Bring the Noise

Tuesday night I went to McNally Jackson Books down on Prince Street to hear the author Julia Glass read from her latest novel, I See You Everywhere, and discuss it with her editor, Deb Garrison. This was part of McNally's Author/Editor series; I've been to several of these, and this was one of the best. There was a good balance of reading and questions, and Julia was incredibly articulate in speaking about the book and her work in general (her other books include Three Junes and The Whole World Over, my personal favorite). 

Two direct quotes:

"All serious fiction is emotionally autobiographical."

"There are always mysteries and things we will never know [about the people we are closest to]...You cannot know everything about the people you love the most."

This last reminded me of a line from Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven: "It occurs to her that this one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are."

The opportunity to hear from authors and editors in person like this is one of the things I love about New York. One of the things I do NOT love about New York, and which has been getting on my nerves more than usual of late, is the noise: the incessant, at times unbearable, constant noise. The noise of a few million people and their various forms of transportation - cars, cabs, buses, subways, airplanes - plus construction noise, dogs barking, even roosters. (I kid you not, up until about two months ago there was a rooster outside my window, and he crowed all the time. Not once or twice at daybreak - ALL. THE. TIME. I haven't heard him for a couple of months, so maybe they killed and ate him. Now, there's a dog who barks and howls alternately, and a man who screams unintelligibly. Really - it's not English or Spanish, and I'm pretty sure it's not any other language either. Maybe all the noise drove him crazy, but still - it almost makes me miss the rooster.)

Case in point: Monday night I was at a yoga class. The windows were open, so we could hear cars going by and snippets of people's conversations. Fine. Then, at the end of class when it was time for sabasana (a.k.a. corpse pose, a.k.a lying on one's back on the floor, a.k.a. the part I most look forward to), about three fire trucks and an ambulance (I couldn't see, I'm just judging from the noise) pulled up directly outside the window, sirens blaring, and remained there for about ten minutes. Sirens the whole time. Okay: I see the need to have the sirens going on the way from Point A to Point B, but parked on the street? Why? 

I was able to let it go. No point lying on the floor being pissed off for ten minutes when I could, as BNL says, "enjoy the humor of the situation." If I could also let go of my low-level paranoia, I'd start wearing my noise-canceling headphones around, and travel in a happy little bubble of silence (or music), but thanks to evolution, I still rely on my hearing to warn me if I'm being snuck up on, or about to be run over by a cyclist or some such. 

Anyway, complaining about sirens - even exceptionally loud sirens - seems kind of insensitive when one considers that it's the soundtrack that accompanies the saving of lives, or the rescuing of kittens from trees, or whatnot. The sirens, at least, have a purpose. I feel no compunction at all, however, about cursing those drivers who use their horns simply out of impatience. It drives me up the wall. Look: I'm an impatient person. This is not a secret. But I firmly believe that horns are to be used ONLY IN CASES OF IMMINENT DANGER OF COLLISION. Not "imminent" as Bush defined it, either, like, maybe this might happen someday, if the stars align and Mars is in retrograde - imminent as in, OH MY GOD IF YOU DON'T MOVE RIGHT THIS SECOND SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE. Or be grievously injured. Honking because the driver of the car in front of you failed to go from zero to sixty the second the light turned green is NOT OKAY.

Are you listening, New York?

That's the sound of me taking three deep breaths.

What I'm reading: The Annotated Alice (surely the Mad Tea Party is one of the best chapters in all of literature)

What I'm listening to: Say I Am You by the Weepies, Worse for the Wear by the New Amsterdams