On my rush hour bike ride from midtown east to Bed Stuy to Boerum Hill I listened to Fresh Air about the Koch brothers, a review of the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and a zencast about our 5 capacities: Mindfulness, Faith, Discernment, Effort, and something else. I passed community gardens in full bloom, terriers being lifted by their leashes, and a sedan’s sideview mirror hit my left bike handle.

I was heading south on Vanderbilt toward Bergen, my turnoff, and heard my name. I turned around and saw Sarah who I met on a bike camping trip. She looked freshly showered and was going somewhere with her friend who’d just moved in. A lot of people are moving to new places in Brooklyn, the friend said. I had just come from looking at an apartment. 

I went an extra block past Bergen out of my way to check out the bookstore but didn’t go in because on the sidewalk in front were 3 cardboard boxes surrounded by women on their knees arm-deep in paperbacks.

Some of these I took for Misha’s brother for whom I am a personal librarian. He has been living in/on the Caribbean on/in a cruiseship since February playing tenor sax.  I have introduced him to Raymond Chandler, Gary Shteyngart, Colum McCann, Michael Thomas, Gregor von Rezorri, and Tayeb Salih. The books get passed around to other crew members. For Christmas his parents got me two Stefan Zweig books.

I’ll send him Bangkok Tattoo, O Henry Prize Stories, The Sportswriter, maybe the Solnit. I don’t know if he has the patience for Duras or West. Maybe being on a boat would help him appreciate Moby Dick. 

TOO MUCH MEMORY by Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson (a play)

I intended to mail it straightaway to a recently rediscovered old friend, an actor, but read it first. Actually, I still haven’t sent it. I wrote an email detailing my experience with the 40 pages of dramatic literature.

Are books in a “free bin” at a (basically) unpaid internship free? That’s a tough call.

hey david,

i read too much memory on the subway today. it was fun to read, very close to Antigone.many moments were smart and unexpected and funny, but i dont know how the whole piece affected me. it made antigone more alive and it was really fun to see those issues set in a contemporary setting, like the utility of civil disobedience and the conflict between your loyalty to your ideals/brother (Antigone: what compromises will i have to make day after day, year after year? p. 30 ) and the desire to feel pleasure/live/love/marry. (Antigone: Don’t you remember how we’d spend nights in the backyard, lying in the wet grass, looking up at the sky, wanting to take in every star, watching fireflies, holding them in our hands, a glow between our fingers, as if our palms were made of light. No, I don’t want to suffer. I want to hold every taste of life in my mouth forever.p. 13) 
it reminded me of the enthusiasm and energy i had for politics in late high school and college which faded in the last few years to almost nothing.. i wonder how political Reddin is or if he was recalling more youthful days. 
since starting this email i have been baking cookies..
anyway i will send you the play. i am interested to learn more about plays and drama from your perspective. i also procured a copy of “True West” by Sam Shepard which i want to read because i enjoyed a story by him in the New Yorker/he is really famous/an ex of Patti Smith.
i dont know how to write about how the play affected me personally…i mainly felt amused. it touches on emotions that aren’t really part of my life..like standing up for what you believe in, sacrifice, martyrdom, defying authority, loyalty to family. if it were a couple arguing or a family bickering i’d probably be crying and i could write to you about that..but maybe i would just feel amused.

There’s no other way to say this. On our way to read a menu at an Italian restaurant, we passed the gated trash area behind a large apartment building. Valuable trash was strewn everywhere. Books. Piles of them. I reached in through the grate to take a “Best American Short Stories of 1996.” All of the 90s were represented in that series, O’Henrys, Fence, and the Denver Review. A pretty blonde woman with a pink scarf asked if I wanted to be let in to shop for books. It was cold and I said OK. Misha watched, and by total coincidence happened to have a camera, as I picked through books. I found much better books than I anticipated.

The woman said they had 1000s of books and the used bookstore wouldn’t pick them up. Discarded postcards, pay stubs, notebooks, and manuscripts revealed the names of the onward tenants and Google further revealed their occupations (fiction or poetry) and confirmed suspicions that at least one of them attended Columbia’s MFA program, which I mention to validate the quality of the trash, some of which was obviously assigned (Fagles, Garcia Marquez, anthologies) and some interests expired (Henning Mankel, lesser D.H. Lawrence, and Pound).

I knew that lugging 60 pounds of books over the 1-hour commute was a fool’s errand, knowing that, no matter how much or how little of them I read (Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor, unabridged Leaves of Grass), they will end up in our trash heap when we run out of time and foresight to gift, sell, and pack.

Found at Montrose L stop in a crate full of books with Vortex cards bandaged to the front. Thanks, Larry da Junkman! The Vortex is a conveniently located book vendor. The prices are low - somewhere around $2, but I recommend bargaining. I prefer to pay less less than or equal to $1.

The first line of the first essay is “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.”

It gets better from there!

The famous essay “On Women” compares our loss of beauty after childbirth to the she-ant’s shedding of wings after giving birth, so both can no longer fly. Women are also compared to brutes who are better able to enjoy what pleasure might be had in the present moment.

On Saturday, Misha and I visited Princeton, New Jersey, home to a well regarded bookstore: Labyrinth. On the remainders table were two copies of The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels for $7.98. Coincidentally, I had a copy waiting for me at the library, but it’s such a big book and of such valuable content that I thought I might just want to have it permanently. In the end, I opted not to get it.

Two days later I went to study at a library in Manhattan. I had to pay $8 in fines in order to check out another book, which I did so I could take home a book I won’t read.

Then I went to the local branch of the Brooklyn Library to retrieve Michaels. On my way to the exit, I spied a cart of “free books” and thought better of it. I had specifically not bought any discounted books because I fear I might move one day. But then I fought my instincts and went to the cart, where I found 7 books that I carried home, where I found a New Yorker in the mailbox. Barely able to put my key in the lock, I thought maybe I had been greedy. I lay my booty on the coffee table, texted Misha that I got him a surprise, and went to work on The New Yorker.

One of the books is THE GIFT by Marcel Mauss, an essential anthropology text that the Labyrinth Books I worked at uptown sold plenty of to Columbia students. The foreword informs me that there is no such thing as a free gift. Society expects you to reciprocate, but first you must receive.

“Wintering” by Anastasia Kolendo is about a Ukrainian high schooler who goes to live with her grandfather in the Ural mountains. She befriends a goose who she calls Derrida and a boy named Nikifor.

My knowledge of WW2 history was refreshed. The cranky Grandpa says,

“You little snot! I marched two thousand kilometers to Moscow and then another two thousand to Berlin for you. In the winter. In just one sock! You’d all be speaking German if it weren’t for me, you guttersnipes!”

on reading the newspaper in his parents’ apartment after dropping out of a PhD program:

“There were really no large meanings, only cries of the phenomena. I read assiduously. I kept in touch with my species.”

“Our room, just off the kitchen, was noisy with refrigerator traffic and running water.”

Line 2 of page 2 of Diane Johnson’s introduction to this slim book gives away the ending, robbing me of surprise. Something was stolen from me, not the library.

BASHO

Even in Kyoto
Hearing the cukoos cry
I long for Kyoto

A snowy morning
by myself,
chewing on dried salmon

A group of them
gazing at the moon
not one face beautiful

They don’t live long
though you’d never know it
the cicadas cry

There is now a bookshelf of books (DON’T TAKE THESE it says) and they have a copy of The Essential Haiku.

We met Das Racist.