This blog is unthawing amidst the deep freeze of a New York Winter – the chilliest in years, I’ve been told. Too late to be attributable to a New Year’s resolution, or even the momentary spurt of post-relationship epiphany, I’m writing on Jan 20 with the grimmer prospect of dating the new year to a new regime. Or perhaps the slightly more palatable timeline of a new semester (alternatively, I could wait a week more and have it begin on the lunar new year, but habits are fickle creatures. Stop being mindful of one for a week, and they disappear for good.)
I’ve largely formulated this blog in terms of things I’ve been doing, reading, writing, etc. Over the past year, I’ve become more aware of – or maybe immersed in? – various forms of writing that have shifted to a more episodic format. What I have in mind are mostly newsletters, like Tooze’s now-daily braindump, that compete in my crowded media-landscape. Yes, I’m back on Twitter. For large swathes of time I found the copious amounts of new economist job market papers, conference announcements intimidating, each new opportunity or thing to read a reminder of the time I’ve spent squandering.) But my habits feel cyclical: I wander to some new format or platform, sometimes self-initiated ones, find fertile ground to think, write, interact, and exchange, and frequently toddle off, reappearing months later. (I don’t have pets now not out of some inhumanity or lack of affection, but out of fear for the kind of consistency and nurturing inherent to these relationships of mutual dependence. Humans suit me better, although sometimes those wander off too). What feels slippery in its own way is memory – films unwatch themselves, the rhythm and intricacies of prose go unspooled. Good meals live on in contextless, flattened pictures. The very same tones and dimensions to the fragments of life I greatly value are also the ones most ephemeral.
So, amidst the chilly start of a spring semester, here we are, again:
Walking
How does one do justice to the scope of New York City? Here I feel my little blogpost buckling under the weight of all five boroughs. (To say nothing of a year in Paris well spent).
The core of my time has been spent between my oddly-laid out apartment, perched loftily above Morningside Park, Columbia University’s neoclassical, and 125th Street’s A/B/C/D subway, from which I am whisked to Midtown via rattling metal car in a matter of minutes. More on Columbia’s oddities to come in later weeks, although I fear I lack the time and authority to explore its subterranean labyrinth. The overworld has been magical. Yesterday, between snatches of fitful jet-lag naps, I glimpsed flurries of snow illuminated against the dull brown brick of my neighbour’s; today, all was caked in white. Joined by my friend Athé on a little jaunt to Central Park, we traipsed across fields, passing gormless squirrels failing to break frozen ground, dogs with powdery snouts, and inconsistently-frozen lakes. To debrief: hot chocolate in a café right on 110th, adhering formlike to a pub while lacking its spirit.
Walking tomorrow will be less fun: -15C perhaps in the wind chill, mercifully to the near side of campus. The first seminar of the semester is a return to the archives via Stuart Hall and Arlette Farge.
Reading
Pivoting in full earnestness to energy and environmental history over the past year demands a mix of the classics of the genre and more fun recent readings; perhaps a separate bibliography will be forthcoming soon.
More fun books: David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, a fascinating examination on the origins of inequality, that recenters the history of social organisation away from teleologies of primitive as/descent into authoritarian centralisation, and then civilization. It is a wonderfully imaginative book grounded in archaeological, anthropological, and historical reasoning alike to unsettle the dominance of the state or the novelty of democracy; more Tokarczuk, this time The Empusium (accuratley subtitled: A Health Resort Horror Story), and a purchase of the Book of Jacob promptly regifted rather than pose a literal literary burden as I traversed five European cities; the AIA Guide to New York City has been a faithful companion to the city’s tangle of buildings and sedimentary erasure, and rebuilding. And oh, a subscription to the NYRA – the broadsheet is back!
I was gifted Futuromania by Simon Reynolds by a friend as part of a Secret Santa, but I haven’t quite had the time to read it yet, sorry.
Listening:
Not much on this front, either. My housemates must be sick of me whistling Dionne Warwick’s Walk on By. The earlier earworm upon first moving in was Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner, although it’s not just the tune, I swear! Others know it as the façade of Seinfield’s something restaurant, my lack of pop acculturation definitely shows here, I know it as the tune that brought us the .mp3 as we know it.
The next time we meet I hope to bring stories of classes, international affairs or otherwise, cinema outings, and some farewell to friends.
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