#40: The Third Lion at the New York Public Library
"I just want to point out that you talk about news and letters and then hard cut to something that is neither."
Snow is falling in Manhattan. The lights are bright in shop windows. Cyclists wear gloves, weave through the cars like ice-skaters. On Lower East Side in Ruby’s bar, there is wood paneling, low lighting, red-cushioned seats. Mac drinks whiskey. It swirls around the ice, oily. California. He thinks about California. Her wooden desk where she will be writing her cards, her letters. He knows the beads hanging in the kitchen doorway, the throws on the couch. Owls nest in the cliffs behind her house. The sea in front. There is so much horizon. Perhaps she will write again this year? He doesn’t need her to. — “I’ll Write You When I Get There,” Jacob Parker, Hobart.
I am behind on reading submissions for Hobart. I am grateful to see Sean Ennis’s work — previously published here on the newsletter — featured on Lit Hub’s Micro with an accompanying interview to boot. I am toying with the idea of using some combination of Cronkite, Yeats, or Bolaño’s “The Part About the Crimes” to write about the present moment, but I’m holding off, as none of those points of reference feel quite right. (Tom Hanks playing Walter Cronkite having a camera crew follow Bolaño around as the latter tries to find the dark heart of the world?)
It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don't suit you, find another pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is necessarily an investment for combat. — Deleuze, in conversation with Foucault, via.
I am listening to Le Tigre. I am listening to Valentina Goncharova. I am listening to Hernan Diaz’s Yale lecture, per David Naimon’s recommendation. I am listening to Belle and Sebastian while thinking about how the community that formed around the Belle and Sebastian e-mail list actually felt ‘more’ like a community, as opposed to the implicit idea behind a video game like Second Life, and how sometimes insufficient doing an apples and oranges comparison like that can feel when you want a community to ultimately look like full-blown country-sized river basin maps.
“At first it was only the Old English faculty so no one paid much notice but soon enough it was the Compositionists and then the Modernists and finally Contemporary Fiction, with their LGBTQIA Comics Studies and African American Disability Poetics. The horse heads were speckled and maned and dark and spotted.” — “THE FACULTY BEGAN REPLACING THEIR ZOOM FACES WITH HORSE HEADS IN THE ONLINE FACULTY MEETINGS,” Miriam Gershow, HAD.
I am creating work for you, for which I apologize.