A new book
Insomniac City by Bill HayesBloomsbury 2017
This is my next book and I've really been looking forward to it since I first heard about the book some months ago. Not only is there an Oliver Sacks angle, but Hayes sounds equally interesting and more visual. And it is also as much about NYC as anything else. And how could I not be interested in a book about what is in some ways the ultimate city.
I almost said "ultimate American city," but I think that would be shortchanging NYC. Though I should also make clear that when I give it this exalted status I don't mean simply the city as it is today, but also the past incarnations. In particular, the Edith Wharton NYC and the city around the 1940s -- before Robert Moses became de facto dictator after 1946.
Anyway, I'm only eleven pages in and the book is already living up to my expectations. Hayes moved to NYC from SF after his partner died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack while only in his forties. (As with Ficre, your forties and fifties are the worst time to have a heart attack. Since heart disease runs in my family, I was relieved to make it past sixty, when your survival chances are supposed to be better.)
Hayes, when he moved to NYC, did what I did moving here, brought only the most basic necessities and moved into a tiny place in a decent location. This almost forces you to live in the city rather than to stay in your apartment. And then his insomnia both drove him out, when I would be deeply asleep, and made sure he had lots of free time to pursue his interests. And, as a photographer, you really couldn't have a better subject.
I haven't been to NYC in over twenty years, but I still remember it with fondness (and I was there at possibly the lowest point in my life). What strikes you most, coming from SF, is how mistaken you were. SF refers to itself as The City, and when compared to the rest of the Bay Area, or even the rest of the American West Coast, this is apt. We are dense and our streets are busy at times other cities have gone to bed... or died. But the moment you walk out on a Manhattan sidewalk, or cross a street there, you realize that your definition of "density" and "busy" was really pretty silly. Compared to NYC, SF is like a Disneyland version of a city... or at least this was true before we added the overlapping "Insanityland" operation.
How is it everyone in books about NYC has a view of either the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, if not both? The prevalence of terraces on NYC apartments in magazines is actually easier to understand. I know one person with a view of the TransAmerica Pyramid. The place I stayed on North Ave in Chicago did have a great view of the Hancock Building, but how could you not see Chicago's towers in pancake flat Chicago.
p9 One day I met a man with the name of an angel. He was French. His accent was so think it sounded fake. We got to talking and I told him what had happened. [This is in SF shortly after his partner of 25 years had died.] "You're going to be fine," Emmanuel said right away. "Something bad always leads to something good." He spoke from personal experience. His partner had died six years earlier. But he did not use the word, died, as he told me his story. Nor did he say passed away, a euphemism I had come to hate. Instead, Emmanuel said, "When my partner disappeared . . ."
... I had to say something. "You said 'disappeared'__"
He nodded.
"That's exactly how it feels for me, too."
Now, this is a book that exists because "Something bad... [lead] to something good." But I still think this phrase is as objectionable as "passed away." It's even dangerously close to "God never gives you more than you can handle" -- which I think should rank right up there with self-defense as a justification for killing someone.
Actually, the reason this caught my eye is that I just read, through Medium, a piece on Stoicism that emphasized amor fati -- if you are flogging Hellenistic philosophy it helps to connect it to that trendy new kid, Nietzsche. (I don't want to be critical here, I'm pleasantly amazed to find people pushing Stoicism.)
amor fati is a more general, and more profound, conception than looking for something good to come from something bad. It's closer to "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" And this is also why I don't try to sell it to my friends, along with vegetarianism and pedestrianism (which I just coined to mean not owning a car.)
Also, Nietzsche's conception of amor fati has a back channel to de Sade which is hinted at, though people tend to ignore it, in the meaning of "Good" and "Bad" in "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" At most, good and bad expresses our subjective perception of some event. de Sade, Nietzsche, and the Wisdom of the East all agree that this subjective perception does not accurately describe the objective reality, which is neither good nor bad. Looking for something "good" to follow something "bad" misses the point. What would be the virtue of embracing Eternal Recurrence of something "good?" It's saying "Yes" to whatever life throws your way that makes us a super person.
What's odd is that this has more than a little in common with the bliss of Zosima's dying brother and of the grace Frank Osteseski was arguing for. I really can't imagine all these people being happy forced under the same tent (I'm imagining them as charged nucleons, or wet cats, held in close proximity by the strong force) but who knows?
"O"
He's still in SF and just met Sacks, who we will be calling "O," while visiting NYC. Usually people leave SF when they want to start a family -- not always, as the small horde of rug rats across the street from me in Noe Valley's new "downtown square" can attest. Or they go to Portland for a more laid-back, Portlandia experience. So I approve of Hayes's change of scenery to a more seriously urban location. If I were one to regret things, never moving to NYC would be the thing I would regret. (I could also make an argument for regretting Toronto and especially Montreal, but those places are not at all the same thing, despite their various appeals. Not to mention the winters.)On Becoming a New Yorker
p24 I had gotten here just like millions of others before me and since: on a one-way ticket and with only vague notions of how I'd make it...
From Kennedy [Airport], I took an A train headed for Far Rockaway. That was the wrong direction for getting to Manhattan, as New Yorkers will recognize and as I eventually figured out. But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.
This is both the identical way I arrived in SF (though on a Greyhound) and my approach to travel... though I have to say I'm better with maps than Hayes appears to be.
He writes wonderfully about riding public transit. Though I wish he would contrast NYC with here, as I'm not sure I see the difference aside from the scale and that it runs all night -- which I do envy.
Subway Lifer
p29 Perhaps he's just presenting the good aspects of riding NYC subways here, I can't imagine this is really the whole story. He makes it sound like Disneyland.
I still remember my love for NYC subways when I first visited the city way back in 1971 (or 1972?). And those were the bad old days. I was enchanted by the scale and the decrepitude... the wabi sabi was overwhelming in those days. When I was back twenty years later I spent more time walking -- an even better way to see a city -- so all I recall was that the trains were shockingly cleaner.
I like to think that New Yorkers wouldn't permit some of the nonsense I see on trains and buses here, just as I did see rush hour crowds sweep confused tourists out of their way like the wind would blow away trash. I imagine them tossing miscreants not observing the common sense rules of using public transit off the vehicle or into pits hidden about the stations. I wouldn't say anything in such a case.
p52 Hayes is giving us the intimate details of their relationship, that O never mentioned. I'm more like O than B in this regard, but I was curious. I'm getting a much better idea of what Sacks's life was like both before and after they got together. If you wrote a character so out-of-his-time as Sacks was -- no computer, no exposure to popular culture, so dedicated to writing with his fountain pen -- no one would buy it. While I respect aspects of it, how someone could be so curious about so many subjects yet turn his back on the internet is a mystery to me. As much as I love books -- and reading them slowly and repeatedly -- I would never give up the ability to read so widely (the internet is the worlds largest library, if you want to think of it that way) and to sample multimedia presentations like Feynman lectures and the various Crash Course and Space Time YouTube series I'm addicted to.
Feynman's QED sits on my "favorite non-fiction" shelf at home, but if I want a blast of Feynman goodness I will find a lecture instead of grabbing the book.
p52 On the roof of O's building. This doesn't sound like City Island, did O move? I don't recall that from his memoir.
Taxis in NYC
p104 I suppose NYC is different in this respect as well, but in both Phoenix and here in SF I had repeat customers on a regular basis. Often more frequently than I would have liked. And while you do find different sorts of people in any neighborhood, they are also sorted to some degree. There are people you would be surprised to find (or are surprised to find) in a given context.
Björk
p111 If Björk makes diner and dessert for you and Oliver Sacks, you pretty much have to write a book just so you can describe the evening. Everything else here is just padding.
Sacks makes a long list of elements that are not present in the human body, but I'm not so sure about this. Perhaps this doesn't include the GI tract as I would think there would be at least trace amounts of nearly everything in the gut, especially of meat eaters. This is a question Sacks could have answered but Hayes probably can't.
p127 The day after Sandy, O is lying on the couch, I am in the easy chair... We have opened the bottle of Veuve Clicquot left over from his birthday; we figure it will get warm otherwise...
The 28th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake was this week. Consuming perishables was such a part of that experience. In the hours after the earthquake we cleaned out the free ice cream from our neighborhood ice cream shop, before it all turned to soup. Then, after night fell, we turned to the contents of our freezer and refrigerator (fortunately, we still had gas for cooking.) A few days later there was a big social gathering (in Cow Hollow, of all places) where the power had yet to return and friends were called in to polish off someone's even larger freezer and refrigerator food supply. With candles for lighting, of course.
It wouldn't have been as nice if we had been caught under falling brick or concrete at the time of the quake, but we weren't, and life goes on.
Lauren Hutton
Now this is something I would never have imagined running into in this book. I can imagine how a young person might not know or recognize Hutton, but for O this is one of the most astonishing examples of how he lived in his own strange little world.
Hutton was my first model crush, probably about the time I started finding Playmates freakish looking. From what little I've learned about her over the decades, I'm a little disappointed she didn't get the black-eye in a motorcycle accident.
Still Insomniac City
Hayes has formatted his book into tiny sections which I'm taking advantage of to read the book slowly. To savor it taste by taste. I'm now at page 238 and I think we've come to the end of the fun part, the part where you can let yourself forget how the story has to end.This should actually be interesting, if not fun. Hayes got off easy with his previous partner, will he appreciate the greater amount of time (and bother) this time 'round? O is such an observer of everything his take on dying should be particularly valuable. Though his passing is also particularly painful due to all he knew. And it isn't really just because I recently rewatched Blade Runner that I'm reminded again of the poetic climax of that film, delivered by the dying replicant, Roy,
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
This is the essence of the tragedy of death, all the moments lost in time but also the memories -- including the memories of other people -- and the knowledge unique to that person.
You can think of life (what is experienced in life) as a multifaceted collection of perspectives. And over time perspectives are subtracted by death until in the end there is nothing left except, in some cases, visual imagery or a written account.
Yes, I did read the ending of that section of Insomniac City correctly.
p252 O rejects adding explanatory info for scientific terms used in In Motion preferring that the reader look it up. Which I did, and he's right. When you look up one thing, it always leads to something else and you learn even more.
Near the end of O
p271 This morning: A bowl of blueberries for breakfast. "Each one gives a quantum of pleasure," O says with delight, then reconsiders, "if pleasure can be quantified."
That's an interesting thought. Can other things be quantified like that? I kind of think not. Blueberries, for example, are not limited to a positive ground state. There's always a under or over ripe one that drops below zero. Anything perishable has this problem. Off hand I can't really think of anything that never drops to or below zero pleasure.
Even if you add ideas or thoughts, as I think O would at least consider pleasures, they too can drop to or below zero.
p272 O no longer wants any visitors to the apartment unless he expressly invites them: "I don't have time to be bored!"
When he is not resting, he is working on new pieces nonstop.
This is actually one of the things I would most fear if I were dying in a hospital setting, say. You would need a gate keeper.
In the end, we get very little about O's actual death, and certainly nothing from his perspective. As with The Five Invitations, there is no compelling argument for subjecting yourself to an elemental death. There's no suggestion here that even Oliver Sacks was able to learn something useful or interesting from the experience of slowly dying.
I think it's a good decision, but it is a little odd that we get the effect on Hayes of the death of his SF partner but not the effect of O's death.
Next Wednesday there's a celebration of Sacks's life and books here at the Commonwealth Club, with Hayes and (for some reason) Victoria Sweet in addition to other people more obviously connected to Sacks. I now want to read the book he was writing at the time covered by this book, but I think I'll probably skip the "celebration."
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