Why Would Chicago Have Cartoonists?

Chicago has a remarkable number of working cartoonists, maybe because it’s relatively inexpensive, or maybe because, as Ware more imaginatively suggested, “it’s halfway between New York City, where it’s about reading, and Los Angeles, where it’s about seeing.”

D. T. Max, "The Bleak Brilliance of Nick Drnaso's Graphic Novels," New Yorker (Jan. 21, 2019) (quoting Chris Ware)

The bulls of rush hour

Magically I was on the Hoboken ferry and then ashore, far downtown with the daily panic rush of commuters leaping and running and dodging in front, obeying no signals. Every evening is Pamplona in lower New York.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America  (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 276 (orig. published 1962)

Steinbeck glimpses a black man's different life

One winter dusk when the sidewalks were iced I stood in my window looking out and saw a tipsy woman come out of the bar, slip on the ice, and fall flat. She tried to struggle up but slipped and fell again and lay there screaming maudlinly. At that moment the Negro who worked for me came around the corner, saw the woman, and instantly  crossed the street, keeping as far from her as possible.

When he came in I said, "I saw you duck. Why didn't you give that woman a hand?"

"Well, sir, she's drunk, and I'm Negro. If I touched her she could easily scream rape, and then it's a crowd, and who believes me?"

"It took quick thinking to duck that fast."

"Oh, no sir!" he said. "I've been practicing to be a Negro a long time."

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America  (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 267 (orig. published 1962)

Geologic boosterism, New York

New York City's cosmopolitanism runs pretty deep, too, geologically speaking. We've been entertaining foreign visitors for better than half a billion years. Most notably the continent of Africa, which came over about three hundred million years ago, crashed into America, stuck around long enough to build the Alleghenies, and then headed back east. If you look at a geological map of New York, it looks a lot like a state map of ethnicity. The bedrock geology upstate is fairly white-bread uniform—big deposits of limestone from the time when New York was a shallow subtropical sea. But when you get down toward the lower Hudson and the Manhattan spur, the rock becomes incredibly heterogenous and folded and fragmented. You've got remnants of every kind of crap that's come crashing into the continent tectonically, plus other crap from various magmatic upwellings due to rifting, plus further crap that got pushed down by the glaciers. Downstate looks like a melting pot that needs a good stir. And why? Because New York truly always was very central. It sits at the far southeastern corner of the original North American shield, and at the very top of the Appalachian fold belt, and on the western margin of all the gnarly New England volcanic-island crappy-crap that got appended to the continent, and in a northwest corner of our ever-widening Atlantic Ocean. The fact that it's a conjunction of all these things helps explain why it ended up as the most open and inviting state in the whole seaboard, with its easy routes up to Canada and over to the Midwest. Because, literally, for hundreds of millions of years, New York is where the action's been.

Jonathan Franzen, "New York," in Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey eds., State by State: A Panaramic Portrait of America (2008) (in a fictional dialogue that includes, here, the New York State Geologist)

Jonathan Franzen ♥ Harriet the Spy

For me, the real introduction to New York was Harriet the Spy. . . a kid's book. The first time I ever fell in love with a character in literature, it was a girl from Manhattan. And I didn't just love her—I wanted to be her. Trade in my whole pleasant suburban life and move to the Upper East Side and be Harriet M. Welch, with her notebook and her flashlight and her hands-off parents.

Jonathan Franzen, "New York," in Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey eds., State by State: A Panaramic Portrait of America (2008)