"New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed. Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm of tired, magpie girls  from a department-store crowded along with shrieks of strident laughter...The numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway -- the  car cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab your arm with another story; the querulous worry as to whether someone isn't leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of food men ate -- at best just people -- too hot or too cold, tired, worried....It was not so bad where there were only men or only women; it was when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten. It was some shame that women gave off at having men see them tired and poor....it was an atmosphere where birth and marriage and death were loathsome,  secret things."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

And well this side. I came upon this passage, as it happens, stuck on either an A or an F train. (There's a reason I'm uncertain -- I never figured out the existential question, What is it when, as the subway announcers declaim, "the F train is now running on the A track"? Can it then be anything other than an A train?) The faces around me were -- typically -- anxious and forbidding, harried and resigned. "Querulous worry" is about right, overall. Locals responded to "Our Town," the more-or-less Chicago import that brought us to the Apple, in a distinctive way: they wept, copiously, sometimes loudly. Day-to-day living here calls for an armor that's not quite natural to evolved beings. Whether you're driving or walking, catching a train or shopping for food, there is a tide at your back and on your sides to be negotiated, and if you execute an unpredictable turn, or pause in your tracks, a dust-up may occur.

We weren't here two months, my kids and I, before observing (in the order in which we saw them): a bloody fistfight (again, in the subway); an auto accident; a drug arrest; and a man sitting against a park fence waving his penis in the air, urinating. We weren't here seven hours before we heard a volley of "fucking" this and that from a guy on a streetcorner, chatting breezily with a friend. With or without money (Fitzgerald's trademark bugbear), I don't see how your heart could fail to pound a little brighter amid this febrile pandemonium.

My oldest son, after visiting us in New York, holds with the eloquently dim appraisal quoted above. Among other things, he decries: the rats (whose population famously outnumbers human New Yorkers), the lousy subway service, and relations between strangers, which he finds brusque and standoffish except when one party stands to make money off the other. On the first point I share his distaste, especially for the particular rat that dashed into our kitchen last week as I stood in socks at the sink. The very erratic performance of the F train, as observed between January and August 2009, substantiates point #2. On the civility of average New Yorkers, though, I differ. Parents at our kids' schools were welcoming and sociable, easy to set up play dates with. Plenty of old ladies on our block in Brooklyn (Windsor Terrace, a realtor's coinage for a small area on the southwest edge of the fabulous Prospect Park) have been happy to use a nodded "hello" in passing as an invitation to ramble awhile, in Wilderesque small-town cadences, about the heat and the rain.

Parts of Brooklyn do offer sub-cosmopolitan graces. Our block is quiet and safe, or safe enough. Every time I've rented a car and returned home with it, whatever the hour, I have found a parking space virtually at my front step. In fact I quickly regretted leaving my car in Chicago, having been sure the concept of car ownership in NYC was unsupportable. You can live in Brooklyn these days without being transient, rich, insensate or homeless. Gone are the days when the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan was, as Norman Podhoretz called it, the world's longest. (To be sure, the trip can still be damnably long, as I found in carting my nine-year-old to violin lessons on the Upper West Side every Sunday, one-and-three-quarter hours each way.) The literate, middle-class, upwardly mobile Brooklynite of today luxuriates in Manhattan-grade amenities -- the cultural complex of theater and cinema and dance called BAM, the almost incredible Fairway market in Red Hook, the hundreds of first-rate restaurants and creatively laid-out boutiques of Park Slope and Cobble Hill -- without needing to cross the river. 

We met quite a few brainy Kultur quaffers in Brooklyn, parents of our kids' friends mostly. Some of them lived in spaces one-quarter the size of my modest suburban house back home in Chicago, with live-in babysitters and incomes that must have been safely in the six digits. I sometimes wondered whether any of them could have swung the $35,000-a-year per-pupil NYC elite private-school pricetag, and were choosing instead to lend their support to the public school system. If so, my hat is off to them. I really think Bloomberg should honor any middle-class citizens loyal enough to the city to extend their residency past their firstborn child's fifth birthday with a private ceremony and a medal, or decorative hatpin. The public school system, it seems to this spoiled suburbanite, requires a lot of toleration. Our boys were enrolled in two of Brooklyn's best-scoring and well-regarded PS's, where they fell in with a couple saintly teachers. But beyond this small bright meadow lay a tangled thicket of unionized senescence -- burnouts, clock-punchers, unintelligible talkers, and one notable curmudgeon who dosed her class daily with anti-Obama bile. (A little propagandizing is no big deal, but someone whose self-discipline is cracked enough to vent politics regularly at an audience of schoolchildren needs retiring.) More serious than subpar teachers and administrators were systemic weaknesses. Absent broad Internet access or emphasis, teacher-parent communication was spotty, and simple information -- half-day and holiday schedules, who was room parent -- took initiative to obtain. The buildings themselves were bleak spaces with dark and airless interiors; and the verbal tone that prevailed on the playground and in the hallway was...streetcorner-like.

"You think it's bad when they tell each other to fuck themselves? How about when they tell me?" The gentleman was a high school music teacher from Queens, sitting at the bar where I was going to play. He was good-humored, impassive, and half in the bag at 6:30.

"How in the world do you deal with that?" I asked.

He shrugged. "You don't. You're not there to teach and they're not there to learn. You're there to keep trouble from breaking out. I mean, there are some kids at the margins you try to reach, to give something valuable to if you can, if they're accessible. But mostly they're not. I try this and that. I'll use Charlie Parker music to illustrate a scale or a principle, instead of, like, Bach. Doesn't matter. They couldn't care less about Charlie Fucking Parker. No teaching, no learning, and no support, anywhere. The system is broken. It won't last another 10 years. But...I retire in 3." He set his glass down softly. "That's all I have to do, is make it 3 more years. After that, the fireworks."

Shortly after I had arrived in New York, there were indications that made me think that the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn were unusually keen on hillbilly. A couple country singers had got in touch with me, inviting me to sit in or share a bill with them. One I responded to and later played with did Merle Haggard songs in something of the jazz-chaos style of John Zorn. There seemed to be honky-tonks and country kitchens in every neighborhood. And my club audiences demonstrated, at times, an almost prisoner-like appreciation for ballads about home and mother and God. This was in stark contrast to Chicago, where we have, as far as I know, about twenty country musicians. I had to remind myself -- Hey dummy, New York has a lot of everything -- somewhere out of my vision there are 500,000 cricketers from the West Indies, if Joseph O'Neill's Netherland can be trusted. My irrational yet not-ungrounded generalization about country music in NYC made me wonder whether living among such a dense population, allowing you as it does to choose your social associates with precision, also allows for a too-complete absorption into specialty, leading to a loss of realistic perspective on what the outsider majority values.

Hey, that's why you come here in the first place, to be among your own bizarro kind. And to be honest, as much cordial contempt as I harbor for scenesters, latte anarchists, and people whose aesthetics line up spookily with the New Yorker's, it's goddamned fantastic to live among so many artists and art lovers. Since February I've had drinks with a Pulitzer-nominated playwright and dinner with a jazz legend, collaborated musically with one of my favorite musicians on earth, hobnobbed with renowned creators of all types and many more soon-to-be-renowned...and I say this not to brag (though if you're impressed, I humbly accept) but to make the point that, when it comes to basking in the secondary light thrown off of fellow spelunkers in the caves of creation, six months in New York is like six years in any other American city. Most of the above worthies I got to hang with simply because they had stopped by the Barbes while I was playing there. You can play at a corner bar in Houston your whole life and not meet a single Pulitzer-nominated playwright.

How much advantage and edge this ferment gives New Yorkers is an interesting question. (I mean creative edge and creative ferment; there's no doubt about the professional advantages of living in the industrial center.) My strong impression from my residency, based on experience as well as common sense, is that the average bright person here is brighter, the average musician more highly skilled, and that both are more numerous. Twelve-year-olds I met through my son conversed idly with me about Brezhnev-era Soviet politics, vegetarianism, Fellini, and exhibits at the National Museum of History in Washington. Musicians had a similarly daunting range -- Haggard to Zorn, Bill Monroe to Bela Bartok. As I implied in my blogged reaction to Chris Thile (himself now a New Yorker, as I understand), listening to some of these people play was like snorting methamphetamines.

What's the downside, if any, of life in the cognitive fast-lane? A numbed beguilement with glittering abstractions, an inability to carve out some quiet mental demesne away from the herd, an infatuation with momentum itself? Out in the sticks you can be nourished from birth on local-grown music that you swallow without thinking twice about it. But in the big city, hindrance and heredity are tantamount to bad manners; here it's about choosing and sorting, trying on and trying out, buying and becoming. Something so simple as a song can be, like anything else, a commodity. You may examine it soberly at arm's length, toy with and bend and rejigger it, even if your feeling for it amounts to sincere love or fascination. The revamped result might be exciting and innovative, or dessicated and undanceable. The odd upshot is that big-city music can be as herd-influenced as the music of the traditionalist who never thinks to challenge his starting point. 

Fashion and reputation and the allure of sexy ideas obviously weigh more here than elsewhere. For that reason I don't see how a place like New York could produce, or at least suit, a Tolstoy or an Einstein, or, a little lower on the ladder, a Hemingway or Harry Partch: the sort of mind that changes our understanding of our situation by working, in seclusion, at the highest level it can manage and with complete disregard for settled opinion. Well, Richard Feynmann and Harry Smith are local boys, so it does happen -- I just don't see how. Could be I'm too old for this place. I appreciated it more as a twenty-year-old, when food delivered at any hour was a higher priority, and when, possibly, the parts of life unrelated to culture mattered less. "The suburbs is no place to raise a kid," asserted my friend P., a lifelong NY-er, as we munched on pierogies the other day on the lower east side. We were talking about his family's cramped conditions in Stuytown, and I was leaning on him to consider relocating to the provinces. He looked at me curiously. "Wait, you live in the suburbs. So, what's it like? Do your kids lock themselves in their room and play Guitar Hero while you open a beer and sit out on your patio and look at the stars?" 

"Something like that," I said, and let it drop. Everybody thinks where he's from is the best, right? Also P.'s kids go to a swanky private school, so that particular gripe is off his list. I guess my kids, who are into their schools and bikes and backyard, are the main reason I can't totally heart New York. In 2018, when the last one's packed off to college, maybe the wife and I will give it another try.