Status Updates From Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, ...

Aunt Ann had struggled to forgive my father for his eulogy of her son sixteen years earlier. About my cousin, the closest thing I had to a brother, my father delivered a rambling monologue about life and poetry and suicide that included the line “little fucker took himself out.”

My father never did know how to relate to me. He tried some things that made sense and some that didn't. When I was in kindergarten, he typed up a bedtime story about a stuffed animal called Doctor Bear. The same year, he showed me Judgment at Nuremberg. I was so traumatized by the graphic concentration camp scenes that soon after, when I saw a Hasidic man on the street, I shrieked and said, “Oh no! Will he be okay?"

There is nothing quite like walking around New York City three-drinks drunk after a heavy snowfall. It feels like waking up, finally, to find that you’re in the center of the universe. That is the feeling characters always have in Dawn Powell novels and in Replacements songs. You’re alive. You’re dead. You’re both at once.

He lived in the glamorous swirl the gifted lonely can invent in a great city.

so far I’m not sure. it’s compelling of course and enjoyable, but the storytelling is circular which may be intentional but ends up feeling like she reordered the chapters halfway through editing the book and didn’t check for narrative consistency. And she’s always spelling out the most obvious bottom line. And pls don’t play woke and then lump in grace Hartigan with the other carousing members of the NYS

i havent had time to sit down and read and its really irritating me but whatevrr

i love this so far

really enjoying actually

reading everything but my loyola library books