1888

The nature of New York's snowstorms, from the Bowery Boys, America's number one New York City history blog.

A Good Point

This subway poster commentator--commentating on the poster at a time when police seem to be watching for people writing on or approaching in any way the advertisements that litter the subway system in New York as well as many other subway systems around the world--makes an excellent point. His or her hand written comment is in the upper left of the poster shown above right, and it is enlarged below right. We are rarely right, so please keep that in mind. Meanwhile, for more information see more information on Poster Boy.

Too Small

Too small for me, anyway, but nice try.

Via

Solid

Photo via Y.L.M.: A Buddhist monk’s footprints are permanently etched into the floorboards he has been praying on every day for 20 years. Text via Walden

I delight to come to my bearings- not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may- not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me;- not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less- not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commerce to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction- a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

The Box

People often ask us at the Thoreau You Don't Know what our favorite Thoreau-esque video is. That's a difficult question; there are so many to choose from. Here is one:

A Big Wow

It has been very cold in Maine lately, as this report in the Boston Globe attests:

The coldest temperature ever recorded in Maine, a frigid 50 degrees below zero, was reached when a blast of Arctic air hit New England last month. The record is tied with a thermometer reading from 1933 in Bloomfield, Vermont for the coldest recorded temperature in New England history.

“It’s a big wow,” said Tony Sturey, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Caribou, Maine. “It’s an incredible number, an insanely cold number.”

In January 1971, the country's lowest temperature ever recorded, 80 degrees below zero, was reached in Alaska. The lowest temperature on record in the continental US is 70 degrees below zero, measured in January 1954 in Montana. Maine's previous record of 48 degrees below was measured in 1925, also in mid-January.

January was a colder month than usual in many parts of Maine and New England. The record-breaking temperature was recorded the morning of January 16, after a mass of Arctic air plunged into Alaska and northern Canada, and traveled eastward into New England.

From Walden:

Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.

Photo Library of Congress--Fred Waters in Auto-Sleigh, between 1910 and 1915.

88 Keys Below W 4th

This is what we at The Thoreau You Don't Know are talking about, and it comes via Flicker as first spotted on Gothamist.

Like Conan O'Brien, Thoreau Went to Harvard

Like Conan O'Brien, Thoreau went to Harvard. In the New York Times Book Review this weekend, Jennifer Schuessler writes of Flannery O'Connor, who is the subject of a great book review by Joy Williams:

O’Connor never made the best-seller list, but she did catch the eye of the budding literary critics Tommy Lee Jones and Conan O’Brien, both of whom wrote Harvard undergraduate theses on her work. In his Class Day speech at Harvard in 2000, O’Brien described the awesome, kryptonite-like powers of his analysis: “I wrote a thesis: ‘Literary Progeria in the Works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.’ Let’s just say that, during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn’t come up much. For three years after graduation I kept my thesis in the glove compartment of my car so I could show it to a policeman in case I was pulled over. License, registration, cultural exploration of the Man Child in ‘The Sound and the Fury.’ . . .” Jones, according to The Boston Globe, received cum laude honors for his opus. O’Brien’s thesis grade has apparently not been disclosed.

Also like Conan O'Brien, Thoreau was big on getting laughs out of his lecture audience, though today have lost their sense of humor when it comes to (a) Thoreau and (b) nature, among other things.
(Photo NYPL Digital archives here--New York's first known comedian.)

Talking Transportation With the Times

A member of the Thoreau You Don't Know team talks about shutting down the Times Square area to cars and, thus, opening it to people here.

Railroading

People think Thoreau was against the train. Personally, we at the Thoreau You Don't Know don;t get that feeling. He took the train to hike in the hills. He took the train to lecture. He used to hang out by the train tracks to check out the nature--kind of like looking at plants on a highway median, in terms of today. One of our favorite reporters is Sarah Goodyear at Streetsblog.org, and she recently had this to say about trains and the United States and today--she is following the people following high speed rail as it relates to the stimulus bill.

In Common Parlance

According to the New York Times Book Review's blog, Paper Cuts, the discussion between Lawrence Lessig and the artist Shepard Fairey. (Jennifer Schuessler wrote the post, "Steal This Blog.") Here's the moderator's Twitter feed. All I want to say is they talked about the commons. Thoreau talked a lot about commons, pitching himself as what he called an extra vagrant, a phrase that, if you think about it, gets better and better. Here's this about the idea of commons:

Speaking of Unemployment

A lot of people think that Walden is a paean to nature. And it is pro-nature. On the other hand, it is an economic analysis--or an analysis of the culture that thinks only economically. The goal, of course, is to mend the rift between thinking economically and thinking nature--"healing the false binary" is a phrase the the staff at The Thoreau You Don't Know have seen in academic papers. It seems relevant to point out that times were not good when Thoreau was setting out as a writer, as this brief excerpt from The Thoreau You Don't Know indicates:

Violent class warfare was more of a possibility than the typically genteel study of the Transcendentalists’ time would indicate, or marketers who invoke Thoreau’s namenowadays might imagine. Union membership had taken hold on a mass scale—in 1834, New York City’s General Trades Union created a National Trades Union, and had a march a mile and a half long—but the layoff s zapped their power. In the winter of 1837, as theaters were deserted and markets empty, renters were planning a mass action in New York City; landlords collectively held back on their attempts to collect. For the first time in U.S. history a president, Andrew Jackson, used federal troops in a labor dispute—against the immigrant Irish workers on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal who had attacked scab workers. The Workingman’s Party was agitating in Boston, while women working in the mills in Lowell went on strike, what they then called a “turn out,” singing, “Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I/ Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?” Philip Hone, the former New York City mayor and diarist, wondered how a workingman fed his family, given that Hone’s upper- class friends were in dire straits. “What is to become of the working classes?” he wrote. That spring, Emerson wrote in his journal: “Cold April; hard times; men breaking who ought not to break; banks bullied into the bolstering of desperate speculators; all the newspapers a chorus of owls. . . . Loud cracks in the social edifice.—Sixty thousand laborers, say rumor, to be presently thrown out of work, and these make a formidable mob to break open banks and rob the rich and brave the domestic government.”

In other words, there was a great recession, a depression, in fact-—that's what Thoreau was thinking about. And it should also be noted that Thoreau survived. It was a lot of work, but he and his contemporaries figured out ways to get by.
(Library of Congress photo of Big Bill Heywood leading strikers in Lawrence, MA.)

A Nineteenth Century Moment!

Is it just us here at the Thoreau You Don't Know or does it feel as if we are having a Nineteenth Century Moment? Thoreau, by the way, was critiquing farming methods when he wrote Walden. At the time, farms were growing less for local customers and more for people out of town, which he thought was a bad idea. (On the other hand, he exported pencils, until German competitors caused him to shift to graphite.) Anyway, look here:



Above is the photo from a recent Times report, below a photo seen on your number one Victorian clothing web site.

But wait--why stop?

Wildlife Patterns

From the Journal Human Nature, via Eric Etheridge's wordblog, The Thoreau You Don't Know notes this wildlife research:

This study investigated the use of mobile telephones by males and females in a public bar frequented by professional people. We found that, unlike women, men who possess mobile telephones more often publicly display them, and that these displays were related to the number of men in a social group, but not the number of women. This result was not due simply to a greater number of males who have telephones: we found an increase with male social group size in the proportion of available telephones that were on display. Similarly, there was a positive relationship between the number of visible telephones and the ratio of males to females. Our results further show that the increased display of telephones in groups with more males is not due to the ostensive function of these devices (i.e., the making and receiving of calls), although single males tended to use their phones more. We interpret these results within the framework of male-male competition, with males in larger group sizes functioning in an increasingly competitive environment. This competitive environment is suggested to be akin to a lek mating system in which males aggregate and actively display their qualities to females who assess males on a number of dimensions. We suggest that mobile telephones might be used by males as an indicator of their status and wealth (sensu �cultural ornaments�).

Photo Library of Congress

Bottlenecks

Click here for a bottle neck story that includes this line: "Researchers say there was a thirty percent drop in traffic congestion last year, the likely result of higher gas prices and higher unemployment." The story is about bottlenecks, not bottleneck slide guitar playing, seen below:

Walking

In the Times today, the mayor's plan to cut out traffic from Times Square is leaked, as is this from Thoreau's Journal, 1857:

... in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it.

Go feet (Photo NYPL.)

The Ecology of an Intersection

We at the Thoreau You Don't Know never tire of watching this, which reminds us of watching herds of animals on the Great Plains, or fish in a stream and so on:

Scramble from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.

Seeing the Wind

As readers of The Thoreau You Don't Know know, the staff of the The Thoreau You Don't Know is very interested in wind and windstorms, especially in the city--which is why we were elated to receive the following e-mail from an alert reader, in particular alert novelist Matthew Sharpe (Stories from the Tube, Nothing Is Terrible, The Sleeping Father, Jamestown), who came across this wind description from Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend:

The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding him and choking him.

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails.

Nice wind quote. (We put it in italics, because italics look windblown.) When the BBC did "Our Mutual Friend," they also ran a scholarly article archive, which can be found here. As far as Dickens and Thoreau goes: we are reminded of Dickens tour of The Five Points, the notorious so-called slum of New York City. (Photo NY Public Library Digital Collection.)

We am reminded that he liked to go slumming. We are reminded that the Five Points was exploding due to the sudden influx of immigrants, running from famine. We are reminded that Dickens did not have a lot of nice things to say about the Five Points residents, comparing them to the pigs.

Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?

We recall that Thoreau came to New York City the following year, living in Staten Island, and had some not nice things to say about the very same immigrants. Then he returned to Concord, MA, where there were also a lot of immigrants all of the sudden. In fact, Thoreau lived with some of the immigrants at Walden Pond, using party of a Irishman's shanty to build his house. Sometime after living at Walden, Thoreau's attitude changed. He began to have nice things to say about the immigrants--about their work habits, their fence building skills, their kids. In other words, Thoreau stayed loose; he was flexible. Kind of like Matthew Sharpe, seen here on the Today Show:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In closing, note that one of the BBC's scholarly articles--Choi, Tina Young. "Completing the Circle: The Victorian Sanitary Movement, Our Mutual Friend, and Narrative Closure." A paper originally delivered at the Dickens Project Winter Conference, UC Davis, February 19-21, 1999--refers to the great English sanitarian Edwin Chadwick and says this:

Dickens's massive novels about urban life, such as Great Expectations and Bleak House, elaborate upon a similar conception of nationhood, where both narrative and nation, in spite of seeming novelistic excess with respect to characters and pages, actually exemplify remarkable economy. But his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, might provide the most fitting example of this emergent sense of nationhood, if only because here, Dickens overlays an almost Chadwickean vision of narrative and national closure with a pervading narrative thematic of sanitation, waste, and recovery.

Reception

The staff at the Thoreau You Don't Know wrote a piece in last week's New Yorker and then forgot to post it. It's about the signal, and your reception, and it raises either no questions at all or questions such as, Are you in a position to see and hear? Are you receiving the signal or any signal at all? Here is the Talk of the Town piece mentioned, and here is an excerpt:

The handoff of the White House seemed like a piece of cake next to America’s transition from analog to digital TV signal. With the White House, you switch residents but get a lot of the same stuff: podiums, helicopters, tour groups. With the switch that is officially taking place in television transmitters around the country starting this week, you could wind up with frame skipping, frozen screens, or, worse, nothing (as in snow). Bill Beam, the engineer in charge of the signal that WABC-TV sends off the Empire State Building, said recently, “We don’t know how it’s all going to wind up.” In the months leading up to the switchover, the city’s anxious cable- and dish-less citizens have been turning for answers to the Antenna King.

Lately, the Antenna King himself—a.k.a. Henry Langan—has not been in residence at the Antenna King headquarters, in the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway. Once, he ruled the rooftops of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx, places where today there are still a few hundred thousand people using old-style antennas to watch “Dancing with the Stars.” (The relatively wide-open vistas of the outer boroughs make them antenna-friendly; Manhattan, by comparison, is practically terra incognita to the Antenna King, save for a few satellite dishes.) Steven Langan, Henry’s son, is in charge now. “I’m the Prince,” Steven said the other day, at the Antenna King showroom.

Here is an excellent report on the neighborhood in which the Antenna King resides, Brooklyn's Leif Ericson Corridor, as it is referred to at this most excellent site, Forgotten New York.

A Simple Meal

This comes, no pun intended, via the Daily Dish, and reminds me of how Thoreau used to say that if you cut your own wood (and he got this from a neighbor) then you would warm yourself three times: once when you cut it, again when you lugged it home, and finally when you burned it. If you were to ask the staff at The Thoreau You Don't Know what they thought of this video, then they would tell you that they think it is kind of beautiful.