As Joshua’s words come echoing across the water and down the years to me, I can’t help thinking that his life was not just his finest thoughts about poetry and friendship, expressed in a style that rejected forcefulness in favor of sympathy, but it was also comprised of his long mornings in his dressing gown with his telephone, newspapers, the Hu Kwa smoked tea and the little sterling-silver strainer that sat in its drip cup when it wasn’t straddled across a cup catching leaves. His life was made up of his pleasure in the morning glories as well as his hilarity ….After [his death] I looked through all the letters I’d ever received from Joshua and I realized I’d been unworthy of him then, that he’d been sending them through time to me as I would become years later. –Edmund White, The Farewell SymphonyContinue Reading →
What with the heavens exploding all around us, New Yorkers have gone rather batty over the last few days. It used to be such battiness was business as usual, but as rents have steadily increased, so have the rates of NYC normalcy. Though it’s rarely acknowledged, New Yorkers have become some of the nation’s biggest conformists since the “Friends”-style gentrification began with the Rudy Giuliani Reign of Terror. Every generation of NY mourns the one that preceded them, of course, but I think I am right in preferring the Lady Bunnies of Alphabet City over the assless chaps who now preside over Nouveau Brooklyn. Continue Reading →
Dishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.
As Joshua’s words come echoing across the water and down the years to me, I can’t help thinking that his life was not just his finest thoughts about poetry and friendship, expressed in a style that rejected forcefulness in favor of sympathy, but it was also comprised of his long mornings in his dressing gown with his telephone, newspapers, the Hu Kwa smoked tea and the little sterling-silver strainer that sat in its drip cup when it wasn’t straddled across a cup catching leaves. His life was made up of his pleasure in the morning glories as well as his hilarity ….After [his death] I looked through all the letters I’d ever received from Joshua and I realized I’d been unworthy of him then, that he’d been sending them through time to me as I would become years later. –Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony Continue Reading →
What with the heavens exploding all around us, New Yorkers have gone rather batty over the last few days. It used to be such battiness was business as usual, but as rents have steadily increased, so have the rates of NYC normalcy. Though it’s rarely acknowledged, New Yorkers have become some of the nation’s biggest conformists since the “Friends”-style gentrification began with the Rudy Giuliani Reign of Terror. Every generation of NY mourns the one that preceded them, of course, but I think I am right in preferring the Lady Bunnies of Alphabet City over the assless chaps who now preside over Nouveau Brooklyn. Continue Reading →
Dishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.