Lucy and the Senator from New York; or, To Think that I Saw it on 5th Ave.

We went to the Saint Patrick Day's parade today (don't ask) in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and had a memorable time. I took my 2-year-old daughter Lucy along and told her we were going to see the "people in the street," in a tone that conveyed that this was something she might like. In fact, she seemed so eager to see the "people in the street" that she practically pulled me down to the corner herself once we got outside. Johanna had to catch up with us later.

We got there just as the lead police horses were passing by. At the sight of this and the drum corp that followed, Lucy froze in amazement and remained that way for the remainder of the parade. She was most entranced by those horses, by these two clowns who were carrying a green banner and honking, and by this giant eagle that was strolling down the street waving to people. She kept looking down the street after it had gone saying "Where'd he go?" She was also glad to get a yo-yo that was handed to her by an employee of Commerce bank and which was emblazoned with their logo. She later saw a green balloon fly by that someone had let go and she pointed at it and followed it with her eyes as it drifted into the cold blue sky. When the balloon was gone she cast her eyes back down to the street and as she did she noticed these three teenage boys who had taken up a perch on the top of a building across the street. She pointed to them and kept saying "look at the guys!" This was an eventful day.

Towards the end of the parade, after about a half dozen bagpipe bands, several vintage cars, a lot of green hats and wigs, twirlers, vans, the aforementioned giant eagle, flags, and vendors, we saw Senator Charles Schumer walking up the street. Apparently he was born in Brooklyn and still resides in Park Slope, and he was here today in Bay Ridge paying his respects to the Irish.

Just as he and his retinue were passing in front of us, the parade paused. As the Senator was glancing around, looking for a target for his next wave, he saw Lucy who was in my arms in front of the Benjamin Moore paint store. He broke from his people and came over. He asked Lucy's name, complimented her shoes (which we had just bought her the day before at Payless - they are white faux-patent leather, with little mauve flowers on the straps...the Senator has remarkably good taste), and wistfully remembered when his daughters were young. It was a very nice moment and we were thrilled to have talked with him however briefly.

I didn't have the heart to tell Senator Schumer that Lucy is an avid Obama supporter, that every time she sees him on television or in the paper she shouts out enthusiastically, "Barack Obama!"

Kids today. Like I said, memorable etc.

Where My Nukes At?

Here's a story that would send chills down Ted Taylor's back.

The article recounts two "accidents" involving nuclear materials or parts for nuclear materials in the past year or so.

This article is from Thursday, March 27th 2008. Today (Friday) there is an OpEd cartoon in the New York Times about the legacy of Three Mile Island...





What do you think about either or both of these stories, bloggers?

Research Challenge

I can only find the opening lines of Andrei Sakharov's article "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" online.

Can anyone do any better?

If you find the whole thing somewhere and post a link, that will count as a blog post.

If you write about it? Two.

He sounds here like a Creative Nonfiction writer...

We regard as "scientific" a method based on deep analysis of facts, theories and views, presupposing unprejudiced, unfearing open discussions and conclusions. The complexity and diversity of all the phenomena of modern life, the great possibilities and dangers linked with the scientific-technical revolution and with a number of social tendencies, demand precisely such an approach, as has been acknowledged in a number of official statements.

The Arms of Orion

Here's some early video of testing that was done on the Orion project, which would have propelled spaceships and more to planets well beyond Mars.

Big Bombs, Big Bomb Makers, and the Sounds of Dissidence

Krystina at "For the Record" makes a good post here about the biggest bomb ever detonated by the Soviets or anyone, the so-called Tsar Bomba, which yielded 50 Mt and was tested in the Nova Zemblya (Russian for "New Land") archipelago on October 30th 1961, the same day as it happens that Stalin's body was removed from its privileged place inside Lenin's tomb to a lesser place outside, near a Kremlin wall. The Soviets claimed at the time to possess an even bigger bomb that would have yielded 100 Mt that they were holding in reserve and whose existence coupled with the testing of Tsar Bomba they were hoping would act as the mother of all deterrents.

This idea of building the biggest bomb possible as a means of ending the nuclear race, as preposterous as it seems, is something we saw in the youthful idealism (if we can call it that) of Ted Taylor as well, as McPhee describes it in The Curve of Binding Energy.

And it seems that the Russians had their own Taylor just as they had their bomb; for one of the scientists who worked on Tsar Bomba was Andrei Sakharov, who would go on to become one of the leading Soviet dissidents and opponent of proliferation.

Sakharov was also a critic of anti-ballistic missile defense seeing it as fueling the arms race and perpetuating the cold war. Not to mention that he saw it as a policy that would inexorably lead to nuclear confrontation. ABM defense was to Sakharov what safeguards were to Taylor.

Sakharov's words and activities led to his arrest and internal exile in 1980, from which he was not to be released until December of 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev, during the early years of perestroika and glasnost.

And for those of us who wonder and worry (as does the Amazon reviewer) about the potential dangers of breached nuclear secrets documented in McPhee's 1974 book for all to see and the danger such openness generally poses to an open and democratic society, we might consider these words from Sakharov:

The second basic thesis is that intellectual freedom is essential to human society — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture.

Sakharov died on December 14th 1989, 164 years to the day after the Decembrist uprising shook the Russian monarchy in Moscow.

"And poor old Homer blind, blind as a bat"

An Op Ed in today's New York Times provides a different perspective on the downfall of Eliot Spitzer and the subsequent rise of David Paterson, the blind, African American Lieutenant Governor suddenly thrust into the spotlight The mainstream media has largely mined the incident for all its salacious details regarding Spitzer and "Kristen," reviving a kind of news tabloidism not seen since the mid-nineties, but Stephen Kuusisto here gives us our first real view of Paterson and attempts to discuss what he says will be harder for the public to deal with than even his race: his blindness.

Kuusisto, who is blind himself and thus speaks from experience and with authority, describes the challenges that Paterson faces every day:

I can’t afford forgotten things. Blind folks must constantly keep track of what we learn and memorize our surroundings. For us, an unfamiliar setting that a sighted person could map out in a glance is a puzzle that requires agile problem-solving. On occasion we even need to ask strangers for advice.

And what is perhaps more important for our immediate purposes, and I suppose related in some obscure way, is that Kuusisto also teaches Creative Nonfiction (which the NYT editors see fit to put in lower case) at the University of Iowa.

And I was struck by how all that Kuusisto says here applies to the writer in general, but how it particularly applies to the Creative Nonfiction writer, who is constantly probing what they see, the received, the perceived. Writers must not take the world around them as an end, but get beneath it in whatever way they can. Rather than being complacent in what they have seen, the Creative Nonfiction writer must constantly ask "What is it I have seen?" to reapply an interrogative formulated by Francois Hartog.

The urge to see and the lack of satisfaction with what we do see should guide all of our writing efforts, as we see in this famous account of a student learning to see what was before his eyes.

Henry Street Settlement and The Big Give

Yesterday on The Oprah Winfrey show there was a segment promoting Oprah's new philanthropic reality show "The Big Give." It showed a brief clip of a shipment of shoes being delivered to The Henry Street Settlement.

Here's a link to an article that says more about it.

Still in NYC

Here's a video that harks back to the days of Candid Camera...



Performance artists and installation artists have always been drawn to the activity and bustle of NYC. Not too long ago we had Christos and the orange gates that he spread through central park like construction cones on the BQE. Now we get this group performance piece that has the opposite effect: rather than pathways being highlighted in bright flappy orange, human barriers suddenly materialize in the paths of thousands of New Yorkers in one of the most heavily trafficked places in the city.

But although the stunt is revealed at the end of the clip and people clap, perhaps the best analogy is not the "gotcha" humor of Candid Camera so much as the clever hoaxes recorded in Herbert Asbury's All Around the Town. I am thinking especially of "The Sawing Off of Manhattan Island," a story about two clever con men who, according to Asbury and his source, manage to convince a large number of people to take seriously the notion of cutting Manhattan Island off, floating it out to sea, hooking it past Governor's Island, and floating it back to reconnect to the mainland. The con men convince people that this is the only way to redistribute the weight that had thrown lower Manhattan out of balance in the 1800s because of increased traffic and construction.

The story climaxes with thousands of ready-to-saw New Yorkers gathered in midtown waiting to take their orders from the two con men, who by this time have long since absconded, their hoax having been played out.

Of course, the hoax is directed as much at the gullible reader as it is at the contemporary New Yorkers who are left wandering around, no doubt seething and filled with thoughts of vengeance and humiliation. Who, after all, would believe that such mass gullibility could exist? Who in their right mind would follow such patently absurd logic? How could two con men mobilize such large numbers of civic minded people in a scheme so hairbrained?

Anyway, the piece of performance art in this clip is more a hoax than anything, especially since the target is not a single person like it is on CC, but rather a large number of people, who are confronted with the unprecedented notion that there can be beauty in stasis and who applaud in relief when movement resumes.

I think on some level any good art is hoax.