Sic transit Brooklyn

We’re expecting guests in the studio next week when BookExpo America is in town and so the last few days I’ve been cleaning. Well, “cleaning” suggests cleanliness, and that’s going too far, but improvement is nevertheless afoot. As part of the process, old piles, old files, old piles of files are being examined. Above is a drawing I came across today (click to enlarge), a location drawing of a junk-strewn vacant lot in Williamsburg, down by the East River. This was done in maybe 2004. Now, in 2013, every Saturday, this site is host to the Smorgasburg outdoor food market. (Here.) Now on this site, you can visit dozens of vendors and then on open green fields with a view of the water and the Manhattan skyline you can sit with your friends and enjoy a foie-gras beignet with Nutella powder, or Tunisian pumpkin stew, or a micro-batch of Kurdish labneh flavored with brined garlic shoots, or what have you. But the price of progress: if you’ve got an old GMC or an International 4700 hood you’re looking to dump, you’re straight out of luck.

Parade of Trains

In conjunction with National Train Day (see last post) the Grand Centennial Parade of Trains is on at Grand Central Terminal this weekend, May 11-12. Details here. 

I swung by today. I hadn’t expected vendors selling historic railroading items, but there they were. I bought more than I meant to but less than I might have. (I mentioned idly to one vendor’s wife that I wasn’t buying an antique brakeman’s lantern — reasonably priced! — because I knew in my heart that I had no real use for it. She assured me that her husband had gotten good service from the old lanterns during Hurricane Sandy. With oil and a good wick, the things still work! Well, why wouldn’t they? Still, I stayed strong.) 

Then it was on to the modelers, where I spent some time drawing the terrific N-scale setup shown above. I got to speak with Charlie Sanborn, who along with his partner in very small trains Walt Palmer constructed the scene, an imagined town and valley inspired by the landscape around New York’s Shawangunk Ridge. They drove the model in from upstate in the bed of Walt’s pickup truck; this made easier than it might sound because the model was precision designed to fit the truck bed. Like a great, busy, Richard Scarry spread, the model invites the eye to wander, rewards with interesting details, and suggests narratives. There’s a lonely hilltop house, a farm, cows, a city, a bridge, tunnels, hairpin turns, even a bit of graffiti on the cliff face (“Class of ’49”), a whole little world. If you’re near Grand Central tomorrow between 10 AM and 4 PM, it’s worth slogging through the crowds (the considerable crowds) to get a look!

Click the images for larger versions.

May 11!

Today, May 11, is National Train Day. (Truly. Amtrak and Wikipedia say so, here and here.) Here’s one train rider’s memory of a formative cross-country trip:

“I was fourteen when my parents returned from one of their trips out West to say that they had found a home in California and we would be moving to the town of Santa Barbara. The train ride from Pittsburg to California took us across country for nine days. The train was taking us from our past, through the vehicle of the present, to our future. The tracks in front of me, hugged the land, and became a living part of my memory. Parallel lines whose meaning was inexhaustible, whose purpose was infinite. This was, for me, the beginning of my ballet Frontier.”

That’s Martha Graham, from her autobiography Blood Memory. Today, May 11, is also Martha Graham’s birthday. Everything connects!

Martha Graham’s birthday is also remembered today on Anita Silvey’s Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac site, here, where there is more posted about Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan. Thank you, Anita!

Happy May 11 to you, no matter how you celebrate it.

Above: a detail from Locomotive, coming in September.

"Done!"

May 10! It was on May 10 in 1869, 144 years ago today, that the first transcontinental railroad was completed. A trip from the East Coast to California, a trip that a few years earlier might have taken up to six dangerous months to make, now took a week. I crib from the author’s note from Locomotive (coming in September):

Imagine the change! At the beginning of the nineteenth century, you could move over land only as quickly as you could walk, or as quickly as an animal could carry or pull you—that fast, and no faster. That had been true for a hundred years, for a thousand years, for as far back as you could imagine.

Then came the steam locomotive. “Time & space,” said Asa Whitney, an early prophet of the transcontinental railroad, “are annihilated by steam.” 

The first steam locomotive in the United States, the Stourbridge Lion, arrived from England in 1829. America’s first regular passenger service came in 1831. By the 1840s serious discussion of a transcontinental line was underway. A road reaching from the growing network of rail in the East all the way to the Pacific would bind California to the rest of the nation, aid in settling the Great Plains, and provide a lucrative route for trade between Europe and Asia. In the wake of the Civil War, the Pacific railway became “the great work of the age.” When the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad Companies completed the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit on May 10, 1869, the news flashed via telegraph from one side of the the country to the other: “Done!” From across the nation came the response: cheers, speeches, fireworks, parades, cannon blasts, prayer. Other transcontinental lines followed; by 1893 five crossed the country. 

Locomotive is much more about a trip on the line than the line’s construction, but the endpapers and author’s note try to lay the foundation for that ride by introducing how and why the line was built. The drawing above will appear on the front endpapers; it’s a take on the famous A. J. Russell photo (here) of the Union Pacific’s Grenville Dodge and the Central Pacific’s Samuel Montague shaking hands after the driving of the symbolic golden spike. As a general rule I try not to have a drawing be based too closely on a familiar image, but with this picture I hoped that something (maybe) recognizable at the book’s beginning would serve as a point of connection for readers, something to help tie the book’s story to what they have and will see elsewhere about the subject. And, you know, also I really like the picture.

San Antonio on Sunday: Signing

A not minor (to me) detail that I forgot to include in my IRA post yesterday: I’ll be signing books at Texas bookseller Pat Anderson’s Overlooked Books booth (booth number 2519) on Sunday, from noon to 2:00. Come by and say hello!

San Antonio on Sunday

I head to San Antonio, Texas tomorrow to appear on a Sunday panel at the International Reading Association’s 58th Annual Convention: “But Kids Haven’t Heard of That!”: Why Teaching Unconventional Nonfiction Is Important.

The panel was put together by Marc Tyler Nobleman and will also include Chris Barton, Shana Corey, and Meghan McCarthy. We’ll each say a bit about our work—I’m looking forward to talking a little Moonshot and Ballet for Martha, plus I’ll be packing F&Gs for Locomotive and will look forward to showing some of the process and research behind that book—and then our moderator, professor of children’s books and reading and language arts Susannah Richards, who isn’t really any more moderate than any of the rest of us, will get the questions and conversation going. 

I’m happy to be on a panel with this great group and looking forward to everyone’s presentations. Thanks, Marc, for getting this organized. The panel will run from 3:00 to 5:45 in room 006D of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. If you’re going to be at IRA, I hope you’ll come by! Details are in the IRA schedule online, here. (That link should take you directly to page 236 of the schedule, in PDF form. Page 236 is where the action is.)

Edit: And! I’ll be signing books at Texas bookseller Pat Anderson’s Overlooked Books booth (booth number 2519) on Sunday, from noon to 2:00.

Thanks, Baltimore

My thanks to the Baltimore School of the Arts and to Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library for the chance to be a part of the BSA’s Appalachian Spring Festival this past weekend, and the chance to speak at two branches of the Pratt as a part of Baltimore’s 10th Annual CityLit Festival. 

Two great events, but the BSA Festival in particular is one that I will remember for a long time. (No offense to the Pratt intended!) Ballet for Martha may have gotten the school started thinking about Appalachian Spring — an exciting thought for me — but when the students of BSA put their own Appalachian Spring on the stage I felt lucky just to be in the room. First there was the set, recreated by the students from Noguchi’s designs. Then there was a prologue to the dance, excerpts from letters and other writings by Graham, Copland, and Noguchi, stitched together and acted out by students. (That was a bit of work that I worried might fall flat, or worse, I confess to thinking, but it was well done and effective; it helped to put the work in context, suggested the outlines of its creation, and even touched on the question of why a diverse cast of young dancers today might and might not find the piece relevant.) Then from left of the stage came the opening to Copland’s score, and it was remarkable to look over and see such young performers working away on their instruments to such good effect. The music swelled, the young dancers came out, and they did their thing and they did Martha Graham’s thing — not a Lite version of it, either, but fully felt and fully enacted. You could feel the emotions in the house building as the dancers and musicians took us all the way through the piece, and the standing ovation, from a capacity crowd, was as fully and happily delivered as you can imagine. I also had the chance to meet a few of the talented students in the art program and to take a stab at critiquing their work, and that was a pleasure, too. A remarkable school, a remarkable Friday and Saturday for me. 

And then on Sunday, after speaking at the Pratt’s Central Library, I headed off to visit friends in the area and succumbed either to food poisoning or a stomach bug or something and spent the next twenty hours sleeping, rising only to be fed small portions of rice, toast, broth, and JELL-O. And then I was over it and caught the train to New York, feeling a bit Lazarus-like the whole ride back. Well, there are ups and downs even to the best weekends. 

Thank you to everyone at the BSA and the Enoch Pratt Free Library for making me feel welcome! And thank you, D and N, for the guest room and the rice.

Earlier posts on the festival are here and here.