Staten Island Sojourn

I went to New York City recently. I do that fairly often these days, but usually it's a day trip. This time an overnight stay was necessary.

I'd like to thank Russ again for his assistance. And thank you to your friends, most of whom I didn't get to meet. (Weather and an adverse development in the business rationale for the trip cut it short.) Thanks too, to the hens for the eggs.

I stayed on Staten Island, which induced some nostalgia, because I lived on Staten Island, in the St George area (right near the ferry terminal) beginning in the autumn of 1982 and well into 1983.

The thing to remember about the north end of Staten Island is -- it rises up from the sea quite steeply. Everything in the St George and surrounding neighborhoods is on an impressive hill. Commuters get the benefit of that hill when they walk down toward the ferry on the way into work in the morning, then they curse it on their way up the hill after they're done for that day.

This trip also created the opportunity for my first time driving over the Verrazano Bridge. (That's one "z" and two "r"s, not the other way around.) The view of the harbor on the way across is breathtaking. What is also breathtaking is the price of the trip -- $13 to get from Brooklyn to Staten Island! The way back is free, which is usually the case these days. Still, $13 for that round trip is a good chunk of change. No wonder they can afford to give away the ferry rides.

My own navigation abilities proved better than expected. I suspect Russ expected that I would drive around his neighborhood, get confused by the warren of 1-way streets, and call him on my cell phone in frustration. Instead I was able to call him to say, "I'm on your street now," which seems to have surprised him.

It's good to be an old SI hand.

New York's Prominence

Years ago, some time in the 1990s, I began a ms on American history, aimed at the high school level, in the hope of selling it to a textbook publisher.

I fished about a bit for publishers, without any luck, then settled into some other project and forgot this one.

I mention this because I've just now rediscovered the long-forgotten partial ms. Leafing through it, my eyes fell upon my brief attempt to acknowledge, and to give some but not too much credence to, geographical explanations of NYC's rise to world prominence.

I observed that the Hudson River gave the holders of its southern extremity, from the era of Dutch dominance to the present, easy access to fertile lands along the long valley. Also, in English colonial times, this was "a highway to the lucrative fur trade and it could carry an intrepid traveller most of the distance to 'New France,' or Quebec. What is more: Hudson's tributary, the Mohawk, offered access to the western frontier."

I also noted, at a remove: "Also customary at this point is the observation that New York was positioned, in colonial times especially, to serve as the intermediary between Massachusetts and Virginia. As a geographical explanation for New York's rise to prominence this is unhelpful. First, it is also true of Baltimore and Philadelphia (which, likewise, possess fine natural harbors.) Second, it is true of virtually any point anywhere that it serves as an 'intermediary' between someone to its north and someone else to its south, so no site derives any especial benefit from that fact."

Okay, not a great piece of writing. But I have retained the ambivalent attitude toward geo-historical explanations that you can hear in my voice there.

The Sirius arrives in New York

It was on April 22, 1838, that the Sirius arrived in New York City, after a journey of 18 days and 10 hours, making it the first vessel ever to cross the Atlantic ocean using only steam power.

She had riggings ready, just in case she needed them, since the new technology was not considered reliable. If you follow that link you'll see what she looked like.

This is a bittersweet day, then, because that completed voyage meant that the age of tall wooden ships with great sails was coming to end. Those old tall ships weren't merely a technology for crossing the ocean, thet were an aesthetic, and they remain a touchstone.

The philosopher David Hume once said that beauty arises from utility: we prize in a horse for example those anatomical features that make it swift, and we come to regard them as beautiful. There is truth in this, but it is very incomplete. Beauty may arise from, but long survive, its utility. A horse is still beautiful to us, though none of us any longer relies upon its features for transportation.

The marks of verse, for example -- metre and rhyme -- may once have been quite useful. In a pre-literate age they may have been the reason a poem survived, passed along from the memory of one teller of the tale to that of another, while many a prosaic story, never put into this form, was lost forever. We have writing implements now, though, and many who know how to use them. If we still consider verse a thing of beauty, the reason is that beauty can outlive utility.

Speaking of both poems and ships then: the poem "Sea-Fever" first appeared in print in 1902. This lovely expression of longing for the "windy day with the white clouds flying/ And the flung spray...." was the result of the passage of more than 60 years since the voyage of the Sirius, the voyage that made the windiness of the day an irrelevance to sea travel.

Scheduling

This entry was pre-packaged. Tomorrow's will be as well. By Sunday I might be writing my blogs in something like real time again, although I have a pre-packaged one lined up, just in case.

On Saturday, I'll be on Broadway, watching a performance of Finian's Rainbow.

I understand that there will be a cast album available in February.

The fascinating thing about this play, for me, is that the lyrics to its songs were written by none other than Yip Harburg, who is best-known as the lyricist for all the songs in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Any man who could write lines like "I'd unravel any riddle for any individle" has a streak of genius in him.

Finian's Rainbow was first on Broadway in 1947, smack in the middle of what we see in hindsight as its golden age, and its songs include "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?," "Old Devil Moon" and "Fiddle Faddle."

When Markets Collide

When Markets Collide is the title of a quite well-written book by Mohamed el-Erian, an economist who worked at the International Monetary Fund for 15 years, and has since worked at Salomon Smith Barney, the Harvard Management Company, and PIMCO.

(Gee, he can't keep a job, can he?)

I read large chunks of it during my train rides Wednesday, from Stratford CT to Manhattan in the morning and back the other way in the evening.

Love that spinning top cover art. The "equator" of the globe presented as a top is considerably to the north of the actual equator, though. the pseudo-equator seems to pass through the Yucatan peninsula.

More seriously: I don't agree with the author's Keynesianism in macro-economics but ... disagreement is why they run the horse races.


I appreciated his summary of theories about the "market for lemons."

Used cars are a product with non-obvious defects. Consumers are aware of this, of the danger that they'll end up with a lemon, but they sometimes do have to enter this market anyway. With what result?

With the result, as el-Erian tells it, that perfectly fine non-lemons end up selling for a price less than they would were accurate information more generally available and appreciated. The fear of a lemon forces a discount on the whole second-hand jalopy markets, and some people get non-lemons cheap.

I suppose something like that was the theory behind early versions of the TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program]. The troubled assets on banks' books include, to simplify considerably, the rights to the flow of money from mortgaged homeowners. Some of these homeowners are "lemons." They'll likely default. Others won't default, though, and the troubled banks might under ideal circumstances sell the rights to the good mortgages for significant chunks of needed cash. But as with cars, the taste of the lemons infects the non-lemons.

But this still leaves us with the age-old question durected by citizens to those who would govern them: "Why do you think you're smarter than us?"

Why are the administrators of the TARP presumed to be better at deciding what is or isn't a lemon than the private sector?

I'll say no more, but parts of this book do help frame the discussion nicely.

Walking in downtown Manhattan

I went into Manhattan yesterday on business.

Specifically, I attended an open house that an accounting firm held for discussion of some of the issues created by Bernard Madoff's giant ponzi scheme and its legal/accounting aftermath.

I walked to the Essex House, where the meeting was held, from Grand Central Station. It was very cold, and I could have gotten a cab, but I felt both cheap and adventurous. Had I been cheap but not so adventurous, after all, I could have taken the subway.

I started walking, said "brrrr" under my breath a few times, looked around at the cabs whizzing by, but didn't hail any. I have a stubborn streak and I had started walking so I was going to finish the walk AS a walk, by god!

Anyway I got there. The meeting was actually more interesting than I had expected it might be. Unfortunately, I don't yet have a set of business cards that identify me in connection with my present employer. This is a severe hindrance at such events. The ritual exchange-of-cards is a necessity if one is going to introduce one's self.

On the way home after the meeting it was dark as well as cold. And I was still feeling cheap, though no longer so adventurous. So I took the subway.

"May you live in interesting times"

The title of this entry is a line often described in popcult contexts as an "ancient Chinese curse."

The actual history of the expression is tangled -- it MAY have Chinese antecedents, although nobody has been able to trace it authoritatively earlier than the 1930s, when officials in the UK, some of them indeed with Chinese connections, began to use the phrase as a way of expressing their anxiety about the darkening of the diplomatic climate in Europe.

Reporters want interesting times, of course. The curse is a "slow news day," whatever the ancient Chinese or Chamberlain-era Brits might have thought.

I thought of the expression when I read this morning a story in The New York Times by David Kocieniewski lamenting the fact that the summer of 2008 seems especially unremarkable -- uninteresting: one might even say -- uncursed.

Mr. Kocieniewski longs for days when every summer in that city had its signature story. The son of Sam, the West Nile virus, black outs, or even a rash of pit bull attacks.

Chill out, Mr. Kocieniewski.

Or, in the words of another purportedly Chinese curse, you may get what you wish for.