Category Archives: Culture

September 21, 2015 · 5:21 pm

The Sidewalks of New York

What lies under the city sidewalk? Dirt. Sand. Rocks, bricks, miscellaneous debris. Skeletal remains of vermin. And thousands of miles of pipes.

And roots.

I found one today on the job, a gnarled and grizzled specimen, a time capsule from before the jungle of New York was so concrete. This London Plane root, a yard long and six inches at its fattest, had been severed by the backhoe as it excavated the old concrete sidewalk. It was still wet with life.

It made me think of those anguished lines by Neruda, in Walking Around:

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,

insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,

going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,

taking in and thinking, eating every day.

In a way, the metaphor is truer than the reality. We’re a lot more insecure than that root I found today, chopped through though it was by the backhoe.

I don’t know how they poured concrete a hundred years back, in the 1890’s, when the pop song “The Sidewalks of New York” was Taylor-Swift hot. Then the streets were mainly cobbles, Belgian paving blocks. Asphalt was relatively new. Some streets were still dirt, more country lane than city slicker. It must have been fantastic for a woman to sweep down a (relatively) clean sidewalk without befouling the hem of her skirts. Especially if she was responsible for cleaning those skirts.

Now a root in the city seems fantastic. On my first job going among the trees, in June, there was a foreman with a sticker on his hard hat that read Irish. His name was Sean, and he had a salt-and-pepper mustache and a twinkle in his eye. I had been tracing the progress of an excavation to install a new gas line, watching the roots as they materialized in the “moist guts of the earth.” Making sure they weren’t broken by the backhoe. I had to leave, and I asked Sean to keep an eye on a certain root I was concerned about. He smiled, with only a hint of irony.

“Ah,” said Sean, “the lovely root.”

The Pits

My job today was seeing after the health and happiness of two trees in new pits, #39 and #40 on the site survey, which were having their environs disturbed by the installation of a brand new sidewalk. It’s a discrete job. Somebody has to tell the foreman the dimensions of the new pits (82″ across, back to the playground seam). Someone, in this case, who isn’t a man. One of the things I do as the men around me install curbs, pour sidewalks, do all the lifting, the hauling, the digging: I give life to the new pits.

“It’s a man’s world,” sang James Brown in his rip-your-throat-out song, “but it ain’t nothing without a woman or a girl.” To these men on this construction site, I am mainly a fly on the wall (and I’d get a little more attention if I were a little more fly). Mainly the workers are, as my boss/friend promised when I started, “respectful.” They are, with an edge. There still exist Neanderthals in the concrete jungle — like the foreman who smiled viciously in my face when I came with a question, saying, “Yes, now, what do you want?”

No one asks me to get them coffee. They pretty much leave me alone, without that vicious smile or even a scowl. But what I do is extraneous to the main purpose of this world. The men work like dogs. Bad metaphor, they work much harder than any dog ever did. Sometimes I feel I’m here only as an audience for their macho performance. I am actually here because New York City requires that an arborist be present on construction sites that have trees. When arborists weren’t on sites, back in the seventies, there was a tree holocaust.

“They also serve that only stand and wait,” wrote Milton. I am waiting for the concrete to surround the new pits, which are supposed to provide a pristine environment for these London Plane trees to thrive, but are now full of fast food wrappers, used condoms and dog shit. “New York City is hard,” a worker originally from Togo told me. “You need to have the trees.” When Khruschev visited the city, he said, “I don’t like the life here in New York. There is no greenery. It would make a stone sick.” Construction workers with their backhoes and cement mixers vs. tree people with their 82″ squares of dirt might be a case of mine is bigger than yours. On the other hand, I feel, all these 40′ spreading Plane trees here are mine. It’s just simpler for everyone if I’m invisible. That’s easy because I’m not the girlfriend or wife but the same age as the silver-haired owner of this construction business.

James Brown: “He’s lost in the wilderness, he’s lost…”

Think I’ll go stand under the serviceberry tree down the block.

Its star shaped blossoms come out first of all the trees in spring, soon after the ground has thawed, when people in olden times had their first burial services after the long winter. I’m going to hang out under the serviceberry and see if I can serve somebody (thank you Mr. Dylan).

Out on My Fanny

Terrific reviews but no sales. Astounding rejection notices. What could be crueler for a writer?

Sadly and swiftly we fell to earth, Fanny and me. I was ready to vault into the next chapter of my life. I was enchanted by my subject and believed that everyone else would be equally enchanted.

But publishing is a peculiar institution, particularly these days. Two dozen editors looked at the proposal for A Dangerous Subject, the book that would take readers on a romp through Jacksonian America and the weirdness of the present day United States as well. (Note I don’t use the word read here, only looked at. How many editors have the time to read everything, actually? It’s a lost art.)

Some of them disliked the subject (“too small”). Many loved it. I remember my agent sharing with me one editor’s response: “omigod!” she wrote, and went on to say she’d had five proposals on her reading stack that night and had thrown them all aside to read about Fanny.

But like I said, publishing is peculiar. At the end of the day, lots of editors relished Fanny but they just couldn’t figure out “a way to publish the book.” In other words, to sell the hell out of it. Me and Fanny were too small to get our chance. And so we fell, like Alice down the rabbit hole, grasping at straws we passed along the way. Mawkish, but still.

And having nursed a novel and a nonfiction idea when neither would end up reaching any readers, after a quarter century in the business of book writing, I had to ask myself: Is that all there is?

5 Comments

Filed under Culture, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

September 13, 2015 · 6:19 pm

Mmmmmm…

Mmuseumm isn’t a typical hoity toity museum but a 4×5 exhibition space tucked into an old elevator shaft in Cortlandt Alley, in Manhattan’s Tribeca. An eclectic assortment of collections and individual objects, it aspires according to artistic director Alex Kalman to be a “modern natural history museum devoted to the curation and exhibition of contemporary artifacts that illustrate the complexities of the modern world.” It’s been entertaining and mystifying visitors since 2012.

So you won’t find anything framed or pedestalled here. But you will find 12 eggs in a heated vitrine waiting to hatch, or a grouping of vicious looking fish hooks that one Doctor Robert Insley in Chatham, Mass., removed from a variety of patients.

Curious as to whether this diminutive place was a giant hoax or a cracked art installation or the real thing, whatever that might be – in other words, whether someone was laughing at me as I perused the rubber chicken wing and the real fake pork sandwich on the wall, I checked out a few facts on the web. It turned out that the thing that amazed me most, a collection of heads called Stranger Visions and credited to Heather Dewey-Hagborg, was the real thing.

Next to each head was a cigarette butt or piece of chewed gum or fingernail clipping. The bio-hacker brought the specimen to a lab, extracted its DNA, then ran the sequence through a facial algorithim and a 3D printer to find out what the gumchewer or smoker looked like. Yes, it might actually be a hoodwink. But it looks like those chicks might hatch.

A Silver Bullet

Gil and I thought we would take to the road on the trail of Fanny Trollope’s wanderings across America. My imagination itched to conjure up the Jacksonian past of the juvenile nation, which she wrote about so incisively in Domestic Manners of the Americans. It would be an in-depth look at the landscape Fanny Trollope found when she went among us, using her words as a jumping off point to explore a strange, exciting, transformative period in America.But I wanted to see these places in the present, too. I planned to call my book A Dangerous Subject, which lifted a phrase from Domestic Manners. Trollope employs it to describe the sprawl and spectacle of America, so overwhelming that it can barely be contained in language. The phrase could apply equally to the woman herself, or to any woman who dares to step outside accepted boundaries. As her contemporary Jane Austen wryly noted in Northanger Abbey, a woman “if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

Fanny always based her criticism in solid observation. I planned for my book to be in part a travelogue assessing the current American landscape. I would talk with all kinds of people, all across the spectrum of beliefs. I wanted to find out what’s really going on in all of the red state cloud-cuckoo lands. But I would settle for taking the temperature of those states on Fanny’s itinerary: Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and New York. I was particularly interested in examining the extensive Southern part of her circuit, as my family’s roots lie in Virginia, Maryland and Tennessee. What Fanny saw there was quite possibly what my great-great-greats were experiencing.

John Steinbeck, when he embarked on the circuit of the United States chronicled in Travels with Charley, rigged up a 1960 GMC truck with a camper for the journey. I thought I would be more rigorous about the truth in my narrative than Steinbeck’s hugely popular though largely fictionalized account. Like Charley. at its heart A Dangerous Subject would be a first-person narrative that attempts “to find out what Americans are like” (as Steinbeck announced his purpose), to portray, as they say about family, “the strangers you happen to be related to.”

If anyone would give me an advance to write it.

1 Comment

Filed under Culture, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writing

October 3, 2014 · 6:03 pm

Cowlin’ for You

I ventured out today. After two and a half weeks in a foot cast, I was ready. The sky was an egg, the fall breeze fresh, the sun silky on my arm propped up at the passenger window of the car. There was sushi, at our local place not usually the best, but which tasted great today. There were errands, to the grocery, to the library. I admit, I stayed in my seat and let Gil do the honors, crutches not being my strong suit.

But I did make it out of the vehicle and into my neighborhood knit shop in Tarrytown, New York, on my sticks.

There I got the largest needles in the world, a different kind of sticks, in a size 50.

On Ravelry, the site for knitting devotees, I’d found a pattern for an Outlander cowl, oversize, chunky and earthy. Based on one Claire wears in the Starz series.

The yarn I found is virgin wool and acrylic, charcoal, heather grey, black and a tinge of blue. Colors one might find worn in the Scottish Highlands 300 years back? I really don’t know, but I like to imagine it.

According to one patron of the shop, Flying Fingers, whose friend is crafting a similar cowl, the Outlander look is a craze that’s catapulting across the knitways of our nation.

I may be consigned to the couch for the near future, but I’m glad to be part of a larger purpose, fitting us all out in history-inspired gigantic wool neckpieces for the first cold snap.

3 Comments

Filed under Culture, Fashion, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting

September 28, 2014 · 3:58 pm

The Exquisite Realism of Pleats

Hiatus. Mine was a long one, at least in the terms of this daily blog. I took off in the spring to research my new novel, then to write the novel, then to take a break after writing the novel, then putting the novel on the market. Now, with my foot up after a third time under the knife (yes, I have three feet), I’m back.

The daffodils came and went, the waves crashed at the beach, but I feel I’ve been inside these months much more than outside. Inside my cranium. The seasons have changed largely without me, and now along comes Fall.

I don’t work at night. The Cabin resides in a quiet, still, isolated pocket of land at the edge of an insect-buzzing marsh. We’re cloistered in the middle of nowhere. Or at least it feels like that, which is remarkable since we’re less than an hour from the lights of New York City. My point is, there’s not a lot of hubbub around, not a lot of human distractions. So after dinner, with Oliver keeping a lookout out at our feet, we either read or consume a fair dose of high-concept binge fare.

We visit different worlds.

It’s hard to get history right on tv. Often it’s too cheesy to watch, whether because of the dialogue, scenery, fashions or some combination that makes you say, I know it wasn’t like that. And turn it off. Go read some good historical fiction instead!

But I’ve been watching a show that manages to have a little cheese and a fair amount of heart at the same time, along with exquisite attention to detail. The premise is time travel, my favorite subject.The Outlander series takes a young English woman just after World War One (she’s a battlefield nurse) and sends her through a witchy wormhole (actually a Stonehenge-like circle of obelisks) back to 1740s Scotland. Adventures and romance ensue. What interests me is the devotion to detail on the part of the producers, down to the beautiful and so carefully sewn pleats in the wedding gown of the protagonist, Claire. Apparantly they are entirely consistent with the real McCoy. There are plenty of people out there waiting to pounce on you if you don’t do it right, but so far a war hasn’t broken out between the pleats and the pin tucks, so we’re okay.

As a writer of historical fiction, I know that you must constantly make choices about where to nail the absolute fact and when you can fudge. In fact, sometimes you must fudge, because the absolute fact would be unpalatable for contemporary readers. It fascinates me to hear about the choices made by the costume designer for Outlander, Terry Dresbach. (How’s that for a fitting name?)

5 Comments

Filed under Culture, Fashion, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

August 10, 2014 · 10:18 am

Slowdown Saturday

A knuckle-sized frog hopped straight by the woodpile.

A butterfly lit on a thistle.

Chickadees flocked around the bird feeder, making off with safflower seeds.

A long day, reading a long novel.

Excitement: Oliver thundering from the porch toward the rabbit he’ll never catch.

It grew cool, deep shadows stretched across the grass.

Then there were dinner pancakes, made with fresh-laid eggs from the good neighbor’s coop and local blueberries, soaked in a friend’s home-tapped maple syrup.

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon,” said Henry James. “To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

1 Comment

Filed under Cooking, Culture, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writers, Writing

August 5, 2014 · 4:04 pm

Sand Between the Toes

I’ll tell you something about Jones Beach. It’s a democratic place. Anyone can put up a flashy pink umbrella.

I saw one today.

Anyone who’s in New York can go to Jones. And everyone does. In August, before the jellyfish descend, the water is superbly cold and the waves fantastic for diving through. Surfers can be seen far off shore, catching small waves. It’s hard to get to Maui, after all.

Children play at the water’s edge shoveling holes in the endless strand, all un-helicoptered by any adult, and sitting on your towel you have absolutely no responsibility for them. Just enjoy their blissful ways from a distance, a dumbshow of babyhood. (In fact there were helicopters, real ones, Blackhawks that made a low pass along the shore.)

There’s the smell of the surf, as primal as that of cut grass. I measure my mood by my receptivity to these aromas. Throw open the windows – what is that that smells so good? Oh, it’s the smell of the ground after it rains, everyone’s favorite. There was actually a poll. But the briny air at Jones Beach came in a close second.

Fifteen-year-old girls make their way by like flamingo offspring, ducking their heads, so shy.

The man carrying a cooler full of ice cream: Chipwich! Frozen fruit bars! Dry ice makes the treats hard as concrete. He smiles though the sand must be a carpet of hot coals under his bare feet. His favorite places when he gets off? A bowling alley. A cave. He loves to wear shoes.

But what I like best is the sight of the old couples, the well-worn lovers, brown as belt leather and greasy with lotion, sitting silently side by side in their low chairs. They never speak. They go everywhere together. As one, they stay still, confronting the sun.

2 Comments

Filed under Culture, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writers, Writing

July 31, 2014 · 7:26 pm

Leafy Air and Cheese

I can breathe again. I took a trip to Michigan and Wisconsin, the Great North Woods, which has leafy air worthy of inhaling.

Also, sweet black cherries worthy of devouring. They sell them, washed, plump and juicy, from little stands at gas stations.

I experienced a hailstorm that hit just as our sailboat anchored in that lovely private lagoon a ways into Lake Superior. Just enough to put every wet person on board in stitches.

I can breathe again because I turned in the manuscript of my new novel and my editor said he likes it. A lot. That’s an outsize sigh of relief. It made me open to everything around me.

I found that lying in bed on the shore of Lake Michigan, I could feel every delicious cotton fiber with my toes.

I saw the sights, hugged family, brought home souvenirs from people who had made them with their hands.

There was rye flour from the farmer who grew it, at Maple Hill Farm in Washburn, Wisconsin.

And fingerless gloves knitted by his wife. She sewed a pad of suede on the palm for good gripping.

The Northland is kind, even its rusty old trucks.

The region loves its fish. Smoked, fried or souped.

It offers a hundred different moccasins.

Thrives on pop (drive-in menu, top right). Known to us North Easterners as soda.

Then, of course, there is the cheese. I tasted a Michigan dairy’s Colby-style specimen, bright orange and moist, that was produced from a 1915 recipe.

Did I mention that my editor liked it? The novel, I mean, not the cheese.

8 Comments

Filed under Cooking, Culture, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, Publishing, Writers, Writing

April 28, 2014 · 7:24 pm

Stuck in the Middle of My Novel With You

I have been meaning to write and say that I’m taking a bit of a hiatus from writing this blog — but I guess that’s kind of obvious. Not that I don’t adore posting here, I do. And I have the greatest readers in the world. But I am stuck in the middle of novel-world, and my writing in the fictional format seems to be taking all of my mental energy. I’m telling the story of a teenage girl in Revolutionary-era NYC. She looks a bit like this, as I imagine her.

I have her portrait tacked up to my bulletin board. And now I have to get back to her.

I will still post here from time to time, and pretty soon I’ll dive back in to the real world, and my real blog, every day.

6 Comments

Filed under Art, Culture, Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

April 18, 2014 · 2:55 pm

High-Energy Serendipities

At the National Arts Club the other night, before I gave my presentation, a very nice photographer named Bruce Allan took me by the hand and led me around from one atmospheric spot to the other to get just the right portrait of me.

Then, as I went on and on (as I often do) talking about Savage Girl and historical fiction and New York City, showing remarkable pictures of Manhattan during the Gilded Age, Bruce captured me again.

He also caught the musicians Henry Chapin (fiddle) and Mark Ettinger (accordion) playing music of the era. So infectious was their performance, they got people who were there only to listen up on their feet to dance. “I danced a reel!” one friend enthused afterward.

All in all, a high-energy event, filled with serendipities.

3 Comments

Filed under Culture, Dance, Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Photography, Publishing, Savage Girl, Writers, Writing

April 15, 2014 · 7:13 pm

National Arts Club Talk Wednesday 8pm

I’m so looking forward to giving a presentation at the venerable National Arts Club on New York City’s Gramercy Park tomorrow night, April 16th at 8:00. The Club is housed in a beautiful old mansion, the perfect spot for time traveling back to the late nineteenth century. I will show pictures during my talk, sign books afterwards, and exhort guests to dance to our live musicians playing tunes from Savage Girl’s era. The celebration is free and open to the public. Please come if you’re in the neighborhood!

6 Comments

Filed under Culture, Dance, Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Publishing, Savage Girl, Writers, Writing

April 11, 2014 · 7:17 pm

April Daffs

Is April really the cruellest month? Just because T.S. Eliot phrased it so beautifully in The Wasteland doesn’t necessarily make it so.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

I saw my first daffodils of the season today.

I’m in a mood. I can’t quite put my finger on why April is hateful, yet I know it to be true.

The birdsong I usually love strikes me as obnoxious.

The bright spring sun, scalding to the eyes. The alternative, sunglasses, too dark.

At the coffee place, I watch the barrista draw a cute foam face on the latte of the guy in front of me. Do you make funny faces for all the lattes? I ask. Just the special ones, he says.

I wait for my latte. Plain old plain old.

It’s that kind of day.

Alice James, that overlooked yet so wise diarist of the nineteenth century, said: “The ancient superstition as to spring and youth being the most joyous periods is pretty well exploded, don’t you think? The one is the most depressing moment of the year, so is the other the most difficult of life.”

Even the luscious yellow of the daffodils. Save it for later, will you? Tomorrow, April might be a peach of a month.

1 Comment

Filed under Culture, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Poetry, Writers

April 5, 2014 · 9:31 pm

A Bronze Frolic

Interesting. The artist John Waddell, who is now 93, is best known for his larger-than-life bronze sculptures of young, frolicking nude women. He’s a longtime resident of the Verde Valley, and when I was in Arizona I got to see his tour-de-force Dance grouping in front of the Herberger Theater in downtown Phoenix.

According to Waddell’s bio, the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham became a pivotal event in his development as an artist. So the tragic death of four little girls led to his many portrayals of grown females in motion?

Some of the pieces here are quite arresting.

One couple reaches up to the highest boughs.

The representational approach is not my cup of tea, especially. I liked the stuff the tree flung to the ground as much as the sculpture that rose above.

You can’t really imagine it the other way around, can you — a 93-year-old female sculptor receiving acclaim for her dancing young male nudes? No way.

But seeing all these women wending around the sidewalk, all that exertion, all that freedom, brought me out of myself somehow. I felt glad to see them there.

2 Comments

Filed under Art, Culture, History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

Category Archives: Culture

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: