Annie Blacker house, Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection

If I weren’t convinced that everything I know is already known well by anyone I’d ever want to impress, I’d use Hemingway’s six word novel as a pick-up line. (I’m embarrassed now to even write it, so certain I am that you all have committed it to memory and started either rolling your eyes or nodding maternally). Deep breath, Emmita! Our romance isn’t dead yet:

For sale, baby shoes, never worn.

Entry hall stairway of the David B. Gamble House

Now that I’ve done some brief internet research, I’m starting to doubt Hemingway ever wrote those words at all, or that they haven’t been irreparably bastardized (one example here–infuriating!) by generations of creative writing teachers who thought “artist” was spelled with one rim of their Clark Kent glasses and “quirky” with the other.

Gamble house from the northwest

I ran into my very own creative writing teacher this evening, in the first meeting of my second-to-last Columbia class ever. Her name is Phyllis (as though there were ever any doubt), and if that author photo bears any resemblance to the once-original, she used to be really, really hot. She’s aged, and, I’d guess, gotten more acerbic. At the very least, she seems to have wantonly embraced the professor as muse complex, common to literary men and women who find themselves at the heads of seminar tables before they’ve stopped being able to fill out an oxford. It didn’t take much actual intimacy before I realized I didn’t really need to bed any of those people again.

Rosewood chair, designed by Charles Greene

And yet: I want to write really well for her. I kept being blinded by the glare from the overhead light reflecting on her glasses and so I never knew if she was looking at me intensely or vacantly, and I was never sure for how long I should maintain my end of the eye contact, so my face in seminar was a flickering affair full of eyelash.

These were my six-word memoirs, in this order:

What do you really think, Mom?

I haven’t learned to mop, yet.

Still frequently falling up the stairs.

Mariah Carey_Fantasy

She gave each class member individual prompts for next class, which I cannot attend because I will be at Clio’s Sail-a-bration in my boss’s stead. Max is graciously serving as my date for the Parents’ Association fund raiser. When my boss told us to wear “jeans, something casual,” I told Max that, in British English, “jeans” means “seersucker.” His response:

I will be wearing my finest pair of Dungareed short pants! T’would a sandalled shoe be appropriate?

Commenced, of course, a rapid-fire email discourse on the virtues (him) versus the criminality (me) of cargo shorts. It did not culminate until the email copied below, which I wrote in character, did not even send and which languishes as a draft because it is just way too completely ridiculous:

“I hate to do this, because you have a lot of cargo in your trunk, but I just think I have too much cargo from my childhood.”

Anyway, Phyllis assigned me the prompt: “I knew I was in trouble when…”

Seriously. That’s my assignment. It think it means that I am inane and boring. Phyllis had heard me speak an hour earlier as we went around the table introducing ourselves. I’d finished my brief monologue, conveniently forgetting the suggestion that we note what we’d “bring to a desert island,” and she waited a moment and said “Well. You certainly have a checkered past.”

Mariah Carey_Always Be My Baby

Do I? I am going to finish my “in trouble” prompt with an explanation of a certain halting, alternately uneasy and impassioned and frequently drug-fueled affair; this may be the point at which I actually know I’m in trouble, of course, but I actually think she’ll like it.

Charles J. Willet house

[Buy Phyllis here and here, and buy Mariah everywhere, including here.]

[All images are from the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection, housed in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia. Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene were born in Ohio in 1868 and 1870, respectively. They studied architecture at MIT and moved West, where their work emblematized the Arts & Crafts movement. My parents live in an Arts & Crafts home in New Jersey and I think it's beautiful; all of the above examples were built in Southern California. One of them, Maddy, is in Ojai!]

Ruthie sent me an e-card under her alias The Real Mii; I’ve been enraptured by her emails of late, especially after my party a few weeks ago when we stayed up really late at Abe and Jocelyn’s house playing Wii. I bought new glasses recently but haven’t had the frames put in yet (I loathe having my pupils dilated and loathed the idea of biking home from 23rd and A with my pupils dilated even more); Ruthie was in fabulous form at the party and decided to wear the glasses herself, frames be dammed.

Numero 6_Da Piccolissimi Pezzi (with Bonnie “Prince” Billy)

Ruthie hadn’t been to Abe and Jos’s before so she had to make a Mii. I remember it being extremely short even though Ruthie isn’t, particularly; the next day she sent me this email:

i was thinking this morning about how funny it was that the mii i created in wii had enormous glasses. you know, just like the real mii.

The Real MII! Amazing.

I’ve been cooking a lot recently, also doing some graduating; I hope these things are more the real mii than some of my other recent activities, which in retrospect mainly involved staying up past dawn and rambling about my parents. That’s what blogs are for, not tail ends of parties.

Numero 6_Quel Giorno Cosa Avevo?

I made cheese:

and a rhubarb compote. Chris and I have fantasies of chronicling other culinary efforts on thesethingstakethyme.com, or at least I have those fantasies and he has the rights to that domain name. I am reviewing my recent photographs in an effort to write something interesting and I’ve discovered certain patterns, like how much I love wearing glasses and how much I love other people who wear them, too.

Download your own Numero 6 here, and then help my neck find a way to get nuzzled by that lead guitarist’s moustache. The band’s website is in Italian, I’ve been squinting at it for a few minutes trying to figure out where you can buy the EP, but it seems essentially hopeless. Berlusconi hates the free market.

I have been away for a very long time! When I wasn’t attending the party of the century, I was writing a thesis. I picked up the bound copies on Saturday and rubbed my face all over them in the print store I loved them so much. I will write about the thesis, the fun parts, and I will also shortly return to posting images of my stunning friends our debonair hedonism and the gorgeous soundtrack thereto.

Fleet Foxes_Ragged Wood

We were all coming back East after Christmas and there was a woman on the plane who my sister Hannah hated but I couldn’t remember why. The woman was sitting right in front of us and in front of her was a family swarming with children

Hannah I said they have children literally coming out of their ears. I think there are five.

Hannah told me there were four. The family-of six-had only purchased five seats for its four very small and two normal to large sized members. They took up the three seats to the left of the aisle and two of the seats to the right. The sixth seat in the row was occupied by the male traveling companion of the woman Hannah hated.

Judith! he said a few times you can come sit up here!

Yes, said the mother of the beautiful and brimming family, the children are so small we will only need four of these seats.

Fleet Foxes_Drops in the River

Each time this exchange occurred Judith declined the offer. Judith along with the rest of us behind the family spent a good part of the flight making faces at the blond baby sitting his mother’s lap.

He looks like Steve Martin, she told the baby’s mother.

What. The woman grew tense.

There’s just something about him the sparkle in his eyes.

I thought Judith was right and I thought that it was funny so I repeated the conversation to Hannah. Hannah didn’t pay attention to the substance of my story because it is admittedly weird to say that a baby looks like Steve Martin but she did pay attention when I told her I’d learned Judith’s name.

Jewess? she hissed.

I wasn’t sure what Hannah had said but I thought it was something that didn’t bear repeating.

Judith! I repeated into Hannah’s shoulder.

Hannah was laughing very hard and I really didn’t want Judith to know what she was laughing about.

Judith! I grunted to the air behind me.

Hannah finally got it.

Do you know what I thought you were saying?!

I didn’t want to tell her what I thought she’d thought I was saying so I made some hemming noises and laughed too. I hoped to confuse her into explaining.

A character in the Bible? In the New Testament? Hannah was thrilled by our misunderstanding so she made her mouth very big around each syllable.

Judas? Oh. I felt hugely relieved.

Later when I was making the quick decision to leave my family to their cab at Newark Airport I asked Judith’s traveling companion how much the express bus to midtown cost.

Well he whined I think it’s like fourteen dollars but you know it’s cheaper than a cab.

Totally. I said even though my only compunction was about whether I should get into the cab my parents were paying for or not.

On the bus ride back to Manhattan Judith and her man friend were sitting two rows behind me. I heard every word he was saying most of the time that word was intolerable.

It’s the waiting that is just intolerable!

This traffic! It’s intolerable!

His daughter Sarah called him she was outside of his apartment in Chelsea with a lot of luggage and no key.

Sarah! I’m not even in the tunnel yet the driver is intolerable! Vita-Dent isn’t open?

He wanted Sarah to get into the apartment by knocking on the door of the dentist’s office on the first floor of his building. It was seven thirty on a holiday Saturday the idea that a dentist would be working was ridiculous.

Just stay calm Judith kept telling him you should stay at my house.

I can’t! He was outraged. My daughter is here!

Well said Judith she should stay too. You don’t have a key either how will you get in?

This issue was never resolved.

Tonight is my one night with my daughter and I’m missing dinner with her she’s waiting for me outside!

Well apparently not Judith said helpfully apparently she has other plans.

She did. Sarah was worried her father would be so late as to mess up the rest of her evening visiting New York friends. He found this intolerable.

Judith was getting off the bus at Bryant Park and her man friend was getting off first at Port Authority.

Well he said after the bus had stopped on Forty-first and Ninth I’m sorry babe.

Babe? I thought.

I’m sorry I’m so tense it’s my only night with Sarah.

Judith told him she understood.

And thank you babe thank you for taking me along on your trip and for being so understanding.

They kissed on the cheek. He got of the bus and I glared at him and then I glared extra hard after his wallet jabbed me in the shoulder. He paused near the door of the bus.

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year Judith said back.

I wanted to say Judy you can do better but I didn’t because everyone on the bus already knew Judy could do better and that was probably enough.

Later I call Hannah.

Judas was on my bus! Why did you hate her again?

Hannah is still angry but then she laughs.

I hated her because she picked her nose!

I remember Hannah saying this on the plane and I once again refrain from mentioning that I too sometimes pick my nose.

She kept annoying the baby when he and I were trying to play peek-a-boo! And her man friend he smelt he smelt so bad.

A grown up? Smelt? I acknowledge that grown-ups should have had enough time to learn how to manage their body odors. Hannah is not done.

Well and they were making out in the aisle of the airplane right next to you when you were sleeping and the flight attendant couldn’t get around them to give someone their drink!

They were making out? I ask.

What? Hannah asks. What’s wrong?

Fleet Foxes_Oliver James

Lipstik_There Is Only One Thing.mp3

Then you get the guy in the fat guy truck–

There was no need to finish. The line erupted in laughter. The man who’d announced that we “got the guy” was waiting for his package at the Maspeth UPS Customer Center, and he was really fat. Since he didn’t work for UPS, I guess it didn’t matter. He was a doorman.

A concierge.

Oh.

Lipstik_Yer So Bad.mp3

Thirty two years I’ve been on the job. I keep my mouth shut, nobody bothers me. I’m my own boss.

Whoops, he’s his own boss. A landlord, not a doorman at all.

I biked to Maspeth this morning to pick up the new router for 211 Montrose. If I hadn’t already demanded our wireless network’s coronation as Chairman Meow, I might have felt less invested. But Chairman Meow is the greatest name I’ve thought of, ever, so I set my alarm for 8am and after frogging around with the Francis Francis espresso machine, I left the house and rode east.

I’m considering leaving New York for law school in the fall; since I started taking that idea seriously, I’ve been paying more attention to the city. I drove Young Max from Gowanus to Williamsburg on Sunday, and as we passed under the J/M/Z tracks a train was stopped at the Marcy (Marcy, son) station. All the doors were open, and I could see through the cars to the cold morning sky on the other side.

The train looked so fragile and aged, there, like something from French Connection. That’s kind of what Maspeth is like, the buildings and the streets like parking lots.

In the tiny waiting alcove, I stood next to a breezy Filipina whose driver came in at one point to check on her.

We are still waiting! she told him, laughing. Once the fat guy had made his fat guy joke, a strong sense of solidarity and first person plural pronouns prevailed. The Filipina was very flirty. I hope I am not… she thought about it… thwarting your morning plans!

The driver was very serious and, I noticed, kind of emaciated. It is my afternoon plans that I am worried about, he said, with no apparent sense of irony. A different woman leaned against the wall and sighed. She was reading a paperback called Desperate Hoodwives. I read over her shoulder:

…a joke, really, since the worst of the worst lived in Bentley Manor.

I stopped reading over her shoulder.

Everyone who worked at the Customer Center had an earring in one ear, so they all looked like my dentist. When was that cool for guys? It’s like a permanent sneer, just mixed with hairspray. The guy who waited on me had gold glitter all over his face, too. It was hilarious. I didn’t have the courage to take a picture of him from the front, though, so you will have to trust me:

[Buy Lipstik's new EP, There Is Only One Thing, here. We have been listening to it all morning. The album is the perfect Maspeth antidote, and since "Maspeth" is such a universal reference it is fine with us if Lipstik uses that quote promotionally.  Love, Red Admirable.]

Bert Jansch_Needle of Death.mp3

I heard that William Daniels once starred in a television series with David Hasselhoff; Daniels is a talking car and in one episode drives Hasselhoff’s character around after he’s fallen asleep. That story made me very nervous and I don’t think I ever want to see the show. William Daniels was also in Boy Meets World, a show that was responsible for my tenacious-long-beyond-its-serviceable-years love of the mushroom cut and not responsible for very much else.

(I also read in the WSJ today that Knight Rider is being re-adapted because we ran out of good ideas in 1982 and just realized now.)

Bert Jansch_The Black Swan.mp3

I disliked the talking car premise because I am wildly in love with William Daniels, circa-1776, but also because when I was seven I was victimized by a recurring nightmare. My parents are nonexistent or else simply absent, and I am in their maroon Corolla, which is sitting inside the garage of the house at 126 South Kingman Road.

The garage was at the end of a driveway; neither garage nor driveway nor South Kingman Road sloped at all, but in the nightmare gravity is taking me nonetheless and then all of a sudden I’m in Audubon, New Jersey, the sun-bleached, muted quasi-city in south Jersey where my grandparents owned a big house and I slept over in a room that, in hindsight, reminds me of The Yellow Wallpaper.

My little sister was actually stuck inside a locked car once. The Corolla stayed in the driveway, but my mother ran around it sending, I guess, panic signals to the neighborhood fire house. Instead, she attracted the attention of Young Don Franklin (my father actually called him Young Don; his pectorals prevented me from calling him anything at all), who was outside mowing his parents’ lawn.

Don was always beagle-esque in his devotion to my mother. When he saw her jumping around, shouting at Hannah that everything would be fine, he took off running. Don cleared the rhododendron bushes that separated our backyards and sprinted to the car, arriving just in time to jump around with my mother for another ten minutes until the fire department arrived.

After the door was unlocked, a fireman reached in and picked my blinking, two-year-old sister up out of her car seat. The fireman turned to hand her off to a responsible party and he found: Don! The lumbering high school senior held Hannah by the armpits and then turned, beaming, to present her to my mother.

Bert Jansch_The Wheel.mp3

He was the rescuer! I spent the crisis drawing in the dirt underneath the swing-set with my toe, and furiously humming William Daniels’s 1776 pièce de résistance, “But, Mr. Adams.” The song is a conversation between the delegates about who is to write the Declaration. Adams keeps deflecting the honor by explaining,

If I’m the one to do it
They’ll run their quill pens through it
I’m obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir.

It is true, he is so obnoxious. I love him. He decisively corners Jefferson:

Mr. Jefferson, dear Mr. Jefferson
I’m only 41; I still have my virility
And I can romp through Cupid’s Grove with great agility
But life is more than sexual combustibility.

Truer words. I have this cat now, too, or I live with her; her name is Guiteau, and she is actually Krista’s. Guiteau fell in love with a stray who matches her and lives near our roof. I like to talk to Guiteau when I get home from a long day of carrying my laptop back and forth on the L train.

When Krista was in London I kind of pretended Guiteau was mine, and all of a sudden I was living the single girl in Brooklyn dream, crooning encouragement at feline love affairs, making a lot of tea and eating cookies to Beach House. I even watched My So Called Life one night while I mended a flannel.

[Buy more Bert Jansch here.]

The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend a few weeks ago. He had voiced some concern about the classism on display in this post; the man is a life-long advocate for dental hygienists. We can’t fault him for trying.

The Spitzer scandal is also discussed.

I am classist above all things. Like many of my worse and some of my better traits, I think the classism began in middle school, when I lived with my family in one neighborhood and all of my social acquaintances—the white social acquaintances—lived with their families in a different one.

Thanksgiving Brown_Runnin’ In High Heels (The Story Of The Cru).mp3

I have probably told you this before, but none of my friends’ mothers would ever drive me home from anywhere. Carpooling seemed very foreign to a girl who had moved to South Orange from Jersey City; the only carpooling I knew about was when my mother, Hannah and I would drive the Bird family back to the projects after church. For some time, I thought I hated “carpooling.” It soon became clear that carpooling, in fact, was when Ali Robinton’s mother drove her, Carly Scher, and Bari Rogoff home from school, or when Alana Gottlieb’s dad picked me, Ali and Ashley Behrens up at the mall.

Carpooling became endless fascinating and stayed damningly foreign. When my neighbor Tyrone’s father was deployed in the first Gulf War, my father would bring both of us to school in the morning. Tyrone was quiet, and awkward, and I thought it was my special curse that I had to both show up with him at South Orange Middle School and sit across the table from him in Ms. Zimmerman’s math class.

To tell you the truth, I had a little bit of a crush on him. Crushing on people was how I dealt with my problems; you heard it here first. I hated him too, of course, but a little loathing hasn’t stopped any of my crushes yet.

A certain kind of classism was how I dealt with my feelings of socio-economic inferiority. My family wasn’t rich, and I didn’t get to have a bat mitzvah, but I did have a ton of books to read, and my parents did take me to a lot of theater. My classism is cultural; I began reading my grandparents’ copies of The Nation at a tender age, and I have not looked back, except to pride myself on being even farther to the left than my parents.

My mother is currently in love with everyone at her dentist’s office. I had to ask her once if she had a serious mouth problem; that is how frequently she seems to go to see Dr. Farouki, DDS. The answer was no, thank goodness. My mother’s love of Dr. Farouki and her secretary, Fanny, is notable especially because she hated my orthodontist. His name was Dr. Persily, he was even shorter than she is, his office was in snooty Livingston, New Jersey, and his waiting room was, unsurprisingly, always populated by snooty residents of said Livingston. I also think he hit on her a lot, but that is something I have understood only in hindsight.

My mother had an especially tense relationship with his assistant, who I would call a dental hygienist. This dental hygienist came into the room where I was diagonal, back on the chair, and my mother was sitting next to me, reading the New Yorker and telling me how insufferable my orthodontist was. The hygienist told my mother she loved her highlights. My mother has never dyed her hair in her life; she only started wearing makeup after my grandmother bought her some on her fortieth birthday.

My mother told the dental hygienist that she didn’t dye her hair, but thanks. The dental hygienist scrunched up her eyes and said Oh, you can tell me. My mother said she knew she could tell her, she just didn’t dye her hair. This time the dental hygienist rolled her eyes, and said it was impossible that my mother didn’t dye her hair. My mother said Really? I just don’t. The dental hygienist sighed and said Oh-kay as though now, she had really seen it all. I was very uncomfortable, and then Dr. Persily breezed in and yanked at my palate expander.

In conclusion, I am classist, so is my mother, and we once had an obnoxious experience with a dental hygienist. I would love to go to a Yankees game with you, which is saying a lot, because I hate the Yankees and going to games at their stadium makes me feel like I am being date raped. I was on a date recently and the man I was with told me that it was unbecoming to talk about date rape as much as I do. It was titillating to realize I have a chip on my shoulder. I am probably the last person in the universe to realize that about myself.

Tom Tom Club_Genius Of Love.mp3

I’m not against all forms of prostitution, but I do think the illegal sex trade is a really great opportunity for economically and socially empowered men to take advantage of women who are poor, undocumented, or otherwise beyond the pale. An obvious way to alleviate those concerns would be to legalize the sex trade, but there also exist plenty of legal ways to take advantage of women in the subaltern, so I am not convinced that’s the answer.

In a moral sense, Clinton’s indiscretions may be worse than Spitzer’s, although it’s not really my place to judge. (Don’t I sound nice and libertarian right now?) As a citizen, I was furious at Spitzer because he broke a law that he had politically benefited from enforcing. Clinton gave Lewinsky a copy of Leaves of Grass? That’s very nice, although she probably should have read Whitman by the time she was twenty-four, or however old she was.

[Buy more Tom Tom Club here. Godspeed your merry purchases.]

[For Thanksgiving Brown, there are special instructions. Email peter [dot] agoston [at] gmail [dot] com, and you can buy a unique album compiled especially for you! Nothing but the best, dear readers.]

Young Max made up a board game: Soccer As Strategy. It was a bunch of squares and a stuffed ball and some Lego guys. He and I named our Lego guys Link Rogers and Julia Child, respectively, and after a tedious twenty minutes of rule changing he finally won and I finally got to say Max, your dad is really going to like playing this with you this weekend. You should bring it to New Jersey.

Oh yeah? He agreed.

Yes! And Easter will be fun too, I bet. Lots of candy?

The best part is the egg hunt.

I forgot about egg hunts.

Yeah, they’re kind of like film noir, except instead of clues, you’re searching for eggs.

You think?

And then instead of red herrings that you think are clues but lead you down a dead end, sometimes you find a thing that you think is an egg but it’s just someone’s colorful rubber ball.

It took me a minute. Your dad’s family hides colorful rubber balls as decoys?

Max had already lost interest. Nah, they don’t do that. Sometimes people just hide their colorful rubber balls in the strangest places.

When my family and I were in Bermuda this Christmas, a genetic propensity for crawling around churches in the dark made for some eerily desolate vistas. I had played them the following track in the car on the way to the airport, and during the vacation we were each moved at least once to screech it’s a ghoooost town into the dark night.

Young Max_Ghost Town.mp3

Then we were like, Young Max is irremplazable, or imprescindible, depending on who you ask.

Beyonce_Irreemplazable [Norteña_Remix].mp3

No one but me knows this was taken on Easter, but no one but me knows where the balls are, either.

[Buy more Beyonce, that's a good boy.]

I have been thinking a lot about marital infidelity this week. Surprise! I have also been thinking about my thesis, which should also come as something of a surprise. I am writing about public hospitals in Harlem during the three Koch administrations. Ed Koch was a odd mayor; pugnacious and jocular and fiercely defensive of himself and his city. He participated in a conference on Jewish humor at the New School once and said, stony faced, I find nothing humorous in the mocking of New York City. Girl, please.

Genghis Tron_Colony Collapse.mp3

During his second term, Koch and his press secretary co-authored a memoir called Mayor. After it was published, a reviewer announced this is the best love story since Tristan und Isolde, with Ed Koch playing both parts.

Genghis Tron_Badlands.mp3

It was true. Koch could do no wrong, and neither could his (young male) subordinates. His favorite protege was Victor Botnick, a tough who had met Koch on the street during his first Congressional campaign. Botnick asked Koch how he felt about Israel. Koch loves Israel almost as much as he hates black people, he told Botnick as much, and thus began a storied, if not beautiful, political collusion.

Botnick initially served as Koch’s resident muscle, but then, inexplicably, rose to assume the presidency of the city’s Health and Hospital’s Corporation. I began researching him because of this, but yesterday I realized he could have great bearing on my less formal investigations into marital infidelity. (When I phrase it like that it’s more clinical than criminal.) Also mortality, always a fascination.

After he left public life, Botnick began dating a dental hygienist from Long Island. (Redundant). He also had a wife back home in Yonkers, but that didn’t stop him from asking the dental hygienist to marry him, and letting her plan a v. fancy wedding. Finally, a week before the marriage ceremony was supposed to take place, he broke off the engagement. I’m dying, he told her. I have terminal cancer.

Oh, god, Victor! she said.

Genghis Tron_I Won’t Come Back Alive.mp3

This is all true, you pretty things, and a matter of public record, you just have to search the archives. Days later, Botnick paid a doctor friend to send his ex-fiance a death notice confirming his story. He got crazier. In 1993, Botnick was indicted for setting off stink bombs (stink bombs!) on two trans-atlantic flights, following a dispute with TWA the year before. The smell was so bad that each time the planes needed to be rerouted, and Botnick was quoted as telling air marshalls that he was a doctor, and so could confidently say that the smell was coming from the air conditioning ducts.

An excerpt from my thesis:

Five months after Botnick took over presidency of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, allegations about his abuse of city funds, a conflict of interest regarding his wife’s employment at New York University’s Medical Center, and the fact that he had never received a college degree led to increased public scrutiny of the man the New York Post called “2-Gun Botnick.”

It became clear that Botnick had never disclosed his wife’s job with NYU, a public hospital affiliate, that he had misled reporters about graduating from various colleges, and that he had never submitted a resume to the city, even after assuming the head position at HHC. In a thorough profile of Botnick, the New Yorker’s long-time City Hall reporter, Andy Logan, wrote that city residents were learning something new about their government. “It appeared that someone who had a friend in the right place could be awarded a seventy- eight- thousand- dollar- a- year appointment, with power over a two- billion- dollar annual budget, without having to fill out any pesky forms.

Logan also wrote about a Daily News cartoon, published on June 17th, days after Koch had accepted Botnick’s resignation, wherein Koch was shown boarding up a dismantled City Hall. The figure of Botnick walked away from him, saying “I didn’t really resign, it was just a fib.” In the background, the city’s hospitals crumbled.

[Buy more Genghis Tron, plz.]

Yesterday I Was Fascinated By Somebody Else

I wasn’t, really, or maybe I really was, but in this case I couldn’t decide which title I liked better so I am using two, echoing the misogynist modernists. Tom Eliot stacked his writing on top and on top of itself, leaving room for wonder and none for story; once a professor asked my class what the real first line of The Waste Land–making “wasteland” one word implicates Pynchon, all of a sudden–is.

Leonard Cohen_Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.mp3

Is it the epigraph from Petronius? Is it the dedication to Pound? The Burial Of The Dead? Is it any one of the many lines from the two sections that originally preceded our published April is the cruellest month, breeding?

Leonard Cohen_Tonight Will Be Fine [live].mp3

I like stacking things, too; it’s an easy way to steal someone else’s gravity.

Leonard Cohen_Is This What You Wanted.mp3

Eliot piled words upon each other, never once adverbing his way into romance. There is a structural parsimony there that my time at Brown had probably prohibited me from ever reaching.

When the children asked, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she would answer: “I want to die.”

I’m at the end of a long moving process; when Chris and I were driving down Grand Street last week he saw a store that I think was called The Art Mart Cente(a)r(t) or something. I said yeah, that’s what we’re calling East East East Williamsburg these days.

It is taking me some time to unpack, so I’m left only with the most recent Economist and The Waste Land And Other Poems, so I just keep reading it. The Journey Of The Magi is a very convenient thing to have committed to memory; it’s unfortunate that I don’t date women, I think they’d really like it. Marina, too.

What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger–
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

[Buy more Leonard Cohen here.]

My grandfather died a week ago. Grandpop grandfather, not Granddaddy one. The funeral was on Wednesday and at a lunch afterwards my father gave a speech. It was mainly about how he liked to fix things. That is what my father said about my grandfather, although this is true of both of them and tin ceilings and Lutheran faucets that would never dream of leaking line homes from Jersey City to Anderson, Indiana, as testament.

I only told a few of my friends that my grandfather had even died. It’s kind of an embarrassment of white haired riches; my other three grandparents are still alive, and the time in which Grandpop and I were close-ish ended fifteen years ago, when I grew bored of his hand-me-down Reader’s Digests.

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I am partial to things, especially sad things and real things, that come packaged in pertness, so when my friends who knew I’d been at the funeral asked how it had gone, I retold part of my father’s speech. He told us that Grandpop was a man dedicated to the virtues of hard work and sacrifice; he served in the Navy, led an Eagle Scout troop, and 1960 armed my twelve year old father with Nixon For President placards and positioned him immediately outside the legal limit of the polls. Given how radically my politics have changed since that time, my own father said, my father is probably still laughing.

I wept the entire time he spoke and had to go outside and get some snow on my face afterwards. I was a little shocked at myself. I have enough trouble caring in public, crying in public is not what I do.

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Both of my parents are in Ocean City tonight, where they have a beach house and where my grandmother now lives alone. I came to their South Orange house because no one was here and I have a paper to write and wanted to cook dinner. They turn off the radiator in my old room when I’m not visiting, and I forgot to turn it back on, so I decided to sleep in their bed. It’s big and warm and Hannah said when they went away last week she slept in it so I thought that sounded nice.

I was hanging up my dress in my mother’s closet when I saw a stack of money with a rubber band around it on my father’s dresser. Next to it was a red plastic covered bank passbook with the word SAVINGS written in slanting old person capitals and underlined twice. It was my grandfather’s, and now my father has it. His mother, my grandmother, my grandfather’s wife, has Alzheimer’s and can’t take care of anything anymore.

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I fell apart. I wept, again, and so loudly it was like I filled up the entire big drafty house. I think that I am having such a hard time with Grandpop’s death because it is the first time I have really needed to consider my father as a person. Generations and confidence and power all get flattened out in the face of death; right now my father is just a sad person with a sad old bank passbook and the contents of his dead dad’s wallet sitting on his dresser.

It may be that recognizing that my father is circumstantially vulnerable to mortality means that he is physically vulnerable to it, too. I wish that my father could remain forever dignified in my mind, but that’s not possible, because his father couldn’t remain forever dignified to his. That’s why I was crying. I am so angry at the world, for my father. There is nothing as degrading as death, not for the person to whom it happens, but to everyone left.

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