en route to Baltimore

Dear Internet,

9.11> Ran 6+ miles north up thru Harlem/Sugarhill to Highbridge park (~172^nd) + back down the west side ... so w/ the 20 or miles we walked in our last post, that makes a marathon of walking/running in the past 36 hours or so ... for the 2^nd time in as many weeks.

10.11> Brother in town (the 1 from Argentina), so walked around ~11 miles or so from 125^th down to Christopher, zig-zagging. And then a few more miles back + forth to dinner, so ~40 miles in last 3 days.

12.11> Got SSEY proofs + ok'ed them. Ran 6 miles, misty + very fall-like.

13.11> Took the train to Baltimore. Used to like trains, now we're not so sure ... or maybe it's just NY Penn Station we despise ... the inhumanity of it. Feel like you're in the rat race, chaos + junk food, swarms of people scrambling every which way + up their own asses. Fight + push to get on the train + even then can't even sit together. Always next to the annoying person blabbing nonstop on the phone, even w/ our iPod blaring Swans full volume can't drown it out.

Arrived in Baltimore at night, walked to Y + N's (our friends we met recently in Italy) house for dinner. Our 1^st time in Baltimore really ... our knowledge of Baltimore limited to The Wire + the blight of row homes u see passing thru on the train.

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Chaulky White

Read Percival Everett's new 1 on the train ... or tried to amidst all the distraction. Not sure if we liked it as much as sum of his others. Feels like he's trying hard to be clever, to come up w/ sum metafictional shtick never used before ... in this case a sort of convoluted story about a father writing his son's story writing his father's story ... or versa-vice-versa. A few different story lines vaguely surface + just when u start to follow a thread, it splinters + disintegrates ... mostly it's just about the act of story-telling, which is what prompted us to get it cuz feels sort of like what we trying to do w/ 'SSES" 'SSES" ^"SSEY' ... xcept it's us writing our brother's story who's re-writing our father's story framed in the context of Ulysses/The Odyssey.

at the end of the day the sum of words

Sat in on a guest lecture at Columbia while we waited for our better-½ to head to Penn station ... doesn't even matter what the lecture was about (cultural anthropology of nutrition) but 1 thing this lecturer said was that people are the experts of their own contexts. We couldn't disagree more. Ppl for the most part oblivious to their own context. U can't be subjective bout yourself standing in your own shoes.

... unless u ever lifting yourself by your bootstraps ... which is what Everett does + it's what we strive to do + admittedly fail over + over again. The only thing worth writing about anymore is the process of writing ... every other story has been told.

+ failure is inevitably a part of it ... to do it again + «fail better» as Beckett says.

view from our room—between piers 4 + 5

Everett has an interesting way of defining post-modernism:

«Son, it was being called a postmodernist. I don't even know what the fuck that is! Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and life in the world.»

... then again, we say this—process all that matters—but at the same we just wanted a dumb story to xcape from the monotony of our mediate environ ... which probly the case w/ most ppl when they crack a spine.

door in «little Italy» (i.e. cluster of Italian restaurants), Baltimore

Question is, how much of this navel-gazing randum meaning-of-life shit that amounts to nuthing can 1 read? Reading about writing bout reading (or versa-vice-versa) ... it's like meditating on nuthing ... can we ever think about nuthing? Even thinking bout nuthing's sumthin cuz inevitably we embedded in the framework of thawed. Can we ever write about just writing w/o real world drama slipping in? At sum point u jus have to move on + not think about it ... but then u a zombie w/ no point of living. + once u in this reflexive feedback loop there's no getting out ... there's no going back to the state of being born ... til u die.

yet another American waterfront ruined by capitalism (not shown, Ripley's Believer It Or Not)

... sort of like running or walking ... u plod on cuz if u don't u get fat + sedentary + don't feel so good inside your own skin while u here.

seagull on the waterfront

construction site or zen garden?

14.11 > Slept in a Murphy bed for the 1^st time in our lives last night. Not sure why we needed a fold-down bed as our room was massive, filled w/ useless furniture. + an adjoining door thru which we could hear everything our neighbor was doing, yacking bored on the phone + flipping channels. Tried to sleep w/ a pillow over our head.

downtown looking up

rebar (making way for «urban renewal», a.k.a. gentrification)

Mt. Vernon church

Woke up + walked round Baltimore ... round the harbor, downtown, up thru Mt. Vernon, up to Remington, met MK at Parts + Labor butchery.

sum other Greek looking church

Edgar Allen Poe

Why's it whenever we're sumwhere we don't live ppl aks us for directions? Hardly any 1 in NYC does ... the other day sum French tourist aksed us sumthing + when we said where she then axed «are u sure?» ... um, yeah, we've been here 14 years + walking every street of NYC as part of our Maphattan project (which we're neglecting this week cuz we away ...)

Penn station, Baltimore

getting up into Charles North now ...

It's funner in towns u don't know, getting lost.

Forgot how nice people are south of New York ... kind of freaked us out at 1^st—when ppl just come up + start chatting w/ u—u think maybe they want sumthin but they just being friendly ... which is novel for a few minutes, but after a few friendly encounters gets pretty annoying. Guys saying shit to us in «sketchy» areas + wasn't sure what to think at 1^st ... but ends up they just making small talk or trying to sell us drugs.

crossing W. North Ave (a.k.a. the drug corridor ... or so we were told)

«renewed» (populated w/ hipsters undoubtedly) Remington row homes

The «sketchiness» of Baltimore not even so much a black-white thing. It was the sketchy white people we most leery of ... dopeheads eyeing us (+ our computer bag) + acting strange.

Parts + Labor Butchery

After eating a smoked trout sandwich + talking of books + Baltimore, hopped a train to DC.

from the MARC train

Was just in DC so walked around trying to find sumethin we hadn't seen ... walked around Capitol Hill area ... the capitol bldg shrouded in scaffolding ... now controlled by Republicans.

quaint Capitol Hill street (quite the contrast from Baltimore)

Walked to our hotel sumwhere near Dupont circle. Probly around 10+ miles of walking in each city, so that makes round 70 miles of walking + running in the last 6 days.

There's a statue of sum dude on a horse out our window + a photo of Lincoln's hand in our room.

Had duck mole enchiladas + a mezcal flight at sum place on 14^th street ... walked up to the U district in the rain. Got real cold in the last day or 2 + we came ill-prepared.

red tree blocking the Capitol bldg

Carnegie library