new york city

The Park in the 1930s “The beauty of the square is marred on its east side by the tall drab buildings of New York University.” In looking at these guides, I thought I would be interesting to see what the New York City guide says about the places we experience every day. Today, Washington Square Park is certainly a tourist destination; it’s difficult to walk through the park on a nice day without stepping in someone’s picture of the fountain or the arch. From the previous statement, it seems like these WPA tour guide writers felt the same way as many do today.

NYU hatred aside, I found the guide presented an interesting view not only what the Village contained, but also what tourists would want to know about it. I feel like tour guides today are overwhelmingly about directing a tourist to some sort of attraction rather than telling them about everything around them. The 1930s guide differs greatly in that it seems to assume it is speaking to an educated audience who desires some sort of knowledge regarding the location. Reading this felt more like reading a history of the area rather than a guide for tourists (also, the fact that the guide was 600 plus pages wouldn’t exactly make it the easiest thing to stick in your pocket to accompany you on a day of sightseeing).

Another aspect I found interesting was how the writer viewed the area (which indeed may have actually been what the space was like in the thirties). In describing Greenwich Village the author writes there are “two focal points…Sheridan Square can best be described as the “Times Square” of Greenwich Village.” Today, there is probably not a single person who would make that comparison. Nevertheless, it serves to illustrate what the space was like at the time.

As far as this functioning as a tour guide, it gets the standard “here’s how you get around” stuff over in the beginning and then seems to serve more as an educational tool. The guide does state in the beginning that “it is intended to give both the permanent resident and the visitor an intimate, accurate knowledge of the metropolis.” From the small excerpt I read, it seems that it would have done just that, but did it suffer a fate like that of the numerous works of fiction published during the 1930s and reach little readership? In any event, it would certainly be interesting to revive the guide today and see how much of the city has changed (taxis are definitely not five cents per quarter mile anymore).

Bum: who are you?First, let’s take a breath. That was one heck of an intense book. No wonder Tom Kromer never went on to publish another novel! Waiting for Nothing is an unforgiving account of day to day homeless life during the depression. Its rough subject matter (starving babies, mutilated bodies) makes everything else we’ve read sound about as scary as another installment of Boxcar Children. In this way, the book felt modern in its attempt to relate to homelessness by showcasing the harshness of day to day life. The chapters come and go like nightmares, horrible dreams unconnected in any sort of timeframe. Our hero keeps emphasizing the absence of time in the life of a hobo, what does another day matter? A week? A year?
There is also much talk about suicide. It seems like the easy way out for our hero, who greets every possibility of death with some morbid rationale. He never chose death over life, but seemed very open to experiencing it. During the depression, suicide rates didn’t necessarily go up according to national statistics, but high profile suicides in the eyes of the public gave America the uneasy feeling that suicide was growing. But, as this book shows, no one was paying much attention to frozen stiffs in mission houses. Who knows how bad suicide really was? By the time I finished this book, I was cold enough to bite the bullet.
This book raised a lot of questions in my mind. Mainly, will this change how I view the homeless of contemporary New York City? Hunger was the driving force behind most of our hero’s actions. I wonder how hungry New York City homeless are? Do they freeze? Do they get chopped up on the subway tracks? It’s strange that we have to ask ourselves these very fundamental questions regarding the value of human life, and it’s curious why these statistics aren’t more widely known. I mean, I know a lot, statistically speaking, and I’m usually up to date. I feel out of the loop, separated from my homeless brethren from the lack of information between us. But that’s just what Kromer was trying to point out. There is a lack of knowledge that creates an ocean of difference between two people that are still just two people. Are we (not homeless people) still so mean to the homeless if they ask for help? Are we better suited to take care of these people nowadays? My thought is that we are, but without that real knowledge in my mind, I am weary of contemporary homelessness. Maybe it’s still that bad. Just maybe.

New York City

After reading Lorena Hickok's One Third of A Nation, I began thinking about who these people really are and whether or not they should actually be traveling during this time. Hickok described the men, women, children and families as "individuals. People, with voices, faces, eyes. People with hope. People without hope. People still fighting. People with all courage squeezed out of them. People with stories."

The first thing that really struck me was how many different places the author of this place mentioned - West Virginia, New York, Nebraska, California, Ohio and many more. Not only do the people of this time have their own traveling experience, but the author has one as well. Traveling and actually meeting these people allows for a deeper insight and understanding of their lives and more realistic ability to portray them in writings and reports.

What I found most interesting about the piece was the criticism of the relief effort in New York City. While it is surely an admirable effort that the city was undertaking at the time, it seemed to not be wholly effective. Hickok wrote, "the city of New York...is struggling today with the biggest community relief job on earth...these are skating along on thin ice, barely existing, undernourished, in rags, constantly threatened with eviction from their homes". New York City was not prepared to undertake this massive relief effort during the depression. The report went on to explain that people would wait hours in line for an interview with a potential employer, until to have the job given to someone else based simply on "need". But everyone was needy. The city simply didn't have the funds to help out all of these people, no matter how much they actually wanted to. It just wasn't possible. New York was "dazed, only half awake to the situation."

Furthermore, one particular part of the piece described Florida as being a prosperous place, somewhere the unemployed could potentially travel to for employment. "Everything right now is going full speed in Florida - tourists, truck gardening, citrus...there are 6,800 on CWA and 10,000 registered for reemployment. And yet they talk about not being able to get labor!" So the question ultimately remains - what do you do? Do you travel down to someplace like Florida, or do you stay in New York? Is it better to travel or not travel in this situation? I think it ultimately comes down to chance. An unemployed person in the 1930's could either stay in New York and hope for federal relief to come his or her way or they could take a chance and go down to the South and attempt to find work. Clearly many Americans chose to uproot their families and travel, but were they as successful or as lucky as though who stayed in the cities and collected federal relief? What would you do?

Firemen: by Liz M.

(Click here or on the photos to see my video project!)

The other night I was watching the latest James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, with some of my roommates. Five of us total, four still awake. The new London import (“I just tried Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for the first time. They’re brilliant!”) left the room. I thought he’d turned in. We struggled to focus…

“Is she the bond girl?”

“Wait who’s that guy?”

“I have no idea what’s going on…”

“Yeah I’m lost.”

“Maybe if you’d stop talking…”

“I’ll rewind.”

Our Brit had gone out for air. Usually around 2am on west 22nd the only company you’ll keep are some mice having a late night feast on your garbage. I guess the mice were not alone. Bounding up the stairs,

“Look out the window!”

Gathering around the windows facing the street. Two per window. Guy girl, guy girl. A cardboard box on fire. Presumably started by the homeless dude fanning the flames.

“Is that a 40?”

“Oh, don’t pour it—”

“Awww, duuude.”

Funny how emptying your booze on your fire doesn’t work out quite the same as a hose, eh? So yes, walk away, walk away… Down the driveway of THAT building? Really?? Hard to be surprised at this point, but come on buddy!

“Not a bad turnout –maybe people DO care.”

“Cops, firemen. Not a bad response time actually.”

“Okay, outside.”

“Quick! Get your camera!”

“I don’t wanna miss the show…”

Cops v. Perp, @ Our stoop: from my Blackberry

Just in time to watch six or so cops pick up the guy, slam him against the car in front of our house. The fire was across the street, in front of the dentist’s office, but suddenly our stoop is the best seat in the house. This is apparently a great way to meet the people you pass on the street every day without acknowledgement. The Israeli from a few doors down, all tight blue t-shirt and muscles. Cigarette and silver spoon in one hand, bowl of fruit-loaded cereal in the other.

“Do you want some? It’s soy milk!”

“Um, no thank you?”

“Can I use your phone to call the dentist?”

“Sure…”

“He said Eysh, that means fire!”

Apparently no one cares that I understand a bit of Hebrew. Oh well. Look away for one second, and now the Israeli is across the street, holding the smoke, cereal, spoon, and the borrowed phone. He allegedly “runs” our block, Mr. 22nd Street. Naturally, he is talking to the firemen as they attempt to break into the dentist’s office. Natural, right, maybe if he was not performing a balancing act.

Where there's smoke…: from my Blackberry, aussi

Back on the north side of the street with Mr. 22nd street.

“How do you spell your name?” “Well THAT’S a diplomatic way of saying you already forgot my name… So do you guys ever go to Chelsea Piers? I have free 1-week guest passes. How many of you are there? Okay great I’ll get five… It’s a shame how they treat rentals, come see the difference when the owner is the one living in the building.”

The Brit leaves. This time for the night. But three of us–girl guy girl—follow Mr. 22nd to his apparently bulletproof door (I didn’t test it…). Beautiful Turkish tile on the floors and walls. The floors donning two or three Persian rugs.

“I used to invest in real estate”

Ultimate Fighting Champion cannot be ignored on the enormous flat screen.

“I only date men who look like wrestlers, warriors. Why do you have a beard? Do you want to look like a Rabbi?”

“My mom’s a Rabbi…”

I try to steer his attention, as my roommate is getting uncomfortable. Mr. 22nd is far too intrigued by the attorney to spend more than a few moments on my attempts at discussing Hebrew and Rabbis. Granted, they are rarely topics I bring up with neighbors, strangers, anyone, but what else am I supposed to say to this guy?

Does it really take an inebriated homeless man setting a fire to meet the neighbors? It’s not like when something embarrassingly touristy happens while traveling and my mom’s go-to line of comfort is “Well, you’re never going to see these people again.” These are the people we see every day. The middle aged, slightly balding dad carrying a scooter down the steps, the lackluster of his “Come on,” not wanting to escape his air-conditioned denial as his young daughter bounds down the steps ahead of him shouting with an opposite tone to his, “It’s summer! It’s not spring, it’s summer!”

Because, really, where WAS spring? A couple weeks ago I brought out my winter coat during a couple of late night study session breaks. This weekend I read on my roof until my skin melted into a new, darker shade. This did not take long. This nine year old girl is thinking the same thing I am. And maybe the odd progression of the seasons is the least of my concerns, but I probably share some of the same thoughts as her dad, my roommates, Mr. 22nd, or even the poor homeless guy who tried to put out his fire with beer and ended up surrounded by the 5-0. Reading about this city through the eyes of Ian Frazier (Gone to New York: Adventures in the City) or Colson Whitehead (The Colossus of New York) or even a surrealist, postmodern vision of Paul Auster (City of Glass), how many times did I think, hey, that’s what I thought when I was on THAT train or in THAT intersection or THAT neighborhood. They name some seemingly unique circumstances—if you’re not a New Yorker. And I have always hesitated to call myself a New Yorker, not from a lack of wanting to belong to this vibrant metropolis, but out of respect for the true locals. I’ve always heard it takes 5 or 10 years in theory, but Carrie Bradshaw said the true natives could always spot their own kind. When I return to California in the fall, I will have only lived here a very loaded 4 years. But according to Whitehead, I may already be a New Yorker. I have been here long enough to watch some of my favorite hangouts disappear and apparently “(y)ou are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now” (Whitehead, 3-4). We all build our mythic New Yorks, and the probably intersect with the myths of others more than we will ever fully realize. I have been here long enough to connect to just about every phrase in some sections of The Colossus of New York. As an NYU student, the “Downtown” section hit hard. I know those kids. I have been some of those girls. And yes, I run into kids from my L.A. private high school on an almost daily basis even when I DON’T go out on a Thursday night.

My point is, if I’ve only lived here 3.5 years and find Colson Whitehead’s portrayal of Manhattan almost uncomfortably accurate, he’s probably not just reading my thoughts. He’s just had the same thoughts—as I have, you have, the smelly guy on the C has. Not all in unison, but at some point in time. No one will look at you on the train, but whatever you’re thinking right now, that dude thought the same thing 13 minutes ago, that woman was thinking it 22 years ago. No wonder we’re so lonely sometimes. If only we could coordinate our little moments, maybe we would understand how connected we truly are. New York is not lonely so much as a haven for untapped communal potential. But strangely, that’s how we like it.

The line that hit the hardest was that, “(m)aybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us” (10). I have to leave by the end of September. Maybe this fact is heightening my senses to embrace New York as my own, one last hurrah, or something less cliché... Or maybe I just know that it really will go on without me. I am just another young adult, thinking the same thoughts as everyone else here.

only living boyS in NY

According to the cover of Gone to New York: Adventures in the City, someone at the Los Angeles Times described Ian Frazier as “America’s greatest essayist.” I may not be much of a venerable critic, but I would not spend too much time arguing with this bold statement. He is at least ONE of the great American essayists. I actually vaguely remember reading his On the Rez in high school…I digress…

What makes Frazier’s collection of essays, written between 1975 and 2005, so powerful, is his fearless approach to exploring his surroundings. He draws you instantly into his little New York world (and beyond), weaving it together with the little New York worlds of those around him. That’s more or less what we are as New Yorkers, small entities of memory, culture, history, intellect, emotion, occasionally intersecting with others, physically or within thought, to create a diverse urban community. As individuals in our day-to-day endeavors, we may be more or less insignificant, go essentially unnoticed. But we prove (do we have anything to prove? Need to prove anything? Probably. At least in theory…) our worth, our value when we collide with other human entities of equal or similarly sized auras. Validation? Recognition.  How many people have felt like “The Only Living Boy in New York?” (<== click for video)

Frazier shares a great deal of typical daily occurrences, like going for a walk through boroughs, as well as quite bizarre or unusual events, such as his walk down Route 3 from New Jersey to New York. What I find most moving about the collected essays as a whole, is not how personal (and personally revealing) his writing feels, although that is certainly a fabulous quality in an essayist, but more the way in which we are suddenly privy to the stories of so many people who have touched Frazier’s life in some way—not to mention the way a humanized New York City has deeply effected him. We not only learn of tender moments between Frazier and Brooklyn neighbors and passersby, but gain the background stories of so many who have moved him to write candidly about this amazing city – from his Israeli landlord on Canal Street to the tragic urban hero Clifford Holland.

The French verb essayer means “to try,” and Frazier succeeds. His topics do not always lend themselves to particularly moving material, although some certainly do, but he has done his homework and seems to give credit where it is due. Ugh, more clichés—forgive me. He seems to get lost in those who have moved him, either face to face, or from a story he is just passing along to anyone to will listen.

Frazier made me wish I knew more about my “friends” at Murray’s Bagels – they are always happy to see me (I’m not the kind of person who assumes such things, but in the chaos that is this popular haven, their faces certainly light up when they ask how I am), know my orders, know I value my sleep (“You’re early today!”), and notice when I have been trying to cut down on carbs (“We’re you out of town?”). They even gave me free Matzah during Passover (“A side of cream cheese and… are you selling…” “No but is that what you want?”) But if they know my name, it’s from looking at my credit card. I see them more than I see some of my closest friends, and I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced.

"We Don't Toast"

When starting the final, I thought a lot about whether or not NYU has a sense of place distinct from the city around it. With each year at NYU, my workload and my time spent on campus increase proportionately, and I've lately found myself wishing I could just sleep in the Gallatin lounge. I'm becoming almost too familiar with the place, yet I can't quite place an identity to it. NYU, as a "place," is conflicted. It doesn't know whether it should be integrated into the urban fabric or should separate itself off, and has done neither successfully. On the one hand, NYU is integrated into the fabric of lower Manhattan: there are no clear boundaries or edges between it and the rest of the city. Unlike other universities in the city, like Columbia, with a distinct campus feeling created through architecture, gates, and closed off streets, NYU's buildings, sprinkled throughout lower Manhattan, are not necessarily distinguishable from the surrounding cityscape. Some buildings are so far from the Campus Core, like Third North, that they can hardly be considered a part of whatever "campus" we do claim. On the other hand, NYU does not "feel" the same as the rest of the Village. It is seriously lacking in ground floor retail and attractions and, because of a love affair with Philip Johnson in the 1960s, has a disproportionate number of "brutish" architectural buildings. During the time between classes, the streets are packed, but lay almost empty during each hour and fifteen minute period (not mixed use!). Students flock to the park (benches!), which has been identified with NYU, but certainly isn't "our" space. For me, a sense of "community" is spatially related; running into people you know unexpectedly makes the city feel smaller and makes me feel more connected and grounded in New York and NYU. On the whole, however, NYU does not do a very good job of providing spaces to facilitate spontaneous interactions. The public spaces the university provides are usually quieter study spaces--the library, the lounges most academic buildings, computer labs... With these issues in mind, I set about redesigning Washington Place between Broadway and Mercer. Ideally, I'd knock open the ground floor of the Meyer Hall and give the space a nice little sidewalk cafe and other ground floor retail to reintegrate the land use of the campus back into the City, but I gave myself the parameters of working with the existing architecture and land use. (In my opinion, not only would this create a better street scape, commercial uses would also provide a reason for the non-NYU public to use the streets around NYU buildings.) My redesign visually separates out the street from the rest of the city. If not as a "gateway" into the campus, I'd envision it as an identifying feature and as a place that facilitates spontaneous interactions. My placement was definitely influenced by Gallatin's efforts to create these types of spaces in the building redesign (which I think have been fairly successful), so I am just taking what Gallatin has already done and dragging it out onto the street. More screen shots are up on my flickr, with larger sizes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7230238@N02/ (I am trying to figure out how to make a video jobbie of the sketchup file, and I will post it on youtube and here if I can figure it out. 3D is awesome!)

New York, New York on the Vegas Strip: It doesn't even LOOK real (photo by JpL)

Well I suppose this blog post is a fitting forum to discuss some quotations and ideas that I had prepared for my Colloquium – Fortunately or unfortunately, I did not need my notes as often as I had anticipated. If I had been asked exactly where I wanted to start, I was planning to offer the following quotation from the epilogue of Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience:

Feelings and intimate experiences are inchoate and unmanageable to most people, but writers and artists have found ways of giving them form. Literature, for example, is full of precise descriptions of how people live. The academic disciplines themselves yield abundant experiential data that deserve our closer attention (202).

Tuan has a habit of bringing to our attention that which would have been obvious if we has only stopped to think about it. In the case of the above quotation, I found my Rationale, Colloquium, and I suppose my Concentration and general course of study validated when reading Tuan’s words. During my Colloquium, we discussed many aspects of portrayal and redefinition of both New York City and Paris, drawing on both literature and film. I believe that the creation of these two cities as mythic concepts derives first and foremost in experiential knowledge of these two vibrant cities. Both Paris and New York have innumerable layers of history (granted, Paris has been around a lot longer…) that make these constantly moving metropolises what they are today. But when I say history, I mean everything you find in a standard textbook along with all aspects of culture as well as individual perception and a side of topography. But when considering these cities as singular entities, if that is even feasible, New York and Paris are certainly greater than the sums of their parts. This synergy comes from their auras. As wholes, they can be more or less deconstructed, but there is that certain je ne sais quoi that can only truly be exposed through art. I have noticed countless times that those who best capture the essence of either city are talented (is that word too cliché?) artists—writers, filmmakers, what have you.

As per our class discussion yesterday at the Christopher Street Pier, New York is perhaps a city of individuals who share common thoughts and experiences. We laughed at the time, it even became a running joke for the rest of the afternoon for those of us who stayed in the sun a while after class was over. But I think there is a great deal of truth in this collective identity that seems to harshly oppose what we consider our idiosyncratic individualities. In just about any book, film or even song that comes readily to mind about New York, I am struck by common themes that come up to some degree almost every time. For example, I find in so many portrayals of New York City a similar touching and beautiful loneliness. If we are all lonely, and it shines through so frequently, how does that fit in with defining New York as its own humanized place in the world?

And on a totally tangential note, here’s a question that came out of my Colloquium: What is it about Paris and New York that make them worthy of being the only two currently major cities to be represented in Las Vegas? How are there senses of place duplicated and/or lost in their reproduction?

She was a blue Raleigh 10-speed. I spotted and fell in love with her the day I moved to New York. I could watch her from outside my dorm window, where she was locked on the street and never moved. I dreamed of liberating her, replacing her tires and tubes, and riding her around the neighborhood.

Like bags stuck in trees, bicycles abandoned to street furniture are ubiquitous in New York City. Though they don’t flutter or shred, the bicycles shed parts as crackheads, looking to make enough for their next fix, strip anything not permanently secured. Wheels are usually the first to go; saddles and seatposts are removed next. Finally, handlebars and stems, brakes and derailleurs, pedals and cranks, bottom brackets and headsets disappear, until the frame slumps onto the sidewalk. Bags twist in the wind—-bicycle frames twist under the weight of drivers who accidentally jump the curb.

Like plastic shopping bags, they come in all sorts of colors and brands: Huffy mountain bikes, Raleigh road bikes, Schwinn cruisers, Swobo track bikes. Original paint jobs fade with the weather and steel parts sprout parasitic brown spots until the rust patches eat clear through the tubing.

Cyclists lock their bicycles to other abandoned bicycles, and then abandon those bikes. Whole piles of abandoned bicycle ooze out onto sidewalks from parking signs. Litter gravitates to abandoned bicycles, hiding underneath spokes and rims, and a trash heap of tangled tubes, McDonalds cups and Vitamin Water bottles emerges.

Along park fences, they form bicycle graveyards. The bicycle skeletons rest against the fencing like lines of Sicilian mummies. One can determine how long ago they deceased by their physical conditions. The older they are, the more distorted and unrecognizable their features.

Abandoned bicycles and stray shopping bags are both ignored by City departments. Frazier’s battle against shopping bags led him to invent the Bag Snagger, while my own crusade against abandoned bicycles led me to pilot an abandoned bicycle-recycling program, a partnership between NYU and the local environmental non-profit Time’s Up!’s Bicycle Co-op.

During the summer of 2007, armed with a small amount of funding through NYU's Green Grants, the Co-op’s head mechanic and I reclaimed, refurbished, and redistributed all the abandoned bicycles on NYU property. We tagged the bicycles with fliers, alerting owners that if the papers were not removed in two weeks, their bicycle would be considered abandoned. Using angle grinders, bolt cutters and a pretty memo from the Sustainability Coordinator, we sawed through locks and brought the bicycles back to our space. We scrubbed off rust and dirt, and replaced missing and worn parts in the evenings after our 9-5 grind. In September, we gave the bicycles a new lease on life, returning them to a group of NYU freshmen.

Photos from http://jschumacher.typepad.com/photos/abandoned_bikes/index.html

Principia Discordia, p.00054

In the beginning of City of Glass, the pained protagonist Quinn lives modestly and alone, having lost his family and having retreated from his friends. He has little impact on the world, especially as compared to his earlier aspirations as a poet; his only even marginally significant impact is through the mystery novels he writes, and even those are published with a tightly-guarded pseudonym and feature Max Work, a protagonist so antithetical to his own being that one could imagine him as negating Quinn's person through overcompensation. The pop-science notion of matter and antimatter would seem applicable to a scenario in which Quinn and his creation meet, annihilating each other with a handshake.

Physically, Quinn occupies only a small apartment and a variety of semi-random meandering routes that he walks through New York City. He moves to move, experiencing the environment abstractly, just as J.B. Jackson's "Hot-Rodder" did on the open road. (205) New York City is notorious for its density and variety, and it is the combination of these qualities that cause the landscape to change so rapidly for the pedestrian (especially at a New York pace) that makes it impossible for Quinn "to dwell on any one thing for very long." (8) Compared to the open countryside that one drives through, the dense city environment is so noisy (for all of the senses) that one need only travel through it at a walking pace to reduce it to an undifferentiated blur, to the drowning-out and disorienting formlessness of white noise.

JBJ notes that when motoring, "to the perceptive individual, there can be an almost mystical quality to the experience; his identity seems for the moment to be transmuted." (205) When this is combined with the active quality of movement (for the motorist, this is rather more abstract than for the pedestrian, as the actual motion is mediated by the car) and "the shifting focus of a moving, abstract world", one can perceive a perhaps coincidental connection to the walking meditation famously practiced by Theravada Buddhists. (205) The way Quinn experiences New York City exemplifies a perverse use of whatJBJ identified as transmutation of identity, a furthering of his escape from the world, into nowhere. To be nowhere is the only thing Quinn desires. (9) His walks take him beyond the mundane nowhere-ness of merely being unknown to the world: for Quinn, escaping the Hegelian notion that self-consciousness exists only for another—only in being acknowledged—is not enough to be "nowhere"; for having escaped the recognition of others, Quinn seeks also to escape his sense of place. He still has an apartment, still has a (superficial) relationship with the man at the lunch counter, mediated by baseball and theMets , and by virtue of even the narrow limits of his hermitage he can still see that he occupies space: just as a point is defined by its coordinates on a Cartesian grid, Quinn perceives his environment defining and affirming his self, and despairs.

It is Quinn's desire to annihilate the self that drives him to annihilate his environment in his walking, and is perhaps even an encouraging factor in his self-destructive pursuit of a haphazard mystery, burying his own identity under those that he knows are not his own, those of the mystery novel detective in general, and specifically those of Max Work, Paul Auster , and (to an extent) the elder Stillman. Just before Quinn decides to pursue his "fate" by pressing on with the hopeless case, he writes in his journal, considering a clarinetist: "To be inside that music, to be drawn into the circle of its repetitions: perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear." (167) He completes his entry with Baudelaire, and his interpretations: "It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world." (168) He subsequently abandons the little that he had before, even the rudimentary senses of place and time of his old life, to lose himself entirely in a stake-out in an alley for an event that never comes.  As everything falls away from Quinn during the stake-out—his money, his few contacts, his apartment, his purpose for staking out—Quinn disappears, almost. He manages, somehow, to survive in the alley while never alerting anyone to his presence: "It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city." (178) He even escapes the narrative of the novel itself, leaving the narrator to speculate as to his actions and methods and the time spent on the stake-out. Like the starlight that Quinn contemplates, wondering if the star "was still there, or if it had not burned out long ago," Quinn becomes himself a speculative figure, aSchrödinger's cat, but instead of being suspended between life and death, he is suspended between existence and nonexistence. (180) Quinn's only traces during this time are the waste that he leaves in the alley, and though one might derive a presence were they to consider the waste, if the only record Quinn leaves is one that nobody is going to read, then like a star whose light does not reach Earth, he remains undiscovered, effectively nonexistent.

Quinn, however, still feels a need "to record certain facts", and the notebook bearing his initials continues to be filled. (165) Even after he does not recognize his reflection, afterAuster tells him of the elder Stillman's suicide, after he loses his own apartment, after he re-enters the younger Stillman's abandoned apartment and begins to gradually fall into the state that was the younger Stillman's childhood—alone, naked, in the dark, fed with a tray from a mysterious hand (whose? Perhaps it was the wrong Stillman that died, perhaps the other had merely been biding his time after all, preparing for a new experiment—but who can say?)—Quinn continues to write, moving gradually from the specifics pertaining to the case, to himself and to Stillman, and ultimately entirely losing interest in himself, feeling "that his words had been severed from him, that they were now a part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower." (200) Finally Quinn disappears. Even what he writes is no longer authored by himself, no longer a trace of his own existence, but instead existing only for itself, as itself. The words have become things unto themselves, and Quinn has discovered Adam's language.

The novel's final pages leave us with Quinn's ultimate disappearance, his vanishing without a trace, save the notebook. This disappearance is discovered by the novel's narrator, who only now appears for the first time in the story. The narrator tells us that he wrote the story by interpreting the red notebook Quinn left behind. There are many passages throughout the book, however, that could not have been gleaned from the notebook, such as the numerous dreams that Quinn supposedly always forgets. A potential hint towards the Quinn's disappearance and the narrator's appearance lies in the transformation Quinn experiences in his writing: "It [the case] had been a bridge to another place in his life, and now that he had crossed it, its meaning had been lost." (200) What the narrator describes here is not only the disappearance of Quinn (i.e., his identity), but also a transformation into something else, something whose words are indistinguishable from form. The most substantial hint, however, lies in the character Paul Auster's bizarre theory about the authorship of Cervantes' Don Quixote: that Don Quixote himself is the author. Don Quixote, not mad after all, orchestrated what Quinn calls "an elaborate hoax" because, according to Auster, "he wanted to test the gullibility of his fellow men. . . . to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn't it? To any extent." (154)

Once we suspect that Quinn and the narrator are one and the same, playing a hoax on Paul Auster and ourselves, "clues" come out of the woodwork. The most obvious, if only because it is mentioned repeatedly, is that Quinn's initials, D.Q., are the same as Don Quixote's, but others include Quinn's wondering at "why Don Quixote had not simply wanted to write books like the ones he loved—instead of living out their adventures", when he himself has lived out the adventures in the books he loved to read—his being mysteries. Another is when Quinn confronts the woman in what was once his apartment: when she acknowledges that a writer used to live there, he blurts out "That's me! . . . I'm the writer!"—the end of her response, read in this context, is quite funny: "I've never seen a bigger mess in all my life." (190) This, and other "clues" that could be taken to support this view, are like the "letters" Quinn himself sees Stillman creating with his meandering walks: they may not be clues at all, just as the letters may not have been letters at all, appearing to us as such only because we want them to. Indeed, Quinn wonders if the letters are merely "a hoax he had perpetrated on himself." (113)

Of course, despite the potential hoax within the context of the novel's narrative, we must remember that it is only within this context, and that the novel's author remains Paul Auster, just as the potential hoax in Don Quixote still does not deny Cervantes' authorship. What it does imply, however, is that within the context of the novel, Quinn's disappearance and transformation is disappearance as a character and transformation into narrator—for within the confines of the novel, the narrator's words are equivalent to form: they are the entire "world at large", in Quinn's own words, "real and specific". (200) Quinn the character cannot know the answer to his final statement, "What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?", but the narrator steps into the narrative immediately afterward, continuing from a self-aware first-person perspective. A late and telling "clue" to the relationship between author, narrator, text, and reader lies in the narrator's first reference to himself, in which he mentions his return from Africa. Cid Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes' fictional storyteller, was a Moor. In Auster's conception of Don Quixote, Cid Hamete Banengeli is a fiction dreamed up by the central character, Don Quixote himself, who takes on his role of narrator. This whole construct, however, is created by Cervantes, the author—according to the interpretation of Paul Auster, the reader. It is the reader who connects the dots, it is the reader who links the clues together, it is the reader who invents the mystery, and it is the reader who solves it.

Dolores ParkThe pace and energy of New York embeds itself in our daily lives. When Daniel Quinn is following Stillman Sr. he had trouble keeping pace with the old man: “He was used to walking briskly, and all this starting and stopping and shuffling began to be a strain, as though the rhythm of his body was being disrupted. He was the hare in pursuit of the tortoise, and again and again he had to remind himself to hold back” (71). Though Quinn is quite familiar with both the City itself and wandering its streets and avenues aimlessly, the pace throws off his sense of place and he is suddenly unaccustomed to the task at hand. “The feel of a place is registered in one’s muscles and bones. A sailor has a recognizable style of walking because his posture is adapted to the plunging deck of a boat in high sea” (Tuan 184). Like the sailor, Quinn’s sense of New York is fast-paced; the physical movements of his body reflect this sense of place.

Quinn’s physical reaction to pace implies an innate sense of place that he denies (whether consciously or not) in the opening paragraphs of the novel. “New York was in inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well… On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere” (4). It seems that, even in a trance-like state, the City’s energy influences the way that Quinn behaves; otherwise, it would not be such a challenge for Quinn to adapt to Stillman Sr.’s pace.

My own routines and habits in this City reflect the energy that New York represents for me; but, like Quinn, I am more attune to these changes when I am removed from my comfortable environment and my behavior is out of synch with another situation or place.

I find myself riding my bicycle faster and more aggressively than necessary when in San Francisco, for example. I’m accustomed to vehicular traffic barreling down the avenues. Without bike lanes (and sometimes even with them—6th Avenue comes to mind), my only hope to avoid the dreaded door zone is to take a lane and try to keep up with traffic. In SF, however, my riding style is unnecessary—rude even—and I struggle to adjust to the new place.

In other aspects, however, the Californian in me cannot adjust to New York’s frenetic lifestyle. Like Quinn, when he finally stops following Stillman Sr. and realizes that he can no longer sustain his previous pace, whenever I return from the west coast, I’m always shocked that I can manage to live here. Transitioning from entire days spent eating burritos, reading books and drinking beer in Dolores Park to a city where lazy days are seen as “unproductive” or, worse, “boring,” forces me to change my habits in accord with the location I’m in. When in Rome…