Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • Day 1-In Which I Learn to Hobble

    It was a success, the surgery, though I awoke from the anesthesia blubbering like a baby. It’s normal, said the orthopedic surgeon, come to check on me. A lot of people cry. Then it was hip, hop, on to the wheelchair, on to the crutches, off to my new full-time lair, my living room, my…

  • Of Leeches and Fiberglass

    Five hundred years ago I would be having leeches applied to my leg today. Now it’s just a thigh-high fiberglass cast. And I know my foot will get better. (Even with all those leeches, a person would probably never get out there again in the millet fields.) Just so you know, I may not be…

  • Life’s a Beach

    Visiting Jones Beach today was like being on a public strand circa the 1950s, the bright beach bags, chairs, umbrellas, suits (except the suits were skimpier, even on the less than skimpy subathers). Families with their chairs drawn around in big circles. Teenagers jumping around, full of beans. Grandpas dozed. Mothers and daughters plunked themselves…

  • Feets Too Big

    All the places I won’t walk. I said I’m sorry to an earthworm. Out loud. It was cut in half, lying on the asphalt. Commiserating with a worm is not something I would ordinarily do, but I could in some ways relate to the creature. I’ll be able to move, but slowly, on crutches, after…

  • Pogo Schtick NYC

    By the time we arrived, the Big Air finals had ended. Pogopalooza 10 was barreling towards its final couple of hours. None of the participants, it seemed, were tired. They were hardly breaking a sweat. It was as if the 10th Annual World Championships of Extreme Pogo, held in venues around New York City over…

  • Captive Audience

    Millbrook, New York is a quiet town, a town of well-behaved dogs on leashes and potted flowers. A town of rice pudding with cinnamon at a cute bakery called Babette’s Kitchen. The last notable murder in Millbrook took place a century ago – a nanny named Sarah Brymer was strangled when her employers, of the…

  • NPR: Great Historical Fiction for Summer 2013

    I liked digging into recent historical fiction for my summer round-up on NPR, which is hot off the presses. I knew some of the authors’ work already, and some novels I discovered for this assignment. I tried for a balance of time periods and styles when I selected the books to review. What I was really going…

  • Portals Into Other Worlds

    I’m thinking about how you can visit other times and places on the web, peeking through portals the way you peer through a cutout in the plywood surrounding a construction site. Here are fifteen visits I’ve made lately that I’d recommend. It was a mistake for Rolling Stone to make a rock star out of…

  • Dirty Disney

    I expected the Paul McCarthy show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory to be raunchy, demented, transgressive. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would be hilarious. If you follow the contemporary art world you know that McCarthy excels at tweaking the public’s nose. Not long ago there was the giant inflatable “Complex Pile” he…

  • The Real Stuff of the Past

    Ice. Bricks. Wrecks. I discovered three potential novels today in a small museum in Kingston, New York. Anyway, there were artifacts that could be the seeds of novels, historical subject matter so robust and potent that some writer’s sure to climb on board. One day soon, I hope. I was there for a festival celebrating…

  • A Manhattan Birthday Boat

    Today was my birthday. I decided to take the two adventurers closest to me and go on the high seas. An oceanographic architectural tour of Manhattan launches most days from Pier 62, on the island’s west side, and the fact that it was the hottest day of the year made a liquid frolic all the…

  • Something to Cry Over

    I like to go adventuring. Small adventures or large, I’m happy if I see something new and arresting. If I have a frisson of … something… delight, wonder, whatever you want to call it. With a companion, adventuring’s the best. So today I was a little down. Finished my work for the day, marking up…

  • Ramen in Harlem

    Outside on this July afternoon it’s hot, hot, hot, but you feel as if you’re in a cool womb within Jin, the ramen bar on upper Broadway at 125th Street. This is Harlem, a Harlem of changes. Every neighborhood in New York experiences flux, of course, but this one is currently in crisis mode as…

  • Rapid Cycling

    You’ve heard about the Citi Bikes that now throng Manhattan. There are thousands of them parked in solar-powered docks from Battery Park to Central Park. Anybody with a bank card can rent one for half an hour. (There are some bikes in the outer boroughs, too.) They’re making New York into Minneapolis or Melbourne or…

  • Phriends of Phragmites

    Today I befriended my inner phragmite.   You’ve probably seen the reeds that form the backdrop for these merry tulips hundreds of times without knowing their Latin name. Marsh grass, aka phragmites. I’ve been thinking about the reeds for a while now, since a landscape-architect friend of mine came to the Cabin and explained that…