Notes
The New Yorker’s font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context.
Yet this paper as a whole felt more insubstantial even than usual—where were all those pieces nobody ever read, but everybody relied upon to be there? He glanced at the front, the top-right corner: WAR FREE EDITION. Ah yes, he’d heard about this. You could opt out now. He left the paper on his seat when he exited the train at Twenty-third Street.
“Haven’t you wondered why the average consumer is uncomfortable with letterboxed movies? It isn’t because most people are programmed to be Philistines, though they are. Cable channels go on offering scan-and-pan versions to keep people from having to consider that frame’s edge, which reminds them of all they’re not seeing.
Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences.
Or maybe Georgina had given him crabs—hah! At Hunter College he’d battled them for a shameful semester, his hairy body their dream refuge. Shaved his pubes and the fiends packed off to his navel and the tuft above his ass, a little allegory of urban renewal and displacement.
The War Free edition really depended on how you defined war.
One of life’s oases, those moments that come less often than we want to believe. And are only known in retrospect, after the inevitable wreck and rearrangements have come.
(Here was another of Perkus’s sacred enemies; I recalled one early rant blaming Gladwell for the “commodification of whim.”)
What a dog couldn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.
Yet just as one’s willingness to board a plane depends on believing a plane’s cockpit impervious to the condition of chaos that rules an airport, I’d let myself go on thinking Perkus was destined to meet some upstanding captain of medicine just outside this arena of human vacuity and dismay.
How could a place like Manhattan exist for just one purpose, instead of a million?”
Live in a Manhattan of your devising, a bricolage of the right bagel and the right whitefish, even if from rival shops. Walk the dog, dance with her to Some Girls.