mr.news no. 14: science fair
Hi Misters,
I’ve commuted a marathon a day this summer, taking the subway from a sublet in South Brooklyn to an internship in the South Bronx.
It took a while to get adjusted, but I’ve grown to love the relationship to time and space it affords me. Transit time is immutable. 75 minutes a morning and 75 minutes a night all accounted for, plus 10-odd minutes on either end depending on my luck, the weather, and the temperament of the southbound B. It’s time I can’t do much about and space my body can’t account for. Though I’m moving somewhere between 15 and 45 miles an hour for the duration of my journey, on the subway I feel still.
Early on it occurred to me that my commute felt a little like cryogenic freezing: you enter the big machine in one time and place, and get spat out in another. A little disoriented, a little closer to the future, a little confused about where the time went.
Like scientists measure the vitals of their frozen subjects, I thought it might be interesting to measure how I spend my frozen time. Every day I noted how many pages I read in transit, what train I was taking, and what direction I was moving while I read. If I read outside of my commute, I marked that time as “stationary.” I did this for two weeks.
I crunched the numbers. I read 776 pages on trains and 481 pages elsewhere. I read mostly on the 4 train, followed by the B train, and reliably read more pages when I was moving North than South. I read less in the morning—the rocking train makes me sleepy—and infrequently read at home.
What did this experiment teach me? Frankly, very little. But it was interesting, and it reminded me that I’m a little less stuck than I give myself credit for. Which isn’t so bad a finding, as far as experiments go.
This week in Misterworld, our contributors have their own findings to share. In Heads, Garry Nitz gets algebraic with a story about “EIGHT GIRLS, one BOY*, bottom of the emptied bleachers.” nat raum postulates that Baltimore is the Greatest City in America in their thoughtfully curated syllabus. And our fearless columnist Shaawan continues his ongoing experiment in what he calls ruthless embodiment, or the joys of divesting from the attention economy as we know it.
Dive in and study up. I hope you enjoy it all as much as we do!
Yours,
PJ Livingstone
WEEKLY READING
From Tima:
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Primary Series Ashtanga with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (do not try to follow along, just watch. It’s beautiful)
The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun
Argentina: The Land of the Vanishing Blacks by Era Bell Thompson EBONY Magazine October 1973
From PJ:
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg
On the Calculation of Volume Parts 1–4 by Solvej Balle
The Flick by Annie Baker
The Piano (1993)
