AfterPunk

Writers? A Murder of Crows Had a thing here this evening. Everybody present. S’great. You got to keep watch all the time, keep the predators away from prey. Twice I had to rescue Nathanael West from Sylvia Plath. She had that thin-lip teeth-deep-inside look going. I gave him a whiskey sour and she moved on. Barthelme was weeping again. Best to leave him alone when he’s like that. Otherwise you get too many minimalist paragraphs of extravagant grief. Nearly had to shoot Beckett. Damn good looking cuss. Women line up to wait for him. Useless to tell them he has the IQ of a turnip. Kafka died again. He always has to top Camus. Messy messy, as usual. Had some fine drinks with the two F’s, Scott and Bill, tied with me for the worst first novels in history. (Thurber’s Henry James screech doesn’t count.) Willa Cather took off her top. At least Kafka didn’t have to see that. Then things got ugly between me and JJ, the fake one-eyed wonder, when I told him I’d written a cosmology bigger than...

What it was like, rocketing up 107 floors in a tin can. I had a strange day when I was trying not to get a banking job in New York City. I somehow left Ithaca with a nice blue suit but no wallet for summer intern job interviews at Citibank and Bankers Trust. What do you do when you have no money in New York and time to kill in 1975? You walk. I walked to the WTC Towers. I took the elevator to the top. Which was free. It felt free. Cheap and cheesy. A tinfoil box swaying like a bitch all the way up. I swear. You could feel the whole building moving back and forth. I don’t get seasick but I was tempted. The slanty elevators of the Eiffel Tower also sway but at least afford you a view. At WTC, it was all Alcoa, and not even shiny. Later, I had interviews. They didn’t want Cornell students. The Bankers Trust guy thought I was as boring as I thought he was. We parted cordially. The Citibank guy gave me a pep talk about working for the government instead of the world’s biggest, most glo...

I once quoted Einstein on the subject of that other guy. Someone asked Albert what it felt like to be the smartest man in the world. Einstein said, “Ask Tesla.” A commenter jeered at me because he said Einstein was actually jeering at Tesla. I loved that. So typical. The difference between the do nothings and the do-a-lots. Einstein’s career. Two important papers as a young man. Then a free ride in academe for half a century of nothing new. All that hagiographic treatment at Princeton. Spending an entire life commenting on the works of other smart men and women, as if he were taking ownership by approving, endorsing, and dismissing others’ ideas, or engaging in his favorite lifetime practice of uttering platitudes quotable in the New York Times. His desk was famously messy. How geniusacious that was. Tesla. Created the real infrastructure that drives the U.S. to this day. A practical application of alternating current that rendered Edison’s dangerous alternative obsolete. A myst...

I stopped commenting regularly on the news and the culture at large because there mostly is no news and no culture at large, or at least no culture worthy of the name. But I can still comment to myself about the sundry unsightly spectacles that keep people amused, enraged, etc. I can also comment on the past because there are so few who remember it and talking to myself about the past is a useful mnemonic for me personally. When I feel like it, I will share.