one more reason I love New York

Remember on Sunday when I was reading Infinite Jest, and I got so crazy to play tennis that I just packed up all my gear and rode my bike around the warehouses looking for a backboard, and the first one I went to had some man there who was like, “Hey! What are you doing?” and I was like, “I want to hit a tennis ball against this wall, is that ok?” and he was like, “You want me to throw you ball?” and I said, “Nooooo, I want to hit a ball with this racquet [pointing to bag] against that wall [pointing to brick wall],” and he looked confused and sent someone else to ask a manager, who came back and told me no, there are insurance issues and it’s an old wall, saying, “A brick could come loose and fall on you and you would sue,” and even though I insisted I would never do such a thing and would be standing 20 feet away from said wall anyway, it didn’t seem like a fight I could win, and so I rode across the street to the Lowe’s parking lot, where there’s a big warehouse backed up against the parking lot and no strange men hanging around asking questions, and I hit against the wall for about an hour, even though I thought I’d have to stop when a security guard kept coming by in his car with a yellow light flashing on the top, he never even really seemed to notice me, he just drove by slowly staring off into the distance looking for car or siding thieves or graffiti kids or something, but I did get some looks from customers who thought it was pretty funny that a girl would be out on a Sunday bashing a tennis ball against a wall in the blazing sun of a parking lot of a megastore on the Gowanus, where 100 feet away cranes lifted trash into a barge and sea gulls drifted high above me but never made a sound, at least not one I could hear because I was busy smashing massive on balls and running around like a crazy person?

Because I do.

city journal: turning into something

I am currently in the process of assembling the material from "city journal," a blog I kept for two years about adapting to life in New York, into a manuscript with the working title "Turning Into Something." I am working on a proposal and hope to have good news to report here at some point in the future. You can browse through the "city journal" here or through the "city journal archive," which groups the entries by category - the same categories I am using in the book as sections.

short report

Man in a coat stopped on the sidewalk below the tracks, staring straight ahead. As the dog colony approaches, he looks up, searching the rafters. There is no train. The night is gathering around him. He – or someone else – has wrapped a ratty maroon scarf under his chin and knotted it at the top of his head as if his tooth hurt. He is very still now, and his eyes are turned up in a kind of prayer. The dogs hurry by, making no eye contact. Their toe nails click on the sidewalk and their eyes catch the glancing headlights of approaching cars. As they turn the corner, the man wanders on, does not look back, or up. This is the end of another day.

dream of another city

Have you ever come (not gone, but come) to a place like a center, a hard magnet, dark eye of the moth, darkness being the thing light must find and light being the way darkness wants to go? I have, now twice. The first time was New York, and I’ve spent the rest of my life and at least two books since then trying to understand it. The dark eye pulls me in daily. I wake to it, dream by its dim light. Who lives here is who can survive it, who wants to try to understand it. All others are turned away, before, most often, they ever attempt to arrive. I did not “go” to New York. I was drawn here, and cannot say exactly how. If you have not read this poem, please do.

The second time I came to a place was to Paris. I did not “go” to Paris. As if one could compare it, could come from anywhere else that forms a point to which a line could be drawn, a connection made, no. One comes to these places, and every other place recedes into the dark matter of the brain that is sensed, that quietly lets us know we’ve lived, we’ve done things and somehow understand that a mass of time and change and city and weather and love and loss has elapsed and hardened into memory, forming what we will later call “a life.” Coming to a place like Paris throws one’s life into relief, just as another shocking and strange monument looms up in the rain, making everything around it fade, seem ordinary, but making no shadow, giving no direction, merely saying, “I am here, look for no reason, just behold and find yourself in yet another form of awe, and then walk away changed without knowing exactly how or why.”

David Foster Wallace (1962 – 2008): A Belated Obituary

I knew you as David Bananas Foster, or David Popcorn Poppin’, in fun, for the wackiness of your ideas and the sprawling ambition of your work. I knew you as the author of the most beautiful piece of writing about a sport I have ever read. I knew you as a fellow lover of tennis and writing and a fellow critic of our culture. I knew you as a reluctant teacher of writing (if your interview with Charlie Rose is to be believed) and divided about it, as all writers must be and I certainly was.

To me, you were a reason that I began writing essays. And because writing essays over the last year of my life has made me so happy and fulfilled me as a writer in a way that I could not have imagined, you made me that happy. Or your work did. And for a writer, really, what is the difference – we are our words, and our words are us. There is no other way.

What I felt sad about on the Monday morning back in September, after you killed yourself somewhere in California with a rope, is that I never got to meet you. It brings up the same feeling I have about my dog, Oso, who died without me there. We always believe we’re coming back. We always believe there will be another time, there will be time, there will be time. Sometimes there is, and sometimes there is not.

*

I am starting, just now, to know why David Foster Wallace was so sad. I understand it on a level I try to reach every time I sit down to write. Every time. You try to access a sorrow – not necessarily be sorrowful – on a regular basis, it does something to you, yes. What is there to be so fucking sad about? Not being understood by others. Really, I guess you could sum it up with that. It’s probably what makes me write – the attempt, the consistent, subterranean effort to reach them, to explain myself, to make a connection. I’m sure it was missing all those years in Jersey, or at least radically disconnected, hanging on by one bent prong in the outlet of life…I was hanging on by music. Another form of connection, but one not operating on quite so deep a level, for me. “The writing. It is what will get you through. It is what matters, it is what will not go away.” A mantra for my life, added to only recently with “Keep going…”

This is important. David Foster Wallace, a lot of people loved you. A lot of people who actually knew you, or were taught by you, or who were able to finish Infinite Jest – I was not, but I will try again, I promise. My thing is your essays. My thing is your soul. My thing is your thin turtle shell and your humility in the face of such awesome talent. My thing is knowing that I won’t read anything by you again, and that I will never get to meet you, to shake your hand and say, “Hey, thanks for the words. They made a difference.” Isn’t that all that matters. Isn't that the saddest thing.