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At noon today we had just finished teaching our class at Fashion Institute of Technology and were on our way to the subway entrance at Eighth Avenue and West 25th Street for the 23rd Street stop when we saw the tragic aftermath of what looked like a horrific subway accident.
Some people in the crowd said a person was hit by a train, and we saw firefighters and paramedics bring up someone on a stretcher, transfer the person to a wheeled cart, where some began the movements of CPR and hustled the person into an ambulance.
There were dozens of fire trucks and other vehicles, a couple of ambulances, and several police cars, along with many, many first responders.
They all looked grim. What a horror, whatever happened. We haven't been able to see anything anything about it on the news.
An old woman with a granny cart came over and said, "You're taking pictures of this? You should be ashamed of yourself!" We said nothing and walked to Sixth Avenue, where the A, C and E trains had been rerouted.
* * *
UPDATE: Gothamist said the person died, that it may have been a suicide. Very sad.
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
We were able to get to at least a few hours of the second day of the wonderful Afropunk Festival at Commodore Barry Park.
Joining the exuberant audiences for some terrific bands who were not headliners, we got to see exciting performances by Phony Ppl,
Flatbush Zombies
and the adorable Gordon Voidwell.
We had another great time at the Afropunk Festival, 
which has included a lot of fun and even some transcendent moments sharing the music as well as all the other things to do and see. 
It was also really nice in these times to see so many people just totally enjoying themselves. 
That means a lot. 
Really.
Last year so many people were disappointed when Hurricane Irene forced the cancellation of the 2011 Afropunk Festival. (This year's tropical storm is disrupting only the less important but much more evil Republican National Convention.) We are very grateful indeed that the weather was great for this year's Afropunk fest, and even more grateful we got to spend time there.
Tonight at East River Park we saw another great SummerStage presentation by the Faux-Real Theatre Company, Jason and the Argonauts, a wildly innovative and dramatically compelling adaptation of Apollonius Rhodius's epic The Argonautia as translated by Aaron Poochigian. 
Directed by Mark Greenfield, the narrative of the digressive and oddly postmodern poem, with a seemingly endless number of characters and adventures, works spectacularly well in making this semi-obscure work of the third century B.C.E. comprehensible and truly exciting for a contemporary audience. 
As the retelling of the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece, a kid's story it's not. (But it also is.)
This afternoon the office of the Arizona Secretary of State released its official canvass of the August 28 primary. It shows that we won the Americans Elect Party primary in Arizona's Fourth Congressional District and says we have been nominated by that party to be its candidate on the November ballot.
We received 11 write-in votes. Sincere thanks to the four voters in Mohave County, the three voters in our home county of Pinal, the two voters in Yuma County, the one voter in Yavapai County and the one voter in La Paz County for writing in our name on the primary ballot.
At 1:20 p.m. we were coming out of the subway on Murray and Church Streets on our way to teach creative writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College when we stopped to watch and listen to the mournful sounds of the Port Authority police bagpipe band commemorate the dead of September 11, 2001.
Our class meets at the newly rebuilt Fiterman Hall, which opened two weeks ago, replacing the old Fiterman Hall, which was damaged beyond repair by the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. It was very hard not to think about that day eleven years ago.
