We’ve been lucky with the weather in NYC this September. Many bright, warm days The aftermath of the powerful hurricane that has devastated areas of the South East is now giving us a little rain. Not so lucky there where hurricane Helene was deadly across five states after making landfall on Thursday. Some of the worst flooding the South has…
OK – so this image is misleading. My photo app tells me this is from last year when – on this date – our stroll took us to the beach at Towd Point in Southampton. But all the rest are either the immediate neighborhood or Wave Hill in the Bronx. The community garden at W.91st Street in Riverside Park…
Before decamping to Brooklyn for the month I saw this on a utility box on Riverside Drive. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to share thoughts about Columbia University. But the daffs were out and there were others busy stamping their ideas on the sidewalk by the park. These were presumably inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s new book – The Anxious…
One Last week IntrepidEd News published another of my pieces. This one is about how schools are on the front line of the political and emotional turmoil of these times. The world is in crisis and schools are in the middle of it. Schools are on the front line in an emotionally charged space where existential threats amplify parental worries…
If you are in New York City and looking for a outing here’s a suggestion: Wave Hill Garden in the Bronx. We were there on a bright morning this week and it was glorious. It really is one of the world’s great outdoor works of art with 28 acres of gardens, and woodlands. And with the view out over the…
The third destination of our Met Museum art extravaganza was Beyond the Light – Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish art. Plenty of light and lots of water. Plus wonderful drawings and paintings of Denmark, ancient ruins, lonely figures on beaches, ships, harbors, woodlands, portraits, and empty rooms. The exhibit overview includes the following background information: Denmark in the nineteenth…
A wander crosstown to the Met with a destination. Or rather three. The first – Water Memories – explores water’s significance to Indigenous peoples and Nations in the United States through historical, modern, and contemporary artworks. The second – right next door – Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection rotation honors the diversity of Native life with…
I’ve been thinking about how we need to stop using the word “gender” to refer to people and why we should not use it for anything other than linguistics. Meanwhile, as I contemplate world improvement, Scotland has just passed an ill-conceived law that will have the effect of tossing women and children under the bus. All this in order to…
Raw, cold, and damp but it’s still good to get out. Thanks to the ongoing lurgy there are no social gatherings, visits, or events to distract us from what is on the doorstep. Like stickybeaking tourists clogging up the sidewalks of a foreign city, we’ve been out and about spotting the everyday marvels and quotidian wonders of the neighborhood. Here’s…
The sun shining … just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange That striking image is from Samuel Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners. Henry Oliver, who earns the nickname Sir Galahad for his bravado, has just arrived from Trinidad. Here he is on that first morning in the big city – in Westbourne Grove – suddenly realizing he is…
I am always a bit astonished when I see tRump signs at people’s houses. And I ask myself: “Who are these people? What on earth can they be thinking?” There’s three on our route to our usual walk – not just signs of course, but mega flags trumpeting the household fascist tendencies, racism, and misogyny to the world. And looks…
Eighty years ago today – on January 26th, 1939 – the poet W.H.Auden – accompanied by his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood – stepped off the boat and arrived in New York City. It wasn’t their first visit. They had spent two happy weeks in the city in 1938, arriving by train from Vancouver on their way back from…
A few November snowflakes and the hits on my all-time most-read post start climbing the “Most Read This Week” list. Chance of Snow is from 2011. You think it would have melted entirely from view by now. But no – 12 hits in the last two hours for a grand total of 12,052 to date. Must be those wishful thinking,…
The temperature’s rising. Time to think about eating outside and settling in at a sidewalk cafe to watch the world go by. But beware! Dangers lurk everywhere and we need new punctuation to express our outraged reaction to a whole range of disasters. I love Paul Violi’s list in this poem. And – when you do venture out, sit down…
Subway Rush Hour by Langston Hughes Mingled breath and smell so close mingled black and white so near no room for fear. Hughes published Subway Rush Hour in 1951 part of “Montage of a Dream Deferred”. In “My Early Days in Harlem” 1963 he wrote of his arrival Harlem as a young man from the mid-West. On a bright September…