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ABCs of MTA Funding at the NY Transit Museum

March 4, 2013

In its continuing series “Problem Solvers” the NY Transit Museum is sponsoring a discussion on March 13th between Ben Kabak of the blog Second Avenue Sagas and Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. This discussion will focus on the intricate funding streams that power the MTA. Issues under discussion will include:

  • How much of the operating costs do fares cover?
  • What role do the New York City and State governments play in raising operating and capital funds?
  • How does the financing picture compare with financing public transit in other large cities in the US?

When: Wednesday, March 13th, 6:30 pm

Where: The New York Transit Museum, Corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn

Admission: Free, but you need a reservation.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Garden of Evening Mists” by Tan Twan Eng

March 1, 2013

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Concede, cooperate, collaborate. Each of these might be thought of as points on a continuum describing different ways we behave when we are trying to get along with others. When the behavior is Yun Ling’s, the central character of Tan Twan Eng’s complex and layered novel “The Garden of Evening Mists” the words can take on very mixed connotations indeed.

Yun Ling is retiring from her post-war life as a judge in Malaysia because an unspecified disease is causing neurological decline and her memory is fading. During World War II, she and her sister were interned by the occupying Japanese. Yun Ling was the internment camp’s only survivor. “I did what I had to do to survive,” is how Yun Ling describes her wartime behavior. The phrase describes the actions of the other two main characters as well.

Magnus Pretorius is an exile from South Africa who left the Transvaal after the Boer War. He farms tea in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. Magnus, who is friendly with Yun Ling’s father, is married to a Chinese woman. Magnus has sold some land to Aritomo, a gardener formerly in the employ of the Emperor of Japan, who is creating Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaysia. Immediately after the war Yun Ling spent several years with Magnus and Aritomo as Aritomo’s apprentice and eventually acolyte, learning to create a garden on Japanese principles.

Yun Ling dreams of creating a garden memorial to her older sister. She is also struggling with her experience of horrors as an internee, mitigated, only briefly, but the occasional touch of commonality between Japanese captors and Chinese internees. Magnus is there to create a new life for himself. And Aritomo has been forced to leave his country after a falling out with a member of the royal family. Or is he? Eng has borrowed from Jim Thompson’s story to suggest that Aritomo might be something more than an exiled gardener. (Thompson himself makes a brief appearance.)

Various mysteries keep raising their heads throughout the novel. Why has Yun Ling turned to an ethnic Japanese for her retreat after her experiences? Where was the internment camp? What was being produced or stored there? Why is Aritomo in Malaysia? The action is set against the 12-year-long Malayan Emergency, and the jungles hide Communist guerrillas fighting for independence from the British. Most of the action centers on the garden, which works as well as a metaphor for memory and forgetting as it does as a symbol of Malaysia itself.

“The Garden of Evening Mists” has beautiful, evocative place descriptions, fully drawn characters, and a misty ambiguity. It’s structure relies perhaps a little too much on coincidence for its resolution, to the extent there is one, and there are some sloppy contradictions that another round of editing might have caught. The gauzy scrim of the garden obscures a series of difficult choices each character faces. Love or manipulation? Loyalty or treachery? Shift your view slightly, and the characters’ actions take on a different coloring. This is a book that repays the reader who thinks about the novel, each new vista opening up different possibilities for interpretation. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Vacant Possession” by Hilary Mantel

February 22, 2013

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The completely mad are different from you and me. Or, maybe not: they have hopes and dreams and lives. When Muriel Axon, who we know (but the authorities do not) has murdered both her baby and her mother arrives at an institution after her mother’s death, one of the residents asks her if she’s mad or stupid. Both, she answers. But Hilary Mantel ultimately settles on another word to describe Muriel, whose true character she unveils slowly in the course of her wickedly funny social satire “Vacant Possession.”

Suzanne Sidney, 18 year old daughter of Colin and Sylvia, is pregnant. Her amour is Jim Ryan, husband of Isabel Field, who was once the lover of Colin Sidney. The Sidneys have bought Muriel’s former house, even though they know, since it is around the corner from Colin’s mother’s house (now occupied by Colin’s sister Florence), that it was not a happy home. Old Mrs. Sidney is in an old people’s home. Mr. Field, Isabel’s father who, it might as well be said, was the father of Muriel’s baby, is in the same home. When I thought about the story, I was irresistibly reminded of this song by Tom Lehrer, except that the pathology here is mental.

Deinstitutionalization sets the plot in motion. Muriel feels that she needs to be repaid for the loss of her house and her baby, and while she may claim to be stupid, she’s as canny as a fox. Settled in an apartment above a grocery store she borrows the characters, if not quite the identities, of people she has come across. To her landlord, an immigrant of uncertain extraction, she is Mrs. Wilmot. To the Sidneys, whose twice-weekly cleaner she has become, she is Lizzie Blank. (Her landlord sees her once as Lizzie and takes her for a prostitute.) Muriel makes herself a canvas where she can paint the expressions she has observed others use.

Muriel is not the only character struggling to keep things from falling apart. Suzanne expects Jim to leave his wife and marry her; when that does not happen she ditches her parents. The only person she trusts is Lizzie. Mrs. Sidney wakes up from her stupor and recovers enough to be sent home. The only person who can bear to be with her is Lizzie, much to relief of Colin, Sylvia, and Florence. Old Mrs. Sidney recognizes Lizzie as Muriel, but no one takes her seriously. Colin is convinced Sylvia wants to leave him for the vicar, though eventually they reconcile, and having decided to move, start working together again.

Mantel uses the book to explore our relationships with each other, with our houses, and with time. In a way, these relationships define us. In another, they control us. So when they are ended, by ourselves, or by circumstance, who is released? In the nicely ambiguous final section Mantel rearranges everything. If you have theories about the ending please share them in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Abbott Awaits” by Chris Bachelder

February 15, 2013

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Abbott – husband, father, professor, and smallholder in the American dream – is awaiting the birth of his second child. It’s a long hot summer, and Abbott’s wife is often uncomfortable. And then there’s the golden Lab, who can best be described as a scaredy-cat. The novel consists of a daily (or nightly) glimpse into Abbott’s life and thoughts. Some are ruminations on events large and small, others are the seeds of an idea. There are some pure (and more impure) fantasies. Some chapters are a few sentences long, while others go on for a couple of pages. It’s the mind as palimpsest, as Abbott coasts or endures or celebrates, depending on his mood.

Some days the world is too much with Abbott. There’s the ennui of caring for a two-year-old: he and his daughter “take a hot morning walk around the neighborhood at a gruelingly slow pace. . . . He estimates the time by subtracting fifteen minutes from his most conservative estimate of the time, but then discovers that he is still ten minutes fast.” Abbott cleans the high chair and the gutters, “alternately repulsed and terrified.” He muses on aging, conformity, and marriage:

The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence: From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed.

Abbott is also a philosopher. In one chapter, ‘Abbott Hogs the Mood,’ he rationalizes his long-term possession of the bad mood because marriage, as he puts it, “is a battle–clinically, a negotiation–over the possession of the Bad Mood.” Fortunately, it’s a good marriage, and Abbott’s wife is forbearing.

Other glimpses make Abbott feel less forlorn. He is profoundly moved by his remarkable child, and the moments when he glimpses the world anew, through her eyes. (This is not to say that he is above ruminating on the possible origins of the songs his daughter is learning: the Jacobite Revolt or, possibly, the plague.) When an employee in a gorilla costume turns up during a rainy day trip to the bookstore, Abbott’s daughter is enraptured.

She is a conductor. She conducts wonder. Wonder passes from the world to Abbott through his daughter.

Have you read a better description of being a parent (on a good day)?

By turns sarcastic, sardonic, musing, earthy, and wonderstruck, Bachelder’s exploration of a man’s mind is rewarding and hilarious. Do you agree? What’s your favorite moment? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Contents May Have Shifted” by Pam Houston

February 8, 2013

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There are some women who are simply unlucky in love, and there are other women who always fall for the shoot-myself-in-the-foot-I-don’t care if he’s bad for me kind of love. Pam Houston’s novel “Contents May Have Shifted,” which follows the travels, and travails, of a woman named Pam, is about one of the latter.

Pam is getting over, sort of, her breakup with Ethan, who was also seeing several other women while involved with Pam. He lied to all of them, of course, including Pam. She knows it but, for a while, can’t seem to do anything about it. She visits spas with her women friends, and explores whether she can settle into a new relationship with Rick. Pam is also running from her experience with her father, who threw her so hard into a wardrobe when she was four that she broke her femur.

The novel explores travel, love and death – and Pam’s perpetual pursuit of the first in order both to avoid, and invite, the latter two. The novel is told in a series of 132 shards, organized around the many things that can, and do, go wrong on the flights Pam has taken. The structure, and the novel, are not standard, but they greatly repay the reader who sticks with them. In between fragments of Pam’s explorations of of the United States, Asia, and Central America, some other themes emerge. The fickleness of men, the steadiness of women – slowly the picture comes into focus.

Houston is an author in control of her craft. She musters facts about whales Melville never thought of. Pam comes across as sensible despite all her provocative issues with men, and while Pam explores what we refer to as New Age-y stuff her sardonic evaluation of it keeps everything in neat equipoise. Discussing a description of one of her friends, Quinn, as a “seventh-cycle sage” by someone versed in “something called the Michael teachings,” Houston says:

We don’t really know who Michael is or was, but we do know he said that before taking a body each lifetime, every essence determines for itself, perhaps carefully, perhaps not, the culture, sex, personality, and body type in which it will be housed. “Essences generally try to set themselves up in the vicinity of their entitymates,” Quinn reports, and then we have to take turns saying entitymate a whole lot of times out loud.

Over the course of the novel Pam’s searches are repaid with self-knowledge, and the reasoning behind the airplane organizing structure is revealed. I found myself completely compelled by this unusual book with its clean clear prose. It took me places – dog-sledding for one – I have never been. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Events

Missed Connections Party on Valentine’s Day moves to Grand Central Terminal

February 6, 2013

A week from tomorrow, on Thursday, February 14, Valentine’s Day, the Transit Museum will hold its annual Missed Connections party, this time in Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal. Tickets are $15 at the door, $10 in advance ($7 for members). Alan Feuer, NY Times writer (“Poetic Connections”) will recite Craigslist postings as poetry, and illustrator Sophie Blackall will sign prints of her illustrations and book. There will be food and drinks.

Tickets are available here. See the Transit Museum’s website for more information. Oh, and The Transit Museum is collecting stories and photos about love-in-Grand Central at #GCT100 and www.NYTransitMuseum.tumblr.com.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Revenge” by Yoko Ogawa

February 1, 2013

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“Revenge,” Yoko Ogawa’s extraordinary new book of intricately, meticulously linked short stories is subtitled “Eleven Dark Tales.” The stories all take place in the same part of a city. It’s a perfectly ordinary city, with a square and a clock tower. “You could gaze at this perfect picture all day–an afternoon bathed in light and comfort–and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing.” The characters run into each other, shop in each other’s stores, live in the same apartment buildings, gossip about each other, appear and disappear. It looks like a placid, ordinary town. Except that beneath the surface lie death, destruction, murder and despair.

In one story, a woman waits all afternoon in a bakery to buy the strawberry cakes for her son’s birthday. The shopgirl talks on the phone, and weeps. It seems reasonable enough, though the woman seems ready to wait a long time. She tells another shopper why: “My son is six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead.” That’s the first of the many turns Ogawa has in store for us. In the next story we learn a bit about the shopgirl’s past, from a male friend of hers. In another story, two co-workers are sorting doctors’ lab coats, readying them for the hospital laundry. The more senior complains about her married boyfriend, Dr. Y In a third story, a bag maker goes to the hospital to visit a client. Dr. Y is being paged as the bag maker crosses the lobby. We know by now that Dr. Y is dead. Why doesn’t anyone else?

Each story has an unexpected turn, twisting but eminently plausible. Each story is narrated in the first person. Is it the same person? Sometimes the narrator is male, other times female. Who is seeking revenge? Who is not? It’s not just the people who turn up again, but things do, too: kiwis. Carrots shaped like a human hand. A Bengal tiger. A dead hamster. Strawberry cakes. A refrigerator. The details shift in every story. Every time an object reappears its shape and its meaning have changed. Each character’s role, and perspective, shifts slightly from story to story, as if Ogawa is turning her characters in a kaleidoscope. And with every turn, the previous story looks different.

The prose, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is limpid and simple. You inhabit the spaces around the big central square with the characters, walking down the streets and listening to the clock in the tower strike the hours. You go to fancy restaurants and fast food ones; you are in a train listening to a group of children sing Brahms, and at the zoo, eating ice cream on a cold day. It’s an immense achievement, one beautifully written story after the next. And the book stays with you as you think through the connections. It’s not scary, though it is penetrating.

It’s one of my favorite books of the past year. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Arts and Entertainment, Books, Events, History

BBBC’s first contest! What Would a Jane Austen Episode of Girls Be Like?

January 26, 2013

“Pride and Prejudice” was first published 200 years ago, on January 28, 1813. In its honor, the Brooklyn Bugle Book Club is proud to announce our first contest:

What is Jane Austen’s Twitter blurb for an episode of “Girls”?

Entries limited to 140 characters, but you can enter as many times as you like. Best entries will be published on the Brooklyn Bugle; the top two winners will also receive a copy of The Jane Austen Handbook by Margaret Sullivan.

Enter below in the comments with a valid email address.

Contest closes Sunday, February 3, at 12:01 am. Must be 18 or older to enter; must provide a valid email address. Winners will be chosen by our panel of judges. Their decision is final.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Trapeze” by Simon Mawer

January 25, 2013

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Marian Sutro, half French, half English, and raised in Geneva where her father was a diplomat, is living in London during the early part of the Second World War. Her parents are semi-retired, in Oxford, and her brother, a physicist, is working in London. Marian herself works in the Filter Room at Bletchley Park. When she is picked to train as an operative of the French Section of the Special Operations Executive she hesitates, but only briefly. During her training, she’s uncertain of her prospective role, though of course we know. One of the many interesting parts of reading this book is watching and responding to Marian as she figures it out.

Marian’s language skills are very good, and she thinks well on her feet. She has a tendency to disregard minor rules and to occasional impetuous behavior. Despite the insistence on secrecy she tells her brother Ned a bit of what she’s up to. And during her training course at a center in Northwest Scotland she “captures” a patrol of six soldiers while she and a friend are hiking on a rare day off. She’s not disciplined for this action, but not commended either – and when one of the six turns up again in her advanced training course, well, what she does is not entirely within the bounds of professional conduct.

Despite her continuing disregard of the niceties, or perhaps because of her ability to improvise, Marian is sent into the field, parachuting into occupied France to be in place for unspecified actions. And she has a dual mission – the authorities want to persuade another physicist, Clément Pelletier, who may once have been in love with the teenaged Marian, to escape from France to work on the development of the atomic bomb. Clément is living in Paris, and Marian’s trip to Paris, as well as her various actions there, are the crucial scenes of the book.

They are also among the tautest scenes in the novel. Mawer is adept at slowing down the pace to inject tension. His description of occupied Paris – the miserable, hungry people, the pewter and tarnish of surfaces in what was the City of Light, the stress of responding with just the right mixture of servility and dignity to German soldiers – is spot on. Mawer’s portrayal of female sexuality and the war’s effect on it is both sensitive and absolutely credible. And his use of Marian’s names (she has various code names, cover names, and field names) is shrewd.

Is Marian too clever for her own good? What do you think of her final impetuous decision and its consequences, for Marian and for the novel? Let us know in the comments.

You can read my review of Mawer’s nove “The Glass Room” here. Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Newlyweds” by Nell Freudenberger

January 18, 2013

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It was George Stillman’s interest in the Indian subcontinent that led him to Amina Mazid of Dhaka, Bangladesh. An electrical engineer, Mr. Stillman, of Rochester, New York, had a good job, a house, and no dependents. A coworker steered him to a Euro-Asian dating site where Ms. Mazid had posted a profile. Her parents had a deep-seated interest in American education, culture, and opportunities, and were seeking an American match for her. After several months of emails (and a gap of several weeks) Mr. Stillman traveled to Bangladesh to meet Amina and her parents. At the end of his visit, he proposed.

The wedding took place in Rochester soon after Amina’s arrival, as Amina’s visa required. Amina is saving up enough money to bring her parents over. She has two worries: George does not want her parents to live with them in his big house, but housing is expensive, especially for uneducated immigrants. And Amina and George have yet to get around to a religious wedding, though they have considered various Islamic sites in Rochester.

Amina comes to understand that in America most people do not live with their parents, so she takes a job in order to save enough for an apartment for her parents. Unfortunately, it’s a dead-end job in a dying mall store. Freudenberger has a good time exploring Amina’s ignorance of American culture – when she asks her husband “is there any other kind of Plan B? A kind you can buy at a store?” George of course assumes she is pregnant.

As Amina becomes more accustomed to her new culture and language, fissures become obvious. George’s cousin Kim, who has been kept out of the way by her mother, becomes friendly with Amina. Kim is a bit of a dark sheep, having spent a great deal of time in India and married an Indian man. She is surprisingly familiar with George, and his house. When one of George’s neighbors lets a few facts slip, Amina realizes that Kim and George’s relationship is not as innocent as she had once thought. Amina carries this knowledge with her when she goes back to Bangladesh to collect her parents, and it affects her judgment and her actions. Since her feckless father has become embroiled with some petty criminals, Amina and her parents must seek shelter with Nasir, the son of an old friend. Since Nasir had once hoped to marry Amina himself, and there are many complications.

Freudenberger structures her book neatly, with some nice parallels among the cross-cultural misunderstandings. She explores the impact of the economic meltdown both here and in Bangladesh, and the American characters are fully drawn. Understandably enough, the Deshi characters, except for Nasir, are less fully developed, though Freudenberger does a persuasive job of placing the reader in Dhaka and in Amina’s village. The cardinal that graces the cover of the book has a role too, but I couldn’t quite figure out what the other bird – a finch? – represents. Can you? If you have a theory, let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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