YMCA

My old friend Farai Chideya writes an evocative piece for the Washington Post about being black at Harvard in the late 1980s. This is the Harvard I remember - I especially remember the Drag Night performance in which Farai and roommates, as the Village People, disconcerted MCs who had imagined they were only going to need awards for solo performers (with strong bias towards M-to-F!).

Chairs, houses

Interesting bit by Mischa Glouberman at the Paris Review. It is about going to Harvard, and what it means if you are Canadian:

If you go to Harvard and then you live in New York, no matter what you do, the fact remains that you will have old college friends who are in the top positions in whatever field of endeavor you’re concerned with. If you’re twenty-five, you’ll know people who are getting their first pieces published in The New Yorker. If you’re forty, you’ll know people who are editors of The New Yorker. You will know people who are affiliated with every level of government. And across the board, just everywhere, you will know some people at the top of everything.

But in Canada, if you went to Harvard, it’s just a weird novelty, a strange fact about you, like that you’re a member of Mensa or you have an extra thumb. There’s no Harvard community here. There are equivalent upper-class communities to some degree, like maybe people who went to Upper Canada College prep school, but it’s not even remotely the same thing. I mean, partly there just aren’t the same heights to aspire to. There’s no equivalent to being the editor of The New Yorker in Canada, or being an American movie producer or anything like that. Partly, the advantages of class aren’t as unevenly distributed in general.

So while going to Harvard constitutes an invitation to join the American upper class, this invitation is pretty useless if you’re living in Canada. I often think about how I was given this invitation—this tremendously valuable thing—and I just kind of threw it away. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

That's an excerpt from the book The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work and Play in the City, by Misha in collaboration with Sheila Heti; they are doing an event this Thursday in Brooklyn at the powerHouse Arena that I am sure will be worth your while if you are local, and here are details on some other tour events.

Profiling

Darryl Pinckney has an interesting piece in the Independent on Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his arrest.

[ED. The article incorrectly suggests that the caller mentioned the race of the two men on the porch; here's a Globe story that describes the content of the 911 call more accurately and explains that the police report doesn't distinguish between the caller's words and the summary produced by the officer on the scene. Copious further comment via Google, and thanks to Brent for the correction.]

TK

Though I do not share his enthusiasm for shad, and though I am finding the magazine's new site registration policy (and the limits it puts on linking) somewhat irksome from a blog-related standpoint, I liked John McPhee's piece about magazine fact-checking in the latest issue of the New Yorker:

In a freight train a mile and a half long, there is a vital tube of air that runs the full length and controls the brakes. In "Coal Train" (2005), I felt a need for analogy and guessed at one:

The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train's very long integral air tube was like the air sac of an American eel.

Before long, the checking department was up to its chin in ichthyologists, and I was informed by Josh Hersh that the air sac of an American eel is proportionally a good deal shorter than the air sac in most ordinary fish.

"Who says so?"

"Willy Bemis."

"Oh."

Willy Bemis is to the anatomy of fishes what Eldridge Moores is to tectonics. Willy was the central figure in a book of mine that had been published three years before, parts of which appeared in The New Yorker. He had since left the University of Massachusetts to become director of Shoals Marine Laboratory, the offshore classrooms of Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire. I called him in Ithaca to ask what could be done. Ever accommodating, Willy at first tried to rationalize the eel. Maybe its air sac was up to the job after all. Maybe the analogy would work. I said the eel would never make it through the checking department, or, for that matter, past me. We were close to closing, and right offhand Willy was unable to think of a species with a long enough sac. What to do? What else? He called Harvard. The train's very long integral air tube was like the air sac of a rope fish.

Also: Rogue eel on the loose! (Via Nico.)