Autumn
Today is First Sweater Day! Well, it is for me at least. Today is a scratchy-wool, red-and-navy, polo-style day with a stray fiber causing my neck to itch. Today is unhemmed sleeves with edges that roll back a little. Today, I have to admit, is an Abercrombie day. First Sweater Day is always exciting because only then is it really fall, no matter what the calendar says. Fall was my favorite season when I was a kid. I'm an October baby, so fall always meant birthday parties and presents and cake. My hometown has a street festival every autumn, arriving near my birthday, so fall also always meant bad food and carnival rides and pretty girls. Fall is back-to-school time and I was always geek enough to love that. I mean, how couldn't you love back-to-school time? New clothes, new people to meet, new books to read. It always made me completely neurotic, but I still loved it. A couple of years ago, when I went to grad school, I moved down to Bloomington from Indianapolis and I bought new clothes and new shoes and then I went out and bought all my books. And then, on Orientation Day, I cycled in, hyper and nervous, to the main library in a new white T-shirt and new blue jeans but it had rained and all this road grime splattered up onto my T and I went into the bathroom and sponged off as much of it as I could, convinced I had totally ruined my chance to make a good first impression. Late fall, after the leaves have fallen and the trees have the beauty of stark, fractal potential, is delicious and bittersweet. When people around me complain that the trees are barren and the skies are gray, I secretly disdain them for being impatient and unimaginative. I'm old fashioned. I think there's truth in the seasons and their metaphors. The leaves and limbs and grass and husks rot away over the winter so we can have fresh topsoil in the spring to nurture the new greens and yellows and reds and blues that everyone else worships so much.New Media
MIT Press has published New Media, 1740-1915, a collection of essays that examine the adoption of new media in historical, social, and cultural contexts. Test: Gleaning, Exchanging and Vernacular Media discusses one such new medium, newspaper and magazine scrapbooking, which apparently arose during the nineteenth century, and its similarities to today's weblogs. [New Media, 1740-1915: MIT Press; Amazon.com; via Anil's Daily Links]New NYC sites on World Monuments Watch
World Monuments Watch 2004 has placed two New York City sites on its list of endangered sites: St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, and the whole of Lower Manhattan. Of Lower Manhatan, the Watch states: "Today, some 200 historic and architecturally significant buildings near Ground Zero are at risk, threatened with demolition to make way for new transportation centers, retail corridors, and urban spaces."4 corners
Ryan's me cousin, see. I saw his name on a Wired News piece a whole bunch of months ago, and then I saw this and e-mailed him asking whether he was the same Ryan Singel who was related to me. A ha! He's living in the Bay Area now, which is beautiful, but not quite as cool as New York.Once in a blue moon
Two amusing Google links: Once in a blue moon, 1 ÷ Once in a blue moon. [via Polyglut]Getaway train under Waldorf Astoria
The Post today mentions a special train parked under the Waldorf Astoria as an escape option for President Bush and other leaders staying at the hotel. The Metro North train is parked at a platform that was built under the hotel during its construction in the 1930s; the platform was previously used by General Pershing and President Franklin Roosevelt, and Andy Warhol's collective is said to have once thrown a party down there. You can get the whole story, along with pictures of the exterior entrance leading down to the platform, at Joseph Brennan's Abandoned Stations page. [via Gothamist]We're a happy family
Gothamist looks at Times critic A. O. Scott's review of the new film Duplex. Damned if they're not right: There are a helluva lot of strollers in Park Slope. Scott even jokes that Park Slope residents are required to have a baby "within 18 months of arrival or face deportation back to Manhattan." This amuses me in part for assuming everyone moves to Park Slope from the city. My clock's ticking at one year; think the stroller brigade will shoo me back to Indiana?Because you're mine, I walk the High Line
In which I describe an afternoon's adventures on the High Line.
Beginning in the 1930's, a freight rail line ran up Manhattan's West Side, carrying cargo through Manhattan's disparate neighborhoods, from Spring Street in Greenwich Village, up 13 miles to Spuyten Duyvil at the island's northern tip. As trucking became the dominant mode of shipping cargo, the elevated rail line carried less traffic. One section was closed and demolished in the 1960s and the last train rolled across the tracks in 1980.
What remains is a mile and a half of untended, elevated right of way, stretching from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District, through Chelsea, and up to 34th Street.
A group of local property owners are fighting to have the structure demolished, claiming it's a blight on the cityscape; they also say they could put the land and its air rights to better use if they were allowed to build on it.
Another group, calling itself Friends of the High Line, wishes to renovate the structure into an urban park of the rails-to-trails model. This group cites the success of the Promenade Plant�e in Paris as a model for what the High Line could become for New Yorkers.
The High Line has been in the news lately, as the city decides what to do with the structure. Newsday reported yesterday that although the city is proceeding with plans to convert the rail line into a park, the final decision might rest with the federal Surface Transportation Board.
Knowing all this, I've been jonesing to get on the damn thing, even though to do so is to trespass, but I wasn't sure where or how you access it, until I read an entry at the blog Oblivio, with detailed instructions for getting to the thing.
Okay, Mr. Oblivio writes, enter the big truck lot on 33rd between 11th and 12th. The lot was easy to find, but my first obstacle was the security guard sitting in the guardhouse right inside the fence. If you want to survive in New York, though, you learn quickly how to walk purposefully through any given space. Act like you belong there, and you won't get trouble.
Or maybe the guard just didn't give a shit. Either way, I walked in like I belonged there.
Continue reading "Because you're mine, I walk the High Line"Singular they
Vocabula Review published a piece today about the use of they as a generic, gender-free singular pronoun, as in the following: "If you love someone, set them free." Many grammarians argue that the correct phrasing of such a thought would be, "If you love someone, set him or her free," or, in an earlier era, "If you love someone, set him free," regardless of the sex of the antecedent. The writer, Jjoan Ttaber Altieri, cites historical examples dating back to Shakespeare and earlier of respected writers using they in this fashion. Most of her examples appear to have been cited from Henry Churchyard's pages on the topic. She, and Churchyard (and other writers, such as Steven Pinker) before her, argue for the revival of they as an acceptable generic singular. Altieri writes that the use of he for the generic is a relatively recent development, dating back to eighteenth-century grammarians in England. Writers and speakers before then commonly used they as a singular generic. I accept their arguments and in principle I agree, but I'd be loath to accept this use of they in my writing or editing. The onus against it is still so strong that one who uses it, even consciously, is deemed a lesser writer for so doing. And although I know that's silly on its face, I'll still allow every grammarian dog to have his or her day.I'm back
Here I am, settling comfortably into new digs. Poke around a bit, tell me whether you like or hate it. Over in Changes is a list of what's changed on the site and with the weblog, in case you're wondering.Transferring servers
If all went well, I should have started the process tonight of moving this site onto a different server, hosted by a different hosting company.
What this means is that, for technical reasons, my pages might go offline--but it should be for no longer than a day or two.
This assumes that all goes well. We'll see.
Also, my mike@michaeldietsch.com mail might also be temporarily unavailable during this switch, but again I hope it's for only a short period.
Social hygiene poster archive
American Social Hygiene Posters from the University of Minnesota. [MetaFilter]
Opus returns to the comics page
Berke Breathed Gets The Lead Out. Back In the Funny Business. "After eight years away from newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is creating a new comic strip called Opus, starring his beloved penguin of the same name." (Washington Post) [MetaFilter]
"In space, it's never Miller time."
Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the fabric of the city
The fabric of the city. The city is fascinating—perverse, complex, sometimes maddening, sometimes startlingly beautiful, full of the middles of stories whose beginnings and ends... [Making Light]
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a long but fun essay about the "passionate fannish interests" that a city like New York sparks. Full--I mean full--of links to all sorts of New York geekery, her essay makes a good jumping-off point for armchair-exploring hidden or forgotten sections of the city.
Blue kamakazi
Friday night, 8/28. Joshua Tree, Manhattan. Ed Mathews orders a round of blue drinks...
I had one, too. I think it hurt me.
Photos courtesy the lovely Lauren Martin.