Charcuterie Vol. 31

This month I read Wild Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV by Solvej Balle, Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, The Lincoln Highway by Amour Towles, and maybe something else yet to be determined.

In shorter things, I unearthed a printed copy of Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting,” in which she describes inventing an excuse—the purchase of a pencil—to go out walking in the evening: “As the fox hunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of horses, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say, ‘Really I must buy a pencil,’ as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling the streets of London.

This essay was a deeply pleasurable gust of chill air at the start of summer. As always I love the way that Woolf plays with the interiority / exteriority paradox of life. She describes perfectly the sudden suffocation that sometimes descends when one has spent too much time in their regular environs, as well as the joy of street rambling anonymity, as well as the comfort of returning home.

This essay reminded me of that famous Vonnegut quote about going out to buy an envelope. Earlier this week I read a random personal essay here on Substack titled “What I Think About New York” or something like that. In it, our author who recently moved from Paris shares that back in the city of lights she would find herself going to an unnecessarily distant grocery store just for the opportunity to walk through the city, but that in New York “if you’re doing that there’s something deeply wrong with you.” This is such an illegally garbage take that I almost got in an internet fight with this sanctimonious idiot! My grandmother travels ~80 blocks to buy Amish eggs on the Upper West Side. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!

Anyway it made me realize how much I love walking around in New York—arguably the greatest city on earth for walking around (Paris included). The other day I saw a couple on a dirt bike—he was revving the engine and her bottle blonde hair was wavy in the humidity. It was on 14th and 6th, and they looked so damn cool it made me laugh out loud.

I also read this piece by Ben Lerner about his experience with open-heart surgery, which greatly moved me. I don’t know much about Ben Lerner and feel like he has a loyal gaggle of followers and an equally loyal cabal of haters, but I will be thinking about this essay for a long time to come. It never occurred to me how heart breaking it must be to have this type of surgery, to have your heart stopped and restarted. Something that would have been unimaginable say 200 years ago, but that now happens to 2 million people a year.

And last but not least, I read two craft-y essays. One was by Linda Gregg on “The Art of Finding,” which was assigned to me in the poetry workshop I’m taking, but that is worth reading for anyone who creates art or who wants to live an artful life. The other, called “My Truck Desk” by Bud Smith expounds on the joys of working on the job. Well, stealing in between moments on the job to not do the job and to write instead. Very much looking forward to his next novel (next year).

That’s all, love you, bye!

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by Tom Robbins

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