Monthly Archives: September 2011

Stone Arabia

“Do you need an audience to create work or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?” This is the question twenty-something Brooklynite Ada poses on her blog before she leaves Greenpoint to interview her eccentric uncle Nik in Los Angeles for the documentary she’s making. Ada’s film will be called Garageland, she writes, and it “will question what makes a person produce in the face of resounding obscurity.” Turn that question inside-out, and it is just as relevant to Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta’s third novel: How is fame constructed? Do the famous make themselves for us, their fans and consumers, or do we make them? What do their narratives truly represent, and who do their stories belong to?

My review of Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia is now up at The Millions.

The Hours

For a little more than a year now, I’ve been working the early early shift.  Most days, I leave my apartment at 3 a.m. to be at my desk by 3:30 a.m.   At least once a week, I’m in an hour before that.  “I don’t know how you do it,” people tell me.  When I think about the fact that the Dalai Lama typically wakes up at least 45 minutes later than I do, I don’t know either.

But secretly, I’ve come to really enjoy the shift. I like slipping out of my apartment building before anyone is awake to greet Carlos, the calm and collected driver who works for the car service contracted by my office.  As he drives his Benz (yes, I ride a Benz to work!) through the deserted streets, we complain about how tired we are.  We talk about politics, money, Moammar Gadhafi, the weather, and our weekends as I scan the latest headlines on my phone.  Sipping my tea and looking out at the Manhattan skyline, I brace myself for the day ahead.

Most days, my shift goes quickly.  A deadline every half-hour keeps me on my toes.  After the show ends, I stumble out into the sunshine, the day entirely open to me. Sometimes I go to a coffee shop and read.  Sometimes I sit in the park.   Sometimes I meet underemployed friends for dawdling, decadent lunches.   Sometimes I go for a run along the West Side Highway, or to an early afternoon yoga class.   There’s hardly anyone at the gym when I get there, and while the lunch rush swells in and out, I take my time.

I take naps. I stay up too late.  I fall asleep on the subway on my way home from work every single day.  I’ve learned to loop my purse around my arms as soon as I sit down so that once I’m asleep it’s not a temptation for anyone else riding a mid-afternoon Queens-bound train.  Once in a while, I oversleep and miss my stop.  I walk the extra avenues home in the bright mid-morning light cursing myself.

Strangely, I haven’t overslept my shift once.

A few weeks after I started this job, my coworker Sitara emailed out a poem called “Four a.m.” by Wislawa Szymborska.  It remains tacked up to the wall of my work-station:

The hour between night and day.
The hour between toss and turn.
The hour of thirty-year-olds.

The hour swept clean for rooster’s crowing.
The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace.
The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars.
The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.
Empty hour.
Hollow. Vain.
Rock bottom of all the other hours. No one feels fine at four a.m.
If ants feel fine at four a.m.,
we’re happy for the ants. And let five a.m. come
if we’ve got to go on living.

I won’t dispute it: 4 a.m. is the rock-bottom hour.  But I’ve grown to savor the luxury of the many other free hours my work schedule affords.  Once work is out of the way, the entire day is mine, and there are always more than enough ways to spend it.  After next week, I start a new shift.  I’ll be saying goodbye to my morning crew buddies (hands down, the coolest kids I’ve ever worked with) to take up a new daytime role.   I’ll arrive at the office after the sun’s come up and leave before the sun goes down like most people do.  “Let five a.m. come!” I thought to myself when my boss delivered the news.  We’ve got to go on living.

Please Look After Mom Essay Contest

After I reviewed Please Look After Mom this past spring, I was contacted by the Korean Cultural Service of New York to serve as a judge for an essay contest they’d decided to host based on readers’ responses to the book.

It was both an honor and a pleasure to read the contest entries and experience Kyung-sook Shin’s novel anew through some of her fans.

The Korean Cultural Service announced the winners a few weeks ago, and has now published a collection of selected essays.  You can download a PDF the collection — which includes all the winning essays and a short essay I was asked to write about judging the contest — here.

Ten Years Later

For a week or two now, it’s been inescapable: “Where were you when?”

My own September 11th story is unremarkable.  At the time, I was in my first semester of college at the University of Virginia.  I was in my dorm room, getting ready for class when my roommate’s best friend called.  Her voice was so emotional I could barely understand what she was saying.  Plane? Towers? Even after I turned on the TV, it didn’t make sense. All I really remember about the rest of the day is pressing redial on my phone again and again, trying to reach my brother, who lived in Manhattan at the time, or my mother, who was visiting him that week. My roommate’s parents worked in the Pentagon, and she couldn’t reach them either.  I remember walking around Alderman Road and seeing everyone doing the same thing: dialing their cellphones again and again.

My mom and brother were fine — and so were my roommate’s parents.  Everyone was a bit shaken but slowly, in media coverage and in our conversations with one another, a narrative began to emerge. The next day I attended a teach-in featuring Politics professors like R. K. Ramazani, Peter Ochs, and Michael J. Smith (who would later become my thesis adviser).  The next week, I talked to minority groups on campus.  A few months later, I visited my brother in New York.  He told me about how his law school roommate, a volunteer firefighter (who would later be the best man at his wedding), had gone down to the World Trade Center site on 9/11.  We went to an exhibit of September 11th photos taken by ordinary New Yorkers and hung by clothespins on the small walls of a downtown gallery. As we walked through the city, my brother pointed out which streets had been filled with dust.  I spent too long staring at a makeshift memorial in Grand Central.  It still didn’t make sense.

It surprises me how much September 11th has entered my career. I’ve spoken with the city medical examiner about identifying victim’s remains from the WTC rubble; I’ve spoken with first responders and post-traumatic stress counselors about 9/11 survivors, interviewed the founder of Stop the Islamization of America and spoken with members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. I’ve worked on coverage of the controversial Muslim community center project in lower Manhattan and of Osama bin Laden’s death.  In recent weeks, I resisted the coming tenth anniversary because it felt like over the years, we (and especially those of us who work in the media) haven’t ever paused from remembering that day. Mark Lilla summed it up sharply in New York magazine: “Remembrance became a narcotic that turned a prosperous nation at peace into a debt-ridden wayward giant lumbering around the world, willfully ignorant of its folly, its speech slurred and incomprehensible to anyone but itself.”

Still, seeing the lights this weekend — the two beams where the towers were, reaching into the sky; and the red, white and blue tiers of the Empire State Building — I was moved by the city’s stubborn memory, and the brighter part of “never forget” that represents an affirmation.  As Mayor Bloomberg put it:

We had to show the world that – in everyday lives – terror could not diminish our tolerance.  Hate could not defeat our hope.  And fanaticism could not destroy our freedom. Each of us did that in a million little ways – in the flags we waved and the blood we gave and the donations we made. We did it in time by volunteering – as rescue and recovery workers, social workers and medical professionals, as caterers and caregivers. We did it in the way we treated each other – with a new-found sense of solidarity. People of every color, of every country, speaking every language, practicing every religion, holding every belief, and yet we were all New Yorkers first – proud of our city, and determined to bring it back.

I wasn’t a New Yorker on September 11th, but now that I live in this city too, I’ve seen those little acts of goodwill and humanity — ordinary acts of kindness and courage — day in and day out.  They give me hope.