Civil War in Times Square
A Post Eclipse Sojourn in New York City
Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
Thank you for your patience this month. A new, and big, exclusive article for The Hunt for Tom Clancy subscribers is coming later this month—and it’s on my favorite topic, the Eclipse, but is not quite ready for your beautiful eyes and beautiful brains, but will be shortly.
The family went out for dinner the night before the eclipse at Judy’s, a local diner in Waldron, Arkansas. The waitress, a middle-aged woman with short hair, wore a sweatshirt with large gold foil letters that said “I love God, but some of his followers get on my nerves.” When I asked her about it, she said that a group of Pentecostals come in once a week. She wears the shirt for them.
The full eclipse piece is still being written and will be here soon; this is a post-eclipse Coda I thought you might be interested in.
Matt
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New York City, LaGuardia Airport; returning from the Eclipse, a three hour layover turns into three days. A friend lets me stay in her guesthouse in Sag Harbor, another friend lets me crash at his apartment in Brooklyn as he’s in Nantucket for the summer.
I’ve not been in New York City since before the Pandemic.
I forget how much this city motivates me to walk, to just do a never-ending patrol up and down concrete canyons. I walk for miles through the city streets. In Manhattan, I go to the Morgan Library, eat a crab salad, look the art. Later that week, back in Charlottesville, I will attend a lecture from my favorite Italian Department professor on Belle De Costa Greene, the Morgan Library’s first librarian. In a back room, I see a stele with Babylonian writing listing out the ritual for observing an eclipse.
I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the way to the Met I note the door to Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse—very close to both the Met and the French Consulate—has been repaired since the FBI used a crowbar to break into the house to serve a warrant, observed by the framed glass eyeballs Epstein installed as art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art won a contest in the 1960’s—the Dendur Derby—to house the Roman built temple to the goddess Isis that was under the floodplain for the new Aswan Dam. Jackie Kennedy accepted the gift on behalf of the United States in 1962.