[7/12/17 | Baltimore > NYC]—taking a brake for a few days befor i go thru th final read-thru of A Raft Manifest. On our way to NYC, but stop'd in B'Timor for a few hours cuz our bedder-½ has ∫um meetings. Now on th train. Reading Gnome by Robert Lunday ... good language, poetic musing, butt ∀ll about faces, wich we cant relate to much. Not that we full blown prosopagnosia, but we usually never bother looking @ people. We'd be a terrible eye-witness if ever called on to identify ∫um-1 or do 1 of those police sketches. If ∫um1's walking a dog we can tell u exactly what th dog looks like but not th person. One time i walked rite past Demi Moore + Ashton Kutchner bud dint even notice cuz i was busy looking at their Chihuahua. Another time rite past Michael Douglas + Catherine Zeta Jones. @ th end of day i just dont like humins. I can appreciate th intricacies of faces, especially in regards to other animals, primates even, just not th humin face so much.

Gnome in our Washington Square Hotel room (where Dylan + Baez shack'd up)

7/13 | NYC> got in last nite, walked th villedge west to east + ate @ Takahachi then went to th Mercury Lounge + saw Cave Singers .. ok for about 1 song, but every song sounds th same. Retreated to th bar + then to another bar (th Library) wich has a great jukebox. Feel so much more at home in NYC then DC. U cd name any street corner in Manhattan + we'd have a visual whereas in DC we have the slightest clue. And speaking of faces, so much more intresting to ppl-watch in nyc, folks from ∀ll walks of life. Started reading Theoretical Animals by Gary J. Shipley, spun in bite-sized chunks of Poe-ish prose, morose koany vignettes hinting at a macabre + cannonballistic apockellipse (aboard a boat on river Thames).

Theoretical Animals overlooking MacDougal Alley

[14 July] Walk'd up to meet w/ our money man, who moved offices up to 109th + Bdwy .. our old hood befor we moved. Yesterday hit 95° + today = 65° + rainy ... sprinkling @ first but then full on downpour ketching us w/o shelter. Soaking wet + everyplace we went int blasting AC. Walk'd up 5th ave cutting thru the park, stopping @ th Hungarian pastry shop. On the way back walked Broadway down 9th ave mostly, stopping for Thai food in th yupper west side. Havent bin to NYC in 10 months, so much changes @ least @ storefront level .. NYC always in flux. We did our Maphattan Project in 2014 but if we did it in 2004 would have been a different city altogether + will become "new" again in 2024.

on the Bowery

Soho

meat packing

midtown

Great Jones st on Great Jones st

Felt like reading something sides Theoretical Animals, so picked up Great Jones Street by Don Dellilo at McNally Jackson. Wanted to lose myself in an ez 2 read novel (still clearing our pallit b4 finel read-thru of A Raft Manifest) + also since it takes place in NYC, nearto where we sleep in th west villedge. Also cuz on th 1° night here when we hung out w/ L + M it o-cured to me (anytime we hang out w/ them actshoally) ∀ll we talk about = rock 'n roll + weve heard Great Jones Street d-scribed as a great rock n' roll book. About a rockstar that has a sort of mid-life crisis (mid-life for a rock star bean 26) + just up + walks out on his band + disappears to his shithole apartment on Great Jones St. Reads like a sort of seakwill to Almost Famous, tho written in 1973 so u gotta wonder if Great Jones Street influenced Cameron Crow? In fact, when a journalist tracks him down in his apartment, his stock antswear to ev:re qwestion = write whatever. «Go home and write whatever you want and then send it out on the wires. Make it up. Whatever you write will be true.» When aksed for a statement on his present whereabouts he also says «wherever you want me to be.» Then when aksed why NYC of ∀ll places (he has other reclusive hideouts to disappear to) Bucky says: «You know where you are in New York. [...] This fact is enescapable. In other places I didn't always know where I was. [...] I wanted to be in one place. An idenfiable place.» Harks back to what i said early about NYC. I know it. I don't know DC + dont want to know it.

7/18 | DC> back in DC now, proof-read ¼ of A Raft Manifest. By next post will have sent it to the printer.