I'm All About the Free Conversations

Last night, Anna and I attended a conversation at NYU SCPS with Pete Hamill and Clyde Haberman, columnist for the NY Times. They talked about Catholicism (and the impending death of the current Pope), conflict in Northern Ireland and how Ireland now (as opposed to every other time in history before the last 10 years) "net imports" immigrants (wherein it used to just be an "exporter"), US foreign policy, the contentious West Side Stadium and other local NYC politics. Mr. Hamill, when asked, gave a chilling account of his experience on 9/11/01 (he was there) and what he learned from that experience. Anna wrote down all sorts of brilliant quips to come out of the discussion, but my favourite was when he referred to NYC as "the capital of People Not Like Us."

I had no idea who either of these gentlemen were before going into the session, only that Mr. Hamill had recently spoken at NYU at their eighth annual Irving H. Jurow Lecture, “What New York Can Teach the Rest of the World” and that I'd seen Clyde Haberman's name in the Times. Immigrants and their impact on NYC has become a subject of great interest for me recently. I think you guys could both enjoy Hamill's recent book Downtown: My Manhattan. Here is an exerpt (available off aforementioned Hamill website):

In my earliest memory, I am five years old, coming home from the Sanders Theater in Brooklyn. I am with my mother and we have just seen The Wizard of Oz. The year is 1940. In the safe darkness of the movie house I’ve seen emerald castles and a lion that talked and a road made of glistening yellow bricks. But in memory all of that is a blur. In memory, my mother takes my hand and the two of us are skipping all the way home singing “because because because because because!”

On this wonderful evening, my mother still has brown hair. She is laughing and exuberant, clearly made happy by going to a movie with her eldest son. I remember nothing else, except the word because. Later, I will learn that the woman I call Mom is actually Anne Devlin Hamill, an immigrant from the hard, dark city of Belfast, in Northern Ireland. She arrived in New York, with perfect Irish timing, on the day the stock market crashed in 1929. She was then nineteen. The calamity of the Great Depression did not dismay her. She went immediately to work for a rich Manhattan family as a domestic servant, glad of the work, joyous about being again in the city of New York. In all the years that followed in the life of Anne Devlin, that city would always be a wonderland. Why? Because.

Next to the Conversation, my favourite part about last night was dinner for $4.25: hotdogs for both me and Anna, a knish for me (my first!) and a pretzel for her, all chomped down outside the NYU building before going inside for the session.

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This Sunday we're going to listen to Sen. Clinton speak at NYU on the topic, "Women's Rights are Human Rights." I have fallen in love with NYU. I think I may attend graduate school at their Wagner Institute for Public Policy. Going to this discussion last night, listening to the conversation and the audience's questions made me realise that I thrive in the forum/Aristotlian open discussion format, and, more importantly, even if I only take one graduate course a semester, I want to keep going with my education. I just love it too much to stop.