Where are the restaurants of yesteryear?

Feeling more like taking a walk than cooking, Jenn and I set out the other day for Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. We intended to stop at a favorite restaurant that we hadn’t visited for a while: the New Prospect Cafe. When we got there the place was dark. Maybe they were taking the day off? No: when we shaded our eyes and looked inside, the chairs were upended and there was a dead plant in a pot. The place was gone, and with it the friendly, casual service, and the blackened catfish that Jenn always ordered, and the bison burgers that I would get when the craving for meat overcame me. Jenn used to go there for coffee and a snack some afternoons. She would have the place almost to herself — not a good sign, in retrospect — and could read and write as long as she liked. When Bodegas and Liquors closed in our neighborhood (both oddly named restaurants launched by our friend Christian and his wife) and then Boca Sol, which opened across the street from Bodegas and for a while had the sweetest plantains and the crispiest codfish fritters, we went into denial at first. The place must be closed for renovation, we told ourselves, or to give the owners a much-needed rest. Denial was gradually replaced by guilt, and the thought that if we had just eaten there a few more times, and brought our friends there, then maybe... But for the New Prospect there was no denying that it was gone for good, and not much reason to feel guilty. The New Prospect was a bit out of the way for us, but at the end of a long walk in Prospect Park it was nice to know it was just a couple of blocks away. Just another casualty of the high rents, probably, and a recession that began with the new millennium and for most people has never really gone away.

The Water Engine

About thirty years ago, David Mamet wrote a play about a man who invents an engine that runs on water. (Dwight Schultz of The A-Team played the inventor on stage at the Public Theater, and William H. Macy played him for a cable production.) I haven't seen it, but I gather that things don't go well for the inventor and his invention when they run up against the forces of capitalism.

Now a researcher from Pennsylvania named John Kanzius has found a way to burn salt water by exposing it to radio waves of a certain frequency. (Kanzius had been investigating the use of radio waves to treat cancer.) It's not clear whether this method will ever produce more energy than it uses, but it's surprising and encouraging that seemingly simple discoveries like this are still being made. Let's keep our fingers crossed for the continuing health and safety of Mr. Kanzius.

Rails covered with lichens

During my latest journey through Thoreau's Journal, I was struck by this amazing sentence from January 27, 1852. It strikes an uncharacteristically melancholy note for Thoreau, it takes more notice of the inner life of Thoreau's neighbors than is usual for him, and at 436 words it must surely be the longest sentence in his collected works. (If any knows of a longer one, let me know!) I'm not aware of any critic who has taken notice of it.

As I stand under the hill beyond J. Hosmer’s and look over the plains westward toward Acton and see the farmhouses nearly half a mile apart, few and solitary, in these great fields between these stretching woods, out of the world, where the children have to go far to school; the still, stagnant, heart-eating, life-everlasting, and gone-to-seed country, so far from the post-office where the weekly paper comes, wherein the new-married wife cannot live for loneliness, and the young man has to depend upon his horse for society; see young J. Hosmer’s house, whither he returns with his wife in despair after living in the city, — I standing in Tarbell’s road, which he alone cannot break, — the world in winter for most walkers reduced to a sled track winding far through the drifts, all springs sealed up and no digressions; where the old man thinks he may possibly afford to rust it out, not having long to live, but the young man pines to get nearer the post-office and the Lyceum, is restless and resolves to go to California, because the depot is a mile off (he hears the rattle of the cars at a distance and thinks the world is going by and leaving him); where rabbits and partridges multiply, and muskrats are more numerous than ever, and none of the farmer’s sons are willing to be farmers, and the apple trees are decayed, and the cellar-holes are more numerous than the houses, and the rails are covered with lichens, and the old maids wish to sell out and move into the village, and have waited twenty years in vain for this purpose and never finished but one room in the house, never plastered nor painted, inside or out, lands which the Indian was long since dispossessed [of], and now the farms are run out, and what were forests are grain-fields, what were grain-fields, pastures; dwellings which only those Arnolds of the wilderness, those coureurs de bois, the baker and the butcher visit, to which at least the latter penetrates for the annual calf, — and as he returns the cow lows after, — whither the villager never penetrates, but in huckleberry time, perchance, and if he does not, who does? — where some men’s breaths smell of rum, having smuggled in a jugful to alleviate their misery and solitude; where the owls give a regular serenade; — I say, standing there and seeing these things, I cannot realize that this is that hopeful young America which is famous throughout the world for its activity and enterprise, and this is the most thickly settled and Yankee part of it.

A strong and beautiful bug

Years ago I learned to set type by hand and to print broadsides on the old Vandercook proof press at the Bow & Arrow Press in the basement of Harvard's Adams House. I printed several favorite quotations from Thoreau, including this one, from the end of Walden. My mother recently remembered it and asked me for the exact quotation. Though it refers to a "perfect summer life" it seems appropriate now, when we are seeing the first stirrings of spring.

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts -- from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb -- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board -- may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Jeffrey S. Cramer, in his annotated edition of Walden, traces this story to John Warner Barber's book Historical Collections, but doesn't attempt to identify the bug. Perhaps it was the golden buprestid beetle, whose "metallic green and burnished copper" certainly make it sound beautiful. (Photo is by Scott Tunnock of the USDA Forest Service.)

The Downside of Lasik

It always amazed me that so many people have been willing to take chances with their eyes. I figured I should wait a while -- maybe the rest of my life -- to find out what the long-term effects of laser surgery are before putting my vision at risk. This article in the Times makes me think I did the right thing:

On April 13, 2007, I had the surgery. Dr. Belmont’s colleague examined me the next day. My vision was a little blurry, but apparently that was normal. Dr. Belmont said that everything looked good on subsequent visits, too. But the blurriness never went away. At night, I saw halos around streetlights; neon signs bled; the moon had two rings around it like Saturn. My eyes felt sore, a result of dry eye, which also causes sporadic blurriness.... True, I no longer wear glasses. But the 20/20 line on the eye chart is blurry. I can make it out only if I squint, and it takes about a minute to read. My doctor views this as proof of the surgery’s success.

The Credit Card Trap

Following a lunch-table discussion at work, one of my colleagues pointed me to this article from the Columbia Journalism Review. It underlines the gap between much of the business press, which writes breathless articles about the exciting profits of the credit card companies, and (some of) the mainstream press, which recognizes that these profits come from fees, penalties, and high interest rates that were once illegal.

The twin myths of over-consumption and the immoral debtor, to use [Harvard law professor and bankruptcy expert] Elizabeth Warren’s phrases, have been debunked for years. Warren documents that the average American household today actually spends less than in the 1970s on clothing, food, and major appliances, and that, after paying for education, housing, insurance, and health care, it has less disposable income, even though the household now has two wage earners. Research shows, for instance, that nearly 30 percent of low and middle-income people with credit-card debt reported medical expenses to be a major contributor. And in a study cited by Warren, 87 percent of families with children filing for bankruptcy listed one of the “big three” reasons—divorce or separation, job loss, or medical expenses—as the cause.

Woodchucks

From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, October 10, 1858

"As I go along the Groton road, I see afar, in the middle of E. Wood’s field, what looks like a stone jug or post, but my glass reveals it is a woodchuck, a great, plump gray fellow, and when I am nearly half a mile off, I can still see him nibbling the grass there, and from time to time, when he hears perchance, a wagon on the road, sitting erect and looking warily around for approaching foes. I am glad to see the woodchuck so fat in the orchard. It proves that is the same nature that was of yore."

Woodchucks are an underappreciated creature, but my friend Lucy has a couple of pages (with quotations from Thoreau) dedicated to them, including a tribute to a gentle woodchuck who met his end too soon.