Walking Is Transportation

RECOMMENDATION FOR A NEIGHBOR'S SUMMER READING LIST

Short story writer John Cheever,
late 1950s/early 1960s.
(Photo courtesy of
Library of Congress)

AN ASTUTE OBSERVER OF PEOPLE
AND PLACE (AND WEATHER)

[Recently, on a social network site called My Staten Island Life (mystatenislandlife.com), a neighbor requested recommendations for a summer reading list. What follows was my response.]

I'm an excruciatingly slow reader, made even slower--if we're talking about printed materials--by the fact that I now do so much of my reading online. Even worse, probably, for the purposes of your list, I read very little fiction. And what fiction I read tends to take the form of the short story. Which brings me to the short story-related book I'm reading now and the one I read before that. I recommend both.

NOW: The Journals of John Cheever. BEFORE THAT: The recently published Cheever: A Life, a biography by Blake Bailey, the editor of the Library of America Cheever collection [publication details follow the text of this review].

Why Cheever? Because of his continually surprising and elegant use of language, principally; because of his acute powers of observation, and not only of people or place or human frailty more generally. Also surprising to me are his observations of weather, light and sky. More than stage-settings, these descriptions are intimate and deeply felt, evoking nature as a force in Cheever's life--something to be considered, recorded, remembered.

THE IMPERFECTIONS IN
SEEMINGLY PERFECT LIVES

Now, more than a quarter-century after his death, Cheever's representations of a certain class group in a certain place and time remain familiar territory to someone of my age. But because I grew up working class in the city, not upper middle-class in the suburbs, that territory will never lose its Otherness entirely.

Despite early critiques of corporate/suburban life (Sloan Wilson's rather sentimental "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," for example), Cheever was the first writer who revealed, at least to me, the imperfections in the lives lived by upper middle class white suburban families as they were broadly represented culturally at that time.

SOMETHING MORE
THAN MEANING

In his journals, which I'm reading now, we can see clearly the consciousness that yielded those astute and often sad insights into the lives of ordinary men and women. That consciousness was also a source of unremitting self-examination, of unsparing critical judgment and self-loathing that Cheever reserved for himself.

Despite his acute powers of discernment, Cheever seems to have been unable to acquit his wife of responsibility for their very difficult relationship until nearly the very end, when he quit drinking for good and indulged, sometimes very selfishly according to biographer Blake Bailey, the homosexual impulses he had anguished over for a lifetime.

For those with a taste for the salacious, neither the Bailey biography nor these journals disappoints. But in the end, it's Cheever's language and his keen powers of observation--not his anguish or excesses--that stop me in my tracks as a writer as well as a reader . . . as I look up from the page and repeat aloud a few words or a phrase I've just read, in a voice hardly above a whisper, extracting something more than meaning from the sound.

______________________________________________________________

Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey, 770pp. Epilogue. Acknowledgements. Notes. Index. Hardcover. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. $35.

The Journals of John Cheever, edited by Robert Gottlieb, 399pp. Editior's note. Softcover. Vintage International, 2008. $16.95.

#         #         #

Everybody Wants My Eyes

The empty chair. The growing pile.

WHEN A PLEASURE BECOMES A DUTY

Reading is my refuge. Always has been. But recently, reading has come to seem less a pleasure and more a duty. I first noticed it when the cooler, then colder weather sent me indoors.

Before the temperatures sort-of plunged, I'd had a mental picture of my over-wintering self. Attired in double-cotton long johns, an ankle-length Navy Blue fleece bathrobe and even fleece socks. Engrossed in something printed, sitting by the window in my mother's 1920s wing chair. Next to the chair on a rickety folding table, a periodical or two, a book or two or three.

A bibliophile's fondest image. But that's not how it's turned out.

Because when I'm in my office, I'm generally where I am now, seated in front of a flat-screen monitor, writing, or more to the point of this entry, reading. Meanwhile, the unread stack of words impressed onto sheets of paper piles higher. In my studio. In the kitchen. In the living room.

RECLAIMING TIME TO READ

The tactile-ness of paper pages, the heft of a hardbound volume can disappear with the lick of a flame, almost as fast as when I click the 'Delete' key to dispose of an unwanted page. And yet the unread book or article has a nagging importance to me that unopened e-mail messages and online so-called subscriptions just don't.

Lured by intriguing subject lines or cleverly titled links, though, I can spend hours chasing text online and, guilty though I am about it, do my best to ignore the stacks of words on paper piling up elsewhere around the house.

But I'm fighting back by reclaiming time to read.

--By writing "Refused," for example, on unsolicited mail and placing it in the mailbox or bringing it to the p.o. [It works! My unsolicited mail, formerly a flood, is now barely a trickle.]

--By discontinuing subscriptions I consider optional, like The New Yorker, most of which I skim. Sure I like the cartoons, but not at these prices.

In 30 days or so the crocuses will be up and I'll be kvetching about crosswalks and catch-basins. Can't wait.

Everything Staten Island at Everything Goes Book Café, Saturday, 11/3, 8 p.m.

Detail, mezzanine wall decoration, Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum station (#2 and #3 trains), Brooklyn, N.Y.

UPCOMING BOOK EVENT WITH A STATEN ISLAND SLANT

Staten Islanders aren't used to media attention, particularly positive media attention, that doesn't start and end with The Staten Island Advance.So if you're a Staten Islander, I think you'll be interested to read the generally positive (meaning--surprise!--not negative) coverage Staten Island's getting on Brian Berger's blog, Who Walk in Brooklyn ( http://www.whowalkinbrooklyn.com ).

Berger will be appearing this Saturday night at the ETG Book Café--along with Staten Island essayist Steve Maluk and Village Voice food writer Robert Sietsema--in connection with Berger's just-published book, co-edited with Marshall Berman, New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (University of Chicago Press). As one reviewer observed about the book, "For once, all five boroughs are represented," an assessment that has special meaning here in The Forgotten Borough.

Berger, Maluk and Sietsema promise an evening of words, photos and discussion, all of it focused on the place we call home.

BRIAN BERGER, STEVE MALUK and ROBERT SIETSEMA
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 8 p.m.
EVERYTHING GOES BOOK CAFE and NEIGHBORHOOD STAGE
208 Bay Street (between Victory Boulevard and Hannah Street)
718-447-8256

Walk-deprived.

For a long time after I stopped smoking, I had a recurrent . . . what my Aunt Harriet would have called a 'yen' for something. But what? The what, of course, was a cigarette. Once I realized it (and it happened, again and again), I would dive straight into the fruit bowl, the candy dish, or the refrigerator. On the theory that it was better to have love-handles than a round of chemo at Sloan-Kettering.

This week I've been shadowed by just that kind of 'yen.' Except there's no mystery about what it is I have a yen for. Simply stated, I need to be on the road, any road, anywhere, now. But landlordly, grandparental and volunteer duties have grounded me and will continue to ground me till the weekend, when I hope to get back on track. Literally.

Thanks for your patience in the meantime.

AN UNABASHED PLUG

There's a lot I miss about a city increasingly dominated by real estate development and national brands, the only tenants who can afford today's outrageous commercial rents.

Two of the things I miss most are (1) used book stores run on a tiny margin by people who love books; and (2) independently owned coffee shops--not franchise operations--where you can spend the morning over a cup or a conversation and the person who serves you is likely to be the person who owns the place.

Here in St. George (Staten Island), we're lucky to live close by just such an establishment, the ETG Book Cafe and Neighborhood Stage--that serves Fair Trade coffees and a variety of teas and fresh baked goods, and has a really large and interesting used book selection, vintage LPs, and a small stage used for all kinds of performances, including an open mic night.

Even in my short time as a volunteer book-shelver at ETG, I've developed an appreciation for the quality of its inventory. If you like friendly, slightly shabby used bookstores where there's enough to keep you browsing for a while, this is the place. The coffee's pretty good, too. And it's only three blocks from the ferry. (I'm the one with the buzzed head standing on a ladder in the back, squinting at a book jacket.)

The walker's private public space

What's my hurry? Not every walk has to point toward a destination. A walk can also be, to use a Hebrew religious term, lishmah––which means, 'undertaken for its own sake.'

Problem is, most of the time my stride is, if not long, then deliberate, purposeful. I'm walking to get somewhere. In that circumstance, walking at a more leisurely pace can seem like a pointless indulgence, a distraction.

My accustomed walking style--fast forward--also reflects my excitement, thinking about the adventure ahead. And it almost always really is an adventure. I picture myself set in a stance like Mercury's, propelled forward, the very definition of 'fleet.'

At the same time, it's been impossible not to conclude that walking is more than dashing from place to place. And certainly more than could be explained by a term like 'endorphin rush.' But what, exactly?

In her 2000 book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, San Francisco-based writer Rebecca Solnit provides an answer, or many answers. She examines a human activity that, throughout recorded history and probably before, has been understood as routine and commonplace, yet deeply mysterious and compelling.

One of Solnit's observations that I found particularly helpful led me to this: The walker occupies one of the most private public spaces there is. S/he is of the world and in the world, yet the walker's relationship to that world changes continuously. The walker is here one moment and gone the next; s/he is always present and always detached.