Wednesday Evening in the East Village: Bomb Magazine and Strand Book Store present A Conversation between Rachel Kushner, Hari Kunzru and Rivka Galchen at the Strand Book Store

Sunday Afternoon in the West Village: Marathon Reading of Frederic Tuten’s "The Adventures of Mao on the Long March" at the Jane Hotel

Although we have to teach on Sunday, we did get to go to the first ninety minutes of today's marathon reading of Frederic Tuten's postmodern fictional masterpiece The Adventures of Mao on the Long March to celebrate its fortieth anniversary and the seventy-fifth anniversary of New Directions, who published it in 1971.

The marathon was an extraordinary special presentation of The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine, and ForYourArt, and the place was jam-packed with audience members listening to over sixty well-known readers, each taking a portion of the novel, which we first were entranced by in 1975 or 1976 when we were in the MFA program at Brooklyn College and working for the Fiction Collective.

The Fiction Collective is how we first came to Frederic Tuten's work, through his contribution to its 1975 anthology, Statements: New Fiction. (We had a story in Statements 2 two years later.) Jonathan Baumbach and Peter Spielberg, our teachers in the MFA fiction program and co-directors of the Collective, told us we had to read The Adventures of Mao on the Long March.

We met Fred Tuten at some of the Fiction Collective publication parties in the mid- to late 1970s and were always in awe of him. Teaching at the School of Visual Arts back then (as we still are now), we heard from several of his creative writing students at City College what a terrific creative writing workshop he ran.

And we learned so much from reading The Adventures of Mao on the Long March about the uses of history, appropriation of texts, humor, documentary, pastiche, irony, and that mixture of serious and playful narrative that makes it such an exhilarating read.

It was a pleasure to hear it read today by such great artists, editors and writers as Deborah Eisenberg, Laurie Anderson, Walter Mosley, Wallace Shawn, Grace Schulman, A.M. Homes, Paul La Farge, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Epler, and others.

Among the later readers would be Linsey Abrams, Dawn Raffel, John Haskell, Philip Lopate, Amy Hempel, Ernesto Quiñonez, Oscar Hijuelos, Lynne Tillman, Richard Howard,

Francine du Plessix Gray, Jerome Charyn, Edmund White, Dorothy Lichtenstein, Brad Gooch, Patricia Marx, Cecily Brown and Wayne Koestenbaum.

Our cellphone takes horrible pics indoors, but we're sure there will be lots of good photos of this event as well as better, more detailed accounts by smarter, cooler people (update: see a professional's work at Philip Turner's post at The Great Gray Bridge) but we're grateful to the folks at The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine and ForYourArt for making today's marathon reading a reality. Most of all we're grateful for Frederic Tuten, who spoke charmingly at the start of the reading, talking about being a 15-year-old in the Bronx who dreamed of the world of Manhattan intellectuals, artists and writers, who began submitting to New Directions even at that age.

We can say for sure that Mao on the Long March and Frederic Tuten's other innovative books were inspiring to an outer-borough kid in his twenties who wanted to be a writer many years ago. Now, at sixty, we were happy to stand on a crowded staircase and squint at the author and his readers and listen to the magic of a book we first loved a long time ago.

Wednesday Night at Tompkins Square Park: Ed Park, Lynne Tillman & Lore Segal for 100 issues of BOMB Magazine

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Thursday, August 2, 2007:

So it was another Wednesday evening, another park: this time, Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. (These ParkLit events by the way have been sponsored by Open City, so thanks to Thomas Beller and company.) But no "literary death match" this Wednesday; instead, it was a celebration of a magazine I called "venerable" in a post a few days ago: BOMB, which has just published its 100th issue. And it featured readings by eminent or soon-to-be-eminent fiction writers of three different generations, befitting BOMB's role in the literary history of New York City. If BOMB were a building, the Landmarks Commission would make sure it would be standing forever (unless Donald Trump wanted to build on it).

BOMB first appeared in 1981, and while it's very much associated with the period of Lower East Side/East Village ascendancy in its early years -- best documented in Brandon Stosuy's excellent literary history Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 -- the magazine has remained indispensible as it continues to fulfill its mission of "facilitating conversations between artists of all stripes" and paying close and serious attention to new developments in art and writing, regardless of their commercial appeal.

With the East Village undergoing what appears to be a similar process of gentrification that previously undid Soho (see Richard Kostelanetz's Soho: Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony), one of the few advantages is that Tompkins Square Park, in the 1980s filled with homeless people and lots of drug addicts (although the spectacle of seeing them gather by the monument to Temperance was pretty funny), is a much more pleasant place to hang out today than it was in the old days, when I avoided it.

The park is filled with people bicycling, strolling, watching their pets at the famous dog run (supposedly one of the best in the world), doing tai chi, hanging out. It's about 87 degrees and humid at 6:30 p.m., the scheduled start for the event. About forty white plastic chairs are set out in front of a microphone and a banner for Park Lit, just in front of one of the park's amazing American elm trees (a rare collection now that Dutch elm disease has decimated most of them in the U.S.).

There's a crowd of about 35 as BOMB's Paul Morris gets the festivities underway, but another 25 or so will join the group as the reading goes on. Paul says it's an appropriate setting for the 100th issue celebration, since the East Village is where the magazine began (it's now headquartered in Fort Greene, Brooklyn).

Nicole Steinberg, whose poetry I enjoyed last Friday evening, joins Paul for the first of a series of re-enactments of the interviews for which BOMB is famous. From its plastic container, they take out a 1978 issue and Paul, as interviewer Craig Golson, questions Nicole, as playwright Christopher Durang (a favorite of mine; I was in the first-night audience at The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the Public Theatre; it contains the classic line: "I don't think God punishes people for specific things; I think He punishes them in general for no reason") about who Chris hates and whether he considers himself whimsical ("I change from day to day.")

Then Paul introduces the first reader, the young dynamo -- founding editor of The Believer, former editor of the Village Voice Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review's science fiction columnist and presidential adviser Ed Park, whose first novel Personal Days will be published next year by Random House. He's in the 100th issue, copies of which are being given away free this evening.

I've heard some truly great readings from novels which at the time hadn't been published -- at Bread Loaf thirty years ago John Irving's The World According to Garp and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon -- and I can't say if Personal Days will be a classic like those books but I haven't heard one I liked as much as I did Ed's book.

The little episodes --featuring a group of office workers who come to each other cubicles to speculate about co-workers' crushes, give unwanted back rubs, help with unwanted double lines popping up in MS Word documents (if it's your resume, you can't ask the IT people for help, can you?), Googling themselves and ex-lovers ("Every time you feel a tingle in your fingers, someone somewhere is Googling you") -- are insightful, hilarious and authentic. As one character notes, we spend a lot more time with our co-workers than we do with our friends or even with our significant others.

I anticipate reading the novel with pleasure. Its deadpan rhythms and knowing vignettes (you never want to be called into the boss's office to be told you're doing a fantastic job because it's sure to mean a layoff is imminent) remind me of a favorite novel of the 1970s, Renata Adler's Speedboat. As it would for the rest of the evening, the repeated bites on my legs of one or perhaps a series of flying insects didn't deflect my attention, though at the moment I am awaiting early signs of West Nile disease.

Just before Ed is finished, a young man comes through the crowd, handing out leaflets about an upcoming rally at City Hall Park to protest the new city policy on taking public photographs. Okay.

After Ed's reading, Paul and Nicole return to the mic and show us the four different versions of the magazine throughout 26 years. The BOMB I first knew was huge, perhaps even larger than Interview, and it's since gone through various formats. There's a funny re-enactment of a colloquy between Steve Buscemi and Tim Roth about why actors who look like they do often don't get the parts that go to Brad Pitt and then Paul introduces Lynne Tillman.

What can I say about Lynne Tillman? Many of us have idolized for years. Her Madame Realism stories have had a strong influence on me. I was introduced to Lynne and her work by my friend, the 1980s downtown scene writer/performer Peter Cherches, and I've never stopped enjoying reading her fiction, essays and art criticism. It especially gratified me when in this decade I met a number of younger artists and writers, like my friend novelist/filmmaker Brian Pera, who shared my admiration of Lynne.

For anyone unfamiliar with Lynne's groundbreaking work, here's a bio note that doesn't do her justice, compiled by me from various sources:

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two nonfiction books. Lynne’s No Lease on Life was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel, American Genius: A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press last year. Other novels are Motion Sickness, Haunted Houses and Cast In Doubt. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The New Gothic, New York Writes After 9/11, The Show I’ll Never Forget, The Penguin Book of New York Stories, and This Is Not Chick Lit. She’s a professor and writer-in-residence at the University at Albany, and last year she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Once the mic is lowered ("It's pathetic to be so short," Lynne says), she reads an excerpt from American Genius, A Comedy. The narrator is in an institution -- whether it's more like Yaddo or Rockland State, we're not really sure -- and she looks at the cosmetics sitting on the bureau, focusing on her anti-aging creams.

From there we have digressions on and meditations about belief in one's work (the narrator imagines that her Polish cosmetician trusts that her work actually helps her clients), imaginings of the lives of those who serve us, the nature of library solitude, and finally to some of the novel's riffs about American history: how John Winthrop's "City on a Hill" compares with his affectionate and even salacious letters to his wife, reflections on mythology, the songs of the past, Manifest Destiny, Bloody Kansas, the sanity of Mary Todd Lincoln, and more. If we don't wish to memorialize memory, the narrator asks, how do we perform our obligations to it?

-- I fear I am making some of the most exciting prose in recent American fiction sound tendentious by my inadequate description, so just let me say: read this book for yourself. Lynne is always a good reader in public; about a year ago I heard her in Bryant Park, along with other contributors to Elizabeth Merrick's anthology This Is Not Chick Lit, and Lynne's reading was equally powerful.

Before bringing on Lore Segal, Paul and Nicole re-enact part of an interview from issue #68, with Chuck D on the cover, by Albert Mobilio of Robert Altman, who discusses his then-forthcoming film Dr. T and the Women and wistfully says that one genre he hasn't attempted but would like to is a murder mystery. It's nice to know that he did get his wish.

I've known Lore Segal and her work for both kids and the rest of us since the early 1970s. I was introduced to her by my Brooklyn College undergrad and MFA professors Jonathan Baumbach (a continuing inspiration: his most recent book, On the Way to My Father's Funeral, is probably his best) and Peter Spielberg, then co-directors of the Fiction Collective, where I worked as an editorial assistant for several years.

I also helped coordinate a conference at BC -- directed by Jon Baumbach, Jack Gelber and John Ashbery -- called "Literature and Publishing: Can They Co-Exist?" at which Lore Segal was one of the panelists.

But it's her 1976 novel, the woefully underrated Lucinella that made me a Lore Segal fan. It seems to be out of print, but it's the best novel about the 1970s New York literary scene I know. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, John Leonard said of the eponymous character, a poet struggling to find her way, "the nicest person ever to appear in a novel about New York writers, yet she doesn't know it and she is, gently, cracking up."

Her 1985 novel, Her First American, is Segal's masterpiece. While there are some similarities in the backgrounds of the author and the character Ilka Weissnix (see also Other People's Houses), for me the most brilliant creation is Carter Bayoux, the brilliant, self-destructive and unforgettable black intellectual who is the book's hero. The Times Book Review said of Her First American: "Lore Segal might have closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel."

Check out Han Ong's interview with Lore Segal in BOMB #99 for more. (BOMB's relaunched website will soon include the complete archive of 26 years of its famous interviews.)

After Paul Morris introduces her, Lore Segal comes to the stage, where a chair is placed for her. "There comes a time in life when you get to sit down," she says.

She reads from her new book, a collection of linked stories, most already familiar to her fans who read The New Yorker. It's called Shakespeare's Kitchen, again featuring her "Zuckerman," Ilke, here involved with the petulant and quirky intellectuals she works with at a maddeningly insulated think tank.

The passage is tenderly funny and sad as Ilke tries to connect, via a series of uncomfortable, pathetic phone conversations, with people who friends or friends of friends have claimed might make boon companions in her new isolated Connecticut setting. Segal's ear for dialogue, particularly that in family households -- especially when it's misunderstood by listeners who should know better -- remains as acute as ever.

As she gets up to enthusiastic applause, Segal offers the audience a sentence of advice: "Don't leave New York." When Segal herself was on the faculty of the University of Chicago, she refused to live in that city and commuted from New York. Similarly, Lynne Tillman's been an East Village resident since 1982 (see her novel No Lease on Life for presumed details) -- so I guess she doesn't have to go far to get home now.

But before we go, there's a raffle. Everyone's filled out these slips with their names and e-mails (so they can get on BOMB's mailing list, I guess) and Paul and Nicole pick the winners of five classic issues from the past. Once that's done, the Parks Department and the audience is given thanks, there's more applause, and the evening's over. Of all the events I've had the privilege of telling you about in the past couple of weeks, this is the one I've enjoyed the most.

Thanks very much to all for bearing with me. Thanks again, Jeff; it's been a blast.

(Oh, and as always, full disclosure: BOMB's repeated rejections of my submissions throughout the Reagan administration -- I had better luck with that other downtown-scene magazine, the shorter-lived dot-matrix-printout-in-a-plastic-bag Between C and D -- have perhaps unduly influenced my impressions of BOMB as a publication dedicated to bringing readers the best innovative work available.)

Friday Night in Williamsburg: MiPO Reading Series at Stain Bar with Richard Peabody, Cate Peebles & Nicole Steinberg

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Saturday, July 28, 2007:

Late yesterday morning I received an email from Richard Peabody, the editor of the incredibly long-running D.C.-based literary magazine Gargoyle and Paycock Press and a talented poet, writer and anthologist. As a guest blogger at Ed Champion's Return of the Reluctant in the spring, I wrote a long post about Rick, calling him "the survivor." We've known each other for over 30 years although I've probably seen him no more than ten times (in the old days snail mail was, of course, the way writers living in different cities connected) -- the last time at a March 2005 conference at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Rick wrote that he'd be coming up to New York to read as part of the MiPO Reading Series at the Stain Bar, which is just a few blocks from my house. But I was surprised to see he'd be reading at 7 p.m. that night. Later Rick told me that he'd sent out the announcement over a week ago but it apparently got lost in the cyber-ether. I canceled my other plans and was at the cozy Stain Bar well before 7 p.m.

I've been there about seven or eight times. Back in May, I read there with my friend and teaching colleague Bronwen Tate and others as part of the monthly P.E.E.L. Series, which features four writers reading, respectively, poems, an essay, an excerpt and a letter. In late June, I went to see another friend, Nick Antosca, and three other writers, as part of the Sunday Salon reading series.

So that's at least three different reading series at Stain, whose owner is the novelist Krista Madsen, author of Degas Must Have Loved a Dancer. When I met her the first time I came to Stain last fall, I noted that I didn't seem to be getting the familiar fish-eye from younger patrons, the way grizzled geezers like myself and Kevin Walsh (Forgotten New York) often do in Williamsburg.

"I didn't want this to be just another hipster bar," she said. "I want everyone to feel comfortable here." And to make me comfortable, she proceeded to point out a couple of people who looked even more ancient than myself.

So I always enjoy going to readings at Stain; it also helps that it's a 10-minute walk from home. The last reading I'd attended was in their cozy backyard, and that's where I found Rick when I arrived there early. But the reading was indoors, perhaps so MiPOesias editor Amy King, the coordinator of the series, could videotape it.

If you don't know MiPOesias, you don't know poetry. Por ejemplo, the latest eclectic issue, edited by David Trinidad, for example, features some of the best American poets currently writing; I can't believe how many of them are my acquaintances and friends from back in the 1970s (Edward Field, Brad Gooch, Lloyd Schwartz, Maureen Owen, Dodie Bellamy, Joan Larkin, Ron Koertge, Charles Bernstein) and ones I've only met in the past couple of years (Charles Jensen, Gregg Shapiro, Aaron Smith).

But if you look at the previous issue -- edited by Nick Carbo, author of the shrewd and funny Secret Asian Man and other great books (who, with his wife Denise Duhamel, was one of the writers I knew back in my South Florida years) -- you'll find a completely different group of excellent writers, all Asian-American, represented: people like Purvi Shah, Ira Sukrungruang, Lee Ann Roripaugh and Jennifer Chang. The great variety in MiPOesias is what I love most about it.

By the way, no offense to anyone, but if you can't identify at least three of the names above, as far as I'm concerned, you're a total literary ignoramus. Literature is more than just fiction! And any fiction writer that doesn't believe that -- well, as Emerson said in another context -- you've just seen half the universe.

Like a lot of New York readings, Friday evening's started about half an hour late, giving Rick time to talk with me as his other New York friends who'd come to see him.

While he's in the bathroom, a young woman comes over to me and says, "Richard?"

"Yeah," I say. I guess I know her from someplace. I've become horrible with names and faces.

She introduces herself as Amy King, so I then realize she wanted Mr. Peabody. "Oh no," I say, "I'm a different Richard. He's in the bathroom, Richard Peabody."

"Oh," Amy says, and then I introduce them when Rick comes out.

Obvious mistake: one 56-year-old white man looks pretty much the same as every other one, and nobody here is nearly as old as we two Richards. (Just as he's Rick to me, I'm Richie to him. My old Brooklyn name, Richie from the block, whatever.)

Weekend summer evenings at readings generally have the smallest audiences, Amy King tells us, but there's a nice-sized crowd gathered: about 25 people, I'd say.

Finally Amy gets us all to sit down and be quiet and she introduces the first reader, Cate Peebles.

Cate's originally from Pittsburgh but currently lives -- where else? -- in Brooklyn, and works as an editorial assistant on an oral biography of George Plimpton that will be published by Random House in 2008.

Cate recently graduated from the MFA program at The New School (along with my pal Justin Taylor, editor of the groundbreaking anthology The Apocalypse Reader -- yes, you knew this was a plug -- and if you're in Portland on Sunday evening, you really should go to his reading at the downtown Powell's).

Like the other two readers, Cate keeps it pretty short and sweet. Here's a sample of her work:

Taco Truck to Awesometown

All the waterfront property in Funkytown
was taken, & we knew the dog-days of groove
were slumped & shaking in the corner, drowning
in pools of mohair and leather; it was time.
The tattoo above my ass says: enough with nut-
shells, I want almonds. Like most things,
it has to do with an ache. There were no circles
under our eyes, but octagons & trapezoids;
all night the barbaric yawn of feral
iambs kept us chewing on our blankies.
Say, it was time to wipe our noses & shut up, it was
time to say yes to hot-sauce, queso-blanco, & lime:
It was time to tighten our lips and trousers & get up, not
down; time to get this motherfucking freak-show on the road.

Real nice. You can read an interview with Cate here.

After a short break to get some drinks (and for some of us to use the bathroom), Amy introduces Nicole Steinberg.

Nicole is the Co-Editor of Lit and Associate Editor of the venerable Bomb Magazine. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast , McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel—Second Floor, PMS, Lumina, and Half Drunk Muse, and she writes for music webzine Axis of Live. She's the founder, curator and host of the Earshot reading series dedicated to the work and presence of emerging writers in the city. She lives in her native Jackson Heights, Queens -- the best place in the world to be if you want to have both arepas and a samosa for lunch.

Here's a sestina by Nicole:

I'm Obsessed with My Wife

Her lips are a very dark pink.
The homeless are especially nice to my wife.
She gives money to every beggar she sees, smiles at each God
bless you, child. She doesn't have to be naked
to get a man's attention. All of Brooklyn
loves her. I read

the funny pages to her every morning, then read
the rest of the paper myself. We hold our mugs with outstretched pinkies.
I saw an ad for the Miss Brooklyn
beauty pageant last week and thought, My wife
would be perfect for that! Still half-naked,
I ran to the phone and registered her. For God's

sake, she said, blushing like a winsome goddess.
Her cheeks were as red
as her naked
pink
ass after her "Bad Wife"
spankings. (Sometimes nightlife is scarce in Brooklyn.)

I would never win Miss Brooklynite,
she said. Miss Brooklyn, I corrected her. Thank God
for her low self-esteem; with minor cajoling, my wife
agreed. After I read
the sports section, we bought a pink
dress. The fabric was flimsy; it made her look naked.

One contestant arrived naked
from the waist up. Not unusual for Brooklyn,
though the pageant was held in Manhattan. My spouse pinked
me in the arm with a fingernail, anxious. God
forbid we do something I wanted to do. Read
my lips, said my wife.

I want to leave, said my wife.
Please—we'll go home, you'll read
and I'll lie naked
on the couch. She cried as we crossed the Brooklyn
Bridge, bawling ungodly
noises. Her tears stained her dress a pretty dark pink.

Have I told you how I met my wife? Two years before Brooklyn;
I was halfway through Naked Lunch. She'd never heard of it. God,
I said, don't you read? No, she said. Her cheeks went pink.

Here are more poems by Nicole.

Finally, Amy introduces Rick at length -- those of us over 55 tend to have lengthy bios if we're lucky. I'll quote the whole shebang here, even if I know it by heart:

Richard Peabody, a prolific poet, fiction writer and editor, is an experienced teacher and important activist in the Washington , D.C. community of letters. He is the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle magazine and editor (or co-editor) of fourteen anthologies including Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Conversations with Gore Vidal, A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, Alice Redux, Sex & Chocolate, Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women and Enhanced Gravity: More Fiction by Washington Area Women. He is the author of the novella Sugar Mountain, two short story collections, and six poetry collections. He is currently working on Electric Grace: Still More Fiction by Washington Area Women (forthcoming 2007). Peabody teaches at The Writer's Center and at Johns Hopkins University, where he has been presented the Faculty Award for Distinguished Professional Achievement. He lives and works in the Washington, D.C . area. You can find out more at www.gargoylemagazine.com.

Recently Rick's poetry has concentrated on his antiwar activism and being an older, sometimes stay-at-home dad to his two daughters. Here's one of the poems he read last night:

folding Laundry in my dream

—for Naomi Shihab Nye


I could fold laundry every day
for one thousand years
and never satisfy the women in my life.

The truth is I was proud of my folding abilities
until one lover confessed with a shrug
that she had always refolded every single item
in the basket upon my leaving the room.

I understand something about
compulsion. Nobody has ever
filled the dishwasher exactly
the way I want it filled.

Never. Ever.

But this laundry issue can make
or break any relationship.

I know.

So I practiced folding.
Took to it like a new religion.

Learned how to fold napkins for wedding
receptions. Practiced folding enough tables
and chairs, until I could set-up the
Roman Coliseum.

Mastered the art of origami,
My specialty—Puff the Magic Dragon.

Worked in a Laundromat until I could
fold jeans like a Levi Strauss employee.

Folded decorative towels. Slipcovers.
Lawn furniture. Money.

Folded knives. Folded doors. Folded bikes.

Learned how to fold myself—to flatten
my bones like a mouse and slip
through cracks in the molding of
our drafty old house.

Even that wasn’t good enough.

I spent hours learning to play expert poker
so I could scream “fold” every time things
were getting interesting.

I tried protein folding. Folding different
parts of my anatomy into each other
like a Russian nesting doll,

until my proteins and amino acids
resembled a room filled with
different-sized corrugated boxes.

After yet another relationship
fell apart over my failure
to fold lingerie “correctly”

I dreamed endlessly of paper airplanes
which I folded into so many intricate shapes
they could never be expected to fly

and somehow they did
soaring higher than I imagine
my laundry ever will.

After Rick's last poem, Amy King stops videotaping (you should be able to see the reading here fairly soon), closes the reading with thanks and an announcement of next month's program, and people leave, hang out, buy more drinks. I am a teetotaler due to a lifelong horror of sounding like Lady Chatterley's father.

I sit outside with Rick and a couple of his writer friends for several hours, talking about a variety of subjects, fun stuff mostly -- but also how communities of artists and writers can survive in these weird political and economic times. Inside the bar, a woman is singing and I smile profusely, as Rick's friend Linda suggests I do, when I enter and exit the bathroom. From experience, I know that people in the bar can hear people in the restroom peeing, so I hope the singer is resonant.

Around 11 p.m., when I say goodbye to everyone and wish Rick a safe trip home to D.C. the next day, I feel good enough to walk the eight blocks home rather than take the L train 2 stops.

It's a gorgeous night, and I feel enormously grateful for poetry, old friends, the efficacy of physical therapy, and the title of Daniel Fuchs' classic novel from 1934.