The Paris Review's Blog, page 696

Butlers for Everyone, and Other News

A Danish cartoon from 1901.

Spurred by Downton Abbey, fabulously wealthy people around the world have decided they must have butlers, and they must have them now. Jeeves must be rolling in his grave—even if he was technically a valet, and a fictional one at that.
“The 1920s and 1930s in France were a moment when extreme ideological currents swept unstable, marginal, even criminal figures out of their ordinary recesses into positions of remarkable prominence.” Sounds awfully familiar…
A helpful (or at least mildly diverting) graph shows us how often a given letter occurs at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Y is nearly always at the end, never the start. Poor Y.
In the forties, a woman named Frances Glessner Lee revolutionized crime-scene investigation with one simple innovation: dioramas.
“After months of cleaning and painstaking scientific investigation, art specialists in Britain have apparently concluded a decades-long debate over the authenticity of a self-portrait by Rembrandt, saying on Tuesday that it was genuine.”
Your next home: a decommissioned Boeing 727.

Relativistic Finesse

Above is an advertisement from our seventieth issue—published in the summer of 1977—for Deep Foot and its sequel, Deeper Foot, two apparently seminal avant-garde novels. Click the photo to see the ad in full; it merits scrutiny.

Anyone seriously seeking Truth, Love, and a real and true ALTERNATIVE to the deadness and shallowness of the American Dream, rather than merely seeking people or trips to become dependent upon: THESE BOOKS ARE FOR YOU!

“This generation may hide these masterpieces under their beds,” the ad goes on, “but the next generation will more likely use them like a Bible!”

I’m of that next generation, and I can tell you: we most certainly would, if we only knew where to find them.

Information on the whereabouts of Richard M. Vixen has been hard to come by—we appreciate any tips you can offer. We do know that Avant-Garde Creations, of Eugene, Oregon, was in existence as recently as 1981, when the company took out an ad in Yoga Journal—a questionnaire, in fact, whose first prompt is “Are you conscious of a deep desire to be in an environment in which you could choose to be with any of 20 (or so) people, all of whom you love and who love you?”

Evidence indicates that Mr. Vixen wrote, in addition to the series advertised here, The Game of Orgy (with a foreword by Robert Rimmer) and The Magic Carpet and the Cement Wall, for Kids from 8 to 92. A rhapsodic Amazon review of Deep Foot describes it thus:

A triumphant, voluptuous novel about a woman's enlightenment. A mercilessly erotic, tenderly passionate journey into love and awareness.

When Lotta escaped from her prison of beliefs (about what she thought her life was supposed to be about) she found a whole new world of love and beauty awaiting her, and she fell in love with … Everyone!

A dissenting critic writes, “Reading it felt a bit like watching a non-lethal crash between two clown cars happen in slow motion.”

The Saddest Sound in the World

Gustave Caillebotte, Jeune homme au piano, 1876.

Not long ago, I happened to pop into a candy store to buy a bag of Dutch licorice shaped like wooden shoes. “That’s a big bag,” said the girl who works there, indicating my burdens. “What’s in it?”

“Oh,” I said, “some antidepressants and a Snuggie.”

I think it was the saddest sentence I’ve ever uttered. The Snuggie was for my dad, but even so.

The next weekend, I went home to visit my parents. We went to some concert they wanted me to see. It was a rainy, blustery day, and I was dressed in my favorite pair of high-waisted windowpane-check wool trousers, which I got at a thrift store about five years ago. My dad met me at the train station. “What interesting pants, Sade,” he said. “They look like something from a nineteenth-century minstrel show.”

The concert in question was part of a free series at a local mansion, endowed by an elderly eccentric. My parents are regulars, but this was my first time. The mansion was liberally sprinkled with oil landscapes and filled with old people. The loner who’s always shooting hoops at the local playground was there. The pianist, who was quite the consummate entertainer, entered in white tie and tails and played some very bravura Liszt. Then he exited and returned in a red velveteen jacket—he played popular tunes, Liberace fashion, in a variety of jazzy styles. He cracked wise and delighted the assembled company.

Afterward, there was a small bar serving wine and iced tea. The hungry crowd attacked a few poor waiters every time they emerged from the kitchen bearing miniature spring rolls and tiny ham biscuits. My mother engaged the pianist in intense conversation about the new organ in Alice Tully Hall, which saga my mother has followed closely and about which the pianist, having inaugurated the original organ, cherished passionate feelings. A couple of people remembered me from the time my mom roped me into a panel discussion at the local library titled “What the Heck Is a Blog?”

Back home again, my father called me into my parents’ room, where he was watching baseball. He pointed to the foot of the bed where, sure enough, the Snuggie was. “It’s become a very important part of my lifestyle,” he said.

“It’s true,” concurred my mother, coming in behind me. “It’s risen to the top of the pantheon, with Big Boy.” (Big Boy is a large square pillow favored by my father for TV watching.) This was high praise indeed. And I was glad to see her mouth was rimmed with the telltale remnants of a Dutch licorice wooden shoe. I, for my part, was on antidepressants. So, something for everyone.

Blinded By the Light

The Boss comes to Mohegan Sun.

Room 704 at Mohegan Sun, a gleaming casino and resort hotel on an Indian reservation in Connecticut, has a phone in the bathroom, right next to the toilet, and it’s hard not to wonder what kinds of calls might wriggle down the line. Are they orders for room service? Broadcasts of wins and losses at the slots? Wheezing pleas from depleted souls in search of a semblance of breathable fresh air?

The big picture windows in the room, which is appointed with a luxe king bed and an authoritative TV, are of a type that cannot be opened, and any attempt at Mohegan Sun to venture outside among earthly elements is met with a kind of bewildered disdain. The best you can do is to sit out on a bench by the carport, where valets prevail. If you have a car, they will gladly park or retrieve it for you. If you want to simply sit and take in the evening air, they will look at you as if you’re insane.

The valets had a lot of cars to tend a few weeks ago, on the occasion of a pair of concerts by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The Mohegan Sun arena, a two-hour bus ride from New York City, has become a regular tour stop for a long list of momentous musical acts: Prince, Bob Dylan, Jay Z, Taylor Swift. The roster goes on, with more of a caste otherwise accustomed to playing settings bigger than a ten-thousand-seat room.

The Boss very much among them. “Did you lose your money?” he asked upon taking the stage on Sunday, the second part of his two-night stand. “You must’ve lost your money. If you didn’t lose your money, then we wouldn’t be here.” Springsteen, coming clean with the ways casinos use show-biz happenings as a loss-leader for all the other entertainment they shill, somehow sold this as a winsome arrangement for all involved, with a beneficent grin signaling a sense of solidarity that was convincing in spite of the usurious logic at play. “Either way,” he continued, “we’re going to make you feel lucky tonight.”

And so they did. The set launched off with “Roll of the Dice,” played for the first time on Springsteen’s current tour and by no means insignificant in a casino setting. Then “Leap of Faith,” continuing the theme, and then a cover of Van Halen’s “Jump,” ditto. It’s moves like these—shrewd and more clever than they need to be—that make the ritual of a live Springsteen show impressive even to a casual observer. To the much more heavily represented legions of evangelical fans, they represent scripture in set-list form.

The day had not started quite so illuminatingly. Though no more so than others of comparable size (read: huge!), Mohegan Sun is very much a casino, with all attendant bells and baubles and spirit-sucking sights. People in extreme states of solitude shuffled around in great abundance. A woman around eighty pushed a wheelchair in front of her, empty except for her own oxygen tank. Weight, on old and young alike, was not shy about making a show of itself. In the Brookstone, one of many shops arranged along a winding corridor, a couple reclined in electric-massage chairs, their ample bellies jiggling. In the center of it all was a grand waterfall issuing a ceaseless and inescapable torrent of noise—an impediment to processing what the eye could all too clearly see.

Springsteen, inside the arena, offered reprieve. With the E Street Band comprising around eighteen for the night, he wound his way through a twenty-seven-song set that made a good case for rock ’n’ roll as a galvanizing force, no matter its battered standing in the wider world beyond. The Boss controlled it all, sometimes with just a mic, sometimes with a tambourine, more often than not behind a worn Fender Telecaster whose mangled top looked like it might have been the victim of a shark attack.

He has a strange presence, at once no bullshit and all show. It would be nice to mean anything half as much as he seems to mean everything. A little more discernment wouldn’t hurt—Springsteen concerts do not lack for more melodrama and gloss than would be ideal—but it’s easy to see, for those intensely devoted fans, why he makes such a rewarding object of adulation.

Early in the set, after just four songs (however lengthily extended), Springsteen went into the crowd to gather signs bearing requests. As per custom, he gathered a bunch handed up to him, on poster board mostly, and flipped through to find one to his liking. The first was scrawled by a little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten, asking for an oddity: “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” Springsteen smiled, turned back to the band, and they played it. Not just a couple bars, but a full-throttle five-minute version of it complete with buildups, breakdowns, sax blasts, false endings—everything that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band bring to bear.

It was May 18. A Christmas song with sleigh bells blared in an auditorium in a casino. The little girl must have been ecstatic. That it was only the seventh or eight most absurd occurrence of an otherwise fertile day made it no less special an occasion.  

Andy Battaglia is an arts writer in New York. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The National, Frieze, The Wire, The New Yorker, and more. Find him here.

Phantom Limb

Charles Ray’s Hinoki (2007) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Ed Bierman, via Flickr

Some six hundred years ago, a cypress tree fell—perhaps soundlessly—in central California. When the artist Charles Ray fell for it, circa 1996, he didn’t carve his initials into its bark; he made sure his love would endure.

Ray had the tree’s corpse removed, in pieces, to his studio in southern California. Silicone molds of it were taken, and a minutely articulate fiberglass model of the corpse was created. This fiberglass, in pieces, was sent to Osaka, Japan, to be used as a model by the master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices, who would carve a replica of the replica from strong young cypress. The physical product of Ray’s love for that tree—titled Hinoki, a transliteration of the Japanese for cypress—was completed in 2007, and is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, which is revving up for a retrospective of Ray’s work, to open in 2015.

Hinoki is a double of a double of a tree that was alive in ancient times. When we look at it, we look into the past. But conceptually, the work responds to what Ray found out about the likely future durability of a sturdy, young cypress: a healthy specimen should be very strong for about four hundred years, after which a “period of crisis” will go on for roughly two hundred years. (Hear, in your mind’s ear, how cracking and splitting punctuates great intervals of silence.) In a final extenuation, lasting approximately four hundred years, a tree like the one from which Hinoki is derived should lie in state, rotting toward the state of decomposition at which Ray discovered the original.

Hinoki will be around for a millennium. And a temperature-controlled gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago is no state of nature; in a rain-, snow-, lightning-, rodent-, disease- and worm-free environment, Hinoki could conceivably celebrate its one-hundred-thousandth birthday intact.

Alas, it seems that there’s no environment in which a tree or an image of a tree, even one which is already horizontal, is not in peril. An Art Institute staff member told me that at an alarming rate, viewers of Hinoki have bumped into and damaged one of the artwork’s thorniest protrusions, marked with an ellipse below.

Thus, in a sense, even museumgoers who may not be able to see the point of Hinoki are still liable to fall for it. Of course, the museum is right to be concerned about its liability for visitors’ pain and suffering, but Art Institute conservators are also worried that if viewers continue to collide with the work, the prong may break and fall some nine hundred years ahead of Ray’s schedule.

So they have removed—the verb amputated tempts me, but it’s not quite right, because the limb is detachable by design, to facilitate transportation of Hinoki—and replaced that length of cypress with a synthetic prosthesis, a replica of a replica of a replica made in Art Institute workshops with a 3D printer.

Because I too have fallen for it, I wonder if Hinoki suffers from that syndrome we call phantom limb. As I write, part of the tree lives a phantom existence among other precious objects, wholes and fragments, deep in storage and properly indexed safety. It may be found and reinstalled if, over the next hundred thousand years, an occasion calls for the whole of Hinoki to be present.

Daniel Bosch is Senior Editor at Berfrois .

Eugene Goostman Is Not What He Seems, and Other News

This boy is a machine. A screenshot from a test conducted by the Royal Society of London.

“In 1919 John Middleton Murry was appointed editor of the London literary magazine The Athenaeum. Shortly afterward, in a rare case of felicitous nepotism, he hired his wife Katherine Mansfield to be its fiction reviewer … from her very first column she’s frank about the terrible ephemerality of most fiction, and the trap both reviewers and readers can fall into by hitching themselves to a brand new novel’s rapidly dying star … Mansfield openly wonders why anyone should bother with new novels at all.”
Eugene Goostman, a computer program masquerading as a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy, has become the first artificial intelligence to pass the Turing Test: in five-minute text conversations, it fooled more than 30 percent of humans into thinking it was a person.
Why did a beluga whale named Noc try to emulate human speech? “He sounds, on first hearing, at least, less like a person talking than a delirious drunk humming an atonal tune through a tissue-covered comb … But the science behind Noc’s mimicry and its apparent motives reveals something far more urgent and haunting: the spectral outpourings of a young white whale calling to us across both time and the vast linguistic divide between humans and the other animals.”
And while we’re discussing animals, “What kind of a person looks upon the world’s largest land animal—a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies—and instead of saying ‘Wow!’ says something like ‘Where's my gun?’” Wells Tower reports from one of the last elephant hunts in Botswana.
The most transgressive song of 1909: “If we listen closely to ‘I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!’ we may hear a surprising lesson: that the culture-quaking shocks, the salaciousness and transgression we associate with blues and jazz and rock and hip-hop, first arrived in American pop many years earlier.”

A Horse Named Paris Review

Go baby go!

With the Belmont Stakes upon us, today is an apt day to revisit a our Spring 1976 issue, in which George Plimpton made an astonishing equine discovery:

This office received a letter from an English writer who reported that at the racetrack he had put a fiver on a horse named Paris Review … We have looked into the matter. Paris Review, a chestnut with a handsome star on his forehead, was born in 1972 in the U.S.A. (by Noholme II out of Pride of Paris), bought by John Hay Whitney’s Greentree Stables at the Saratoga Stakes, and named by Mr. Whitney soon after.

Paris Review, pictured above, may never have enjoyed the cultural primacy of your California Chromes, your Secretariats, or even your Mister Eds—maybe it was that missing definite article holding him back—but he had his day in the sun. In his second year, he won, placed, and showed in a series of races in England. After that, he was bought as a stud and sent to Australia, where presumably he had a lot of fun.

Plimpton closes the piece by “passing on to the Australians a few suggestions of titles of poems and stories ‘out of’ the literary Paris Review which could be applied to Paris Review’s offspring”:

Looking Backward; Last Comes the Raven; Ho Ho Ho Caribou; Phenomenal Feelings; Travel Dust; Chest of Energy; The Flying Fix (!); Mister Horse. If there were not a limit imposed by the Racing Commission on the number of letters possible in a horse’s name, we would offer these two poem titles, Going Downtown to Buy Some Pills, and (our favorite) Nimble Rays of Day Bring Oxygen to the Blood.

Read the essay here, and gamble responsibly this evening.

What We’re Loving: Genealogy, Pathogenecity, Bloomsbury

Detail from Chuck Close’s Emma, which appears on the cover of this month’s Harper’s.

I relish hearing my mother’s crazy tales about her forebears, many of whom got kicked out various European countries, throughout history. And then there’s her maternal grandfather, about whom the stories are legion—they begin with him leaving home at fifteen to fight with Pancho Villa. I often wonder what he and I have in common, whether there is more than blood that connects us. It’s that impulse that partly explains the contemporary obsession with ancestry, as I’ve learned from Maud Newton’s absorbing essay in the June issue of Harper’s. Newton’s research into her family tree has led to revelations about her lineage, but by and large her search seems directed at the branches on which she is borne—her parents—and it describes the central tension in the modern hunt for ancestry: the desire to explain or to explain away certain aspects or ourselves, but also to make some kind of sense of where we come from, without losing sight of who we are as individuals. “We come from our parents, who came from their parents, who descended, as the Bible would put it, from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers,” Newton writes, “and then we enter the world and we become ourselves.” —Nicole Rudick

Angelica Garnett was Bloomsbury royalty: the daughter of Vanessa Bell and niece of Virginia Woolf, she grew up at Charleston, the colorful East Sussex farmhouse that became the movement's literal and spiritual home. Until the age of eighteen, Garnett believed herself to be the daughter of the art critic Clive Bell; in fact, she was the product of her mother’s affair with the artist Duncan Grant, who often made his home at Charleston. At twenty-four, she married fifty-year-old David Garnett—Duncan Grant’s former lover. It should come as no surprise that Garnett’s 1984 memoir Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood is somewhat … ambivalent. She describes a world ostentatiously devoted to freedom yet still fundamentally hidebound by Victorian convention—in which she and other children were largely casualties of an adult experiment. Even years later, the author’s anger at her parents’ self-absorption is palpable, and she is not necessarily sympathetic herself. It can be uncomfortable reading. But to anyone interested in either the romance or reality of Bloomsbury, I'd recommend it highly. —Sadie Stein

My fiancée and I joke that bacteria and viruses are actually alien life-forms that have been here for billions of years, lying in wait for the chance to wipe humans out. (Look under a microscope and try to disagree.) But in Ed Yong’s fascinating look at bacteria’s pathogenicity, bacteria attack us more by accident, not to assassinate us—people are just “civilian casualties in a much older war” between microbes. Yong writes, “We’re not central actors in the dramas that affect our lives. We’re not even bit players. We are just passers-by, walking outside the theatre and getting hit by flying props.” —Justin Alvarez

Anne Carson’s poem “The Albertine Workout,” which appears in this week’s London Review of Books, is an ineffable marvel—it seems to have emerged from the same winking achronological wormhole that Barthelme’s “Eugenie Grandet” came out of more than forty years ago. —Dan Piepenbring

I was eight when the Monica Lewinsky story broke, and all I remember is the jokes. The story is full of all sorts of absurdities: the ten-month-old stain on the dress, the length and cost of the Starr report. Renata Adler’s 1998 exegesis of the affair, published in Vanity Fair, is the best thing to read on the subject. She uses her typical stone-cold nerve to unravel all the ridicule and hypocrisy in the story. It moves from the ridiculous to the sublime, and sentences like “[Linda] Tripp does not know if [Vincent] Foster likes or dislikes onions” become more essential than you could have imagined. —Anna Heyward

In anticipation of next week’s World Cup, I recommend a striking and powerful Brazilian film, Petra Costa’s Elena. The most-watched documentary in Brazil last year, the film had its American release last week. It depicts Costa revisiting the charged locations and documents of the life of her older sister, Elena, who committed suicide after moving from Brazil to New York to become an actress. Costa culls material from her past, including a vast archive of her sister’s homemade videos, and interweaves it with new footage of herself and her family exploring the lost world of Elena to craft a profoundly personal and artful cinematic memoir. The editing brilliantly tangles the images of the two sisters, illuminating their shared aesthetics as well as their ultimately divergent paths. One scene that really struck me, in the way it pushes the boundary between documentary and constructed fiction, features dozens of Ophelia-esque female figures floating in the water in Brazil, capturing how, in Costa’s words, “pain and grievance turn to water … dissolved into memory.” —Chantal McStay

Contaminated

Getting back on the skateboard.

Not long ago I went to lunch with a gracious, well-intentioned editor who was not, I quickly realized, interested in publishing my book, the worst possible pitch for which is: “It’s a middle-grade novel about peak oil.” Having tabled my hopes like a used napkin, somewhere between the Lebanese tea and the shaved fennel, the editor asked what I’d rather be doing with my days, “in an ideal world.” I was surrounded by sandwich-eating professionals and suffocating, psychically, at the thought of being one: that’s when I remembered kickflips.

I’d given up skateboarding when I was fifteen, after breaking my wrist—I hadn’t been on a board since. When, shortly after graduating high school, an acquaintance of mine went pro, the specter of his early success strengthened my resolve not to skate: Why confront my talentlessness when it was more easily avoided? But at lunch that day I realized I was thirty years old and viscerally hating myself for matching the workaday worst of Lower Manhattan in my light-blue button-up and tan oxfords.

So I started to skate again, taking mostly to a ten-block loop in Brooklyn that I call the Greenpoint Skate Lab, a toxic hat-tip to the ecological impact tours that roll through the Lab while I’m there most Saturdays. It’s a deeply unhappy spot, physically and psychically—haunted by the same oil spill (“three times worse than Exxon Valdez”) that, at home, a few blocks away, I only ever remember after having drunk from the bathroom faucet. As a reflective-vested guide explained to a small, inexplicable crowd on one of my first days out, a drunk driver once crashed through the barricade on Apollo Street where it dead ends next to the BP oil refinery. The car dove nose-first into the shallows of Newtown Creek. The water was so contaminated with oil that it was on fire for days.

Unsurprisingly, the Lab is also where the local BMX kids go to smoke and sell pot, and where you sometimes see cop cars idling, keys in the ignition, as their drivers relieve themselves against the encroaching ruin. It’s the kind of place you want to punish, where you become slightly more open to the realities and rituals of flagellatory living. Somehow, these environs made it easier to bully myself—after months of bruised heels and Achilles tendonitis, I kept going back.

It helped that I could measure my progress with metrics like number of scabs collected, number of inches ollied. There was an objective truth to the sport; unlike my writing, my powerslides were self-validating. At home, a printout of my manuscript lay untouched on my desk.

“What’s it like to fall in your thirties?” my friend Scott asked after seeing one of my clumsy skate pics. “Like, really fall.”

Terrible. Exhilarating.

After a happy summer of fastidiously sweeping the dead end of loose asphalt and Snapple caps, though, I finally gave up on the Greenpoint Skate Lab. Not because I’d had any luck on the novel front—I was, at this point, nominally “revising” (i.e., skating two to three hours a day)—but because one day I arrived to find the charred chassis of what looked like a Civic in the center of the once-manicured block, covered in a sickly beige foam and radiating shattered glass and plastic.

From then on, the Lab belonged to the Fire Department and their weekly drills, which consisted mainly of setting a beater on fire and then smashing it into its component parts.

It was just as well. It hadn’t been the same since I made sustained eye contact with a man in the backseat of a parked sedan. He was, I realized belatedly, a john, mid-transaction, and I’d been practicing my pop shove-its next to him—cursing loudly and with abandon—for at least an hour before I felt him glaring. Sunbaked and full of Zebra® Cakes, I’d started to feel tough and acclimated to the empty streets—but after that, I couldn’t skate without looking over my shoulder for his runny, Ecklebergian eyes.

Though I had to leave the Lab behind, I wasn’t about to give up on skating again. At this point in my descent into action sports, having subscribed to “the magazine” (Thrasher) and purchased a handful of skate vids, I had more favorite skaters than authors. Lizard King (referred to, in my household, as BigBizLiz, his Instagram handle), Spencer “Monsanto Kills” Hamilton, Aaron “Jaws” Homoki, and a fourteen-year-old king-of-the-world who goes by “Baby Scumbag.” In graduate school, I always said I was into onomastics—the study of names and name origins—and I told myself that possibly my obsession with skateboarding was academic, that I was more interested in their myth making than their varial flips.

Meanwhile, as fall and then winter set in, I layered up and expanded into an industrial zone on the far side of the BQE, specifically an abandoned build site on the corner of Stewart and Cherry, my attention drawn by a mystifying ENYA tag that looked like it came from the same doomed romantic who had scrawled “Go Away, Evil” in looping girls’ cursive. Having dragged a parking block to the center of the floating slab, I avoided thinking about my edits. The market, I had been advised by a friend, wasn’t really looking for dystopias anymore. Clearing my head, I practiced boardslides as crews demolished the surrounding lots, my ragged breath hanging visibly in air that was sweet with rot from a nearby dump.

I never did perfect my slappies, though, and Stewart and Cherry got fenced the week before my book sold.

It still needed edits and a sequel, but as eager as I was to get started on those, I gerrymandered the Lab again, this time settling closer to Greenpoint proper. Skating next to a row of sound stages in the shadow of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, amid understated signage for the cast and crew of The Good Wife, it was a relief to cloister myself from the increasing anxiety of my writing life. A few blocks over, a bar blasted Bob Marley’s Legend, and, popping ollies and manualing down the empty street, I shamelessly emoted.

Every little t’ing…

“Hey, come’a this biker bar,” someone shouted, holding a thick hand, chapped from overwashing, in front of my chest, forcing me into a skidding stop.

Startled, I was expecting one of the homeless guys who bivouacked throughout the Lab, but it was a muscled, older man in pressed and faded jeans. “Lemme borrow that board,” he said, grabbing my palm and pulling it to his chest in a tight squeeze. “Just kidding, lemme buy you a drink at this biker bar over here.”

He gestured magnanimously toward the eight towering, scintillating tanks of the sewage treatment plant, happy to have met a friend, or a victim, or maybe both. He was the shambling Gatsby of Greenpoint’s sludgy eggs, stepping up, when no one else would, to scare me back to my laptop and the relative safety of Literature, which—typically self-absorbed—hadn’t even realized I was gone.

Nick Courage is the author of The Loudness, which will be published in 2015.

Addendum

Albert Roosenboom, The Tempting Cake (detail), nineteenth century.

On Wednesday, I mentioned to you a certain menu description. This description caused something of an existential crisis. I wept; I ranted; I pondered existence. But life is not just a vale of tears!

I might still be lying in bed, paralyzed by the enormity of everything, had I not been saved by yet another piece of food-related writing. This one came courtesy of a slightly outdated gourmet-store catalogue I picked up at the airport last week. I say “outdated” because it contained a number of Easter and Passover treats available for purchase. I always find looking at food relaxing, but when I opened it, I found that this catalogue was much more than just pretty pictures and appetizing captions. It was riveting.

The prose was bold, even dashing. Also, bizarre. Here is a description of all-butter croissants:

Boasting French connections of the cuisine nature, they immediately bring to mind afternoons on the Seine. Indeed, it is their verity that affords them this intensely delicious recall.

On a certain flowering tree, sold in the garden center:

Just in time for Easter, these thespians make a gorgeous, ornamental impact with their mounded, weeping habit and abundant early spring blooms—a dress rehearsal, indeed!

But here is my favorite of all:

Our Easter cakes are super dare we say “cute”? Well of course we dare, because they are decorated with with icing grass and malted chocolate eggs! See? CUTE!

I love the deliriously unfettered oddness of these captions. I love that someone had fun with them. I love that no one who encounters them can simply read them and move on—you have to stop and reread and think, Someone did this! And then, yes, wonder if that cake is, indeed, cute. I’ll be the judge of that, I thought. I was irritated and challenged and intrigued. It was the way I had once imagined Internet dating could be: knowing in a few words that you had met a kindred spirit; wanting to immediately know everything about them, yet feeling you could guess the important things already.

I went to the Web site to try to find the cute cake, but it was too late. We’ll have to take the caption writer’s word for it. But know that, whatever the objective truth, one thing is for sure: as the stalker at the end of Stolen Kisses would have it, “les gens sont formidables.” (Boasting French connections of a cinematic nature.)