Here is New York.

A dear friend was in town visiting last weekend, and his eyes lit up as we walked by an independent bookstore in my neighborhood. While he spent the next hour poring over everything from philosophy to cookbooks and stationery, I found myself wandering into the New York section. Remembering a book that's been on my wish list for ages, I scoured the shelves until I found it.



While physically a book, Here is New York is more accurately an essay that E.B. White wrote one sweltering summer in 1949, as he strolled through this fair little city. It is seventy five hundred words of inspiration, longing, and majesty, and every one of those words made me swell in a frenzy of underlining. If you have ever gazed at this site in silence –



...or have felt something, anything upon watching this AmEx spot -



...then you should read it. I don't even know which bits to share with you since I've underlined half the book, but here's a shot at a few.

And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little diners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin.
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By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience – if they did they would live elsewhere.

One of my favorite things about Here is New York is that despite there being some things that date it, like elevated trains on 3rd Avenue or mentions of "in baskets" at work (heh!), it still feels like he is writing it today.

Police now ride in radio prowl cars instead of gumshoeing around the block swinging their sticks. A ride in the subway costs ten cents, and the seats are apt to be dark green instead of straw yellow. Men go to saloons to gaze at televised events instead of to think long thoughts. It is all very disconcerting.
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The glib barker on the sight-seeing bus tells his passengers that this is the "street of lost souls," but the Bowery does not think of itself as lost; it meets its peculiar problem in its own way – plenty of gin mills, plenty of flophouses, plenty of indifference, and always, at the end of the line, Bellevue.

But the best part – the very part that made me almost throw the book up into the air and do a dance as it made its way down, was this. I love it so much that I am putting it on the Internet again so that as many people as possible happen upon it.

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

This post is for Nicole. ♥

1Q84

This came in the mail today:



I don't think I have been this excited about a book, ever. About a year ago, I read that Murakami's latest novel was to be translated to English, and that it was so long that it would be coming out in two volumes. I got so excited that I tried to quickly make myself forget about it, because I don't deal well with anticipation.

When murmurs started up about 1Q84 again a few months ago, I immediately put the pre-order in my Amazon cart, probably got distracted, and forgot to check out, leaving it sitting there. I have 10 other books of his (8 novels and 2 short story collections); just as I was sorting through them all tonight (a very strange coincidence), Mister Toky knocked on my door, holding the copy he had pre-ordered for me with a smile. I hugged it and hopped around the apartment for a bit, read a random sentence fragment toward the middle, and then set it aside. Things are way too nuts right now to even consider starting a book of this length that I know will consume me, but in about 2 or 3 weeks' time... let's just say my friends might be seeing a bit less of me for a while :)

The Arrival

I wrote this last night while half awake and just remembered about it! Yes, I'm alive. Hopefully the next time I'm this busy, I'll force myself to stay awake again and write. In short, the past two or three weeks have been solidly filled with a new and super exciting project. In between, I took a long weekend for my birthday! Speaking of, let's talk about one of the coolest gifts I got this year.


The Arrival is a graphic novel. Though: there are no words in it. Shaun Tan drew this entire thing with pencil, and makes one feel like they're looking through a photo album rather than reading a story; check out these clouds he drew in 60 different ways:


The book is about a man who travels to another land to make a better life for himself and his family. The journey begins with their tearful goodbye, the train and ship that take him to the new place, and the immense line of fellow immigrants waiting to sign their way into their new lives.


The man gets lost and confused, can't read the new language, draws pictures to communicate with others, is befuddled by strange-looking foods and creatures, looks for work and meets other people who have come to the same place with similar stories of finding a better life. You see him gaze at the family portrait that he has brought with him while alone in his room, and the loneliness /longing for his family is palpable.


My boyfriend told me that he had read about The Arrival in the New York Times some time ago, so I looked it up and found a review. They put it well:

“The Arrival” tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story. ... By borrowing American imagery to communicate an otherwise universal story, Tan highlights just how central the immigrant experience is to the way America defines itself.

Something about this book feels so real, even though the fantastical gadgets, food, animals and alphabet in this unnamed land are completely made up. Tan's thank-you in the back of the book talks about how he was inspired by things like photographs taken at Ellis Island, and a famous shot of a newspaper boy announcing the sinking of the Titanic. But maybe even more than this, it's because this is how anybody must feel when traveling to a completely foreign place. Even though I had the luxury of the Internet and some prior knowledge of Japanese culture before going over there in the spring (for example), I can identify with this main character a lot of the time in his confusion and feeling of homesickness in a sea full of people. Conveying all of these feelings without even writing a word is truly awesome.