{superlefty}

Death and Logarithms

One of my more difficult kids today, champion eye-roller, adenoidal whiner, one who feels the indignity of being sixteen more acutely than most and takes it out on me. Probably doesn’t even need a tutor, seems to pick up a decent understanding of the material from class, but highly unmotivated, vulnerable to that oldest of […]

Read More

Spectacles, Marriage & Civilization

I am getting closer to my glasses, I can feel it. Ever since I was robbed of my spectacles in South America, I’ve been dawdling in replacing them. But lately I’ve been picking up momentum. Every time I see an optician I duck in and try on all the frames. I’ll ask the salespeople to […]

Read More

The Greatest Caper That Never Was

Momentarily contemplating committing insurance fraud and disappearing forever into the Intangible Zone.

Read More

In Your Neighborhood

With nothing better to do tonight, I went out for a walk and ended up, as Baudelaire says, taking a bath in the multitude. Modest Mouse was playing in McCarren Park Pool, an event of epic proportions of importance in the hipster universe in which I both fortunately and unfortunately reside. I circled the track […]

Read More

Lima, Peru

Having neatly skipped over a summer of salient details–reconstructionist Judaism vs. reformed, East Coast vs. West, wealthy enclaves of Long Island’s East End vs. those of the Cape Cod’s outer reaches, the life span of a human vs. that of a golden retriever and therefore weddings vs. funerals and therefore love vs. death–I come to […]

Read More

The Great Lawn

The crowd at the playground at 85th and Central Park West is about half nannies, half mommies, with the nannies up by a woman or two. There are Thai nannies, Indian nannies, Caribbean nannies, Dominican nannies, post-collegiate American nannies, matronly nannies. Some of the nannies are like mommies, wiping noses, feeding Cheerios one by one, […]

Read More

Friends of Moynihan Station

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon writing in the New York Public Library. I thought it might be different to write in an enormous room full of marble and hardwood. It wasn’t. I was still there and so was the blank page. It was just like writing at home, except that when I leaned back in […]

Read More

Outdone By the Television Listings

“Come to an art party in Bushwick,” said the bright-eyed young hipsters, the wide-eyed young poets, the starry-eyed young lovers. “You can read a poem.” I found a poem. It was a found poem. I stomped through the snow. I read it while the sleet drummed stacatto outside, on all the hard surfaces of the […]

Read More

Music, or Tears

One of those days, those days, woke up with a knot in my stomach, a lump in my throat, a sinking sensation, a sense of foreboding. No particular reason, other than the days of my life, the horror of time, the relentlessness of selfhood, and the pointlessness of words, the futility of my efforts, the […]

Read More

You Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone

I know that Takashi* and Sung* had to move forward with their relationship. (*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the innocent, who, if you read on, you will find to definitely include Takashi and Sung.) I know that the time had come for them to shack up together in one of the […]

Read More