The way some writers obsess about relationships — whether it’s poets reading poems about how they want to sleep with another poet in the audience, or novelists writing thinly-disguised (or not-disguised) accounts of their trysts/flings/marriages — I obsess about cities.
Category: Reading
Victor LaValle is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus and two novels, The Ecstatic and Big Machine and writes fiction primarily and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and the Washington Post. Here, he reads a short story called Debt.
There was a crazy Nor’easter over the weekend, and we had to go to Jersey – an activity rarely on any Brooklynite’s top ten list, and especially not on a rainy Saturday night. But there was a family bar mitzvah, and we are nothing if not devoted to the family.
Hasidic Jews might not be the number one most-fetishized religious group by the media – my Muslim punk rock friends would probably win that particular medal – but, dammit, we get our fair share of attention.
The first time I saw Reddog—a lean, Pit Bull mix—I peered through the haze of anxiety and heroin hangover that I then lived in, and thought: now that is a sexy dog. Beauty like his, the kind we call sexy, it pleases some aesthetic instinct, softens something in us, makes us want to look longer, to memorize its implicit promise that there is ease in the world, that some things accord.
Nola squints in the sunlight that has just spilled over the rooftops and illuminated Williamsburg’s McCarren Park in all its dewy spring splendor. Slipping her Chanel sunglasses down over her eyes, she sips her latte and makes a sweeping gesture toward the jogger-strewn park, its busy dog run, and the new high-rise condos that have sprung up along its borders.
“There is no way I’d be living here without my nurse hat, if you know what I mean. This place is going to look like Park Slope in a few years. They might dress like hipsters, but they’re just yuppies with vintage wardrobes.”
DEPTH OF FIELD—I read on the internet the other day that Europeans brought the rat to Hawaii, and it took over the island in a New York minute. But what exactly it took over isn’t clear to me. Alleyways? The space between walls? Everyone has space between walls. That’s where the outside meets the inside and they find their balance, like in a decompression chamber. You don’t want to let the outside in.
Most relationships after a certain age begin with a body or two under the bed. Usually these are ex-lovers, whose legacy manifests tangibly in shoe boxes of old letters and photos, those morbid and sentimental curations that pulse faintly from the closet shelf. In my case, it took the form of a garbage bag full of S&M equipment.
Holden’s hunter’s cap haunts me as a lasting symbol of American literature as few others do. At once evocative of the hunt—of searching—and an insulation against the world, Holden’s defining sartorial article works nicely as a metaphor to be mined by high school English students in sophomore term papers year after year. But as nexus between the “very corny” trappings of life and the way we occasionally can’t help but fall for them ourselves, it also serves as a perfect reflection of the place Catcher in the Rye has staked out in the canon.