenue gym, where thanks to United Health Care I still enjoy a membership, and was denied admission since I did not have proof of COVID vaccination with me.
Now on the one hand, I endorse their uncompromising, pro-science stand. On the other hand, since in the past my locker there has been broken into and possessions stolen, I wouldn’t dare carry the much-envied “COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card” anywhere near New York Sports Club.
So I came back to the apt and downloaded an app for the New York State Excelsior Pass, which certifies that I have indeed had the jabs. I hope that will do the trick.
Mind you, it does suggest that Big Brother is watching, just as the anti-vaxxers say. Precisely what other info does the Excelsior pass contain, I wonder?
The time approaches for the visit of our niece, Montana, who intends to get a COVID test on her way over. Then, we will have a feast of croissants, Italian prune plums, guacamole, fresh apple cider, and more. You just can’t get these things in Kansas City, no matter how up to date that place is. (Maybe Cinnabon or Dunkin’ is just as good. You bet.)
Dinner: If we’re not too stuffed from brunch, it will be spaghetti Bolognese and salad.
Entertainment: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries via Kanopy.
With the first frost of the year predicted for tonight, I got busy this morning with yard tasks that may or may not have been necessary. First, I trimmed our now-bedraggled looking rose bush, following the instructions of a horticulture professor’s YouTube video. Then, I planted 16 tulip bulbs that I hope will blossom spectacularly next spring.
You’re supposed to plant the bulbs in sunny spots. But the sunlight wanes in the autumn, making it difficult to recall just which are the yard’s sunniest spots come spring.
We’ll be going back to the city for at least three weeks beginning next Monday, November 8. The dreaded end to daylight savings time comes on November 7, so our return will coincide with the beginning of short, wintry days.
And the reason for our trip is also dispiriting: visits to dentists. My McGraw-Hill retiree dental insurance is being canceled thanks to M-H’s successor company, S&P Global.
“There are many options available through insurance companies,” S&P Global declares in the form-iest of form letters dated September 30. As if this is a recent discovery!! OH, you could simply buy it for yourself! They strongly recommend that we “reach out” to such insurance companies for replacement coverage.
Are they allowed to cancel retiree benefits like this under the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, one friend asks? I guess they must be….
Anyway, both Emily and I will be getting new dental crowns next week, then seeing some other doctors while we have the opportunity.
We’re also weighing insurance options for next year, since the Medicare open enrollment period has begun. Always a pain in the neck. According to the Times, most people just continue with their existing plans, failing to weigh options that could save them many dollars. So much for economists’ rational-choice theory and the notion that people maximize utility.
Dinner: a Latin American picadillo stew and a green salad with avocado.
Entertainment: the final episode of the weird French policier Nox.
I have not seen Wes Anderson’s new movie, The French Dispatch (available only in theaters), but I look forward to doing so. Centered on a fictional but nonetheless familiar magazine based in Paris and greatly resembling The New Yorker, the film has drawn glowing notices in the Times and—surprise, surprise—The New Yorker. The flick consists of four narratives—one featuring a reporter, another considering an imprisoned painter, another looking at life via the eyes of a James Baldwin-like writer, and finally, one focusing on a 1968 Paris Spring student firebrand.
Anderson is perhaps the most literature-influenced film director since Jean-Luc Godard. His previous movie The Grand Budapest Hotel drew inspiration from the work of once-popular and now largely forgotten novelist Stefan Zweig. This time around, Anderson has reportedly instructed his actors—including such regulars as Owen Wilson and Bill Murray along with the suddenly ubiquitous Lea Seydoux—to check out the writings of Mavis Gallant, a Paris-based New Yorker writer of yore.
But why? Gallant certainly knew her way around a stylus; her Paris-scribbled short stories are impressive even if they focus on such uninspiring protagonists as a former German POW, a nose-to-the-grindstone Riviera hotelkeeper, and a hard-pressed art dealer. She also penned very lengthy dispatches about the 1968 events that ran as a two-part feature in The New Yorker. These are likely what Anderson had in mind when advising his cast. And there’s where the problem lies: The jottings capture the flavor of events but give us little more.
So what did Gallant make of 1968’s happenings? It’s not altogether clear. Gallant’s “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook” adopts the form of a diary, with entries focusing on the garbage in the streets, food shopping and shortages, disruptions of daily life, the looks of the protesters and of the Gaullist counter-demonstrators, radio news reports, her own dreams, and brief conversations held with a range of friends and frenemies.
She is stingy with her compliments. “Why do they keep on about Marcuse? Except for Z.’s dentist friend, no one even knows who he is,” she kvetches. “How can you talk about the Spanish Civil War to people who don’t even know what happened in 1958, or 1961, or what the O.A S. was about?” she whines.
But if she finds the student protesters unwashed and uninformed, the pro-de Gaulle counter-protesters are even less admirable. A vast May 30, Champs-Élysées-filling right-wing crowd has only summoned the courage to turn out, she believes, because the French army now has tanks and troops surrounding Paris.
“I am acutely unhappy at the slogans I am hearing: ‘La France aux français,’ ‘La police avec nous.’ I find this ugly. When I heard the students last week shouting ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’ I thought they were speaking to their parents. Today the parents answer: ‘La France aux français.’”
At their rallies, the young folks were idealistic; these revanchists are repellent. “I liked those kids. They were generous, and they were very brave. And when they shouted a slogan they were always asking for some sort of justice, usually for someone else. What is generous about ‘La police avec nous’?” Afterwards, Gallant only regains her equilibrium via “an enormous dinner with floods of wine.”
In the end, the writer offers no real stock-taking of the May events and their consequences. There is, she says, “No explosion de joie, as papers suddenly have it—just depressed feeling, as after an illness.” News reports convey the notion that the whole thing had been nothing but a game. As if by magic, the gasoline stations suddenly have plenty of petrol, the shops have lots of food and once-scarce sugar, and an “enormous tricolor is hung from the top of the Arc de Triomphe—[the] flag usually kept for July 14th and important state occasions.”
People ask themselves: What has been gained exactly? The “tone of conversations is relief, bewilderment, disappointment, fatigue. It is like the feeling after a miscarriage—instant thanksgiving that the pain has ceased, plus the feeling of zero because it was all for nothing.”
And that’s about all Gallant has to offer in the way of evaluation. And yet May of 1968–with its factory occupations, three-week General Strike involving 10 million people, and near overthrow of Charles de Gaulle—lives on as a stirring inspiration to progressives: “be reasonable—demand the impossible,” as one Paris graffito had it. Perhaps Mavis was simply too exhausted to deliver much more than she did.
When does a piece of writing become interestingly historical—and when is it annoyingly quaint? Perhaps that’s the same question as one once posed by John Banville: When does the past truly become the past?
“How much time must elapse before what merely happened begins to give off the mysterious, numinous glow that is the mark of true pastness?” Banville asks in his Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir. “Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.”
Sitting on some shelf around here, unread, there’s a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 book The Corrections, and I’ve considered giving it a go. But today’s Times review of Franzen’s new book, Crossroads, has persuaded me that the older book has not aged well. Reviewer Thomas Mallon speaks of The Corrections’ “mosaic of a still-twin-towered world, gluing in all of its diskettes and antennaed cellphones.”
Cringe. I didn’t like that period when we lived through it—with its “greed is good” mantra and all that celebrating of the rich and combat-ready. So I have little wish to revisit it now.
All the same, I do enjoy reading old bits of prose that evoke periods of yore. Recently, for example, I read Joseph Conrad’s astonishing short story “Youth.” That 1898 tale begins with a group of English gentlemen sitting around a mahogany table, sharing glasses of wine as “Marlowe,” now an accomplished lawyer, tells a hair-raising story of his disaster-prone first sea voyage, back when he was 20 years of age.
Marlowe had signed on aboard the Judea—about 400 tons, laid up in dry dock for a long period and consequently “all rust, dust, grime—soot aloft, dirt on deck.” But the ship is bound for that land of enchantment—Bangkok!
A gale hits before they can get well out to sea, and they spend 16 days just reaching Newcastle. Soon, they smash into a steamer—meaning another three weeks’ delay. Then finally underway, they fall victim to another gale, blowing “with spite, without interval, without mercy, without rest. The world was nothing but an immensity of great foaming waves rushing at us….”
Amid the tumult of the cruel ocean, Judea‘s crew mans the pumps—all day, all night, all the week. “We turned those handles, and had the eyes of idiots.” (After several days of unheroic but taxing physical labor around here, I can certainly relate; your brain begins reeling and it’s all you can do to stare vacantly into space. More on this later.) “It seemed to last for months, for years, for all eternity….”
And yet “there was somewhere in me the thought: By Jove! this is the deuce of an adventure—something you read about….I would not have given up the experience for worlds.”
They were still not out of England. Six months have elapsed, a third crew has been recruited, and small boys laugh at their plight. Back in London, the underwriters and the owner consider scuttling the whole venture.
Well, many more disasters await the Judea—until its cargo of coal finally catches alight and explodes.
“Youth” could perhaps have been made into a classic film by one of the silent-screen comedic geniuses—or even by French new wave master Claude Chabrol, whose specialty, a critic once said, was slapstick tragedy. Conrad’s writing is as visual, rousing, frustrating, and frightening as any movie masterpiece.
You take your thrills where you can get them. I, meanwhile, have spent several days washing the filthy, pollen-encrusted windows of this house. So far, I have cleansed 20 mullioned windows and three glass-paned doors. Eight large windows remain…but they may receive no more than a lick and a promise, as my mother often said. My shoulders and hands ache and my mind has all but collapsed. Bring on the entertainment!
Tonight’s dinner: wine-braised chicken with artichoke hearts, couscous, and a green salad.
