Category Archives: life

Book Review: The Subway

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The Subway is an intriguing quasi-fictional appropriation of reality that all New Yorkers can identify with. The Subway contains the full sweep of humanity in its passengers, as they jostle or sit at safe distances or stare into the passing faces. This panorama of society contains the myriad human interactions that make up civilization, from shoving to giving up your seat to flirting.

Minute gestures of the passengers lead one to observations of humanity. For the protagonist is like Everyman of Pilgrim’s Progress. He goes about his quest to arrive at his destination, and struggles with the conflicts of finding his metro card, missing a train by a second, being crowded into a smelly homeless person; we see his personality revealed, and as people and especially as New Yorkers, we can identify with his quest.

Within The Subway, all the glories and incongruities of American democracy are present. From the homeless to the elite, at any hour of the day the vast swell of humanity is present in all its odors. All people in the hunt for seats have the equality that makes America great.

Who wrote this fascinating study of the human psyche and deployed his acute and pointed observations on human nature? Who depicted the possible scenarios that could happen among such a group of people? No one. This novel doesn’t exist.

How is it possible that no one has written this book yet? I can’t be the only New Yorker who on their endless commute sometimes wondered about their fellow passengers, about where they were going and why. Storytelling has its roots in such unparalleled access to people. People who are too immersed in their experiences to put up facades. The subway is humanity raw and uncensored.

Considering people’s (and my own behaviors) on the subway, I’m convinced it is a minefield of character and of situation that is integral to a great story.

Musicians…

Mother with child, woman in pink, and Hasidic Jew

Nursing mother

Young lovers

Homeless man

Young pole dancers

These photos from the NYC subway make great character studies. It’s seems so much like a book already written to me. But I checked on the Internet, where all things are true, and The Subway hasn’t been written. Yet.

Jealousy Strikes Over Writer’s Rooms

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A creative space, exactly as you like it, and a routine, undisturbed, can make a day or, in the case of some people, a work of art. Balancing work and writing is something I’ve thought about lately, but more than that I’m curious about other people. How do they write best? So to fill that curiosity, we have creatives spaces and routines…(ahh, the wonders of the internet.)

Rooms:

The Guardian has a great page dedicated to writer’s rooms…literally a series of photographic “portraits” of the rooms the writers work in by Eamonn McCabe. Coincidentally, McCabe has an exhibit that just opened that runs through January 17 at Madison Contemporary Art if you are in London.

They’re gorgeous and interesting shots that give you an intimate look of the creative spaces of various authors. They tend to have a desk and a computer…but other than that, these spaces are as varied as can be. Some are bare spaces with merely a desk, but most tend toward a messy, comfortably chaotic appeal. I wish they would do a series of artist’s studios next.

These are clearly all successful, middle-aged writers because they have rooms they can devote to writing. I live in New York city, and have a compact desk in my bedroom that I can devote to writing. There is just room for it between the door and the bed. It’s usually crowded with papers that I once meant to look at. The chair hurts my shoulders after a while. A certain someone likes to sit at it with his computer. And so, my workspace has become wherever there is a computer. A helpful versatility, no doubt, but I envy the luxury of a room of one’s own and the flourish of a quill pen, like in Jane Austen’s room, right.

Routine:

It isn’t mere space I pine for, but the lives that could be led in them. Similar to these room portraits, blog Daily Routines gives a brief summary of how artists, writers, and other ‘interesting people’ organize their day in all its intimate detail. The writer Murakami runs marathons to get into a zenlike state, much like his dreamy novels. Kafka’s is bizzare. Truman Capote is a “horizontal” author.

My routine involves a lot of ‘sometimes’. I go to an office sometime. Sometimes I have been up writing or reading for an hour. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I’ll polish something up during the day, sometimes I’ll write at night. Today, I’ll cook up a nice breakfast and lay in bed typing while trying to plan the most productive possible day.

I’m still settling into a quasi-writing life, but I have dreams of what it would be like. They run along the lines Oscar Wilde’s perscriptum of life as art. In which case, I have a lot of work to do. Christmas angels and huge koi decals are competing for decorative space to ill effect in this writer’s rooms. Yet based on the differences I found in rooms and routines, I’d have to say to each his own.

Art of War

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Balancing work and writing has been difficult lately–Eek! Not a boring article of work and writing? Hardly, gentle Reader: this is a war.

My writing and my job are at odds with each other, and lately my job has been winning. People always speak about a work/life balance, but my problem is a work/work balance. Perhaps someday I’ll have an official writing job (perhaps you readers could mail me some checks…) but until then, I work a normal work week and try and squeeze in writing.

Time, in itself, is not the problem. I could work, and then have enough time to write a blog post on a normal workday. But the real difficulty with writing, besides saying things well, is having something to say. When I become consumed with my paying job, I loose the creative bit of my brain. I’m out of the loop on interesting news as well, and can’t process it enough to form an opinion of my own. (Opinions being crucial in this blogging business.) Of course, right now I’m talking about working and blogging, not even working and blogging and sleeping and interacting with humans… which are getting squeezed these days.

Today as I was dealing with drudgery of the day job, I stopped what I was doing and brainstormed. Slow at first, but soon I felt all juiced up and full of ideas and happier. It’s easy to forget the passions that make you happy sometimes. And then I felt inspired to write about the delicate art of balancing work and writing. I myself am not quite an artíste at this balancing act yet, but maybe someday.

Until then, Reader, I accept personal checks or cash or cookies. I am especially partial to holiday cheer in the form of sugar.