New York City Subway 30 Day Metrocard Notebook

The MTA offers customers a 30-day
MetroCard; but, is it worth it?

Note to myself: Is my 30-day New York City Transit unlimited MetroCard worth it?

$104 Metrocard

Cost Per ride (with 7% discount): $2.09

Total Number of Rides: 64

List of rides with random notes made on a 30 day unlimited card purchased at the BMT 45th Street Station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn January 19, 2013. 

Subway List Graffito

1. $2.25
2. $2.25
3. $2.25
4. $2.25
5. $2.25
6. $2.25
7. $2.25
8. Tuesday aftn 01/22/2013 $2.25
8. $2.25 Wedy morning 01/23/2013
9. $2.25
10. $2.25
11. $2.25
Thursday afternoon after class.
12. $2.25 Friday night
13. $2.25
14. $2.25
15. $2.25 Saturday afternoon
16. $2.25 Saturday night
17. $2.25 Monday morning
18. $2.25 herald square Monday even
19. $2.25 Jay Street/Metro  Tuesday
20. $2.25 Tuesday afternoon jay
21. $2.25 Tuesday whitehall
22. $2.25 Wednesday morning (smoke on the track) 01/30/2013
23. $2.25 Wednesday night to 42nd
24. $2.25 Wednesday night home
25. $2.25 home
26. $2.25 Thursday morning
27. $2.25 Thursday evening jay
28. $2.25 Friday afternoon 45th street
29. $2.25 Friday at 33rd st.
30 $2.25 L train
31. $2.25 l train to the q then n
32. B63 bus
33. r train at bay ridge
34. Sunday afternoon 45 street
35. b63/Atlantic avenue Pacific street
36. 49th street night
37. 45 street R/N express
38. 42nd street times square
39. 45 street R local
40. Court Street R local
41. 45 street R Local evening
42. G at Bedford/nostrand
43. G at Nassau (church ave bound)
44. Atlantic/Pacific (I walked from the Fulton G station).
45. 36th street D express Thursday night
46. Union Square n/r Thursday night
47. 45 Street Friday afternoon
48. M1 fifth avenue
49. 47/50 Rockefeller center
50. 45 street Saturday afternoon
51. Astor Place Saturday afternoon
52. Grand Street Saturday afternoon
53. 36 street D train
54. E/M 53 street/6 51 street
55. 8th street NYU
56. 45 street
57. Q union square
58. 45 street ash wednesday
59. 42 street with melanie and Troy
60. Broadway/Lafayette Ave. D train night. I watched Lore tonight. I had butterfly shrimp with Melanie and Troy. I have $1.16 in my bank account.
61. 45 street waiting for Manhattan bound R train. Picked up money order at Western Union. Got a call back from a job. Transfer to the M3 bus

62. 14th Street Union Squre: Commute home

63. I gave my metrocard to a friend to use. I think she took the L train to Williamsburg and 64. came back home on the G (then a transfer to the R).

Metrocard expired.

Baby, it's worth it!

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On the Experience of Reading Novels

What is the experience of reading a novel? 
The experience of reading novels is a solitary one. While it is common to hear authors read from their newly published books at signings or to listen to a novel on tape, these are subsidiary experiences of the novel that I relegate to the category of performance rather than reading. Orality is to the epic what solitude is to the novel. The Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were not meant to be read silently to oneself but were told out loud and spun by a storyteller as part of an oral musical performance. Prose fiction did not begin with the novel; Satyricon was written centuries before Moll Flanders. Scholars debate as to what constitutes the first novel — is it Cervantes’s Don Quixote, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or is it Richardson’s Pamela, or DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe? — I think the answer to this question lies in the shift between reading publicly versus reading as an internalized experience. The epics were meant as univocal expressions of storytelling governed by the principle of archetype and standard mythological rendering. Often the plot was well known by the hearers.
Reading Novels is Not Exactly the Same as Going to a Play 
Ancient Greek theatergoers who attended Sophocles’ production of Oedipus Rex were well aware of the plot. And this is true even for Shakespeare. Midsummer Night’s Dream, while certainly not lost in an individual reading, the dramatic form, like the epic, is meant to be performed, not read. The point of storytelling has been for centuries a ritualized experience and not at all adumbrated by individuality or an experience with everyday particularities. To read a novel once is an individual experience and to read the same novel twice is yet another distinct reading. Even movies, another modern discovery, are more akin to public storytelling than what happens when I read a novel. Reading as an individualized personal experience is a modern discovery. Augustine, for example, was shocked to discover Ambrose reading to himself. In the West, reading has been considered mostly a public act. Those who owned books were either the clergy or the very wealthy. Books were proclaimed rather than read. The correlation between introspective thought and reading troubled Augustine because he did not equate reading with individuality. What we consider the modern novel is instantiated by introspection and was only made possible broadly by the invention of the printing press which made books cheaper and more easily accessible to the masses.
Novels Deliver the Particulars of the Everyday
Novels are heavily entrenched in the particulars of everyday life, such as bathing, doing the laundry, eating a sour grape off the vine, making love on an unmade bed, reflections on the banal and the mundane, and so on. The novel lingers in the details of everyday lived experience. The novel is a repudiation of the epic form’s dependence on universals. Once we are inside a novel we are wrapped up in a world of particulars. Like Pip, in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, who traces his fingers over the particular raised letters of his dead parents' names inscribed on their tombstone, to conjure an image of what they must have been like, either stout or tall, fat or grim, we do the same when we read a novel, trace our fingers over the individual characters, in their instantaneous contingencies in order to trace out a life, to search out a proper name for universal life, to match both life and literature.

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