Sunday Scattershot

A few unconnected things that may or may not be of interest to anyone who may or may not be reading this:

1) It was gorgeous in the Valley today, and it was, consequently, probably the last chance I'll have to ride down the Norwottuck Rail Trail to Amherst. Everyone else, their dogs, their children, and their elderly grandparents seem to have had a roughly similar idea, and this, along with the copious debris littering the trail as a result of last night's rain, made for a fairly perilous journey. It's sad to abandon the trail for the winter and to have to rely, instead, on the Buddhamobile or the bus to get me to campus, but I'm consoling myself with the thought that this was probably how the pioneers did it, back before the bike trail was there.

2) I have a phone interview on Tuesday with a large state school outside of Nashville. This is potentially a sign either of good things to come or of bad things, or both. Good because I've got an interview at a decent school located in a decent part of the country (I recently visited Nashville with my brother and was quite taken with it) and because it suggests that other schools might also be interested. Bad because the reason MTSU is jumping the gun and conducting their interviews way ahead of the normal historian-job schedule is that they're afraid a hiring freeze might be introduced next year and so they're trying to get someone locked into this position before the end of the year. Part of the reason I went into academia was that I fondly imagined it might insulate me from the boom-bust cycle of late-period capitalism, but developments such as this are revealing that to have been an embarrassingly erroneous calculation. Dark mutterings about budget cuts, hiring freezes, and even failures to meet payroll are filling the halls of higher education these days. Just today I learned that Brandeis University, which had advertised a position I was planning to apply for, had suspended its search owing to financial difficulties. I understand some 900 colleges had large chunks of their endowments invested in some Wachovia fund that they can no longer access, owing to the crisis at Wachovia, and the suspension of the Brandeis search may be a consequence of their inability to get at their own money. Colby College, I hear, also had its money in Wachovia and recently sent out communications to its faculty reassuring them that they will make payroll this month - how's that for a reassurance that can only fail to reassure? These developments are slightly troubling to me.

3) Pumpkin update: in happier, if not exactly lighter news, I can now report that, in addition to the pumpkin items discussed in a previous post, I have now had pumpkin-apple-curry soup, some pumpkin-chocolate-chip bread, a piece of pumpkin cheesecake, and yet more pumpkin beer. The pumpkin cheesecake was the sole disappointment of the three: spiced exactly like pumpkin pie, but much much richer, all I could think of while eating it was how it wasn't pumpkin pie, but instead something that might ensue if you mixed pumpkin pie up with a bunch of egg nog. I didn't finish it.

4) The band They Might Be Giants played the Calvin Theater the other night. I'm not a huge huge fan, but it just so happens that their seminal 1990 album Flood was one of the first CDs I ever owned (this was during the period of my life when I listened to nothing but novelty records - my other early CDs were from people like "Weird Al" Yankovic and Tom Lehrer), and the band will therefore forever have a place in my heart. To my shock and delight, they opened the show by playing, in sequence, all the songs from Flood. If you have even the slightest acquaintance with TMBG, or even if you don't, you probably know at least one song from Flood: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Istanbul (Not Constaninople)", "Particle Man". Several of these songs even made it into an episode of the wonderful but short-lived animated series, Tiny Toon Adventures - here's the "Istanbul" segment. Anyway, hearing these songs again - many of them for the first time since I was a teenager - had a powerfully transporting effect, reminding me of things like sitting around playing video games on my friend Brian's computer and wondering what it might be like someday to talk to a girl. I was giddy with nostalgia, wondering at my brain's ability to remember all the words to even the most obscure cuts on that album. Do I wish that that brain space had been filled with more productive knowledge lo these many years? No. No, I do not.

5) I'm reading a collection of George Orwell essays at the moment and lurving it. Everybody thinks of Orwell as this prescient political novelist who constructed powerful critiques of governments and ideologies, which he was, but he was also deeply, cuttingly funny. My favorite quip so far comes from the essay "The Lion and the Unicorn", in which he characterizes Stanley Baldwin (British PM in the 1920s and 1930s) thus: "As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air."

That's all for now. Next time I think I may talk about Shakers.

The Ninja

There's a ninja living in my driveway.

I know because I've seen and heard him. The first time was about a month ago, not long after I'd moved into the Submarine. I was home alone, practicing walking from the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen without ever touching the floor, when I heard a sound like someone throwing a clown off a tall building.

"Hey! Hey-yay-yayayayayayeeeeeeeeiiiii!"

Alarmed, I ran to the front door and looked outside. All I saw was a slight, nebbish man wearing jeans. glasses, and a t-shirt and looking for all the world like Stephen Colbert's younger, slightly dorkier brother. Relieved that there were not, in fact, clowns falling off the roof, I turned away from the window and then stopped. There it was again!

"Hey! Hey-yay-yayayayayayeeeeeeeeiiiii!"

Pulling aside the curtain, I saw the man turn rapidly around, lift a large stick above his head, pause, emit a loud "Hey!", bring the stick down violently, and then lunge forward with a kind of prancing motion across the driveway. (When I say prance, I mean prance - with a tight little booty shake that made it look like he had a child's hobby horse between his legs). While doing this he thrust the stick out horizontally, as if to vanquish a gang of invisible samurai, and emitted the "Hey-yay-yayayayayayeeeeeeeeiiiii!" that I was starting to recognize as his battle cry. Mesmerized, I watched for a few minutes from behind the curtain, mentally grading him on poise, posture, and what I somewhat unsatisfactorily termed "heart". Occasionally he would alter his battle cry to a sort of "Hooowahwahahaoooooo!", but it was unclear what made this change necessary. After a few minutes of this, fearing that he might catch me looking and suddenly feel self-conscious, I turned away from the window and went back to what I was doing.

Since that night, I've heard the battle cry several times, always at night, and it always catches me off-guard. I've toyed with the idea of turning on my porch light for him (the driveway gets rather dark, and I control the only light that makes it navigable at night), but - again - I don't want him to feel self-conscious. I have absolutely no idea who this ninja is, or where he lives. At first I thought he might be my upstairs neighbor, Stompy McStompstomp (that would account for some, at least, of the violent racket upstairs), but I recently heard Stompy doing his thing while the ninja was outside doing his, so I'm positive it's not him (besides, one would think that a ninja would normally move with stealth, at least in his own home, and stealth is most definitely not Stompy's m.o.).

On the whole I believe he's a friendly ninja, and I feel much safer knowing he's out there keeping watch, defending me from the evil that stalks NoHo at night. I sometimes wonder if, like that other invisible guardian of truth and happiness, Santa Claus, the ninja might like it if I left some milk and cookies outside for him from time to time. It might keep me on his good side - or it might simply enrage him. It could go either way, really. So for now, I'll just lay low.

In the meantime, my main hope is that he doesn't give the squirrels any ideas.

Some Tour Guides I Have Known

I'm a historian, so I naturally spend a lot of time taking tours of old stuff. Houses, prisons, libraries, castles, palaces, battlefields, forts, churches, meeting houses - chances are, if it's old and you can string one backward-walking guide and ten to twenty be-fannypacked tourists through it, I've toured it. I've also toured non-historical things - ice cream factories, chocolate factories, creameries, breweries, distilleries, caves - and it is, I believe, due to this vast touring experience that a pattern has slowly started to make itself clear to me, like one of those magic eye paintings that were all the rage about 10 years ago. A pattern that I hope, by sharing, might enable others to gird themselves for what's to come the next time they find themselves standing in a semi-circle, surrounded by strangers, staring at another stranger, in a place where they would not normally be allowed to go.


First, I should say this. I do not, as a rule, enjoy tours of this sort. Partly this is because, as Sarah Vowell points out in her wonderful book Assassination Vacation, tour guides - and the people who listen to tour guides - are often obsessed with "the thingness of things", to the detriment of anything truly interesting or provocative about the items they're displaying. Thus, for instance, if you tour Independence Hall in Philadelphia, you are likely to have it pointed out to you which quill was the quill used to pen this old document, which chair was the chair this famous patriot sat in, which desks were actually in this room when the Constitutional Convention sat, etc. Your fellow tourists, moreover, are likely to pump your guide for even more information regarding which of these items is authentic, what happened to them in the years between the events in which they are implicated and their current location, and all sorts of other irrelevant and frankly rather dull nonsense that enhances your own understanding of the period, people, or issues at stake during these events not at all. Is this really the pillow on which Lincoln's blood spilled after he was shot? Who cares! How did his assassination impact the course of postwar Reconstruction and the social/political conditions of the postbellum South? What did America's first presidential assassination do to the political culture of the country generally? How has Lincoln's legacy been contested, reinterpreted, and revised over the years? Why, for that matter, was this pillow saved? That's what I want to know.


I realize that I'm being supremely unfair to all the people out there who are not professional historians - and, let's face it, there are quite a few non-historians on this planet. After all, most people are taught that "history" is simply a story about things that happened in the past, and that all they have to do to understand this "history" is to memorize the story and spit it back on the test. Once you've got the story, you've got all you need. There's no sense that the story might be incomplete, its meanings contestable, its purposes ideological. This sort of thing can be quite pernicious - in America the dominant historical narrative we receive about our country's relentless march of progress and freedom has led directly to a widespread belief in American exceptionalism and indirectly to all sorts of terrible things in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan - and it is reinforced by the way history is presented on historical tours. But I realize I'm fighting a losing battle here, so I'll move on.


Another reason I dislike tours of this sort is that they go against my very strong desire, while traveling, to take things at my own pace and to explore what I want to explore. This is also why just thinking about package vacations, resorts, bus tours, or cruises makes me break out in shingles. If I wanted my time to be managed by others I'd move into an assisted living community. If I wanted someone else to decide what I should be seeing and what I should be thinking about what I should be seeing, I'd stay home and watch the Travel Channel. Granted, often a tour guide (or, more frequently, a handheld audio guide) will tell me things that I wouldn't otherwise know, and sometimes that bit of knowledge will actually enhance my experience of a place, but all too often I find myself moping around at the back of the group, staring listlessly at a fireplace or a Louis XIV chair, while some half-literate hayseed asks the guide if she could explain one more time just how short a person would have to be to fit in a bed that size.


It should be obvious by now that another of my objections to guided tours has to do with the people one often finds oneself forced to share a tour with. There seems to be something about guided tours that attracts the gormless, the corny, the chatty, and the elderly. The sorts of people one encounters on guided tours are what I envision the whole of Jay Leno's audience to be like: impervious to irony, none too sharp, and - above all - easily amused. I have been astounded by the glee with which my fellow tourists invariably greet even the cheesiest and most threadbare of tour-guide jokes (which all come, I am convinced, from the same handbook), as if our civilization were still bogged down on our path of comedic development somewhere between Bob Hope and Jonathan Winters. But then again, maybe I'm just revealing how little time I spend around average Americans in non-guided-tour contexts.


Anyway, the pattern. Here's what I've discovered. There are essentially two types of tour guides: Professionals and Enthusiasts. Professionals are, of course, people who are getting paid for giving the tours. They may or may not have any real interest in or knowledge about the places/people/things they're discussing - they're there to draw a paycheck, and their continued ability to draw a paycheck is often dependent on the feedback their bosses receive about their performance. Often a Professional's presentation will be smoothly polished, his timing impeccable, his jokes well-practiced and well-placed. If the Professional happens to be Irish, he will often have an exaggerated accent calculated to meet the expectations of American tourists whose knowledge about Ireland comes chiefly from Riverdance and Darby O'Gill and the Little People. If the Professional happens to be working at Independence National Park, he will often look like Benjamin Franklin.


For all the slickness of their presentations, however, there are several severe drawbacks to having a Professional show you around. First, they are often the worst offenders when it comes to retailing some master narrative about the significance of a place or a person - there's little you can do to get them to deviate from their script. Second, they will often lie to you - because they often have no real interest in the matter they're discussing, they will have no qualms about spouting off the most preposterous nonsense that will often be revealed as such should one ever take that same tour with a different guide. Third, they are often incable of improvising - any question that diverts them from their script will throw the whole performance off kilter. Fourth, they are often mean.


As an illustration of this last point, I'd point to my recent tour of the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT. It's a beautiful place that I recommend you all visit, but be aware that there are very strict rules that at least one of the guides will enforce with a ruthlessness approaching the Hitlerian. From our initial interaction with her, in which she very condescendingly asked my father if there was something she might be able to help us with (we had inadvertantly wandered past the cash register and were straying dangerously close to the forbidden, paid-customer-only area), it was clear that she had a chip on her shoulder. Throughout the tour, she reminded us several times how carefully security was watching us (I pictured small gray men crouched behind walls with DDR-style listening devices fixed to their ears) and explained how her bosses would hold her accountable if any of us - heaven forbid! - strayed too far from the group or lingered too long in a particular room. She got exasperated when one of the tourists had to leave early (and therefore had to be escorted back to the visitor center), exasperated again when another tourist proved too corpulent to make it up the stairs (therefore requiring another escort), and downright hostile when a little old lady began unwrapping a cough drop on the last leg of the tour.



Mean Tour Guide: "I'm sorry, ma'am, you're not allowed to have food on the tour."


Harmless Little Old Lady: "But I'm going to cough."


MTG: "I'm sorry, but it's not allowed. And security is watching us, so those of you that are lingering behind in the other room are going to get me in trouble."


HLOL: "..."


The other type of tour guide is the Enthusiast. This will often be a volunteer, usually a retiree, who has decided to spend her time learning as much as she can about a place or person and giving tours while the people who get paid to look after the historic site do whatever else it is that they do. Enthusiasts are the most flexible and least dogmatic guides you can have, happy to travel down even the most tangential path if prompted to do so by a question from the crowd. They usually know their stuff and are truly excited to be sharing what they know with others. At their best they can impart great enthusiasm for whatever they're discussing; at their worst they can be completely incoherent, senile, and dreadfully dull.


A recent visit to Arrowhead, Herman Melville's house outside of Pittsfield, MA, was an example of an Enthusiast's tour at its best. Although we arrived 40 minutes after the last tour of the day, the guy running the place agreed to take us on an unofficial, private tour without us even asking him to do so. Would a Professional do that? No chance. He was genial, knowledgeable, and clearly excited about telling us things we didn't know about Herman Melville.



Touring Arrowhead


A recent example of an Enthusiast's tour at its worst, on the other hand, took place at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, which I visited with Meagan this past summer. The guide was an older, talkative lady who had clearly spent her golden years reading everything and anything she could about the library, the founders of the library, the founders' families, and the historical context surrounding key dates in the library's history. Indeed, so much information had she accumulated, and so little had she managed to process, that the tour was nothing more than a ceaseless torrent of words and phrases that may have been related to one another, and to the library, via some flickering synapse in our guide's mind, but whose connection to one another was completely lost on us. We did manage to ascertain, through repeated statements to this effect, that "World War I beggared Europe" and that "gloves destroy books", but what relationship these undoubtedly true statements had to the library we were touring was and is a complete mystery. By the end of the tour we were exhausted, bewildered, and probably slightly stupider than we had been an hour earlier. But then we managed to explore, on our own, a special exhibit devoted to Maurice Sendak and to learn what a strange, strange man he is - and that (almost) made it all better.


In sum, it's best to be able to gauge whether you're in for a Professional or an Enthusiast tour, and then to prepare yourself for what's in store. Better still, perhaps, to sneak into these places after hours and enjoy a completely unmediated experience.

That's some great pumpkin ravioli, Charlie Brown!

[I've been uploading photos like crazy. Photos of NoHo are here; photos of Amherst are here; and photos from around New England are here.]

By any objective criteria, autumn is the best time of year, October is the best part of autumn, and New England is the best place to be in October (specifically rural New England, specifically when the sun is shining and the air is crisp). This is so patently obvious that I don't feel like I need to explain the reasons this is so. Even people who have never been to New England in autumn - even people who have never been to New England period - even people who have never heard of New England and live in places like Burkina Faso or Sri Lanka - know this is so. But, because we live in a society in which we expect our cultural products, including blogs, to perform the vital and primary function of telling us things we already know, allow me this quick indulgence.

Autumn in New England is perfect for essentially three reasons. 1) The colors of the trees. Even someone with no interest in nature - indeed, even someone who is actively hostile to nature, who spends her time burning down forests, stomping on helpless woodland creatures, and lobbying for the oil industry - will concede that the brilliant reds, oranges, yellows, and (yes) greens of a New England hillside forest in autumn can be among the most stunning sights on this or any other planet. 2) The air. Together with the changing and then falling leaves, a crisp sunny day is simultaneously a stirring affirmation of the essential wonderfulness of life and a melancholy reminder of the onrush of winter. 3) The food. Sure, you can find apple cider and pumpkin pie all over the country (even, perhaps, in Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka), but it's the freshness, the variety, and - more than anything - what's done with autumnal foods in New England that makes this place unmatchable.

As an example of 3), I refer you to the humble pumpkin. Pumpkin patches are, as you will perhaps have inferred from my earlier post about the bike path, ubiquitous in the Happy Valley, and farm stands selling pumpkins are as common out here as bumper stickers denouncing the Bush Administration. Front stoops all over town are awash in pumpkins. Children ride giant pumpkins to school, clad in knitted sweaters and corduroys made entirely from pumpkin silk. I have to fight my way through several yards of pumpkins just to get from my living room to the bathroom. Sometimes it rains pumpkins.

We have, in short, a surfeit of pumpkins.

In the past month (and this is no lie), I have had the following: pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin donuts, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin cheesecake ice cream, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin beer, fettuccine with pumpkin sauce, and pumpkin ravioli. And I'm not done yet - yesterday I saw a recipe for pumpkin pecan waffles, which I am determined to try shortly. Where else but in New England can one find such a variety of (universally tasty) foods made with a vegetable as otherwise obscure as the pumpkin? Burkina Faso? Nope. Sri Lanka? Try again.

And this is just one example. There's also the wonderful variety of squashes (and dishes made from squashes) available right now, from the ugly-duckling buttercup to the prima-donna butternut. There's actually a restaurant on Route 9 called Butternuts, which I'm dying to try, if only because I think "butternuts" sounds like some particularly naughty pet name that two lovers might share.

And then, of course, there are apples and apple-picking, mulled cider, apple pie, and all the rest of it. A truly democratic fruit, the apple, accessible to all without the need of any special knowledge or tools. Just pick it and bite into it - hell, share it with someone next to you. The apple is nature's friendship bracelet: available in dozens of colors and varieties, yet still managing to bring people together.

But as I say, everyone around the world knows all this already.

Hey, wait a minute! Ducks don't wear socks!

One of the things I liked about living in New Orleans, which I did in the previous century, was how improbable the whole place was. Coming from a mid-American suburb where I rarely saw anything out of the ordinary, where people fit easily into a handful of commonly acknowledged categories and conducted their lives within the bounds of well-defined parameters, where the unusual wasn't just scorned but actively repressed - coming, as I say, from a place like this, I was excited and a little bit frightened by the variety of life on display in New Orleans. A homeless man grinning and jamming to a boombox like he was the happiest man on earth, a randy group of St Ann Street queens purring and catcalling at me and my friends on Halloween, a bearded man wearing an Uncle Sam hat riding an enormous bicycle down St. Charles in the middle of a weekday, serious as church - things like this were entirely new to me, and they helped me to realize that life could be a lot bigger than I'd always assumed. It's funny now, after more than a decade of living all sorts of places and seeing all sorts of things, to remember just how wide-eyed I was back then. And how perceptive: I vividly remember, as a freshman in college, attributing all the improbable things I saw in New Orleans to the improbability of the city itself. There should never have been a city built there in the middle of a swamp like that, I reasoned, and so the people there were living with a sort of subconcious understanding that they were living on borrowed time, that the sea and swamp could at any time decide to reclaim what was rightfully theirs, and you'd better try to live life a little before it all comes crashing down. That may or may not have been true, but subsequent events have at least shown how precarious - if not exactly improbable - life there could really be.

Since I left New Orleans I've lived in quite a few places where the unusual happens more or less frequently. Boston wasn't a great place for the unusual, although Somerville had its moments. In Dublin and Belfast I had to pick my jaw off the ground several times - the time I watched two young men, one African and one Indian, standing on the Lisburn Rd in Belfast watching an Orange Order parade, decked out in Kick-the-Pope Protestant regalia, exchanging thumbs-ups with perplexed and inebriated Orangemen comes to mind - although much of the craziness I encountered in these cities was undoubtedly due to the quantity of drink consumed by the people I was observing (and by myself). During my too-brief stay in Philadelphia I often found myself stopping and smiling at something crazy or pleasant or fascinating going on out on the streets or in a park - when, that is, I wasn't dodging drunken brawlers at Dirty Frank's or having long, intense conversations with strangers who looked like Adam Duritz - and I'm pretty sure that, given enough time, Philly would have helped me recapture a bit of my youthful fascination with the odd and the improbable.

But all the same, I'm finding that as I get older I'm getting harder to impress. Things that 18-year-old me would have seen as evidence of life's rich possibilities now often seem fatuous and contrived, tired variations on a theme I've heard too many times. NoHo has got me thinking this way lately. It's the sort of place where being Subversive and Different are highly valued activities among many of the inhabitants - where the mainstream is something to be scoffed at and dismissed with almost the same vigor that the unusual is scorned by the the folks back home. My heart, as always, is with the subversives, but now it does so with a sort of resigned and weary shake of the head (I know hearts don't have heads - just bear with me) instead of the "golly gee whizz" amazement of my youth.

Example 1: Last night, while walking down Main Street with my father and brother, we passed the usual group of hippies clustered around the entrance to the Haymarket Cafe. A small boy of about 2 was playing with something and the hippies were cooing over him. On closer inspection I saw a large black duck wearing socks - the pet duck, as it turned out, of the woman who appeared to be the boy's mother (they were her socks the duck was wearing). The little boy was thrilled to pieces with the duck, but I don't think I even cracked a smile.

Example 2: Also while walking through town with my family the other day, we saw a man ride past on some sort of vehicle made out of what appeared to be several bicycles, some multicolored plastic plates, and an umbrella. He had a twirling beanie on his head and some sort of music playing. I don't remember the rest because I didn't really bother to turn my head to look at him.

These are two examples from the past few days, but things like this happen all the time here. I've already mentioned the singing girls who gave me the heart-shaped cardboard cutout the other day. In a future post I intend to talk about the ninja who inhabits my driveway. Sometimes (as with the singing girls) I'm fairly charmed by this stuff, and sometimes (as with the ninja) I'm annoyed, but more often it just barely registers. All the same, I suspect that I'd miss this sort of thing terribly if I ever moved back to Oklahoma - and would probably be regarded as eccentric myself, if not downright strange, if I failed to shed my crazy big-city ways quickly enough.

OK Commuter

The Submarine is docked about 9 miles from campus, where, at a minimum, I have to go every Thursday for lunch (except this past Thursday, due to Yom Kippur) and usually several times a week on one errand or another. If we exclude helicopters and hot-air balloons, there are three ways to travel from here to there. The first is to take the bus, an option I haven't yet tried but probably will once the weather worsens (apparently I get to ride the bus for free with my college ID). The second is to drive down Route 9. This takes about 20 minutes and is by far the most efficient option, if also the most depressing. Route 9 is the only part of the area that looks like NW Oklahoma City, where I grew up: big box stores, gas stations, and fast-food joints. It's home to the area's only Wal-Mart, Target, Applebees, Chilis, and - soon - Home Depot. Just to remind you of where you are, Route 9 also has a few things we didn't have back home: a couple of farm stands, a drive-thru organic coffee hut, a Trader Joe's, and a Whole Foods. Traffic on Route 9 is correspondingly heavy, the drive often tedious and aggravating.

The third option is by far my favorite, and it's what I want to talk about today. This is the bike path, or the Norwottuck Rail Trail, which runs along a disused railroad track dating from the 1880s. Thankfully, they've taken the track out, although there are several jarring patches along the path that certainly make it feel like you're biking over railroad ties. The trail roughly parallels Route 9, but, apart from a brief stretch that passes behind Wal-Mart and Target and the movie theater, to travel down the trail is to enter a different world entirely. Starting from NoHo, you first cross the Connecticut River via a charming old steel bridge, from which, to the south, you can see and hear cars whizzing down the highway.

Then you come upon farmland. Red barns, cornfields, pumpkin patches. It is ridiculously, even stupidly, quaint.

Moving on, you go through moderately dense forests, veer south under the highway, check out a bit of the fall foliage, and pedal on through the trees.

Then you get to the boring part - the part behind the box stores, where the path unaccountably gets really rough for a time, but even this can present some surprises.

(I don't even know)

And then it's back to the country - a charming vista of Mt. Tom to the south, a dense grove of trees, a small herd of cows (whose smell invariably alerts you to their approach), up a hill, and into town.

I love the bike path for several reasons, only one of which has to do with the scenery along the way. It is relatively flat, which makes the 9 or so miles go by fairly painlessly; it is usually uncrowded; it appears to be utilized principally by the elderly, who are easy to dodge and unlikely to go zooming past me at perilous speeds; and it is usual to smile, nod, or even verbally greet the people whom one meets along the path. All of these things make biking the Norwottuck much more pleasurable than, say, the Minute Man Trail north of Boston, where traffic jams are common, "serious" bikers speeding by in their fluorescent spandex jumpsuits present a serious and unending hazard, and people are anything but friendly (I once even biked through an Arlington High schoolyard brawl on the Minute Man, for chrissakes). My one concern about the Norwottuck Trail is the chipmunks. Many, many chipmunks scamper back and forth over the trail all the time - they're fast little buggers and you don't have to worry too much about running one over, but here lately, perhaps because of the colder temperatures, they've become increasingly lethargic. The other day, after nearly running over several of them myself, I was horrified to see one instance of actual chipmunk roadkill on the path. I can only imagine what the poor guy thought as some gigantic whizzing contraption came barrelling down the path, breaking the peace of a crisp autumn day, and crushed the life out of him. I have, consequently, moderated my own speed on the path to avoid doing anything similar. (Squirrels, I should note, are also an area of concern and for the same reasons, but in my hierarchy of cute animals they fall well below the chipmunk, and so are less deserving of serious precautions. Besides, most of them are big enough to look after themselves.)

We All Live in a Noho Submarine (part 3)

The Submarine is growing on me by the day. This is partly because I've finally managed to get things arranged more or less as I'd like them, which makes things homier; partly because I've got some nice little houseplants to look after, which makes the place feel a bit more alive; and partly because I've now been here over a month and am starting to get used to the downsizing that I've undergone. It's always a great concern of mine that I not become a bourgeois cliche - in Philly I underwent great inner turmoil every time I began to be annoyed with the lady (an Eritrean refugee paying her son's way through college) whom we paid to clean the apartment, even when she did things like showing up 36 hours late, because I was afraid that made me seem petty and entitled: "My, my, one just can't find good help these days! And do count the spoons before she arrives next time, my dear landlord/roommate, as I don't want her making off with our fine silver when we're not looking." Any time I feel myself sliding into this way of thinking I try to remind myself that most people inhabiting the planet would give up a limb or two to have what I have - and, indeed, I'd wager that most people reading this blog right now would be more than happy to switch me places and receive a reasonably middle-class salary in exchange for doing absolutely nothing 80% of the time (I'm asleep the other 20%). So what follows should not be taken as a litany of woe-is-me complaints but rather a description of some of the challenges that I've encountered with my new apartment, challenges that would pale to insignificance if my day-to-day existence weren't otherwise as hassle-free as it is.

1) The size. Several people who saw the photos I posted of the place remarked that the place looks "cute". If this is true, and I'll concede that it may have some validity, I suspect that it has more to do with my decorating/arranging skills than with any inherent cuteness in the apartment itself (in which case I thank you for the compliments). But all the same: puppies are cute, babies are cute, chipmunks (even chip-punks) are cute - but I wouldn't want to live inside one. The kitchen floor is 5'x4' (I just measured) and has all the counter space of two shoeboxes placed side by side. This wouldn't be a problem if I were a frozen-pizza-and-bagel-bites kind of guy, but I'm not, and what with all the organic produce around it'd be nice to have a decent kitchen in which to transform that produce into tasty meals. I'm doing what I can, but it's a bit cramped - and you can forget about trying to fit more than one person in there at a time. The bathroom is similarly tiny - with almost no counter space at all, and not even a medicine cabinet behind the mirror. And the shower? Man, it was like week 3 before I managed to get done what needs to be done in there without banging an elbow or a knee or a shoulder into a wall or a knob or something. I've finally got the hang of it, but do you have any idea how hard it is to shower with your arms straight down against your sides? It's like being in a cryonic tube. The bedroom (through which you have to pass to get to the bathroom) is big enough for the fairly large bed I have, but just barely, and many's the time I've had to vault over the bed from the living room to get to the bathroom because I couldn't manage to squeeze my way around the bed. The living room itself is not bad but quite narrow - you've got to scoot the bouncy chair back quite a bit if you want to watch tv without actually sitting on the tv, and then scoot it forward again if you want to get out the back door (to do things like laundry).

All this has forced me to get quite creative with my space - living vertically, I believe the interior design magazines call it. So I've installed a hanging dish rack above the sink, a hanging paper towel holder above the counter, a wall shelf in the bathroom, etc. I'm not sure what the rules about drilling holes in the walls are, but I'm pretty sure I've broken them.

2) I hear EVERYTHING my upstairs neighbor does. I only met the upstairs neighbor once, today as it happens, when he came down to get his clothes out of the dryer, clothes which I had just moved out of the dryer and into a basket so that I could get my own clothes in the dryer (hey! his were in there all night). I don't know his name, so I've decided to call him Stompy. Stompy McStompstomp, actually, with a few variations such as Noam Stompsky, Ostompa bin Laden, and Samuel Stompers (extra points if you can identify the namesake of that last one). Stompy hasn't earned that name all on his own - the shoddy construction of the place has a lot to do with the noise that travels from his place to mine - but I'm calling him that all the same. Stompy usually awakes around 5:20 and immediately goes to the bathroom. I know this because the pipes from his toilet run right past my head in the bed where I lie, and the sound of his flushing resembles a herd of rabbits running rapidly downward from his apartment into mine. Frightened rabbits, wearing tap shoes. He then proceeds to walk rapidly around his apartment for about the next 16 hours, sometimes pausing to lift up a piece of furniture and hurl it mightily into a wall. Indeed, Stompy appears to be a practitioner of what I've come to call "furniture bowling," which is a sport in which you take a chair or table and roll it across the floor as forcefully as possible into other pieces of furniture, and then jump up and down atop the wreckage. A few weeks ago I was home trying to watch "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff" when Stompy had what I believe was a furniture-bowling party: dozens of voices and footsteps could be heard directly above me, the general hum broken only by the occasional "thwack!! thud!" of some unfortunate piece of furniture being smashed to bits, and so loud was the party that I seriously had to lean forward and strain my ears to hear Elizabeth Taylor's histrionics on the TV (if you've ever seen this movie, you have some sense of just how loud one has to be to drown out Elizabeth Taylor). I've been trying to retaliate by hammering nails into the walls at irregular intervals, but so far this seems to be having little effect.

3) Whoa, did this thing just move? As mentioned previously, the floors of the apartment slope downward to the east. This is because the apartment is sinking. I've arranged the furniture in such a way that one rarely finds oneself on that side of the apartment and thus doesn't notice the slight balance adjustment that one's body automatically does while moving from the sloping part to the not-sloping part, but there are still a few rough spots. In particular, if one is sitting at the desk in the rolly office chair (as I am now), one notices a quite strong tendency on the part of the chair to move eastward, like it's being pulled by a tractor beam. This requires some serious maneuvering to keep one's midsection from getting crushed up against the desk as one is typing on one's laptop. And let's not even talk about the difficulties of playing marbles on this floor.

4) It feels like a basement, even though it isn't. The entryway consists of a low ceiling and three steps downward, giving one the impression of descending into the earth (like a Hobbit) as one enters the front door. Once inside, it's clear that the bulk of the apartment is, in fact, at ground level, but it's so totally surrounded by trees and other buildings that very little light gets through and you still feel like you're underground (or underwater, as the case may be). This sensation is enhanced by the fact that the laundry/storage room - a dank, filthy, cobweb-ridden excuse for a room - looks and feels an awful lot like a basement (and Edgar Allan Poe's basement at that), even though it's on exactly the same level as my apartment and reachable through my apartment's back door.

(Scary, huh?)

These are the major things. There are a handful of other little items I could gripe about (the state of the walls, the toilet that keeps breaking, the lack of a light in the big closet), but that's enough whining for one day.

Peace in the Valley

It was a beautiful fall day in the Valley today and so I took myself out to shoot a few pictures. NoHo was abuzz with shoppers, tourists, student-visiting parents, parent-visited students, and the usual assortment of buskers, panhandlers, loafers, and idlers (it was a wonderful day for idling). A gang of dredlocked kids, along with a few dogs who may or may not have been associated with them, were gathered on the lawn near the old bank that's being refitted as an Urban Outfitters franchise. One of them played a ukulele.

A table with a sign saying "Bread Not Bombs", along with a few boxes containing (one presumes) bread rather than bombs, stood nearby.

Down the street, in Pulaski park, a few passersby had stopped to listen to a band playing Radiohead covers. The band was there to call attention to the fact that today was Shelter Sunday, a day when volunteers go door to door collecting money for local homeless shelters. While the band played, three bearded men huddled in front of the adjacent Memorial Hall trying to fit a tent into its protective wrapper.

I decided to have coffee at the Yellow Sofa Cafe.

As I sat outside the cafe, reading a wonderful collection of essays and stories about the 50 states - called, appropriately enough, State By State, and given to me by my brother - I heard the sound of singing. Looking up, I spotted two strikingly pretty, bohemian-looking young women crossing the street. They were both belting out, in a tight harmony that had clearly been well-practiced, a song I'd never heard before whose lyrics featured the word "love" quite prominently. They paused to hand something to the couple sitting across from me, and then, reaching my table, handed me a heart-shaped cardboard note. And I thought: well, yes.

We All Live in a Noho Submarine (part 2)

Here are some pictures of The Submarine for your enjoyment. If anything new happens in here, I'll post an update.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that I'm wholly dissatisfied with The Submarine. Quite the contrary: I could very well have ended up in some godforsaken apartment complex in the "suburbs" of Amherst, going slowly mad in a secluded farmhouse, sauteeing tofu in an anarchist coop, or hosting drum circles at my yurt near Hampshire College (there's no shortage of yurts around here, to say nothing of drum circles). So let me begin by enumerating the nice things about where I live.

1) The location. Right on the edge of downtown Northampton, my house is ideally located for a number of reasons. First, of course, the entirety of Northampton can be traversed in about 10 minutes, meaning that I'm never more than a few minutes from the many wonderful restaurants and bars and coffee shops and markets in town. And there are many. Second, although I'm downtown, I'm set off from the street enough that I don't get much street noise. Third, I live next door to Noho's public library, the Forbes, which is not only a lovely old building (I'll take pictures soon) with some fabulous amenities, but also the home of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum. For some reason I got very giddy when I learned of this. Oh, and fourth, downtown Noho is not West Philly - this means I can go out at night without carrying a precautionary can of mace, I don't have to put that silly steering wheel lock on my car anymore, and I can sleep with the door unlocked. It's kinda like living in Canada!

2) My very own designated parking space.

3) The fauna. Okay, so it's just squirrels and chipmunks and the occasional bunny, but man oh man do they LOVE my house. Especially right now: they're always outside my windows nibbling on acorns, burying things, or running around on some urgent errand. I'm especially charmed by the chipmunks, a type of rodent we didn't have where I grew up (I was in my teens, and in Colorado, before I saw my first live 'munk) and which I largely came to know through Disney cartoons, animated TV Christmas specials, and a certain cassette type I acquired in the mid-80s called "Chipmunk Punk", which was memorable primarily for Alvin, Simon, and Theodore's stirring renditions of The Cars' "Let's Go" and Tom Petty's "Refugee" (it was a very long time before I realized these were not, in fact, punk songs). But these little guys out here, while bearing a slight resemblance to their animated cousins, seem to speak primarily in clicks, run around with their tails perpendicular to the ground, and live in holes. Fascinating!

4) Free heat. That's right, I get to weather a New England winter without worrying about - to adopt the standard media phrase - the Spiraling Cost of Home Heating Oil. This is perhaps bad for the planet, but great for me.

5) I have a back yard. I don't go out there much, and it won't be much use here in a few months, but I do have it. And at night it comes alive with all sorts of chirping and whirring things that I can only infer are insects. Or maybe chipmunks.

So that's the good. Next time: the not-so-good.