In Which We Visit The Best Bookstores In New York

This is the first part of a two part series. You can find the second part here.

Off the Shelf

by BARBARA GALLETLY

All I ever really wanted was to read books and make more. So I came to New York in the fall of 2005, fresh out of college, to work in publishing. It took me some experience, time, work, therapy, and exploration to understand where I fit in. Also, shopping. My story, in bookstores:

Book Culture

I lived for six months on the Upper West Side, four blocks from Labyrinth, where I used to stand in the stacks and feel the weight of the knowledge I lacked. College had not gotten me where it seemed to have gotten everyone else — nobody appeared nearly as bewildered as I was. And I felt tremendously small, uninformed about life, not to mention sad and lonely. This place did not help. Every course offered at Columbia was neatly packed within — it didn't just seem that way.

I bought a bag despite the fact that I really had nothing to do with the place. I was not devastated when it changed ownership and its name to Book Culture. I had also moved on. This is a good place to go for anything that could be of academic interest. Also, if you want to find someone studying humanities at Columbia to date. Neither was quite compelling to me at the time.

Housing Works

I interviewed for many jobs I did not get, most memorably with a prodigy editor who had started as an event planner at the Housing Works bookstore in Soho. They mostly hosted big parties at the time, weddings of editors (who usually marry one another) and private book parties thrown by publishers, when they still did that kind of thing frequently. Anyway, that was how Prodigy Editor got started and when he suggested more books, The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe and Michael Korda's famed memoir of his life as an editor I made the trip to his old employer, where I found the titles easily. As I was wont to do, I soon fell in love with the world these books conjured, a phantom New York that has always been ten or fifty years old.

Housing Works is a beautiful space to read and to look for books donated famously by the famous writers of downtown Manhattan — a dwindling breed. An excellent selection of titles, beautiful editions of particularly special books, a copy of a book you're interested in reading. It is old school in a charming number of ways. If you have to go to SoHo for a coffee, meet at Housing Works because there's probably a place to sit. Also go there if you want to contribute to their program for homeless people fighting HIV.

Not long after my little love affair began I orated my way into a job assisting one of the most experienced and awesome book agents still standing. It was a dream to be working with real literature that I had studied in college, professional writers and translators, and to have my own office full of windows overlooking 57th Street, shelves of books I wanted to read. I was a book girl, going to be a really successful and ethical agent because I just loved books the most, literature over money. On the other hand, I got to wear blouses and answer the phone with someone else's name. Suffered lots of hangovers.

The Strand

I sometimes tell people that I refuse to go to the Strand Bookstore. I never find what I am looking for, and I hate to check my bag almost as much as I hate being chased by a security guard when I "forget" to check my bag. And it's crowded. But still, it fills a niche. It just has so many cheap books — it's like the Strand will sell literally anything. I think this works okay because the books stay cheap, the store is convenient, and it has tourist devotees still clamoring for The Catcher in the Rye.

It was also my gateway drug. I started going when I worked, briefly, at a textbook publisher nearby, just to see what was up. Of course I continued to go. The Strand might have anything and it's fun to check on what they do have, what is out of stock.

The Strand's discounted new books still always strike me as a little off but they provoke me enough that I remember I'm a person with convictions, opinions. For example, I love to read epic poems, so when I saw Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad at a discount on a table up front I went for it. So dull and unfortunate, it is the only book I can remember returning. On the upside, I didn't mind asking for my money back from the Strand.

Barnes & Noble, Union Square

This is the place I've seen Claire Messud, T.C. Boyle, and Jonathan Franzen give readings to tightly packed crowds. These are like going to concerts you'd otherwise pay for, for free. The catch is that you have to stand in the back in very high heels. It's uncomfortable and worth it.

All other times it is a nice place to be anonymous, since you won't see anyone you know there. Good for a cry before you get on the subway, where you would feel slightly less anonymous. Also, a youth hostel.

Walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, and you can figure out what the majority of people in this country are reading. They will have some good and some uninformed staff and a ton of books, but they also offer a bunch of options that appear to many to be redundant or stale. They simply aren't big enough to compete with the internet and make everyone happy, thanks to the infinite long tail legacy of book publishing. Their fault is that they tried. It worked for a while but the failure of "big box" bookstores is now logical. If you don't like Amazon you can now go to Walmart or Sam's Club for a similar, cheaper experience, or to a small local store. I don't think this is really a huge deal in the long run because let's face it: of course.

A more important issue, one of many problems with the big and sluggish book publishers that still flood Barnes & Noble with inventory, is that they are looking for ways to keep making money on books without thinking very hard about what books can really do for us or why, how to make them more important and to remind us that we invest in our own good when we invest in them. Instead they tend to think about how the manuscript they're offered is more or less like Three Cups of Tea meets Dewey the Library Cat — the important trends to pursue.

Yes, books still make money. But barring Harry Potter, figures don't grow from year-to-year like they used to and the enormous corporations that own publishers are not okay with the trend. So, as people do, publishers throw money at the problem and escalate the Crap Situation. Even Billy Joel knows his (expensively purchased) manuscript just shouldn't be published, while on the other hand it seems there have been discussions and panels about the death of the book at every publishing conference I've attended.

This exacerbates major publishers' inabilities to maintain identifiable identities (they're called The Big Six and really, their offerings are indistinguishable); causes a certain amount of difficulty in navigating their output, even if it's all you do; highlights the fact that even if you do find someone whose opinions you can trust (there are multitudes you may rely on) they may suggest something that is not easily at hand. I'm talking about the unmitigated flood of shit into our communal cultural archive, if I can even use those words, and the failure, on many levels, of publishers to act as cultural curators and to help readers sift through the morass of crap they produce.

Such a loss of identity and purpose, or the broadening of such things until their boundaries disappear, means publishers fail to offer helpful hints about what you might want, or what you might need based on your previous experiences. One publisher (okay, a smaller independent one, which makes it more sad) is known for Sudoku books and translations of literary fiction from Russian, but you might not be interested in both. The differences can be less superficially obvious too, trust me. And yes, there are exceptions (for example, FSG most of the time, an imprint like Twelve).

An author also proves unreliable: he moves from imprint to imprint, publisher to publisher, according to his sales figures or where his editor finds new work. Maybe the same author falls into decline in terms of quality as he becomes more popular (Salman Rushdie? Gasp!). You love Gary Shteyngart and would trust his advice, but you don't know why he has blurbed 8,000 books since you can't possibly read that many. You might not notice right away, or have good luck, but you will eventually become frustrated.

Lisa Pearson of Siglo Press pointed out that this leaves some space in the market for quality small independent publishers to curate purposeful and interesting lists of books, and thankfully there are a few potential Barney Rossets and people like the Borchardts out there now. But as William Gass puts it in "Culture, Self, and Society" (thank you Mr. Gass): "A culture morally and functionally fails which does not let its crazies, its artists and its saints, its scientists and politicians, claim, on occasion, a higher law than its own congresses can pass, traditions permit, or conscience conceive." Siglio and Other Press and Graywolf and Ugly Duckling are working hard, but we aren't exactly all doing our parts quite yet.

At the time I wasn't totally aware of the ways I was affected by my little world. The excellence of the work surrounding me, the boring routines it necessitated: I had begun to blur my boring daily work with its significance, at once expecting all books to be fantastic literature and thrummed down by requests for checks that were overdue, options clauses and e-book clauses, overlapping contracts and delivery dates. Publication of Beckett and Yourcenar and their forbears and philosophy and poetry became peripheral, abstract motivations, which was tremendously disillusioning.

But I also did things I loved to do: I read and read, but can't tell you what or why. I edited, learned names and roles. Reading Publishers Weekly to see who came up where was like reading a written description of Pop-a-Mole. Then it was really hard to sell anything, really even to find something I wanted to sell. I felt myself to be so small a cog. Worse, I was out of touch with what was going to happen. Declining sales plummeted. The oversized publishers became more gigantic, merging into even bigger companies that competed to lose millions of dollars on Keith Richards. Books about disabled pets living in libraries or saving their owners took over. Not that this was new, but it was newly killing my passion.

At a loss as to how to wage and win my own battle, I tried hard to refocus my reading, on submissions, or selling challenging books. The millions of them. I didn't read anything that had actually been published yet for months and months, and read a lot of terrible and wonderful things I could never sell. In really low moments of desperation I bought stacks of literary journals, and though I pored over them I retained nothing, thought too often about something from the Talk of the Town or who wrote it , and primarily read Jezebel while I was at my desk. I interviewed for editorial jobs worse than my own, and felt angry that I couldn't find something more effective to do, to feel more important or do more exciting work. And then I came back to the bookstore for inspiration — thank god it was expecting me.

St. Marks Bookshop

St. Marks Bookshop is the place to go if you have to be in the East Village, also a place to learn about something to teach yourself if you haven't been to graduate school in the humanities. The fairly small collection at St. Marks seems designed to draw a browser to essays, to French philosophers and criticism of literature or art. Very nice. I can't say I ever noticed any narrative-based work in there unless it's Sebald. They have a wonderful, tidy collection of journals and magazines that aren't always easy to find, even in New York. I don't know if you'd agree with me, but this store reminds me of like the last video store. A bunch of intellectual fellows with smart but very particular taste. Which is, after all, probably the most important thing to acknowledge.

McNally Jackson

Soho happens also to be home to another fantastic bookstore. McNally Jackson is a destination in itself, and since opening in 2004 has become, more and more, an exciting place for books. It's not just a beautiful space, or a warm one (it is both). It demonstrates an uncannily good sense of what's good. Amazingly, you can also now print books on demand at the store. In a recent interview Sarah McNally gave to Poets & Writers, she said, "It's a constant act of regeneration. If you stop, you're dead."

McNally Jackson hosts readings or talks and conversations between editors and writers almost every day of the week, which means that all walks of (good) writing have a voice here. One of the best things the store does is to bring in authors that are not terribly famous, not best sellers, and demonstrate the urgency and significance of their work. This is particularly true of poets they host: Forrest Gander, Maggie Nelson, Dorothea Lasky. I have learned about or gained an entirely new appreciation for several writers through McNally Jackson. And bought more than a few beautiful books.

McNally Jackson is probably the most successful, but it is demonstrative of the fact that quite a few little bookstores are succeeding. They offer books that appeal to the citizens of their neighborhoods, or to promote their neighbors (don't we all probably write sometime?), or take advantage of the fact that people want to read to learn, read new stories or influential stories. Their owners are cool, because they have the time and flexibility necessary to engage publishers of different sizes, and editors and neighbors, and their tastes develop with the writing that comes to them, and with the response to their offerings. They build your trust and prove their value to you, as curators of their own libraries, slowly over time, in presenting relevant options and encouraging you to think about why something just may be worth your energies. They expose you to what they, probably also your neighbors, are interested in, and maybe introduce you to one another. And they demonstrate that it still makes sense to ask someone you trust for help with a personal problem.

As McNally Jackson attests, the well-curated bookstore is no longer a thing of the past, objectively doomed to failure. It returns from near extinction (if you're to trust trade publications) to fill a more and more essential role, returning culture to books. Booksellers are proving consistently that a customer will seek out a reliable personal experience in the form of their advice, which is entirely related to a sentiment of community, mutual interest of neighbors, a desire to know more but also to connect. Conversations about books return, their contents, the communities we form based on common opinions or arguments.

Don't get me wrong, I know the sales numbers are down overall, at least from time to time. But at the same time, small bookstores are still opening, and they aren't all closing. They probably offer used books, and e-books on their websites. But they limit their offerings. They provide a counterbalance to the unbounded void of too-much-to-handle. And they are quick to adapt to new technologies, to come up with new ways to reach customers.

BookCourt

From the Upper West Side, I had moved to Crown Heights. No bookstores nearby in 2006, and I don't know of any now either. But anyway, soon after (the hot water didn't work and feral cats kept me from sleeping) I moved to Brooklyn Heights, which was almost like moving back to Manhattan but more suburban of me. There was a used bookstore on Montague Street, and a Barnes & Noble on Court. The former closed in the three-year period I lived nearby, the latter remains as it was then.

The best place to go was BookCourt. It was small, with fiction and local books and essay collections upstairs and a little section of travel books and something else (sports?) down a little dark staircase. I went often, to check out the selection, snobbed around and judged it a little Jonathan Lethem-y for me, and often left to buy what I wanted at Barnes & Noble, which felt kind of awful. Since then Bookcourt has grown into the adjacent storefront and its offerings have expanded. I started to trust the store more — a good decision, since it clued me in to some of what I was missing in midtown Manhattan.

It is special inside — I think there's something of a gallery in its neat organization and ample floor space; and it is very current. Bookcourt has an excellent range of important new books, but most interesting is the small section of the store's own monthly best sellers, and they are sold at a discount. These are normally great books or provocative ones; a lot of Brooklyn editors and writers live nearby or visit, or otherwise participate in the community here. Still lots of literature from Brooklyn, its writers and small presses, but I appreciate that more now. Paula Fox! Archipelago, Ugly Duckling!

BookCourt now hosts very popular readings and literary journal release parties (lol, this is a huge deal). Some of the booksellers are now themselves full-blown literary personalities, though they might leave it to colleagues to try to sell you their books. Or not. Lacking a better metaphor, I think of it still as the tip of the iceberg, if the iceberg is the interesting stuff going on in Brooklyn.

Adam's/Unnameable Books

Around the time BookCourt started seeming more important to me, Adam's Books opened and then became Unnameable Books. Adam was a friend of my college boyfriend who painted the ceiling and helped build bookshelves, so I felt personally estranged and also connected. I had seen The Idiot's Guide to Owning a Small Business (or something like that) in Adam's hands a few months before, and I was awed by the store's quick success. What a book. A couple of years ago Adam moved across Flatbush to Vanderbilt, just with the help of volunteers (he reimbursed them with pizza). He tapped into the literary community of Park Slope (much of which had relocated from Fort Greene, and which has now become in some cases the literary community of Prospect Heights) unless it actually tapped into him. He is a poet, and friend to many poets, and he has produced some excellent and popular readings especially when it's warm out in the pebbly backyard of his store. He writes about these in a truly excellent newsletter.

He sells old and new books, and his is the only place I've asked to order me something that wasn't in stock anywhere else. How weird to have done that, especially since I think it was just a few months ago. I definitely recommend The Owl by Sedegh Hedayat, which I think they now stock.

Freebird

On the way to Red Hook, probably to get the best chocolate cake or plants or vintage jewelry, but still in Carroll Gardens on Columbia Street, Freebird lies in wait. The store sells some excellent used books. It has been run since 2007 by Peter Miller, who is also a book publicist and can probably be credited with the store's reputation for a cool collection of New York-themed books (it sounds cheesy but it's more fun and strange than that) and a post apocalyptic literature book club.

The store isn't always open, you're supposed to call before you go, but I think most people just sort of wander by and pop in if they see a light on or a door ajar; and though it only opened for the first time in 2004 (under different ownership) it is ancient, dark and narrow inside. But it's a treat to browse, creaking as you go, and to stop and watch the container ships unloaded on the East River or the ceaseless construction that may one day yield a park across the street. It has a charming yard, and hosted one of the most pleasant book parties I've attended—for Pierre Bayard's How to Talk about Books You've Never Read… It was a popular event. The book is worth your time if you haven't read it yet.

Spoonbill & Sugartown

I am pretty thrilled by buses and liked to take the B61 from Atlantic Avenue to Williamsburg for haircuts, etc., and to visit Spoonbill & Sugartown, Booksellers. A place to wait for the bus and buy some Barthes or to browse books about art or by artists. Actually it is quite small, and full of customers who are talking loudly about things you'd like to correct them on, but they have wonderful table displays. Before the rest of the new kind of stores, they mixed art and theory books with more standard fiction and non-fiction, used and new. Their selections are always relevant, and organized into displays that are quite attractive. Dense enough to be engrossing but small enough to be manageable. A microcosm of Williamsburg, or at least the part of Williamsburg that I know (because I don't hang out with bands).

Idlewild Books

Translation has always been my favorite literary concern, so I was very excited when Idlewild Books opened a couple of years ago. The store sells international and travel literature, and it also feels sort of like a vacation from Union Square. It offers language classes, globes, and it is gorgeous and old worldly inside. The other people in the store are almost always really attractive, and I rarely failed to attend book and journal events there because of that. The translated book award ceremonies are held there, they are delightful and I highly recommend you attend. Or at least buy your travel guide there and not at fucking Barnes & Noble.

Greenlight

Weirdly, one of the newest bookstores finally arrived in 2009 to fill the void in Fort Greene, which is usually called the most writer-centric neighborhood in the entire city. Actually, its tardy appearance probably allowed more literary diversity in the little neighborhoods nearby, or at least more little bookstores. Greenlight had a big pre-established customer base since hundreds of writers and editors and book people populate the immediate area.

The store is pretty big, especially compared to most of the above-mentioned Brooklyn stores, and it is open late enough that it helps you fill time around dinner (I mean, encourages boozy book-buying, if you didn't eat before you went out). It also engaged almost immediately with the small local publishers that are delighted to increase their recognition with local readers. Book parties! Catalogue parties! Journal parties!

Kitchen Arts & Letters

Kitchen Arts & Letters is not a new bookstore, but a specialty. For sale are cookbooks, old (if out of print) and new. Memoirs about cooking. Food-themed postcards. I visited Thursday evenings after therapy and always left feeling comforted, relieved. It made me want to move to the Upper East Side. And have babies with a nanny. And cook. My therapist told me it's so popular that people travel from outer boroughs just to shop there. She also told me she thought I was smart and brave to leave New York; that I really should go if I wanted to figure out whether and how much I need the city, and why. I wanted to remind myself there's more. I know it was better to go but I miss this bookstore, though I miss Lucy most of all.

Word

I began to leave a couple of years ago when I moved to Greenpoint, the New England of New York City (except let's say City Island is Maine), from Brooklyn Heights. Even though it was the only English-language place in sight (the rest are Polish), and was just a couple of blocks away, I didn't think much of the store at first. It was small, and it had nothing of interest to me aside from some letterpress cards. I didn't want to buy any of the books they stocked. But in the last year I spent in Brooklyn, up north, far from my friends, it became a place I loved. The tiny collection came to hold what I wanted, and to demonstrate what I should be looking for.

Word's basement readings were so conducive to community, and the readers there were bound to become the store's bestsellers. The best reading I saw last year in New York was at Word. Rachel Glaser wrote the weirdest stories, published in Pee on Water, which I was not excited to hear about until I did — she read after Blake Butler, who was just really weird. When she read "The Magic Umbrella." Well. It changed things, I felt like a teenager understanding for the first time that books are cool. You should really read it, preferably aloud.

There I bought the Lewis Hyde book Common as Air, which argues for a radical expansion of the public domain even though I could have gotten it free (it was available in its entirety on Google Books for a little while). I also purchased all of my Christmas presents and gifts to myself, had them wrapped, at Word. Most memorable, is the copy of Notes from The Underground I bought on the way to the airport to visit my grandmother just before she died. I don't know why I did it. I passionately hate Dostoevsky and his Catholicism, a family thing, and maybe that's why I chose it and can't read it, or go anywhere for long without it. I think I'll keep carrying it around with me until I muster up the nerve to get it over with. Sometimes a book is an object, but nevertheless it's still a book. Unfortunately it means everything and nothing at all.

Of course I realize it's not just Word that changed — it has actually grown, and has hired an adept events planner — it had an impact on my interests and choices. I had worked at the agency for five years, and at each anniversary I felt I knew much more and that the world I was chasing had morphed proportionally. Though Random House underwent so many restructurings we had to keep charts of submissions that began to look like complicated mathematical spreadsheets, more and more and more fabulous publishers began to issue good and interesting literary fiction. I think at a certain point it came to me that the narrative of the book industry, and how it would remain important or interesting, was just as interesting to me as the books being published. I saw that I had more to learn if I wanted to continue to participate.

Barbara Galletly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She twitters here and tumbls here. Tune in for the second part of this post, examining L.A. bookstores, here. She last wrote in these pages about hysteria.

Photographs of the author by Trent Wolbe.

"I've Been Gone" - The Cassettes (mp3)

"For Too Long" - The Cassettes (mp3)

"Watchers" - The Cassettes (mp3)

In Which Some Letters Are Failures But Few Are Lies

The Breakup

by LUCY MORRIS

1

I am home in the Midwestern city where I was born, and I am not entirely certain how I got here. I know that I have taken a lot of trips in the last year, to two continents and three countries, over and across the United States a handful of times by air and once by car. I know that my pockets are filled with bar coded baggage tags, and that I never have the clothes I need for the right seasons. I am rarely dressed for the occasion at the best of times, but lately I have been looking stranger than usual, hoping a smile and a pair of earrings can compensate for living out of a suitcase. 

I am not exactly sure why I am here, but like a lot of things I have done this year, I suspect it has something to do with a boy. Twelve months ago, the idea of uprooting myself for that reason seemed unfeminist and absurd to me. Back then I was working long hours and eating Goya beans every night for dinner with produce retrieved from dumpsters by a fregan acquaintance who was spending some months on my couch. Cutting the mold off a block of cheese, he would ask incredulously, "How can you eat something straight out of the can?" The Squatter, as I affectionately called him, also advocated following your heart. I had never before considered my heart to be a particularly reliable compass, and following it is not the marketable experiment that a year spent following Oprah or the Bible is, but nothing else was working for me so I decided to give it a try. 

I had lost my bearings and two consecutive Metrocards during a period when a lot of things in my life were turning over. I'd moved from a two-story house I shared with my boyfriend to a basement apartment with three roommates and a number of mice. I thought of the former house as the place where I had learned to cook soups and invest in quality tights. It was easier to eulogize it that way, rather than as the first place where I made someone important to me cry, and then learned to look away, in a way that seemed like self-preservation but was in lieu of having to change, a callous made thick from gardening instead of just buying gloves or learning to hold the spade right. 

Once settled in my new apartment, I began the process of something many people I know have done in reverse: New York was breaking for me and so I decided that I was in love with someone far away. The super of our building was ejected from his nearby home over marital issues, so he began converting the laundry room off our kitchen into an apartment for himself. Bugs crawled through the new incisions he made in the walls. It seemed like the city sanitation department never recovered from holiday weekends, the trash mounting in lolling piles around lampposts. I had developed a difficult relationship with the man at the laundromat, and when I walked to the bodega at night, a guy on the corner had started saying things like, "I would do anything to touch your legs." I loved my neighborhood anyway, the sudden jolt from the smell of dried fish in cardboard boxes at Nostrand Avenue produce stores, or Saturdays sprawled in Prospect Park's islands of shade. But sometime last summer I thought I might be able, for a while at least, to love this boy more than I loved the city. For a while I did.

2

His name was Jonah and it had begun as friendship five or six years prior, but the events that find me here now started late last winter, when I was visiting family in Milwaukee for a week. In a dark bar, illuminated by the torch I'd carried for Jonah for years, I made up my mind to try something – someone – new, even though I had a boyfriend back in New York. Our big house in Bay Ridge, with its old-lady-and-new-smoke smell that still clings to my sweaters, was not enough to contain whatever quarter-life crisis I was having. A week before, I had a cinematic panic attack in a dressing room over a jammed zipper on an expensive dress, which seemed, as these things do, prophetic only later. From the B train home from work the next day, I called and told Jonah what had happened. "I'd do anything to see you in a dress," he said, which I knew was both the wrong response and exactly the one I wanted to hear. I was both old enough to see that he knew this and too young to mind his transparency. 

Back in the Midwest, he drove me around his hometown, where the snow banks were pockmarked with grime and the storefronts were empty. The palette of winter in Wisconsin was lunar in a way I had forgotten, and the realities of the 2010 economy were visible in a way they weren't in my daily New York life. We talked unemployment rates, and then some hours later, Jonah reminded me in a decidedly different, slurring tone, "You have responsibilities," by which he meant a boyfriend, a good deal on a place in Brooklyn (and how New York a perspective! I thought through the gin – the real estate consideration). To silence this line of reasoning, I kissed him on the forehead and then the cheek and eventually the mouth. We went back to his freezing attic bedroom. I hadn't slept next to a different boy in years and because of that I was mostly struck by the ease with which we melded into each other, curled like cavatappi right down to our toes. At first I thought this was indicative of some greater compatibility, and then later I knew it wasn't, that once you spend enough time sleeping next to another person, it becomes natural to anyone who comes after, that your body – or is this just women's bodies? – is memory foam adaptable to whoever touches it.

3

Back in New York, it seemed to suddenly, aggressively become spring. My ventilation-less office in Brighton Beach acquired the inexplicable vomitous smell of an aquarium, and so I spent lunch breaks on the boardwalk listening to "Hounds of Love" in regular, repetitive doses, as though it was some kind of medicine. I broke up with my boyfriend and moved out. The walls of my new bedroom were Mexican restaurant-style orange sponge paint and the slats under my low bed never stayed in place, so my mattress sank to the floor under my weight. Rent was the only physical check I wrote each month so my checkbook was always piled under detritus on my desk: behind some bottles of beer, underneath mass mailings from politicians, in a tangle of computer and printer cords. "It is unclear why we are here and what we are doing," is how I described the life of my post-college peer group in a note I wrote to Jonah from the boardwalk one day. I asked him whether he thought it was normal to forget the spelling of your landlord's name every month, and if it was weird to eat breakfast on the train or drink coffee in lieu of lunch. I suppose I was hoping his distance, his Midwestern common sense, or the four years of life he had on me might afford him the authority to comfort me. But deep down I must have known those were not resources he had in him, because I never sent that letter.

I believed I was having a lot of fun – and in the absence of any other unambiguous passion, the blanket pursuit of fun seemed logical – by making meals for one, chatting with my roommates, and drinking more than was advisable and yet not enough to be of real concern. But I was growing impatient, and while I knew perfectly well that this was an internal shift, daily city life seemed to validate it. I felt that impatience in the insufferably slow lurches of the Q train I rode each day past station construction in Sheepshead Bay. It was in the slow lines at Key Foods, where customers rifled for coupons and food stamps while clerks tapped their nails on registers. It appeared among the crowds that gathered on the steps of Union Square as days stretched toward their summer limits, everyone lethargic but urgent, ready to meet their friends and start their nights. When I thought about it later, it was the tactile elements of these months that seemed especially if inexplicably poignant: the thick envelopes my pay stubs came in (LUSYA M, my Russian boss wrote in polite cursive), the slick of my Metrocard when I reached for it in my purse every morning at the Park Place stop, or the scrape of the brownstone under my legs when I sat on the stoop at night with a glass of cheap gin and sour juice, talking to faraway Jonah on my phone, the screen of which swirled with sweat when I was finished. 

4

Halfway through June, after months of long calls and coyness, I stood up straight and wrote Jonah a love letter, offering to come spend the rest of the summer with him. "Some Letters Are Failures, But Few Are Lies," is what I called it, a line from Amy Hempel's stories, which I'd been reading on late night subway rides. Although it did not seem strange at the time, I now have to wonder what kind of person titles a love letter, and what's more, why I was compelled to include in it these details of life in my neighborhood: "Gyptian is playing on car stereos on Franklin Avenue by my burger place and Bushwick boys with jeans pegged just above the ankle ride their fixed gears up Bedford. I told K. he was an asshole but I liked him anyway, and the Squatter, beard freshly washed, asked how my writing is going." I wrote: "These nights in the gardens of Brooklyn when around 4 AM I reach that moment of sobriety and all I can think of is Milwaukee, or nights in the bed of my friend where he says we probably shouldn't do this again because I am clearly in love with someone else – these are making me (crazy) restless, sending me pacing the aisles of the E train or up and down Eastern Parkway trying to Be Present with the farmers market boys I'm with or just by myself." Who were those farmers market boys? Where was I coming from on the E train? Why was I so concerned with being present, and what did that even mean? These are the questions I am compelled to ask when I read what I wrote then. And, finally: why did a love letter to a boy really read like a love letter – an ambivalent one, maybe a failure of one, but hardly a lie – to New York? 

Jonah called me a few days later to reciprocate my sentiments. I was flustered by the sudden fact of getting what I wanted. I wished to put him on hold and confer with the Squatter, whose Spanish guitar melodies were wafting down the hallway. "Let me call you back," I said, and when I did I demurred, telling him I had to give my boss a month's notice, although that wasn't true. "I just need some time to wrap things up," I said, although what was left? All my good friends seemed to have wisely evaporated to less humid climates for the summer. I booked a ticket to Wisconsin, and then I moved it up a useless four days. During the intervening lonely weekends, I took buses to visit friends across the Eastern Seaboard. I went to the MoMA, hoping the steep price of admission would at least force me to focus on my immediate surroundings, to provide the present-mindedness I thought I lacked. Half the time I was radiant and half the time I suspected I was making a terrible mistake, but my friends disagreed. "Nothing matters before we're 30," my writerly roommate reminded me by way of reassurance. "Nothing matters ever," the Squatter added from his perch on the couch. And what more authority did I have than any of them? How could I argue?

5

Soon I was in the Midwest again, camped in the attic of the house where I'd grown up. I never fully unpacked, but I spent a lot of my time out with Jonah, and plus I wasn't staying more than two months: why commit to placing dresses on hangers or shoes in neat pairs? In fact, I was afraid. I made the mistake of thinking it was still summer, although it was August now, and people around me were already registering for fall semester classes and anticipating autumn leaves. Undeterred, I bought a swimsuit and drank iced coffee at outdoor cafes where I typed away for my Brooklyn Russians, who'd asked me to work remotely. At night, Jonah and I walked all over town, drinking malt liquor and stumbling home on empty streets, past bar after bar and successions of blinking stoplights. Sometimes we built fires and slept in hammocks, which felt very rustic, although one night during a tedious bar argument I texted a boy I had barely and briefly been intimate with in Brooklyn to say, "I miss New York," and I meant that. I did not mean, "I miss you," but like most of that summer, I was tipsy and I was tired, and didn't know who to tell. 

I started to worry that my heart's directives had led me wildly astray. I wished the Squatter had a phone so I could call and ask him to remind me that nothing mattered. I was as desperate to believe there were no consequences as I was determined to believe I still had summer ahead of me. I knew things with Jonah were breaking, that I didn't want to be drunk all the time, and that it was getting too cold at night to sleep outside. One night I made cocktails out of my mom's last melons and I meant to leave a note of apology, but first we were out on the porch arguing and then we were in my bed pretending we could make things right again. But it wasn't like the cold night in his attic room. It was sticky now, we coiled in opposite directions, and I slept with my phone pressed to my cheek, a half-composed text to my best friend on the screen.

I went west for three weeks to see her, and there I cried in cars and at Catherine's kitchen table, because what was I doing, anyway? I sat on her lawn and had a long phone conversation with an old friend who had last called a few months earlier when I was at a party in Brooklyn. At some point I stopped listening to him and just mentally returned to that night in late May, when it had been disconcertingly, amazingly windy and on the walk over from my apartment, Catherine and I had stopped outside the Brooklyn Library to allow the wind to push us around, surrendering to the moment at hand, a custom I had come to think of as uniquely New York, although I had been enough places to know it was not. In the garden in Park Slope, people attacked a piñata filled with condoms and miniature bottles of liquor, and everyone there seemed set on a kind of self-destruction that alienated me in its deliberation, the agreed-upon premise that we might work good-for-the-world jobs during the week, but we'd still drink too much and go home with the wrong people and have to beg cab drivers to take us back to our out-of-the-way apartments in early morning hours. Months and miles removed, I now found I missed those strangers the way you miss exes in spite of their flaws. They did do good jobs, they made mistakes but endeavored to fix them, they even hired a mariachi band to make a spring night more festive for their friends. Where was that ingenuity, that ambition back in the Midwest? It was time to go, but I wasn't sure where.

6

Catherine moved to China, so I bought a one way-ticket there, and then I started seeing someone new in Milwaukee, someone even more ill-advised than the last, for reasons of age, acquaintance and temperament, and most of all my reasons for engaging: what were they, exactly? I couldn't remember – the heart I'd followed for thousands of miles was like a crazy cult leader full of bad ideas I couldn't escape – but I kept finding myself at his house, and I wasn't unhappy. He was from New York and we mostly talked about that, our vocabulary a glossary of street names. Like the last relationship, it had an expiration date – my departure for Beijing – but like the past-sell date yogurt from the dumpsters of Gristedes that had formed my breakfast diet all spring, sometimes that doesn't have real significance.

Fall came while I was in China, evident in boot displays in store windows and the slow fade of the sky around 5 PM every day. I thought frequently of falls past, which is to say I thought of New York, where I had spent the last five of them, seasons rich with foliage and laughter. Happy Chinese girls perched on the racks of their boyfriends' bikes couldn't distract me from the chasm of nostalgia and anxiety that always opens at that time of year – or is that just in us overly sensitive, us seasonally affected types? My excitement for my eventual return to New York made me lightheaded, but it was counteracted by the dread that swelled in the pit of my stomach when I thought of actually going back. Waiting there in the improbably clean metro stations, so untarnished you almost expected new-car smell, I thought of the early evenings I had spent staring down the train tracks in Brighton Beach, willing the B to arrive and whisk me from work back to non-Russian speaking Brooklyn. Listening to boilerplate subway recordings on the train in Beijing, I thought of the pleasant impatience I felt those nights, ready to get home and sink into my boyfriend, but also of the panic I felt transferring to the R to go home to him once things with us were breaking. I thought, as surely everybody has at some point, that I could get on the train and just keep going, right until the end of the line, and start over there. But our house was just three stops from the terminal one. Nowhere seemed like it could be far enough.

7

And with this fickle heart guiding me, maybe nowhere could be, which is why I'm calling off the experiment and heading back to New York. Recently I have been back in Milwaukee, spending time with someone and waiting for a place to open up for me out east. My old place in Crown Heights is now occupied by strangers. This year's exes have new girlfriends. Most days, I am less certain of my own growth, but as I'm packing, I keep finding old Metrocards – maybe the ones I thought I lost a year ago – at the bottoms of my bags, tucked inside yellow papered notes to Jonah. These objects are like relatives I haven't seen in years, familiar but foreign: I recognize my handwriting but not the sentiments I express in it, which is comforting and alienating all at once. Someone told me recently that your heart, that misguided compass of an organ, gets less resilient as you get older, not more. If most of us believed this, I am not sure that living or loving would be bearable rituals, but by some miracle of human nature they are. At least for me. At least for now.

Lucy Morris is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and translator living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about living in Beijing. She tumbls here.

"Everything Falls Into Place" - Young Knives (mp3)

"Human Again" - Young Knives (mp3)

"Running From A Standing Start" - Young Knives (mp3)

In Which We Are Feeling A Lot More Solipsistic Than Usual

No Room for Muses

by KARINA WOLF

Where else can you be paranoid and right so often?

All of Manhattan is Woody Allen’s Manhattan: the reservoir, the restaurants, the skyline, the shrink’s office, the horse and carriage, the modern art, Central Park, Minetta Lane, the Great White Way, the Pierre, and Elaine’s. Most of all, and most importantly, the patois.

New York is a solipsistic, humanistic kind of village. Despite his singularly white and wealthy cast of characters, Woody Allen’s work reflects the way we live and speak. His post-9/11 short, Sounds of the Town I Love, is illustrative: in one-sided phone chats, New Yorkers are narcissistic, petulant, self-serving (the comedy often masks the aggression), hypochondriacal and high-handed. They’re also survivors, with a measure of warmth that keeps them human. They’re all of us.

It’s the idiom that makes Allen believable — that grasping, uncertain mode of talk. When it works, his dialogue is spot on, full of latent aggression and open insecurity. For actors, his words are perfect storms of contradiction. And the delivery, tossed off, half-recalled, is probably the element that allows people to conflate Woody Allen the actor with his characters. His words sound like him, how could this be fiction?

But Allen is a more complicated talent than his hapless schnook act suggests. He’s a comic workaholic, a tireless spinner of jokes, gags, sketches, sex comedies, murder mysteries, chamber pieces, ensemble dramas, fictional biopics, false documentary and ragtime jazz. He’s been at it since he was 15 and commuted from Brooklyn to churn out punch lines for $40 a week. His is a formidable discipline: writing, directing, exercising, practicing the clarinet, going to bed and rising on a precise schedule. Woody Allen leaves no room for muses.

According to Allen, many of his films are unsuccessful in some sense or another, but the work is his goal. Just as his characters seek a meaningful experience of the universe, Allen finds purpose through creativity. He explains why he continues to make films (his latest, Whatever Works, is his 40th): “You don’t think about the outside world, and you’re faced with solvable problems, and if they’re not solvable, you don’t die because of it. And then, if it’s the right film...for several months, I get to live with very beautiful women and very witty men.”

He writes for his limited range as an actor – he says he can play only low lives or intellectuals – but it’s a broad canvas for film: bank heists, mysteries and magic acts for the comedies; adulterous love and morality plays for drama. If he returns to certain motifs, he is a kaleidoscopic innovator. If the wind-up to the jokes seems wordy or his sense of drama derivative, there’s still the inescapable: he’s created a vocabulary for the urban American.

Allen’s art has progressed in leaps – he was dismissed from NYU film school in the 50s, then immediately employed writing for TV. When he moved to filmmaking, he received an on-the-job apprenticeship with some of the world’s finest technicians. Ralph Rosenblum, the editor who cut Annie Hall, taught Allen about shaping a story; Gordon Willis, who lit The Godfather, instructed him in framing a shot. Then Allen moved on to simpatico collaborators who matched his on the fly approach: cameraman Carlo di Palma, for example, who’d arrive on set without knowing the day’s shot list.

With these artisans, Allen created the signatures of his filmmaking: the long takes with little coverage, the amber glow that makes his actors beautiful and his interiors romantic. He claims his aesthetic is borne of practicality. Husbands and Wives, composed with a handheld camera, mid-scene cuts and equally jagged exposures of the human heart, was the result, says Allen, of ‘laziness.’ He didn’t want to be bothered with the formal niceties of American films.

"Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman?" he ponders in a remembrance of the Swedish director. Allen’s idols are the somber giants of world cinema, and when he stretches himself, it’s because he wants to make the kinds of films that fulfill him: the stark emotional landscapes of Bergman or Kurosawa, the family melodramas of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. This attitude may be forged (just as his view of Manhattan was) in the traditions of Hollywood, where comedy is a jester and drama is artistic king. As Eric Lax says, for Allen, the comedy was never disparaged but it certainly was considered a route to drama.

Woody Allen’s descendents are numerous – what contemporary filmic romance doesn’t owe something to Annie Hall? But his movies often subvert the laughs, with Allen supplying happy endings when they disturb and less sanguine ones when they’re hoped for. When a man gets away with murder—and goes unpunished, and feels fine—here, you see his darker view of human nature. “Your mind will never be able to give you a convincing justification for living your life, because from a logical point of view, if your life is indeed meaningless — which it is — and there’s nothing out there, what is the point of it?”

But whatever his diagnosis of humanity, his comedy has healing powers. In a way, the 2002 Oscar ceremony was the world’s reconciliation with Woody Allen. The heart wants what it wants, says Allen, but punishing judgment was passed upon the direction of his desire when he left Mia Farrow for Soon-Yi Previn. More than a decade later, the couple was still together and Manhattan falling apart; the world needed Woody.

His appearance at the Oscars, after he’d so frequently refused to show, was a gesture for survival. Allen introduced some clips about New York and brought the audience to their feet. “I said, 'You know, God, you can do much better than me. You know, you might want to get Martin Scorsese, or, or Mike Nichols, or Spike Lee, or Sidney Lumet...' I kept naming names, you know, and um, I said, 'Look, I've given you fifteen names of guys who are more talented than I am, and, and smarter and classier...' And they said, 'Yes, but they were not available.'" He was transformed from a polarizing figure to a reassuring one. And by remaining recognizably himself, he made New York itself again.

When I saw him perform at the Carlyle, there was a similar elation in the audience. I’ve never felt the same lift as when Woody came out: good will, excitement, childish thrill. The Café Carlyle is café-sized. Every seat was a good seat and from where we perched we could see that Woody was suffering a cold. He stared fixedly at the floor, as a friend who’s worked with him had warned, and he slumped through the beginning of his performance, but roused himself to play the tunes of Jelly Roll Morton. His balding piano player sang “Because My Hair Is Curly,” one of Sam’s comic songs from Casablanca (this, even though Allen has confessed that he doesn’t much like the classic film).

Geoffrey Rush stood at the back, spattered with rain, just in from his Broadway performance of Ionesco. The maitre d’ was unerringly hospitable as we shuffled a wad of dollars to pay the daunting dinner bill. It was a packed house: tourists and Upper East Siders and locals like ourselves, who arrived at Bobby Short Way to listen to the jazz we hear in his films and share a bit of his time. He played for two hours, and left the crowd wanting more: “That’s all folks. I’m going home.” And he wove through the tables, nodding at a few, disappearing, perhaps, to his planned, early bedtime.

Some will say that Allen doesn’t speak for them, or that his films are no longer relevant, no longer funny. But what he’s done is create a consciousness: some of his works shape how we perceive places, people, even feeling. Some of his lessons are so persuasive that you want to be a part of them. In Manhattan, his character constructs a convincing list of things that make life worth living. As viewers, we have the pleasure of adding to that list the films of Woody Allen.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin Putnam.

"If It's True" - Anais Mitchell (mp3)

"Why We Build The Wall" - Anais Mitchell (mp3)

"Our Lady of the Underground" - Anais Mitchell ft. Ani DiFranco (mp3)