There were apparently four arrests during Public Ad Campaign’s New York Street Advertising Takeover. More images at cronicasbarbaras.com (via Wooster Collective), as well as a video and lots of pics on Flickr. No more crazy outdoor shenanigans for me. I can just see myself sitting in central booking for forty hours with a baby on my back.

Photographer Sandy Carson’s images of Galveston in God’s Love on This Island 1 and 2. I lived in Galveston eighteen years ago, near the cluster of cemeteries at 61St toward the seawall. Perhaps because I was a high school student intent on rocketing out of there at the first possible opportunity, the entire city and it’s venerable history always felt oddly temporary to me, like a stage set. I used to give tours of the Bishop’s Palace and as think, as I heard myself talking about Tiffany lamps and Victorian craft, this is not my life, I’ll barely remember this place some day.

Here’s the thing: if I read everything the instant it comes out, I end up having to slog through a lot of crap. If I wait awhile, some of the mediocre stuff flakes off the top of my reading list and I don’t have to waste the time or money or shelf space on it, and meanwhile there’s no dearth of classics and classics and noire to read and reread. And when I get done with Balzac and Hawthorne, there’s my reading list, all shiny and exfoliated and all I have to do is pick it up and say now I will read The Savage Detectives or something. The only problem is that I theoretically could have been reading The Savage Detectives a couple of years ago when it came out in English and that kills me.⁰¹ (V. just began to read it in Spanish, but there is no way I am doing more than flipping through. If the translation is any indication, and I think it is, that thing is co-lo-qui-al. The translation is genius as well, by the way. Natasha Wimmer has a really sensitive feeling for when to translate and when to render things directly. I get frustrated when translators make everything so idiomatic that the specificity of the setting is lost.) Does it kill me dead enough to make me want to read all sorts of inoffensive volumes with bees and gerunds in the titles? Well, no. However I admit that by being a couple of years behind, I will inevitably die without reading something wonderful that was published right under my nose.

And another thing: The Savage Detectives made me want to make poetry and it didn’t help me one bit with my resolution to use parenthesis only outside of sentences (oh well). Roberto Bolaño could parenthesize! Every time I saw another parenthesis coming, I would get excited, as if the parentheses contained all the chewiest parts.

An interview with Francis Alÿs, who is responsible for moving a mountain. But not entirely by faith.