A Reading by Jumpha and Jonathan

I always seem to find out about readings by authors I like too late. In New York they are always going on at various bookstores, but I always read about them in a back issue of New York Magazine a week after they've happened. Manu, however, is more on the ball, and a whole week in advance he invited me to a joint reading by Jumpha Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen. Lahiri is perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection _The Interpreter of Maladies_ which I finished at 2:00 A.M. on an air mattress in Anthony and Jane's living room floor about a year and a half ago. Franzen wrote _The Corrections_, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. (I don't remember where I was when I finished it several years ago, but I find myself thinking about it a lot, which is the mark of any good piece of writing as far as I'm concerned.) I learned at the reading that he's also a prolific author of non-fiction, journalistic-type pieces.

The reading was a fundraiser for Lahiri's kids' school, the Waldorf School, in Brooklyn, a very new-age-y kind of place for wealthy families that has an unconventional instructional approach and organic everything. Apparently she's really involved in construction of a new library there. It took place in the auditorium of The New School, which I'd never visited before. After a late start, a very nervous moderator, apparently also and author and parent at the school, introduced the authors and babbled for a while about how much time they'd all put into discussing and planning the event. Based on his struggles to lead discussion later, it didn't really show.

Lahiri read first, two sections of a new novel she's working on. She didn't tell us the name, probably because it most likely doesn't have one yet. For a change, it's about an Indian kid in the Northeast... Of course it was beautifully written in a very elegant, understated way. Actually, that phrase describes Lahiri herself quite well. She has a soft voice and a shy, serious demeanor. Next, Franzen boisterously read a non-fiction piece called "Emptying the Skies" about illegal songbird hunting around the Mediterranean, which appeared in The New Yorker in July of 2010. It was funny and exciting and fascinating all at once. Lahiri is, very obviously, a splendidly accomplished writer, but Franzen can make your jaw drop. I'm often nervous about whether authors I meet will live up to my expectations; I want them to be delightful people, when often the antisocial, too-introspective, socially awkward types are the ones who have the inclination toward literature. Franzen was exactly the way I wanted him to be: sharp, witty, insightful. I'd like to have a martini with him.


After the reading, the moderator inexpertly led a discussion, which started off with a series of statements that kept dead-ending when he realized that they weren't going to lead to questions. Franzen pointed out that both he and Jumpha were more than capable of interacting with the audience if they'd only be provided with something to answer. The audience had passed in a fair number of index cards with questions on them, but the moderator largely ignored them. When he was finally able to stagger out a rather uninteresting question about geography, both authors jumped on it and discussed it at length - anything to prevent the mic from being passed back to the moderator, it seemed. Lahiri spoke about the way that, for her, people define a place more than the place itself does. The daughter of immigrants, Lahiri's cohort served as a more significant atlas than the geographical location. She also talked about setting a story in an Italian village she'd never visited, based entirely on a tourism video she got her hands on. Years later, she found herself visiting the village and taking copious notes, even though the story was already published.

Franzen spoke about the role of research. Surprisingly, he feels facts are confining for a writer of fiction, and he'd much rather write things they way they seem like they should be. (One of the protagonists in _The Corrections_ has Parkinson's, so I was surprised to hear that Franzen eschews research, since he must have had to do a lot of it to follow Alfred through his deterioration.) On other hand, he said one has to pick facts that speak loudly when one is writing non-fiction, since the piece is essentially a series of facts cobbled together. I'd always heard that authors love research, but I guess I tend to read about research only after I finish a work of historical fiction, and obviously authors drawn to that genre are going to have a propensity for it.

Now that my copy is signed, I refuse to read it. I just checked one out from the library.

After the reading, we stood in a long line to get books autographed, then went to a hip restaurant not too far away for a decadent dinner with Manu's glamorous cousin and her entourage, which included her assistant, her co-jewelry designer, and a married Brazilian singer-songwriter-musician couple. Our final stop of the night was a Southern diner-cum-hip-hop lounge with retro album covers all over the walls and tables shaped like records. I can't say it really fit with the theme of the evening, but it was certainly a nice way to cap things off.

The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Fall

My assailant

If this is true, I'm colossal. Two Sundays ago, I was 3 miles into a very pleasant 12-mile run with Manu when, for reasons still unclear to me, I went flying, Superman-style, and landed on a metal subway grate. Although my  shoulder, hip, hands, and elbow took a beating, my left knee was the first to make impact and therefore got the worst of the fall. By the time I had hobbled over to some nearby steps and worked up the guts to roll back the my tights to actually look at it, it was already puffing up, and the parts that weren't bloody were taking on a striking shade of indigo.

After I got my breath back, I was annoyed, and insisted that I could probably keep going. "Oh yeah?" asked Manu, who was doing a masterful job of keeping a straight face as sympathy and amusement battled behind his calm exterior. "Run to that wall." Huffily, I stood up and took off running. This lasted for exactly two steps, when, to the enjoyment of a nearby group of tourists, I set my left foot down and nearly fell again.

I insisted that Manu go on without me - no point in ruining the run for both of us - so he escorted me to street in a manner that put me in mind of a retirement home nurse. He flagged down a cab for me, threw me a twenty-dollar bill, and continued on his way. (Had I been alone, I'd have been in quite a pickle, as I never carry cash or even a Metro card with me when I run.) I limped from the cab to his nearby apartment, where his roommate's brother, a 4th-year medical student bound for the ER, very professionally wrapped a few ice packs in paper towels and applied them to my various injuries, all the while not breathing a word about what a klutz I was. Manu's roommate kindly asked me if I needed one more ice pack for my bruised ego.

Kneecaps #1 and #2

While the incident was, obviously, annoying, particularly when you consider that there are four flights of stairs between my apartment and the rest of the city, I mostly found it amusing. It's slightly less so now, with four days between me and the National Marathon and what looks like a second knee cap stubbornly refusing to go disappear. My dad told me in an over-the-phone diagnosis that there really wasn't much I could do but wait for it to go away. (Bad.) However, he also said that, from my description, there wasn't really much I could do to cause further serious damage to it either. (Good. Sort of). I ran three tentative miles on it yesterday, and while it was achy throughout and is, perhaps, marginally more sore today than it was yesterday, it was definitely tolerable. So I plan to line up in the corral for the National Marathon on Saturday and see what happens. Donations of pre-race morphine will be accepted with gratitude.

Bluegrass in the Big City

Have I mentioned that I have absurdly interesting, talented friends? On Wednesday, I met up with Chris, and old college buddy, who as moved to New York to record and play bluegrass music. (Huh?) Ok, so he's had to pick up a few temp and tutoring jobs here and there to make ends meet, as well as pick up a third roommate, but he's loving his time here, and has introduced me to some great music venues. First it was Irish music on Sundays, and on Wednesday we went to the Grisly Pear near Washington Square for some fantastic bluegrass.

I discovered bluegrass sometime during college, and have been an on-and-off fan ever since. I'd only ever seen a few live performances, though, and this is one genre that shines brightest when great musicians get together to jam. This is exactly what happens at the Grisly Pear. We arrived early and got spots at a centrally located booth, and after about a beer and a half the musicians started to arrive, various cases in hand. They were mostly guitar players, but initially there were mandolins (how I love the mandolin!), a banjo, a harmonica, a bass, and a dobro (I'd always thought it was called a steel guitar, but Chris kept using this term for it), and more musicians showed up throughout the night.

The musicians stood in a circle around a few tables that had been pushed together to hold their various beverages. They played pretty consistently for several hours, and were still going strong when I left. Sometimes one or another of them would drift away to chat with someone or have a smoke outside, and the gap in the circle would close until he reappeared again. They went around the circle, taking turns doing lead vocals or instrumental solos, with everyone else joining in with effortless harmonies from time to time.

A picture that I wish I'd taken from The New York Times. Uncle Sheriff Bob is near the middle, wearing his straw hat.

The best character, by far, was Uncle Sheriff Bob, a man in his 70's who showed up in a battered straw cowboy hat and a leather vest that had a sheriff's star pinned to the front and "Sheriff of Good Times" embroidered on the back. He came and chatted with Chris for a while, then proudly pulled out a battered article (read it here) about the group's jam sessions that had appeared in The New York Times a few weeks before. We congratulated him. Chris joined in for a few songs while I was there, and as soon as I left I'm sure he was back up again. The talent in the room was staggering, and the atmosphere, with the dim lighting and acoustic music wending its way through the appreciative audience, was at once electrifying and soothing. I felt as though I'd been transported out of New York.

Job Search (and Search and Search and Search)

Dear Fate,

I thought I played this right. I went to grad school right when the market was at its worst and jobs were supposed to be scarcest, particularly for government jobs because of tightening state budgets. I wasn't looking for a job during the worst of the recession; I used that time to get another credential and therefore improve my chances of being hired to teach...somewhere. Now the economy is picking up (according the most recent issue of The Economist, anyway), and I've graduated from a top-notch school. So how come you seem to be conspiring against me?

Let's start with the hiring freeze. Seriously? The New York public school district supposedly isn't hiring anyone (although I hear they're making occasional exceptions for special ed. and ELL teachers), and on top of that, I hear that they plan to lay off 6,000 teachers this spring. SIX THOUSAND. The upshot is that competition for charter schools and independent schools is brutal. Everyone wants to teach in NYC, and everyone wants to teach English. Yeah, yeah, I've got the reading specialist degree to give me an edge, but at this point I'm not sure it's enough.

I've attended two recruitment fairs in the last few days, both through Columbia. One was specifically for charter schools and one was a more general K-12 fair with charters, independent schools, and out-of-city/state districts. They were essentially huge rooms filled with tables manned by representatives from different schools snagging passers-by with varying levels of enthusiasm. Most of them had stacks of glossy brochures that must have cost a fortune to print, and some of them even had personalized tote bags, water bottles, mints, pens, and mini bottles of hand sanitizer to give out alongside the standard bowls of candy. (Most people, myself included, seemed too intimidated to stock up on all the free loot, though.) They were happy to answer questions and would take resumes, but the litany was the same virtually everywhere that I stopped: Fill out our online application. My biggest accomplishment was collecting a giant stack of brochures for anywhere and everywhere I thought might possibly lead to a job for the fall. Next step: carpet bomb New York with my resume and hope for the best.

You haven't been entirely cruel, Fate (or maybe you're just toying with me). I have two phone interviews scheduled, one this week and one next week. Friends have told me that most schools ask you to come in and teach a demo lesson to a room full of kids you've never seen before if the interview goes well. I hate being observed, and I hate the idea of trying to teach a lesson on a random topic to kids who were studying something different yesterday and really don't owe me a thing. But that's the way it goes, and it's a bit depressing that the chance to teach one of these lessons is my immediate goal since it will lead to employment.

Look, Fate, I know you've been kind to me in the past. My first teaching job fell into my lap, since I student taught at McGavock before they hired me, and I knew I had the job in the bag as soon as the principal proposed it to me. (Boy was that the best interview ever!) And let's not even talk about how great St. Paul's was. I have an OK gig going with the whole tutoring thing, but I'd love to get some more experience to build up my resume, to say nothing about making enough money to keep living in New York. I'm trying here. I really am. I spend about three hours a day filling out mind-numbing online applications. So how about smiling on me again? Please?

Sincerely yours,
Unlucky and Underemployed on the Upper West Side

Cooganized and Wet on a Sunday

(How's that for cryptic?)

The New York Road Runners, the organization through which I did all my half-marathons, puts on lots of races throughout the year, one of them being the New York marathon. I am dying to do the marathon. Alas, so is half the running world, meaning that if I enter the lottery it's extremely unlikely I'll be chosen and get to run it. Luckily, NYRR has this great deal called 9+1 that guarantees one entry in the marathon. If you register for 9 of their races and volunteer at 1 during the course of the year you get automatic entry into the marathon the following year. I've registered for two races in April so far, and on Sunday I volunteered at a race in Washington Heights called Coogan's Salsa, Blues, and Shamrocks 5K. I have no idea where the salsa or blues come in, but one of the sponsors of the race owns a restaurant called Coogan's, in past years there was a live band (it rained this year, so perhaps that's why we didn't get to see one) which may account for the Blues, and St. Patrick's Day is sort of soon... Happily, my volunteer duties didn't involve explaining the title to anyone.

Volunteers. I'm 3rd from the left  - Sorry for the wet lens!

I worked coat check on Saturday night and didn't get to sleep until about 4:30 A.M., so you can imagine that when my alarm went off at 6:00 I wasn't too chipper. Brushing my teeth and getting dressed woke me up, though, and by the time a very grumpy Manu joined me on the uptown subway, I was wide awake and looking forward to the race. I'd signed up for the post-race hydration and nutrition station. Decked out in stylish neon orange mesh vests with reflectors, a group of about six of us headed off to fill hundreds paper cups halfway with water. I chatted with a middle-aged man who said he'd been volunteering with NYRR for years. He lives in Brooklyn and had cheerfully risen at 4:00 that morning to make it to the race on time. He knew everyone who walked by, it seemed, and said that Fred Lebow himself had persuaded him to get into running years before, although he preferred shorter races and had never done a half- or full marathon. (See below for information about the legendary Fred Lebow.)

Buff starters

We were soon pulled away from the water tables for guard duty at the starting corrals to ensure that people lined up according to the numbers on their bibs. I immediately volunteered to monitor the competitive runners' section, meaning that I wasn't supposed to let anyone past whose number was higher than 100. I was excited to check out all of the fleetest of the fleet, but first I had 25 minutes to wait. Twenty-five drizzly, chilly minutes, as it had started to rain right about the time I left the water tables. A miserable 15 minutes followed during which I lost touch with my toes one by one. An emcee made announcements no one really seemed to hear and kept asking the drifting crowds if they were ready to "get Cooganized." I watched the runners jealously as they jogged up and down, half to prepare for the race and half to stay warm. At last, the runners began to assemble in the corrals, and I discovered that the pre-race excitement I always feel before the gun isn't limited to the runners alone. I skipped to the side of the course seconds before the start, and watched the elite few in the front explode across the starting line.

As soon as most of the 7,000+ runners were on their way, a short-ish man in a hat with an accent shooed us to the center of the course, where we were supposed to ensure that outgoing runners stayed to our right and incoming runners headed back toward the finish line stayed to our left. It was pretty exciting watching the first two finishers blowing towards the end, neck and neck. No one broke the record that day, but the first-place finisher still wound up with a time somewhere around 14 minutes. I always enjoy watching races. It was interesting to see the differences between the stride lengths, energy levels, and body types of these runners from the people I see in half- and full marathons. They take huge steps, have much stronger finishing kicks, and tend to be bulkier and more muscular than the long distance runners.

I was originally supposed to have manned the fruit and bagel tables after the race was over - really, whose carbohydrate stores are so depleted after running three miles that they are in immediate need of a bagel? - but Hat-and-Accent Guy chased several of us across the finish line where we were supposed to keep people moving towards the water tables. Next, we broke down the metal barriers that had held the onlookers in place, emptied leftover water bins, and folded tables. It continued to rain on and off, but now that I was moving again it wasn't so bad. Finally, the kids' races started, and we got to watch tiny competitors zig-zagging their way along a short course until they reached the finish line, where a cadre of police were handing out huge medals. One little girl was leading her heat pretty handily until she crashed headlong into a traffic cone taller than she was and went sprawling. Whoops. The whole scene was hilarious. Shortly thereafter we handed in our vests and trudged back to the subway, which transported me to a hot shower and one of the most satisfying naps I can remember taking.

Competitors from last years kids' race, who look both adorable and very dry.

I always noticed that there were a lot of volunteers at NYRR events and enjoyed munching the post-race apples, but I never really appreciated how much work goes into coordinating these races. We put in a solid 4 hours, and that's not taking into account the work that went into ordering food and paper cups, arranging for t-shirts and medals, setting up and hauling away portable toilets and metal fencing, supervising the baggage drops, stopping traffic... The race entry fees I used to gripe about suddenly seem like a bargain.

Fred Lebow

Lebow, an immigrant to New York from Romania, was an avid runner and founder of the New York marathon. The first one had only 55 competitors and took place in 1970. While checking my facts just now, I was surprised to learn that he finished the first marathon in well over four hours; I guess I'd always assumed he was a bit more competitive than that. (Of course, the poor guy was almost 40 then, and that was in the days before Hammer Gel packets.) There's a statue of him monitoring his watch on the east side of the park which I run by nearly every time I go out. The statue is moved every year to the finish line of the marathon, however, so he can be present as the runners come across.

Facing East at the Tagore Gallery

On Friday night, Manu and I went to the opening of a new exhibit at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Chelsea. According to the webpage, the gallery is "devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures.... [and] focused on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that engage in spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues." All of the artists who had work on display had "deep roots in Asian culture," with the exception of one American guy who spent a lot of time living somewhere in Asia and studying Balinese music. There were going to be paintings, sculptures, photographs, and I wasn't sure what else, but I was excited about attending my first gallery opening.

This wasn't the set-up at the gallery, but it gives you an idea.

The first thing I noticed, before I even walked inside, were the gongs. There were three of them mounted above the entrance, and they seemed to be connected to some sort of mechanism that caused little padded mallets to whack them at intervals. It was a bit cacophonous, so I was relieved to get through the door, where I assumed I'd find a hushed, spacious series of rooms filled with people murmuring to each other occasionally as they gazed at paintings on walls. To my dismay, there were gongs everywhere, and they made such a racket that the mass of people packed into the small space were having to yell to make themselves heard. The din died down, however, as the intensity of the gongs waned; they seemed to be programmed to reach a crescendo occasionally, but in between the mallets didn't seem to bang as hard or as often, and the noise was actually quite pleasant when it was in the background instead of being center stage. I saw a guy in his late 20's wearing eyeliner and a maroon blazer with a swatch of kimono fabric sewn onto the back panel fiddling with the monitor that controlled the gongs. (This was Taylor Kuffner, the Balinese music protegee, apparently.)  

I liked some of the pieces on display. There were some tapestries that I wasn't wild about, and some interesting squares involving fading colors, which impressed both Manu and me until we decided that the artist had used an airbrush and were instantly disenchanted. On one wall, painted white, there were hundreds of white pieces of paper cut into identical wispy feather shapes and affixed directly onto the surface with straight pins to form a wavy sort of pattern. I didn't love it until someone walked by it and the feathers all rippled rather fetchingly. Manu particularly liked a series of photographs of bodies with cool designs superimposed over them. I liked a huge abstract waterfall done in black and white on two panels that occupied a back wall from floor to ceiling.


We were very literally cornered by Nhat Tran, an appropriately eccentric artist-type, when we wandered into a hallway with no outlet where one of her pieces hung. She asked us if we'd like to know more about it, and of course we said yes. We got a crash course in Urushi, a Japanese lacquer technique that she learned through a fellowship she won to study art in Japan. Apparently Urushi artists use sap from a particular tree that grows only in a certain part of Japan and can be collected only during the tree's 8th year of life - 7 is obviously too young, and 9 far too old. The sap must be mixed with pigments, and although it is very thick, it must be applied thinly. As it oxidizes (or something) the colors transform. She told us it took her about a year to produce the piece on the wall in front of us, a profusion of colored splotches covering a piece of wood about a foot high and three feet long. Goodness. Amusingly, after growing up in Vietnam and studying in Tokyo, she's set up a studio in Indianapolis, although she has not yet attended the Indy 500. She was tall for a Vietnamese woman, although I suspect she had some help from her heels, and had very long, elaborately curled hair and a slinky black cocktail dress with a Japanese-esque chrysanthemum pattern embroidered on it. She was quite exuberant, and after about five minutes of talking about her artistic training and commiserating with me about how small Tokyo apartments are, she began to gush about how beautiful I was and how handsome Manu was and insisted on taking a picture of the two of us posed in front of her piece (called, appropriately, "A Puzzling Statement"). Puzzled, we consented, posed, and said our farewells.

"A Puzzling Statement"

The artists and their work were obviously pretty fascinating to see, but my favorite part of the experience by far was the people-watching. I had dithered while dressing earlier that evening, not sure what one should wear to this sort of thing, but I saw as soon as I entered that my indecision was completely unnecessary. I could have closed my eyes, grabbed a hanger out of my closet at random and donned whatever was on it and I would have fit in perfectly. About half the people there wore jeans and sweaters or blazers and looked pretty average. The other were scattered somewhere along a scale between artsy and wacky. A woman in her 40's had thin colored feathers draped between locks of her hair but was otherwise normally dressed. A younger woman looked like blend between a salsa dancer and a mourner, her elaborate ruffles and layers all somber black. Feathers turned out to be not that unique an idea, because another woman turned up in a sequined tank top with a cardigan that reminded me powerfully of a butterfly net and a fountain of black and white feathers shooting upwards out of her hair and cascading down either side. My favorite patron, however, was a man in his 60's with a long-ish gray goatee and wild, mad-professor hair. His glasses had yellow tinted lenses and thick black rims, and his loose trousers were a faded brick red. He had on a white shirt, open at the collar, and set off by a brightly colored floral ascot tied jauntily around his neck, and he held an unlit, much-chewed cigar between the fingers of the hand that wasn't holding a glass of the free white wine available at the bar. (Did I mention there was free white wine? There was.)

Airbrushed?

Manu's dad had charged him with paying his respects to the man himself, Mr. Tagore, who owned the gallery. He is a short Indian man with salt-and-pepper hair and a luxuriant, jet black unibrow. We had to wait in a sort of informal line to get to him, and he and Manu chatted for about 90 seconds before he politely thanked us for coming, handed Manu his business card, and wandered off to mingle with some of the other patrons.

Although I was distracted from the art, which I'd thought was the whole point of the opening, I had a great time. Or maybe the art wasn't the point at all. Maybe it's about seeing and being seen, networking with other artsy types, and getting new ideas about fashionable uses for feathers. That and free wine.

Z!nk

Yeah, I'd never heard of it either. But when Manu got an invitation to go to the March cover release party for Z!nk magazine, I agreed to be his plus one without hesitation. I'd never been to a magazine cover release party, and I figured it would be worth seeing.

I was absolutely right. The party started at 10:00 on a Tuesday and ended at midnight. We arrived at the club (called 1OAK, for 1 Of A Kind...) half an hour late. There was a line to get in and we had to give our names, which were checked against the guest list before a security guard unhooked a red velvet rope to let us in. It was loud, dim, and absolutely packed inside. After checking our coats and bags for $4 an item (!) we squeezed up to the bar. Ally, Manu's friend, ordered a club soda and I ordered a vodka soda. The bartender yelled that my drink was free and that Ally's was $6, then added, in case we were wondering, that beer was $10 and all other drinks were $25. Ally realized that tap water was what she really wanted, and Manu decided that what I was drinking looked pretty good after all.

We ran into Lisa, Manu's friend who was responsible for the party, a few minutes later. She was able to demystify the drink prices - "We only gave them vodka," she explained - but Manu said she seemed stressed out and so we wandered away after paying her our compliments.

I was perfectly happy to just stare at the other party-goers, which was a good thing because conversation was nearly impossible over the music. Our companions were an interesting mixture of hipsters, fashionistas, run-of-the-mill night-clubbers, and people who looked like they'd just come from a costume party. A guy in a black fishnet shirt snuggled with a girl wearing a colorful turban in a booth. A blonde guy with a glittery star painted around his left eye posed for a picture with a girl in knee-high boots and a short faux-fur coat. We counted at least two pairs of sunglasses, a truly noble ode to fashion since it was so dim I could hardly see even without shades. Plaid hunting jackets and horn-rimmed glasses mingled comfortably with miniskirts and sequins. A true equal-opportunity party.

This is what 1OAK must have looked like before the party started.

We yelled back and forth for a bit, refreshed our drinks, and watched the colorful tights, open shirts, fedoras, and impossible platform heels surge around us. At one point a huge guy in a suit who looked like he worked security for Al Capone squeezed behind me on his way somewhere, putting his hands around my waist so that I thought for a minute he was going to lift me out of the way. "'Scuse me, baby," he said. I excused him.

The crowd started to thin just before midnight. I thought it was because the party was ending, but a visit to the bar revealed the real reason: the gratis vodka from the magazine had run out and the bar's normal drink prices were in effect. Time to leave. We collected our coats and collected cool canvas gift bags on the way out, which contained ridiculous plastic sunglasses, a fun bracelet, some pamphlets and coupons, and the March issue of the magazine. I can't say that I love Z!nk's style - it's a bit adventurous for me - but they throw one hell of a party.