“…and when I crouched forward, over the papers on my desk, to reach the untied shoelace, I experienced a faint surge of pride in being able to tie a shoe without looking at it. At that moment, Dave, Sue, and Steve, on their way to lunch, waved as they passed by my office.  Right in the middle of tying a shoe as I was, I couldn’t wave nonchalantly back, so I called out a startled, overheartly “Have a good one, guys!” They disappeared; I pulled the left shoelace tight, and bingo, it broke.

The curve of incredulousness and resignation I rode out at the moment was a kind caused in life by a certain class of events, disruptions of physical routines such as:  reaching a top step but thinking there is another step there, and stamping down on the loading….

In the aftermath of the broken-shoelace disappointment, irrationally, I pictured Dave, Sue, and Steve as I had just seen them and thought, “Cheerful assholes!” because I had probably broken the shoelace by transferring the social energy that I had had to muster in order to deliver a chummy “Have a good one!” to them from my awkward shoe-tier’s crouch in to the force I had used in pulling the shoelace.”  -  The Mezzanine

Nicholson Baker never ceases to make me laugh..

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Being nearly four years old, [Laura] was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term “human” a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human – they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.

[...] It is true they look human – but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

Subconsciously, too, everyone recognises they are animals – why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely

- Richard Hughes (A High Wind in Jamaica)

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“It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl – the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface – and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.” – Toni Morrison (‘Black Matters’ is part of a collection of essays called ‘Playing in the Dark’)

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Welcome to bookworm heaven! - Strand aka “18 miles of books”

This independent bookstore is a New York legend. Open since 1927, this east village jewel holds over five floors filled with an extensive selection of used books, bargain titles, and review copies. Don’t expect any of the workers to offer their help with a smile; you might even experience the stereotypical “Manhattan attitude”. However, if you come in with an open mind and a willingness to rummage  you will not leave empty-handed.

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