July 2009
10 posts
To see two different books by one substantial author being read in the same train car - it knocks the wind from my chest.
“But it’s useless,” I said, “if you don’t share any consciousness.”
-You Shall Know Our Velocity
Corners of Cafes, Corners of Cognition
Perhaps Garp got under my skin in a way of which I was unaware. In the back of my edition, Irving wrote about his method for piecing the story together. In one portion, he talks about how he tried leading with two chapters that are now published in the last quarter of the book. Such an idea was astonishing to me; sequentially, the chapters were in the perfect place and the story line was...
The Book is the Life
It’s miraculous that, after resisting reading for years, I’ve turned into the voracious reader that I am. I’ve always been an academic at heart, but barely anything ever served to me in school was inspiring; bad, district-selected literature made reading synonymous with doing chores. While I listened to music and played sports for fun, I couldn’t believe that my best...
To Dream, Perchance to Sleep
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making up a story while lying in bed falling asleep. I suppose - sparing the sleep pun - I’ve always been a dreamer in that way. It was never anything totally outrageous; I was never a princess in a castle or starting a colony on Mars - it was always something rather pratical, something that amplified my own talents and aspirations. ...
In other pertinent laundromat news, working on my novel while doing my wash really bolsters the validity of my “unemployed writer” claim.
Sinners, Sailors, and Souvenirs
Sitting outside of my Eighth Avenue Brooklyn laundromat - Internetting, blogging to be precise - I was approached by a Baptist with a “message from Christ.” He wanted to know if I wanted to receive it. I politely declined, smiled, and watched him cross the street back into the Memorial Baptist Church as a van with the rest of his group, marked from Lebanon, PA, pulled up and unloaded...
The Mobile Dry Cleaners
Before nine a.m., I would predict that it’s about seventy percent more likely that a New Yorker will pick a fight with you - about nothing, about anything.
M
“She had a writer’s sense of immortality: if you’re in print and on the shelves, you’re alive.”
-The World According to Garp
With the money that New York spent on six barges of fireworks last night, I bet they could have finished the Second Avenue subway line by like, next Tuesday.