And so we come to the final blog post I shall write in this apartment. As others nimbly perambulate through airport security gates, their rucksacks and tote bags brimming with books to read on the six hour flight to Los Angeles for the annual cacophony to score galleys and gratis cocktails, I shall be driving a van in New York, negotiating the BQE and doing my best to remember that you can’t make a right turn on red. The desk is half-disassembled. Twenty boxes of stuff reside in the other room. You can wander through the apartment and experience a slight reverb colliding against the barren walls whenever you recite half-remembered lines from Shakespeare or sing pop song lyrics you hoped would snap and crackle out of your brain.
I read 117 books while living in this apartment, but I may be missing a few. My hairline receded quite wonderfully! I shall be a full-fledged chromedome by 35! I grew many beards. I shaved my hair off six times. I negotiated the celerity and terrain of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and offered a dear goodbye (with the promise of a return visit) to the folks at my neighborhood cafe, where I often holed up with my laptop. Last night, I purchased my last beer at the bodega run by a friendly racist. I battled cockroaches and a few mice and lived to tell the tale. I lost weight. Whether it was the walking, the frugal living, or the freelancing, I cannot say. I became more cheerful and got a little crazier. I survived the chilly winter and the humid summer. I put up 90 installments of The Bat Segundo Show. I made friends and became closer to acquaintances. I sent 10,032 emails on the main account. I banged out around 80,000 words (not counting the blog) for fictional and professional endeavors.
All in all, it wasn’t a bad run. I don’t know how much the topographical and spatial dimensions of this apartment factored into these activities. This is a strange but serviceable apartment that I hope will offer similar feats for the next tenant, whoever s/he may be.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
bon chance Ed
When will The Collected Emails of Ed Champion be coming out?
The Apt. is dead. Long live the Apt.!