Summer Interlude

July humidity is a uniquely oppressive phenomenon for those who are economically committed to all-urban summers.  Nothing-- animal or material-- escapes its wilting inertia; we slow, perceptibly, like a musical command... and offer an opportunity for things to penetrate. If we took a personal inventory,  I think summer memories would dominate.

After the massive Nersesian novel (thank you, Arthur, who individually thanks an impressive litany of his East Village neighbors at the end), I took up some late Roberto Bolaño who never lets me down, even at his least luminous.  A summer vacation diary-- with deaths and mysteries and World War gaming minutiae... but the heat... the damp, the summer rain.  It stuck to me like my clothing.

And then Soldier's Pay-- to cleanse my literary palate, so to speak-- with early Faulkner.  So many of us read Faulkner in school-- before we were able to absorb his language facility-- well, it's worth going back after all this time.  One wonders where Cormac McCarthy would have been without him.  The imminent summer is palpable... and the way he is truly in love with not just words but the way people speak them... and the descriptions drip vocabulary like wet rain.  He over-saturates but it's young and utterly world-shaking. 

It occurs to me that old writers become more sparse and bitter, as though they are slowed and dulled by their own self-critical ghosts. Maybe, as we age, we spin off enthusiasm and joy like coats of paint-- and we are left, in our later years-- wiser but hampered by our own hesitations.  Rarely does one see a senior kick up his heels on the sidewalk. Later novels tend to be more careful.

Evenings I still circle the park; one of the highlights is the 110th Street drum circle.  Africans of several countries meet here and sing and dance-- some in T-shirts and jeans, some in colorful native dress. Beats and chanting fuse with the denser landscape up there into a ceremonial soundtrack.  There is joy in the circle-- camaraderie and affection... but overall there is this pall of homesickness-- of these transported people into the harsh summer reality of Manhattan... and I feel sad for them.  

Among friends, many are crippled with a kind of depression which seems less justifiable in summer, but nevertheless persists.  I speak to them because they know I'm awake at 3 AM when they are haunted.  I empathize, and I refuse to cross their boundary of despair.  Some of them hide in their apartments-- I, too, am a little guilty of anti-sociability-- but they assume these Facebook Fred personas-- they post and converse on social media... it's an anodyne, I suppose.  Many of them describe and display their surgeries and illnesses-- their recoveries and badges.  It's wonderful-- but what about those of us who toughed it out-- no  addictions, no drugs, no 12-step programs? We changed diapers and bailed kids out of jail.. we did the daily penance with no one but a vague Jesus beside us to listen to our prayers. No award.

Some of us cannot see what we have become.  Some of us work hard at filling in wrinkles and lifting saggy jowls-- at coloring our hair and camouflaging reality.  The depressed and vocal do not see how they have become narcissistic-- a black hole into which they draw their friends and anyone who will listen.  It's like a kind of emotional quicksand.  

As we add more and more to our life scoreboard, the losses ironically mount disproportionately.  Some of the losses are more memorable than the wins, although in this Olympic season, we barely remember even the medalists.  We love doing some things in life... others we dread, but we are glad that we did them.  I thought much about that couple who set out to sail the world and were found dead in a lifeboat.  Even they would not have had regrets; somehow we know this.

At a certain point we begin to give things away-- we realize what we got is not really what we wanted, and conversely, what we wanted is not what we got.  Some things happen to us... and they are not good, but I also often wonder that life has not been even more tragic-- that the good has outweighed the bad, that five mediocre novels do not change the one brilliant one; it is only the writer who suffers.

Tuesday at 5 AM I watched part of Bergman's Island... the original documentary which is Bergman at 80-something speaking about his life, filmed on his beloved Fårö.  He is consciously at his productive end and has always been clear about his films-- their meaning, the brilliant intertwining of his life's personal narrative with his work. But it seemed so simple-- the landscape, the genius himself in his fleece slippers, sitting on his fireplace, looking and explaining.  He was so utterly candid-- so honest.  His fear of death, his failures, his memories. It's extraordinary-- what he accomplished and how he of all people was able to see himself.

Dawn seems to come quickly in summer.  Evenings are slow... I feel certain, on the cusp of August, I will sense the season being sucked from the room.  It's another goodbye.  Whatever the summer has brought, whatever it has meant,  I hate goodbyes.  I will miss my sticky fingers on the keyboard in my unairconditioned apartment.  I will log my summer reading and console myself with the knowledge that these months are a smaller and smaller fraction of my lifespan. But I also think, after all these changes, I do know who I am.  And despite the relentless over-saturated cloud of grief no one measures with daily weather and air quality statistics, I belong here.

Peace, Love and Understranding

Along with the unseasonably hot weather in New York City, there have been a few strange sitings: the coyote treading water like a dog in the East River... the dolphins, putting on a small show for the Upper East Side... and then the usual fires, suicides, shootings... a woman brutally attacked near the Central Park Reservoir. It's enough to make me nostalgic for the 1970's when a parallel April heat wave ushered in the unforgettable Summer of Sam.  

I can remember browsing the stacks of the un-airconditioned Strand bookstore while my guitar-player boyfriend was setting up at Broadway Charly's across the street. Sometimes I'd leave my shoes at the club and sit barefoot on the old wood basement floor reading proofs and review copies which sold for less than $1.  People hung out there--- the piles of books were intimidating... one by one the dedicated staff browsed and perused and classified and logged.  If you were looking for something, you could call in... if they didn't call you back within 48 hours you'd assume the search was unsuccessful. But they were dedicated.  The place was dusty and musty, as were the books... mice ran in and out of shelves; once or twice I witnessed some unsavory behavior but for the most part it was a haven for us book-people.  We met and talked... we exchanged.  Tom Verlaine was often there Friday nights, checking the review stacks.  Ben McFall came a bit later.

So I have a new book out-- my fifth.  The Strand has been a sort of platform for me; as a student I longed to be among their indie writers and seeing my first book on the New Poetry table was like winning a Pulitzer.  Granted, the pandemic affected everyone... but this time, instead of delivering happily and being greeted or congratulated by the incomparable Ben, he has left the world... the Strand no longer takes telephone calls and their online search is punishing for small presses like mine.  In fact, they managed to mis-read the title and post it incorrectly.  Who is this author?  I don't know, but it take some effort to even locate my name.  Not so the major labels, the merchandise, the best-sellers... it feels remarkably like a slightly more dense version of Barnes and Noble.  

No barefoot hippies, no intellectual clerks anxious to discuss and learn and find... it's a pressurized department store, the brands books instead of hoodies and sneakers.  Actually, you can get your hoodies there, too.  Surely they sell better than local urban poets who publish carefully and slowly without press or publicity machines. The cream no longer rises to the surface but paddles hopelessly like the coyote in the east river.  

In the Summer of Sam I found a stray dog.  When I moved further downriver, he leaped off the boardwalk at 59th Street and half-swam north while I yelled frantically, running uptown, until at the 96th Street pier a man with a boat helped me retrieve my wet animal from the swift current.  No news media, no photos... but today's news resonated.  

Tonight hoping for a dolphin-siting, I walked along the river... at the 111th St crossover, two boys were throwing rocks at the cars-- a dangerous pastime, but a sort of rite-of-passage for kids.  Something about these moving targets-- and it's not as though they are trying to cause injury-- it's just the act.  I remember doing the same as a girl, hitting someone in the eye and having to get scolded and shaken by the girl's father who warned me I was going to city court where they would put me in jail.  I was terrified.  I was nine.  But there was just something so timeless and 'boy-mischievous' about these two tonight- on the cusp of adolescence... here I am this old white lady brushing by, asking them to spare me-- I'm someone's Grandma, and they let me pass, unthreatened.  It was as though their life was sped up by the early summer-- their already-racing biological clocks were being pushed forward by the weather.  

Three shootings last night.  Jesus.  The heat is always an incendiary. Summer is on... all bets are off.  In my world the illnesses and deaths continue, like a relentless accelerating wheel.  I look at my Facebook page and it is filled with sad notifications and griefs. News. We look at the obituaries daily with trepidation.  In the rock and roll world so many people of my generation have disappeared-- it's as though each loss is somewhat diluted by the next... two on one day, three on the next... we have barely time to grieve.

Last night on the corner of 86th Street someone had left a few piles of books.  A youngish man and his girlfriend were looking through. Good stuff. Biographies.  Classics.  On the sidewalk.  I feel a certain simpatico with these piles of books; in some sense I am my own work-- the books which are increasingly disrespected by the corporate machine, the instagram world of branding which sends me poetry memes from people who have no sense of rhythm or lyricism... but unlike me have huge consumer audiences. 

Yesterday I browsed the kiosk on Fifth Avenue by the Park... the classics are still considered best-sellers-- but the new titles... who am I, I thought, like one of those children's books?  I felt like a misplaced coyote.  There was a time when I'd visit friends and there on the shelves would be familiar things-- great things, like old comfort.  If I had to wait for someone, I could take down a Faulkner or a Baldwin or an Anne Sexton... we all had these things-- Shakespeare, Proust. Now everyone sits everywhere consulting their phone like a God. People buy books like merchandise-- like souvenirs... many of them will end up on sidewalks, or on the Strand outdoor displays, unread, waiting to be rescued by the next owner like a stray dog, hoping, as I do, to be read.  

As though they read my mind, The Paris Review today published a piece about Larry Campbell, one of those guys who had a used-book table on Sixth Avenue for decades.  The interview had been conducted pre-pandemic across from the Strand which, over the years,  sorted through his wares and picked out the valuable things. Where did he get them?  Dead people, he used to say.  There was a quotation in the Review: "The best books I've found are from people who died.  Older people have the best shit." Larry is now 72.  Amen.