{"id":932,"date":"2016-05-07T01:07:36","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T05:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/?p=932"},"modified":"2016-05-07T01:07:36","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T05:07:36","slug":"and-what-if-the-subway-turns-out-to-be-so-public-conveyance-not-really-worthy-of-our-mental-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/2016\/05\/07\/and-what-if-the-subway-turns-out-to-be-so-public-conveyance-not-really-worthy-of-our-mental-space\/","title":{"rendered":"And What If The Subway Turns Out To Be So Public Conveyance Not Really Worthy Of Our Mental Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

There's this collection of essays called The Subway Chronicles<\/em> which includes writings by some relatively notable people and then some up-and-coming writers, or at least writers who were maybe up-and-coming around 2006, which is ten years ago now.<\/p>\n

So the thing about the subway is while it's crazy and cool and moves a lot of people places and used to have really amazing graffiti and is one of the biggest systems in the world, it's maybe not at that interesting, in and of itself. At least, that's what you kind of walk away with after reading Chronicles.<\/p>\n

By which I mean that all the crazy stories are not all that crazy, and the first-person accounts of various subway shenanigans are, well, kind of not that wild, and then you sort of question what the point is at all.<\/p>\n

The funny thing is that for all the navel gazing and nostalgia erupting, there are one or two pieces that really get at what is actually interesting about the subway: David Ebershoff's "Lunch Time" is one of the very, very few pieces that go outside the rider\/writer's mind to do original research — versus ruminate about "what it all means." The result is funny, if not completely satisfying: he corners some subway cleaners and learns about what it's actually like to clean the subway: in other words, not speculating about people, humanity or whatnot.<\/p>\n

A word about 2006: it seems people around then found license to talk about themselves in an outsized, universal way. And for whatever reason, people (also, publishers) listened. This is crazy. There's nothing special about people when they're first to do it. If there's a slogan for today it should be "blog softly and don't perseverate about getting clicks." Then type whatever it is you want to say . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There's this collection of essays called The Subway Chronicles which includes writings by some relatively notable people and then some up-and-coming writers, or at least writers who were maybe up-and-coming around 2006, which is ten years ago now. So the thing about the subway is while it's crazy and cool and moves a lot of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[266],"class_list":["post-932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-are-the-suvs-of-writing","tag-book-club"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/slightest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}