To allow myself this pace, I discover a tension between freedom and impatience, that is, in the slow, I find a fresh inventiveness and sovereignty from the relentless influence of our economic system. Though within this, I must temper and unlearn my own fixed haste at generating creative work at a rapid measure.
A good park bench leaves me in a state perched somewhere between nostalgia and eager anticipation. Where once I was excited by the profanities engraved on wood, I now find, as a 40-year-old, that I’m more appreciative of each bench’s quiet stoicism, the way they’re willing to wait out their turn in every weather, remaining available to all-comers. Like a good book or piece of music, a park bench allows for a sense of solitude and community at the same time, a simultaneity that’s crucial to life in a great city.
“LaserWriter II” is a screenshot of a less gentrified East Village in the 20th century’s final decade, with punk rockers squatting in an Avenue B apartment, a broke intern reselling CDs to Mondo Kim’s on St. Marks Place and well-honed observations about Tekserve and its people. It’s a crisp redraw of a time when Apple Computer was the rebellious choice, poor rebels could afford to live in the Big Apple and — in more ways than one — people found themselves offline.
At the end of “One Friday in April,” Donald Antrim frames a domestic scene: his wife, Marija, plays the piano while he sits “on the living room sofa, writing to you.” It’s a small moment, intimate yet generous in the way it seeks to include us. It also seems to represent a point of closure — or as near as Antrim’s brief and devastating memoir gets to one.
In a letter addressed to the reader in her book “Dear Memory,” the poet Victoria Chang explains why she chose the epistolary format: These letters were a way for her to “speak to the dead, the not-yet-dead.” They would steer her toward her parents, her history and, ultimately, “toward silence. Toward death.”
Three reasons you should read Susan Orlean’s “On Animals” even if, like me, you are a faithful subscriber to The New Yorker and eagerly consumed nearly all of the essays when they first appeared during the more than 25 years this collection spans: (1) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (2) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (3) Every essay in the book is magnificent.
The book is all about boiling life down to what really matters, and its simplicity is part of its bountiful charm. It’s remarkable, really, that Doughty could come up with this many happy-making things. The book is not short and the font is not large, yet page after page, he continues to remind us how many reasons we have to smile.