What are your thoughts on the eve of 9/11? The floor is open

Since March 11, 2002, the six-month anniversary of 9/11, presented jointly by New York's Municipal Art Society and Creative Time, MAS has annually presented the now-iconic Tribute in Light, which in the words of MAS President Vin Cipolla "has become an international symbol of remembrance and hope, honoring both the victims of the attacks and all those who worked tirelessly to help New York City through its greatest trial. It is a testament to the profound losses we suffered that day and to our city’s determination to persevere.” Now MAS is asking all of us to Help Guarantee the Future of Tribute in Light. (By the way, you can click on the photo to enlarge it.)

"While other comedians show us persons tormented by bad luck and enemies and so on, Bob and Ray's characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. There is a refreshing and beautiful innocence in Bob's and Ray's humor.

"Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive.

"And this I believe."

-- from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Foreword to
Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray

"There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."

-- from the first chapter of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

by Ken

Is there anyone who hasn't thought so much about 9/11 over these ten years that there's hardly anything left to think?

Maybe that's why every path in my brain right now is leading me back to this lovely insight of Kurt Vonnegut's, which I shared last month ("Bob and Ray Tonight: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. remembers being interviewed for a job by the fellows"). And since Vonnegut surely knew way more than he wished about evil, I'm led to that line from Slaughterhouse-Five, that Vonneguttishly phantasmagoric novel set against the backdrop of the World War II fire-bombing of Dresden, a book I haven't read in a bunch of decades and undoubtedly need to read again.

I don't know that I would have planned any "activities" for the 9/11 anniversary. Luckily, the Municipal Art Society did my thinking for me, scheduling a rare members-only "walk around the World Trade Center site, "The World Trade Center: 10 Years Later." I know it's sold out, and guess it sold out pretty quickly. (As you know, when the new MAS tour schedule comes out, I stop everything and do my registrations for the tours that require reservations and squeeze the ones that don't into my schedule.) I love the plan:

We will survey the progress of the rebuilding, recount the history of the World Trade Center and of its neighborhood, and contemplate the future. The tour will not enter the site itself, which will be in the middle of intense preparations for the ceremonies of the following day, but we will be able to look down upon the site from a nearby vantage point. We will conclude the tour with a visit to a nearby rooftop for a discussion of the MAS Tribute in Light, which will be in the process of being readied for the following night.

And who better to lead the tour than architectural historian Francis Morrone, with whom -- in theless than a year since I joined MAS -- I've done more walking tours than I can remember, in three of the city's five boroughs, each of which left a powerful imprint on the way I see the world, a different kind of imprint in almost all cases. (For last weekend's "Dawn Powell and the Greenwich Village of Her Time," for example, never having read a word of Dawn Powell, I began reading the 1954 novel The Wicked Pavilion, which I've nearly finished -- and I've ordered the two Library of America volumes containing nine of her "bitterly satiric"novels and also the published Diaries of Dawn Powell, which Francis insists should be read "by everybody," for their bold and frank insight into, well, the complicated and messy process of everyday life. From the tour itself I got, as I expected, a particular and vivid connection to the geography and history of the Village.) Between Francis and the people who've registered for this evening's tour, I can't imagine better company for this grim 10th-anniversary lookback.

At some point, as I'm sure Kurt Vonnegut understood as well as anybody, that line between stupidity and evil gets blurred, as it did with Osama bin Laden and his followers (oh, they got themselves plenty of attention, but did they really imagine they were going to do their cause, whatever it was, any good? unless their goal was to cause disarray in the U.S. that would help send us down a path of self-destruction), and as it did with the apostles of American moronitude who used it as a tool for slathering their poisonous, delusional view of reality across a country that deserved better. But I don't know that there's anything new to say about any of that, anything that Howie and Noah and I and our large contingent of guest posters and of course commenters haven't been saying here for years.

What I'm thinking now, perhaps inspired by the lively discussion I was delighted to see sprout from my post last night, "Is anyone listening to President Obama anymore? (How about President Obama?)," I'm wondering what readers are thinking on this doleful occasion. The floor is open.


URBAN GADABOUT REMINDER: JAMES RENNER'S SERIES
OF NORTHERN MANHATTAN WALKS STARTS TOMORROW

For six Sundays at noon, starting tomorrow and running through October 16, the official historian of Manhattan Community District 12 is offering walking tours of selected locations in "WAHI," the Northern Manhattan neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood, plus little Marble Hill, which on maps looks like it should be part of the Bronx but is actually part of Manhattan. (I listed the subjects of the individual tours in my last post on the subject.)

Sunday, September 11, 2011, 12:00 noon
JUMEL TERRACE HISTORIC DISTRICT & SUGAR HILL

JUMEL TERRACE HISTORIC DISTRICT & SUGAR HILL are noted for the Morris-Jumel Mansion, Sylvan Terrace and the moes of famous African American entertainers Paul Robeson, Count Basie and Duke Ellington at 555 Edgecombe Avenue. The area is home to a local bookstore and the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library. Nearby Coogan's Bluff is where baseball fans watched the New York Giants play at the Polo Grounds at 155th Street.

There is an admission fee to the Morris-Jumel Mansion; $5 for adults, $4 for seniors and students.

DATE: Sunday, September 11, 2011
TIME: 12:00 noon
MEET: 160th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in front of the Library

I've been grappling with scheduling conflicts for a number of the six WAHI tours (which are $15, $10 for seniors and students) but have managed to keep tomorrow clear for this one, which syncs wondefully with the free "Highbridge Park Hike" -- essentially along the upper edge of Coogan's Bluff -- I did in July with expert urban geologist Sidney Horenstein. We started that walk at the lower edge of the park (and the bluff), on 155th Street opposite the northern edge of the famous northern Harlem enclave of Sugar Hill.

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