{"id":731,"date":"2002-05-03T11:28:00","date_gmt":"2002-05-03T11:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/?p=731"},"modified":"2024-12-03T20:16:55","modified_gmt":"2024-12-04T04:16:55","slug":"big_city_dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2002\/05\/03\/big_city_dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"Big City Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve moved back to a cubicle with a commanding view<\/strong> of midtown, facing northeast from my spot on the 20th floor at 34th and Park. After the dreariness of the last couple of days, it’s nice to take a second and shake the typesetting out of my head by staring off at the East River<\/a> and the Chrysler Building<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rooster reminded me of detail from Kurt Vonnegut<\/a>‘s Jailbird<\/A>,<\/i> in which the uppermost room under the spire of the Chrysler Building is the showroom of the American Harp Company. A character sneaks up daily and sits listening to all the harps played in demonstration for customers. It’s kind of magical, capturing the way the spires of buildings like that hold the iconic power that the spires of cathedrals once did. <\/p>\n

And then there’s also Vonnegut’s Slapstick<\/A>,<\/i> set in the near future, when the King of Michigan rules the area stretching east to the Atlantic and lives in the Empire State Building, in the middle of a largely uninhabited Manhattan transformed into a public park called “Skyscraper National Forest.” <\/p>\n

In a more mundane way, Vonnegut’s Timequake<\/A><\/i> reminds me of when I worked by the U.N.<\/a>, blocks away from where he was living at the time. In the book, he talks about how he had a crush on one of the women at the corner Post Office, inspiring him to go into a dusty little stationery store nearby just about every day so he could get envelopes and notepaper to mail off. The little routine seems like a quaint anachronism from an earlier time, except that I went to that store and that Post Office just about every day when I worked in Turtle Bay. I used to stare at the surly, tough women who worked at the P.O. and imagine which had inflamed the desires of that grumpy, frumpy old man.<\/p>\n

So many books distill these little parts of the essence I love about New York: Up in the Old Hotel<\/A>,<\/i> The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay<\/A>,<\/i> Low Life<\/A>,<\/i> and others. New York has always captivated my imagination so much, and given me such a rush of pride about living here, that I get so excited when I encounter books — fictional or not — that really capture the sense of how I feel about its features and its people and its magic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve moved back to a cubicle with a commanding view of midtown, facing northeast from my spot on the 20th floor at 34th and Park. After the dreariness of the last couple of days, it’s nice to take a second and shake the typesetting out of my head by staring off at the East River … Continue reading “Big City Dreams”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultracultural","category-ultrapersonal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77552,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions\/77552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}