The Appeal of the New York Times’ “Metropolitan Diary”

 

     Many readers of the Sunday New York Times, myself among them, pause among the stories of war, corruption, and fabulous real estate prices to enjoy the “Metropolitan Diary” which presents anecdotes submitted by readers accompanied by loose and casual drawings.  For those who eschew comic strips, it is an amusement, but, like all entertainments, it has meaning.  An examination of a single day’s “Diary” demonstrates a striking regularity of theme while suggesting a basis for its long-lived popularity. 

     The feature is so well-edited that any day’s column would serve as an adequate sample.  For yesterday, May 8, the stories might be summarized as follows. 

 

1.  The non-Hispanic writer listens to Latin music, leading his building super to ask if he speaks Spanish.  He does not.  Later, when a Puccini aria is playing in his apartment, the immigrant super begins singing along in Italian.

2.  In a nostalgic reminiscence of youth, the writer recalls a trip to Brighton Beach with a friend where they encountered a man with bared buttocks who explained that he had a rash.  The bit concludes “And that is my Brighton Beach memoir!”

3.  The writer observes two children play rock-paper-scissors from opposite sides of a subway platform.

4.  A renter kept awake by partying sounds from a park across the street finally makes a noise complaint, only to find that the bureaucrat who answered the telephone is a neighbor, also annoyed by the noise.

5.  The writer buys a pint of ice cream, intending to eat it on the street.  He asks for a plastic spoon and the clerk says he has none, but then a security guard not only points them out, but suggests the customer take two. 

 

The original text is available at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/08/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html.

 

     Every one of these stories focuses on unrelated people suddenly forming a transient bond across barriers of several sorts.  In the first the tenant and the superintendent discover their common love of opera.  In the second two girls interact with a man with whom they would ordinarily not speak and value the memory years later.  (This is the only example that stretches the use of the word “bond” in my definition of the theme.  The ambivalent sexuality of the experience – doubtless an unattractive, somewhat disturbing man, yet in a way fascinating – distinguishes this story.)  The charming impromptu friendship of the children in the subway, the common interests of the people troubled by street noise, and the security guard’s solicitous interest that the customer enjoy his treat all fit the same pattern.  In each case the tale involves a breakthrough of sympathy in what might seen the anonymity of the big city.  A person who might have felt solitary a moment before becomes suddenly a sharer in a common humanity.  These stories are like fairy tales, approaching a kind of sympathetic magic in which their telling can create a sense of a responsive and sympathetic environment whether such a thing exists in reality or not.

     The links among the characters are the stronger for their base in appetite: ice cream, Italian opera, a day in the sun, pure play, and rest (balanced here against revelry).  In the slightly non-conforming story, the writer indicates her fondness for Broadway with a reference to Neil Simon.  In desire we can know we will surely find our fellows, and the Times reader can easily identify with a narrator who likes premium ice cream and live theater.  Our wishes are our weaknesses as well, and enable comedy, so all these stories whatever the voice, have the same indulgent, mildly self-mocking humorous air.    

     The lead actors are entirely passive.  Everything unfolds before them like an aleatory spectacle.  The super spontaneously began singing, the sun-bather sunning, the children playing, the city worker on the noise beat could not have been expected to be in the same spot as the caller, and the guilty pleasure of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s awakens a friendly response.  In no case was the story-teller seeking human contact, and, in fact, the publication of the piece is an example of contemporary forms of simulated human contact providing the illusion of community.  (The internet offers a great deal more.)

     The myth, if one may style it so, is not merely that the great imposing indifferent city is actually alive with people more like yourself than you had imagined.  Part of making this proposition emphatic is to imagine class strata as insignificant.  Readers of the Times are surely likely to be among the socially and economically elite compared to readers of the Post and the Daily News.  In spite of the fact that the tenant and the ice cream fancier are presumably more affluent and educated than the super and the guard, they are united by their pleasures. 

     The fanciful wish-fulfillment character of these scenes is suggested by the fact that two of the five are presented in retrospect, as experiences of childhood.  The children in the subway present a similar pre-adult ideal. 

     “Metropolitan Diary” favors stories that explicitly refer to New York City circumstances: a building superintendent, bodegas with visible guards, the subway, immigrants, and street noises.  New Yorkers notoriously consider simply living in the city to be a daily achievement.  They take pride in the difficulties and expenses of their home in a mirror image of the suburbanites who are pleased to be rid of the very same big city problems. 

     Yet in “Metropolitan Diary” the challenges of impossible rents, homeless sufferers, and very real street crime can play no role.  Within the column New York City appears in idealized form.  Just as pastoral conventions elide the rougher realities of life in the countryside, this feature weekly presents readers with an idyllic city in which all contradictions are elided and serendipity awaits around every corner.