And a very different interview which also belongs here...Irish Times has just published this article on the Writers Studio director Philip Schultz. It highlights the irony of his winning the Pulitzer last year for an anthology called "Failure" (based on the "failure" that was his father's life).
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Springtime’s coming out onto the streets of New York and with it New Yorkers and tourists in their thousands are coming out onto the streets too, flouncing as-yet-un-sunned bodies of all shapes onto the Christopher Street Pier, cramming into the square by Bleeker playground to scoff overrated Magnolia cupcakes, getting brushed if they're lucky by falling white pear tree blossom (there are lots of blossoming pear trees which is funny because I don't remember them from last year - these ones don't bear pears apparently, which makes me wonder if they can really call themselves pear trees), congregating at sidewalk cafés, photographing each other in front of much-photographed New York symbols – yellow taxis, police cars, jagged skylines. This afternoon I lay for a while in a Sunday sun-daze on the pier. From there the statue of liberty looked, as I scribbled in my diary at the time, like a misshapen missile pointed at a jaunty angle to the sky. Its trajectory was destined to descend somewhere in the Gobi desert. That is to say, off whatever its target may have been.
The previous weekend I ambled further down the river in search of a quiet place to finish reading Last Exit to Brooklyn. (Accomplished, in North Park, a patch of presumably reclaimed land jutting out into the river just North of the World Trade Center site – an incongruously calm place to finish that book with its relentless riff of violence). On the way, in an echo of the Cambria play, I happened to pass the place where Frederick Douglass’ boat came in when he first arrived in New York. A plaque marking the spot is inscribed with a quote from an article he wrote in July 1848, after attending the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls: “Standing as we do on the watchtower of human freedom, we cannot be deterred from an expression of our appreciation of any movement, however humble, to improve and elevate the character and condition of any members of the human family.”
A little girl walked passed me with her Dad towards the river while I was reading the plaque. “That’s the ocean!” she said.
“No, that’s a river,” he replied.
She insisted. “No, it’s the ocean.”
“Well it connects to the ocean, but here it’s a river.”
“It is the ocean.”
I liked her persistence and her foresight.
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Weekends have got pretty nocturnal recently – time for a spring-time shift to more diurnal habits, getting out sailing again, venturing on excursions outside the city. There’s been one of Sam’s epic dinner parties that ended with survivors finding themselves on a West Village bar-hop till the early hours, Ji’s Colombian fundraiser in Brooklyn, slam-poetry at Nuyorican Poets Café and last night, many deliciously sweet caipirinhas at D’s…
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My bedroom window slides down to close itself unless there’s something stuck in the bottom to hold it open. So I’m using books, different ones depending on how much I want to keep the window open by. Belize Lonely Planet guide for just a little gap of air, Satanic Verses to let in more.
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