Covers of The East Village Other

As I pack the FedEx box addressed to the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, New York—a nonprofit study center for “objects created as part of social movements by the participants themselves: posters, flyers, publications, zines, t-shirts and buttons, audio recordings…”—I am holding a poster that says FUCK COMMUNISM and suddenly find myself in tears.

My collection of printed matter from the sixties and seventies has followed me across decades and miles, from East Coast to West. By packing these items off to this worthy repository in my native city, I am letting go of those miles, those years, and these fragile things on yellowing paper. “Imagine no possessions,” says John Lennon. “Does it spark joy?” says Marie Kondo. But this personal downsizing is more elemental than any kind of tidying up.

These items are handcrafted artifacts of the late twentieth century’s analog era—a road I followed, and in some small ways contributed to making. Now, in the early twenty-first century, that road tapers off into the digital ether, leading who knows where.

So I feel compelled to take one last look at a few of my treasures before sending these things off. Read More

Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, 1797–1798, etching and aquatint, 8 1/4″ x 6″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

—William Shakespeare,The Tempest

Sleep

I once read about someone who had a mirror installed above his bed for use at night. He wanted to see himself while he slept.

The thought is not as absurd as might appear to be at first glance. There is probably not one of us who has not tried at some point or another to catch hold of that exact moment when we fall asleep or to observe ourselves while in the state of sleep. In any event, I myself have attempted both these things many times. More than once I experimented with how I might be able to track the exact process of falling asleep: to accompany myself, as it were, following from behind, watching my own self slowly growing sleepy as I left a state of wakefulness. To watch it slowly lose its contours and turn into something about which I have almost no knowledge. The one thing I can say about this entity is that it certainly cannot refer to itself as “I.” The rest is just a kind of obscure feeling, something that would have a kind of floating, trembling, spongy substance, protruding and then holding back on itself. There were many times when I wished to lie in wait for it. Read More

Shirley Hazzard. Photo: © Nancy Crampton.

“There were days in winter when the narrow spiralling streets of this town were reduced to slippery channels banked with snow; when, viewed from the foot of its hill, the city rose up like a symmetrical, frosted fir tree, branching into great terraces of church, palace, and piazza.”

“Ordinariness, the affliction and backbone of other cities, was here nonexistent. Phrases I had always thought universal—the common people, the average family, the typical reaction, ordinary life—had no meaning where people were all uncommon and life extraordinary.”

“Tancredi had grown up in Sicily, where no entertaining is ever done in the summer afternoons, where there is a solitary, almost therapeutic drinking of lemonade or almond milk in darkened rooms before the sun goes down.”

“A town of overhead wires and small discouraged shops.” Read More