I would like to have
only good memories
of this day
this time of year
but I just see hospitals
both parents dying
this first month bodes heartache
for me
so I approach January
tentatively
like a door on a house
one fears might be haunted
for ghosts reside here
and though I see candlelight
a woman dancing naked
friends huddled around fondue pots
three floors of live bands
parties with casinos
and people dressed as elves
dinner at the Duck House
a woman in a tuxedo
and fishnet stockings
tap dancing her way
into my heart
there are still those ghosts
hovering
like birds of prey
waiting for another soul
to stumble to fall
in the desert
that is sometimes
life

And yet, in many separate ways, the people of the city express certain common emotions. The forms and details are different for every generation and every group, but certain emotions have continued to repeat themselves for centuries. One is surely greed, the unruly desire to get more money by any means possible, an emotion shared by citizens from stockbrokers to muggers. Another is sudden anger, the result of so many people living in so relatively small a place. Another is an anarchic resistance to authority. But far and away the most powerful of all New York emotions is the one called nostalgia.

The city is, in a strange way, the capital of nostalgia. The emotion has two major roots. One is the abiding sense of loss that comes from the simple fact of continuous change. Of the city’s five boroughs, Manhattan in particular absolutely refuses to remain as it was…

There was a sense among those working people,almost from the beginning, that you would do all right in New York if only you followed the rules. Where I came from, the rules were relatively simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts. Never cross a picket line. Don’t look for trouble, because in New York you can always find it. But don’t back off either. Make certain that the old and weak are never in danger. Vote the straight ticket.

The creators of the American Yiddish theater also provided what earlier entertainers had given to the Irish and the Germans: the immense gift of laughter.  They used gags, skits, slapstick, and wit to make fun of one another.  Romanians made fun of Hungarians.  Both made fun of Poles. All made fun of Russians.  They skewered the greenhorns, the pompous nouveau rich, the greedy landlords, the humorless goyim, the corrupt politicians; and they added something else, an attitude that forever shifted the New York mind: irony.

That is, they made jokes out of the difference between what America promised and what America actually delivered. Irony remains the essence of American humor to this day.

The summer I was sixteen I got a job in Times Square. I worked with a man named Butler, who was heavy, growly, with a whiskey-hurt Hell’s Kitchen face. He said he was fifty-one, but he looked seventy. Our job was to change the show cards in the lobbies of movie houses. Together we would pry out staples and take down the old show cards, which were five or six feet high, four feet wide, all in color. Good-bye, Joel McCrea; so long, Yvonne De Carlo. . .Then I would hold the new show cards steady while Butler stapled them into place. Hello, Rita Hayworth; enjoy the run, Glenn Ford. Then Butler would have a nice long cigarette break before we moved to the next theater.

I loved the job. There I was, at the crossroads of the world, with the breaking news moving around the face of the Times…

I see you in dreams
like the Everly Brothers
dreamdreamdream of you
vapor shape in air
just dreaming my life away

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And, long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write–and rereading the beloved books of the past–constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And yes, inspiration.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion, or to be more accurate, rereading Joan Didion these last few nights, the book being her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem which is one of my all-time favorite collections of essays by an American writer, and I thought I might post an excerpt from one of her pieces but I’ll be damned if I could pick one excerpt because I just keep wanting to post the whole book. It is better than I remember and I remember it quite fondly, having read it now for the fourth time over these long decades since I first stumbled upon Play It As It Lays back in the early 1970s.  One of the profs in the MFA program had it in a course he called First Novels but the books were not first novels (Ismael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Tom McGuane’s 92 In The Shade as other…