Not much activity on the website this week - I was terribly busy hanging out on the beach with the family and reading about the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I did have some time to add to the Further Reading section, with work by Steve Almond, Jonathan Lethem, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Michaels, and Joe Brainard.
OK, I just added a few more list-essays to the Further Reading section of The List and the Story for your reading pleasure, including work by Donna Steiner, Meriwether Clarke, Tim Bascom, Debra Marquart, Brenda Miller, Carol Paik, Susan Allen Toth, and Dawnelle Wilkie. Links are provides for the ones online, and links to find the ones only in print.
I still have a lot to add, but I've put up the Further Reading section on The List and the Story, dividing it into "List-Essays," "List-Books," and "Some Critical Background on Listing and Storytelling."
Much more coming, especially in the List-Essays section, but here's a taste!
OK, this is big, people. I've decided to put a years-long project I've been working on, which I'm dubbing The List and the Story, up on the website. For the last four months of this year, I'm going to entertain you, break your heart, make you feel sorry for me, crack some jokes, wax aphoristic - all for free.
You can read more about it on the Introduction, but here's the gist: Each month I'll give you a decade of my life, in list form. September=Eighties, October=Nineties, November=Aughts, and December=Seventies (in a little prequel action). I'll add in chunks a few times each week, which I'll assemble along the way until, by the end of the year, you'll have the list and the story of my life.
More soon, Lovelies.
Filmmakers Anna Sang Park & Eric McGinty, with their daughter Oona
I've been vacationing with the family on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for the last week, but I did manage to post an interview with filmmakers Anna Sang Park and Eric McGinty on A Child Grows in Brooklyn. They're currently raising funds for the final stage of post-production on their Brooklyn-set film Wallabout . Enjoy!
In last month’s summer Parks Series entry, I wrote about navigating the abundant natural water around our city with Stringbean. But let’s be honest—while a ferry trip is a pleasant diversion, the meat of our outdoor summer activities with our children involve inland water that is decidedly unnatural, whether we’re splashing in city pools, bathing in the majesty of the many fountains, or enjoying the many watery elements of city parks we’d forgotten were even there over the winter and early spring.
No playground is a playground in the summer without some water to offset the heat generated by all those shiny metal slides (for a case in point on how stifling a playground can be if the metal-to-water ratio is off, just take a hopefully-short visit to the newly redesigned Union Square Park playground at midday) and in fact many, like the sublime Teardrop Park and the overwhelming Pier 25, both downtown, incorporate outdoor plumbing so thoroughly and naturally into their architecture that you have to wonder what they do in the winter. Most of the major fountains of New York City are accessible, some (like the one at the top of Grand Army Plaza) for sitting next to and perhaps catching some spray, and others (like the one at Washington Square Park) for getting in and splashing around.
Man, I am obsessed. But in fairness to myself, these new uses of Google Maps fell into my lap with absolutely no effort on my behalf.
I found the first two in my inbox via Scoutmob. The first, Yelp Wordmap, is a new wordsourcing service Yelp provides that shows what I can only describe as "heat spots" (I hate the word "hotspots") of words people use in their reviews; the service ostensibly allows someone looking to avoid hipsters to avoid heat spots with concentrations of reviews that mention the word "hipster," or if someone is looking for an uncrowded patio he/she might want to find a heat spot of patio concentrations to increase the chances of finding one.
The other use is simpler, but maybe more wonderful. Falling Fruit maps all the known fruit trees in the public domain of urban areas, in order to "facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods." Totally taking my daughters on a fruit hunt soon.
The other, more literary use was posted to my Facebook wall by Patrick Madden, who is quickly becoming my map-essay hookup, supplier of the good stuff. This time, it's a Google-Mapped adaptation (more of a summary, really) of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley , tracing Steinbeck's (supposedly) nonfiction trip across the US with his beloved French poodle.
For my fellow map-essay nerds, this one, created by Chris George, is a doozy - a map of NYC, with place markers of many of the places photographer Weegee took his iconic shots. I found it while researching Weegee photos for my next A
Child Grows in Brooklyn piece (yes, I'm somehow working Weegee into a
parenting blog). It's a work-in-progress, but remarkably complete already:
While in Lawrence this week, I heard Mavis Staples' recent cover of Can You Get to That, and it totally made me rethink Maggot Brain (the Funkadelic album, not the decomposing organ). This is such a great song, on an album I hadn't really ever listened to much, mostly because I really hate the 10-minute psychedelic guitar jam at the beginning.
For HIGH QUALITY & STEREO: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8rrOdcnFbAY&fmt=18 Song: Can You Get To That Artist: Funkadelic Album: Maggot Brain Year: 1971 Label: Westbound
Besides now listening to Maggot Brain obsessively, I've also discovered this amazing cover by Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers, from the back of a van no less:
Official Website:http://www.nickibluhm.com Like us on Facebook:http://on.fb.me/NBGs_FB Music on iTunes:http://bit.ly/NBluhm_iTunes Funkadelic - Can You Get To That - Cover by Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers - Van Sessions 12 (Performed between Salt Lake City, UT and Denver, CO). Thanks to Jeff and Cassie Jones for selecting this song and supporting Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers' Winter Tour 2012!
I've been a bit MIA for the past few days, as my grandmother died last week. I'm giving the eulogy at the funeral today, and I thought I'd share it:
Me and Grandma Ruby, taken at the K-Mart 1976
It’s hard to convey the essence of a person who means so many things to so many. Wife, sister, mother of six, grandmother of fifteen, great-grandmother and great-great grandmother—of many more, and each of us has a different set of stories.
I’m not going to pretend to speak for everyone, or to show Ruby Light through anyone’s perspective but my own. She was my grandmother, but in some tangible ways she was also a mother to me. She took care of me and my mother until I was three years old, letting us both stay with her and my grandpa in their already-cramped trailer. She took me to K-Mart to get our photo taken together every year we stayed with them. When my uncle Mike told me to move from in front of the TV and I refused, instead of swatting my behind—like she maybe should have—she told Mike to just let me be, knowing it was the only space I could find for myself. She and Grandpa were the first to take me fishing, though my uncle Mike later informed me—mostly truthfully—that for some reason they only kept the little fish. When my mom married and I had trouble in my new home, she let me stay for weeks, even months with them. When I selfishly and wrongfully demanding that Grandpa give me a larger cut for helping him cut and stack firewood, she insisted that he give me all the money he made working with me that week. I still wish I hadn’t taken that money.
Grandma relished the role of matriarch—she was dramatic, yes, she smoked prodigiously, and like all of us she sometimes held grudges. She always made saying goodbye a long process, asking when you were coming next, insisting you take a quilt, and letting you know she was going to miss you when you went out that door. My wife now complains about my extended goodbyes—this is where I got it. One of us said it best last month on Facebook, on the day of her last birthday: This woman is the foundation of our family.
When someone important to a family’s sense of itself dies, especially after 84 years, many of which she spent as the family’s guiding force, that death may seem to signify a crack in the foundation of that family. To an extent, this is natural—children become parents, parents become grandparents, and generations proceed from those that came before them. Especially in a family as full of, er, personalities as ours, it’s easy to use this as an excuse to split the possessions, to hunker down with our immediate families, to bicker over perceived slights. But we can also use this time to reaffirm our connection to each other—to remember our matriarch, to reminisce about the time we’ve had together, to plan our respective futures together while we grieve the loss of our central binding figure.
I say we choose the latter. As Grandma always said, “Isn’t it nice, this time we have together?” Even without her, we’re still together, in this room, if only for today. Look around, and recognize your own faces in each other. Say hello, tell stories of Grandma, plan something you’d like to do together in the future, and mean it.Take care of each other, internets.
About a month ago I wrote a post on the festering war between churchies and brunchies on Sundays in NYC.
Well, it's been resolved. The brunchies win!
Now, can't we all just get along?
Besides childcare duties and general summer fun, I've been spending the past couple of days gathering and reading the responses to my first post on the map-essay as form. Unsurprisingly, I was remarkably naive in thinking I was discovering territory many people hadn't already mined.
Also unsurprisingly, one of the first people to point this out to me was Patrick Madden, who somehow managed to find time while hiking through the UK this week to write this brief summary of the form's development after fellow essayist Liz Blood mentioned Dinty W. Moore's "Mr. Plimpton's Revenge" as a prime example:
Joey Franklin invented the Google Maps essay, which Dinty then borrowed. Joey had a version of his essay in The Normal School later. Joey may direct you to his original. Amy Schuff Roper published a map essay called "A Catalog of Childhood Games" in The Iron Horse Literary Review last year.
He later followed up with this, exemplifying the idea of independent redundancy that he's currently developing in a forthcoming essay:
The idea of a Google Maps essay might arise independently from different people, but The Joey Franklin to Dinty W Moore trajectory is documented, as Joey was Dinty's student when Joey's car was stolen, giving rise to the idea. When I read Joey's, I thought "I gotta steal that idea!" but I haven't yet done it.
Steven Church, whose The Normal School published "Mr Plimpton's Revenge" with full art layout and design in 2009 (available for $5 on TNS's website), took the idea and ran with it. In a wonderful fit of inspiration in response to my original post about map-essays and my earlier review of his "On Loitering," converted it to a map-essay:
And quite a few other friends gave me other references for unintended uses for Google Maps:
ADDENDUM:
Patrick Madden just let me know about Barbara Hui's wonderful map-critique of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn , saying:
It's "criticism" of a non-map book, but it gets at the overlap, and Sebald's a wonderful example of a wanderer whose work lends itself to mapping...
I used the Hui map in planning a hike along the Sussex coast tracing Sebald's steps with this study abroad group.
You can find Hui's map-essay here, and read a NYTimes article about it here.
...But if there is a time when New Yorkers take notice of their watery condition, it’s summer. And I find kids especially attuned to any hint of water, from ocean to fountain to puddle. My last Parks Series entry focused more on the destructive capacity of the water around us, but one of the many great things about kids is that they don’t see that. They see puddles to jump in, waves crashing into them, sparkly reflectors of golden sunshine and azure sky.
Every single one of my trips to parks last summer with Stringbean involved water. It was a prerequisite, and she took great pains at the beginning of each adventure to pack her swimsuit, apply her sunscreen, and find out in advance not which parks we were visiting but what water would be involved. And being an adult with a remarkable capacity for sapping the mystique and fun out of these spontaneous encounters with my children and my child-self, I’ve spent some time codifying and categorizing these experiences. Once a month this summer, I’d like to present to you my findings. For my June post, I’ll tell you about one of my favorite categories of water-mongering: ferry-riding.
As a reader and a writer, I am a lover of the essay. As such, I tend to try to crowbar just about everything I ingest in the media to somehow fit under the essay umbrella. The word "essay," after all, derives from the French essai , to try or attempt, so I tend to think of any mode of nonfiction expression that's attempting something new or vaguely experimental as an essay. This would include list-essaying, video essaying, audio essaying, mashup, mixed-media, or any other attempt at subverting and/or expanding the limits of human expression.
With that said, one of my recent favorite essay forms is the "map-essay." Made widely accessible by Google Maps, the map-essay is created when one or more people use a map as the structure around which to frame a topic, inserting bits of information and/or story about the topic into the relevant places on the map.
One of my favorite recent examples of this is "Mapping Dylan." Created on Slate by Thomas Bollier, Chris Kirk, and Richard Kreitner for Dylan's 72nd birthday, Mapping Dylan is an interactive map of the world with a marker for every place Dylan has every included in one of his songs and a mini-essay on the place's meaning in Dylan's world. Its creators explain it thus:
Bob Dylan’s music, it’s often said, happens in a world of its own—where the highway is for gamblers and you’re always 1,000 miles from home. It’s a surreal, ethereal realm, lawless but for chance, allusion, and rhyme.
And yet it is our world, because there's another, parallel tendency in Dylan’s songs: the direct place-name reference. Once the amateur Dylanologist tries to think of some, they flood the brain. “I’ll look for you in old Honolulu/ San Francisco, Ashtabula.” “Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn/ In the year of who knows when.” “Oxford town, Oxford town/ Everybody’s got their head bowed down.” From the personal—“that little Minnesota town”—to the political—“Ever since the British burned the White House down/ There’s a bleeding wound in the heart of town”—Dylan uses place-names to maintain rhythm or rhyme, to reference other works of art, or to evoke certain thoughts and emotions. (We never do learn what it’s like “to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again,” though we feel like we do.) It’s only natural, after all, that a man who left tiny Hibbing, Minn. for New York City at age 19, quickly became world-famous, and has spent the last 25 years on a “never-ending” worldwide tour, might have a curious perspective on the concept of place.
A more utilitarian use of the map-essay, of which this is but one of many examples, is "The Scoop," which compiles and organizes many places in New York City on a map of the town by subject; my favorite "subject" is coffee houses, and I consult The Scoop frequently when I'm looking for a place to work on my laptop for an hour or two while away from home. A brainchild of the New York Times, The Scoop is now available as an app.
These two examples might seem like completely different things, and they are, in intent at least. But they share a formal quality with all the types experimental essays I listed above - an assumption that, in a post-scarcity age of information, any stab at originality or utility, in the arts or in the marketplace, lies not in creation of new objects but in arrangement of the myriad objects already in existence.
At night now in Fresno or in your city they might gather beneath the glow of street-lamps, lurking around its penumbral cone of light. Packs of teenagers. Black kids. Brown kids. White kids. Brawny boys in baggy clothes, hats and team jerseys; pale, inked kids wearing white wife-beaters; girls in skinny jeans, high-heels and higher hair; or a population of bearded men smiling through meth-snaggled teeth, shuffling burnouts and tweakers with face tattoos, gang bangers with bulldog paws or red lips painted permanently on their necks; or maybe it’s those ubiquitous kids at a suburban mall wearing Polo shirts and skinny jeans, high-top sneakers, and puffy Tommy Hilfiger jackets and they’re loitering around Jamba Juice or the movie theater, around your neighborhood school, or outside your business every night. These are the loiterers, the idle enemies of consumption and purpose. These are the targets of subjective warfare.
This essay by Steven Church from The Rumpus hit a number of buttons with me. First, his definition (or redefinition) of loitering as "an idea...as undefined, abstract, and subjective as happiness or suffering" had never occurred to me before, but made perfect sense.
To do nothing now in the name of loitering is also to repurpose in the name of purposelessness an otherwise purposed space. And we are surrounded by purposed spaces.
As a city dweller I see this all the time, and like Church it sometimes gives me a great sense of reclamation, of the triumph of humanity and self-determination over the authoritarian voices of municipal government and corporate America, but sometimes, like when teenagers dribble their basketball and shoot them at streetlamps outside our window, it gives me a vague feeling that spans from annoyance to dread.
One of the beautiful things about "On Loitering," though, is that Church doesn't choose sides. But he does (fairly) frame loitering laws as legislative crutches governments and police can use when they don't really know what law someone - whether a loafing teenager or an Occupy protester of Martin Luther King - is breaking.
Legislating loitering is like legislating nothingness.
That last line there is what perhaps sticks with me the most after reading the essay - firm, moderately existential indictment of imposing rule over human nature, and an acknowledgement - even a defense - of that void we all sense absent purpose.
As an avid Best American Essays reader, I really can't think of better news than this. Since its inception in 1986, each of the BAE volumes have reflected the fluid, ever-changing nature of the essay as a form, with each guest editor defining the terms as s/he went. Through much of the Nineties, thanks to practitioners/advocates like Phillip Lopate, Ian Frazier, and of course series editor Robert Atwan, the term "personal essay" became accepted as a sort-form hybrid of criticism, lyric meditation, argument, and/or personal memoir. For the last fifteen years or so of the series, though, I've noticed less stability in definition of what exactly an essay is, which I think is a good thing for the essay as a form - it's more shapeshifting and mellifluous than ever because of this instability - but has made for some wildly varied BAE volumes. Last year's volume, edited by David Brooks, was on the whole stolid and reportorial; 2011, edited by Edwidge Danticat, was intensely personal and memoir-laden; 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens in the last year of his life, was heavy on argument and did little to alleviate the conception of the essay as the domain of old white guys.
This year, with Strayed as Guest Editor, we get a bona fide superstar. Her bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail made her as close to a mainstream name as nonfiction writers get, and Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of her Dear Sugar columns for The Rumpus, kept her in tight with the more literary types. From a PR point of view, there's no possibly better choice for Best American Essays.
Of course, I'm no publicist. I'm a writer, and as such I can see no better choice. I actually wrote a review of one of her earlier essays in my BAE series on Hunger Mountain, with some rudimentary photoshopped splicing of a photo of her with some Sugarcubes album covers that had my editor considering killing the review so neither she nor the Sugarcubes management would come after us.
I eventually convinced my editor that the Sugarcubes were sufficiently broken up and wouldn't care; I did worry a bit about Strayed though. One of the splices in particular could be interpreted as disrespectful, though I didn't mean it that way. I wanted her to like me, and didn't want her not to like me.
Less than a day after the review was published online, I saw a tweet from Strayed:
@HungerMtn What a cool piece. Thank you, John Proctor.
Now I'm not typically prone to be starstruck, but I'm unashamed to admit my first reaction was, "She liked it!" And my brief interaction with her was not atypical. Cheryl Strayed, more than most writers, welcomes the social, interactive nature of writing, or more specifically essaying, a form of writing which, however it is defined, is characterized by interaction - with memory, with experience, with other texts. Can't wait until October 8!
The confluence of a great fishing trip this week and both of my daughters' birthdays over the past few weeks has made me a bit nostalgic. One product of this nostalgia is that I've gone back to one of my earlier blogs and found this post, from just a few weeks before my first daughter was born, reprinted here. Enjoy!
To date the majority of my fishing experience in the New York City area has been freshwater fishing and casting from the piers while crabbing on Long Island. But I’ve been wanting for years to go out on one of those charter boats for striped bass out of Sheepshead Bay while they’re running in the spring and fall. On the urging of my wife, who’s two weeks from due with our first child, I finally made the trip last Wednesday night aboard the Sea Queen VII.
I’d heard about the Sea Queen from an old acquaintance who, after thoroughly researching all the different rates, confirmed it as the best deal for the cost (45 bucks per person for the night). The boat left at 7:00pm and I was a little worried about traffic on Ocean Avenue and the Belt Parkway so I left at 4:45 or so; turns out I overshot a bit as I got there around 5:15. Captain Steve was at the dock and the boat was just coming in from the day trip, so I made sure with him that my online payment went through and then went to the bagel shop across the street and got a pastrami and sauerkraut on pumpernickel and a coffee while I waited. I noticed at the counter they were selling Dramamine for seasickness at $1 a pouch, but didn’t bother.
The day crew was still cleaning the boat when I boarded, so I took my seat in the cabin while the crew talked about the day trip and speculated that the stripers would really be running that night. I’m pretty sure the “No Smoking in the Cabin” sign was either a formality or just for customers, as I was the only one not smoking in the cabin.
For a good 30 minutes I was the only non-crew member on board, then a guy in glasses and a baseball cap took his seat on deck and looked stoically out at the water. As far as I could tell, he didn’t get up from his seat until we got back. The next guy on was wearing a full Puma jogging suit and had a perfectly gelled part in his hair. He walked with an exaggerated swagger, and sat down next to me in the cabin. As soon as the next guy walked in he yelled in a thick Slavic accent, “Ahmed! I fished wit’ you lastime, remember?” Ahmed nodded at him, and then I recognized him – Ahmed was the guy I’d seen in the picture from two nights ago on the Sea Queen website with a 41-inch striper, the biggest of the season. I congratulated him. “Eh,” he replied, “I catch more tonight, I think.”
I watched as about 20 more people got onboard, while the crew tried to court people onto the boat on the boardwalk as they walked by. There ended up about 40 people in all as we disembarked. A crew member set me up with a baitcast rod and reel that looked about 50 years old, and the guy in the Puma jogging suit sat down next to me.
“I from Albania, my friend,” he said. “What country you from?”
“Um, Kansas,” I replied.
“Kansas? Where that at?”
“About as far away as Albania.”
As we got further out, I looked back and saw the sun falling on Coney Island, the Wonder Wheel and the parachute jump silhouetted by that big yellow ball, and the Verrazano Bridge looming ubiquitously behind it all. And the guy in the Yankees cap was just sitting there looking at it. I guess he didn’t really come to fish.
My Albanian friend leaned on the railing. “These waves, my friend. I don’ like.” I was starting to agree with him.
The boat stopped, and one of the crew guys gave each of us a cupful of worms. But they weren’t like any worms I’d ever seen – more like 4-8-inch millipedes, with a gaping mouth at one end that made them look like lampreys. “Just hook one through the mouth and let the rest dangle,” the crewman told me and the gaggle of college kids from Montauk that had gathered on the other side of me and were all looking into their cups with varying degrees of fear in their eyes. One of them poked inside the cup and pulled his hand back like he’d just been stung. “Just grab one, they don’t bite,” the crewman said, then pulled a handful out of his bucket and put one on each of their hooks. “See?”
Then for the first of many times that night the ship’s horn rang, followed by the clamor of baited hooks being thrown into the water all at once. I about lost my balance getting my line in the water, the boat was rocking so much. And for the first of many times that night:
“Fish on!”
A guy on the other side of the boat brought in the first striper of the night, a “short” that didn’t meet the 28-inch length minimum, and then an eastern European lady at the front of the boat brought in the first keeper of the day. And so it went for the next hour - fish on, fish on, boat horn, lines in, move the boat, horn, line out, fish on, fish on, “FISH ON!” I finally had one of my own at the end of my line, and after a couple minutes of fighting I brought in my first, a 25-incher that the crewman didn’t even bother himself with but I had to admire for a minute before putting it back in the water.
Then the horn sounded, and I ran to the bathroom and puked up about one tenth of my body weight in coffee, pastrami, and gastric acid. I must have heaved about ten times, but serendipitously my stomach was completely empty at the same time the horn sounded for the next round. I went back to my place next to my Albanian friend and looked over to see another guy puking off the side of the boat.
My Albanian friend
Then my Albanian friend shouted, “Fish on!” as his rod almost bent over double. “Holy sheet! Is big!” he yelled. My line went tight as well, then I realized it was because it was caught on his. This was obviously a keeper on his line, and I knew it was my job to get my line the fuck off his. The fish came to the surface thrashing, and I had the precarious job of grabbing his line long enough to untangle my hook from it but not long enough for the striper to break it. I was in top form though, doing my job in less than 5 seconds flat, and he landed his keeper for the night.
The run kept going strong for another hour – I caught another short, the guys at the front of the boat caught maybe 10 keepers, and then it was over. Between boat positionings, I noticed the eastern European lady and her husband would go into the cabin and have kumquats and shots of Patrón. They never looked sick, and they both pulled in their 2-fish limit of keepers and plenty of shorts. Don’t know about the tequila, but I’m totally bringing the kumquats for the next trip. And the Dramamine.
On many Sundays like this one, my family and I enjoy the closest thing we have to a Sunday morning ritual, brunch. As reported recently in Brooklyn Magazine, our Sunday ritual is coming into a strange, old-meets-new conflict with another Sunday morning ritual:
Around this time last year, we all had a little bit of a scare about a so-called War on Brunch, in which older, presumably pious Greenpoint residents started fussing about sidewalk brunch seating literally blocking their routes to church on Sunday mornings. Tame and sort of silly as far as these things go, except that they actually did have the law on their side, thanks to a decades-old (and mostly ignored) regulation barring restaurants from serving outdoors anytime before noon on Sunday mornings. Now that it's nice again, this problem is back!
The regulation and its current application, paraphrased in an earlier New York Times article, goes like this:
An obscure city law, probably meant to accommodate the serenity of the Christian day of rest, bars cafes from setting out tables on the sidewalk before noon on Sundays. The rule is being cited in an effort to shut down outdoor brunches at two sidewalk cafes, and it is a rule that both cafe owners and officials charged with enforcement have mostly ignored.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, as a recovering fundamentalist Christian I can attest that brunch is a lot more fun than church, and most times more worthwhile. On the other, the story can also be framed (and in fact often is framed) as the gentrifying brunchers vs. the old school immigrants who settled the borough long before, in this case the waterfront neighborhood of Greenpoint:
...A bastion of immigrants from Poland...for the past decade has seen an influx of hipsters, young professionals and condo owners who have imported their flâneur lifestyles and more freewheeling religious outlooks to a historically blue-collar neighborhood of row houses, ethnic shops, small factories and old churches.
Of course, this could be a non-story soon, as Williamsburg/Greenpoint councilman Stephen Levin is presenting the case for moving the opening time for sidewalk brunch to 10am to the city with a dramatic flair that makes me love local politics:
The time is now for the war on brunch to end. Meals have been lost on both sides and the uneaten stack of pancakes continues to grow. I am certain this bill will go over-easy with New Yorkers hungry for common-sense brunch regulations and hopeful that the bill will move through committee and be passed by the full Council before more people have to sacrifice brunch for lunch.
Bon Appetit! Or Amen. Or whatever.
I write this post with a belly full of white wine and striped bass, so beware any overt romanticization and verbal hyperbole that may ensue. (Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I will probably hold off until tomorrow to post, after I've edited out the most embarrassing stuff.)
I love striped bass, with a deep, abiding, respectful love borne of decades of mythologization and years of pursuit. Growing up in Kansas, I read In-Fisherman magazine and watched Bill Dance obsessively, and no fish - not a 70-pound catfish, not the delicately-hued California golden trout - looked more regal to me than a striper that spanned two outstretched arms. I'm not a particularly good striper fisherman - left to my own devices, I haven't yet caught one over 18 inches from the surf, and I don't own a boat-ready rod and reel so I have to use the stock tackle provided by the charter and party boats where I hitch a ride a handful of times during the spring striper run.
And to tell the truth, I hadn't had much luck fishing so far this year. I got skunked on the Marilyn Jean IV, my favorite party boat out of Sheepshead Bay, a couple of weeks ago, and I was pretty sure my luck was on a continued downturn this morning when our local ferile cat jumped out in front of my path at 3:30am when I was walking out of our gate.
And then, when I met my party at our charter boat, the Karen Ann, off Cross Bay Boulevard in Jamaica Bay, we had to wait an hour on the dock as they (pretty amazingly, I must say) strung a series of extension cords from a nearby building to charge the boat's battery, which had been drained when someone nefariously left the lights in the boat on all night. As they were working the first mate called out, "Anybody got any water?" I handed over my pint bottle of Poland Spring, and he downed the whole thing in about three seconds. I guess I wasn't that thirsty.
Speaking of my party...one reason I felt pretty good going into this trip was that it was kind of like a bank heist, with a crew assembled by Paul Greenberg, author of the bestselling Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food , that included oceanographer Philip Orton, documentary filmmaker Sam Green, and me. Also in on the caper, er, fishing trip were Captain Frankie, a chef at Blue Water on Union Square, a post-Sandy relief researcher (Frankie has some great stories of riding the storm out with his boat to keep it tied to the shore), the mate, a local, and a photojournalist who documented everything.
I'm tempted to spend the whole night here recounting the narrative of our adventure, but I'll instead say it in photos (all of which were taken by someone who wasn't the photojournalist - his are undoubtedly much better):
The scene at dawn. Guys in kayaks, teams in skiffs, masses in party boats, all after the same boiling mess of fish under the water.
Bringing in the bait - menhaden to ecologists, bunker to fishermen.
Got the bait. Lock and load, boys.
This is what happens when a bluefish gets to your bait before a striped bass. It's a dangerous business.
After a long morning of fishing, the getaway - with a suitable metaphor soaring into the clear blue sky over JFK.
Paul, dividing the loot.
The crew, with the haul.
And me, with my prize.
As you can see, catching a big striped bass makes me very happy. Part of me feels like Bill Dance or any of the Lindner brothers from the In-Fisherman; part of me looks forward to coming home and showing the big fish to my four-year-old daughter; part of me can't wait to throw it on the grill. As you might not be able to see, being out on the water with friends, old and new, and forging shared experiences and memories with them also makes me very happy.
I went on my first fishing boat for stripers in the weeks before my oldest daughter was born; she turns four years old tomorrow (or today, as I'm now posting this). In the past four years I've shared boats with my best friend Andrew, my best German friend Chris, a bunch of dad friends, some great crews, and a bunch of strangers whose only shared inclination with me is wanting to catch these beautiful, ravenous, tasty fish.
Some might judge me, like my friend Michelle, a vegetarian and animal lover (I am the latter as well), who in her own good-natured way berates me on Facebook when she sees my fishing and crabbing photos, or like the guy who wrote the less-good-natured recent blog post in The L, "Pescetarians Are the Fucking Worst," but I would venture to guess that guy 1) smokes, 2) has listened to or played music at a level that has annoyed his neighbors, and/or 3) wears at least one article of clothing from the Eighties ironically, all of which are imminently judgeworthy depending upon the audience. Paul Greenberg, our group's leader, makes his life out of maintaining sustainable, healthy fish populations for future generations. Frank, the boat's captain, comes from a fishing family that has sustained itself for generations on the bounty of Jamaica Bay. And it's not like we robbed a bank or something.
In 2009, in order to sublimate myself to the essay as a form, I began reading each volume of The Best American Essays
, one volume a month, in reverse chronological order. This lasted for
about a year, or until I got to 2000; I now satisfy myself with just a
handful of essays each month from the remaining volumes. While I was reading a volume a month, I began writing "Sideways Reviews" for Hunger Mountain in which found something novel in an essay or series of essays and responded to it in whatever ways I saw fit. My wonderful editors Cynthia Newberry Martin and Claire Guyton then did their best to get the reviews to make some sort of sense. I now have those reviews, nine in all, with a convenient Table of Contents from Hunger Mountain's website, in my Critical Work section.