I'm over in the States for the Windham-Campbell festival at Yale (Knausgaard!) and the Brooklyn Book Festival (Philip Lopate! Elif Batuman! Ann Powers! (whose Good Booty I've just started reading, on Fergus B's recommendation, and it's GREAT)). I'm here a few days early, so I've been wandering around mostly failing to get my bearings so am just looking at things: the beautiful buildings (some of which look incredibly like decorative hats), streets that look like healthy green salads, a variety of small dogs, slow-moving professor-types, young men with lustrous hair walking with their hands held behind their backs. My overwhelming impression is: many people here are very, very clean and ironed-looking, like they've just hopped down off a clothes hanger. Even the air feels tumble-dried. I'm conscious that I'm kinda scruffy, still bloodshot-eyed and shiny-foreheaded from jetlag, and alternately I'm dripping with sweat or the sweat is drying out into a thin, salty crust. (It's not massively hot, it's a kind of close warmth: but also I'm a stress sweater. When I feel it coming on, there's nothing to do but brace for the wave.) In an effort to tidy myself up a bit I went into a cosmetics store today and the lovely woman at the counter tried to put some makeup on me but like the octopus vanishing in a smokescreen of ink my face abruptly disappeared in a cloud of sweat. So. All of the Windham-Campbell writers are having our photos taken on Wednesday, in the
Octopus v.2
Octopus v.2
Octopus v.2
I'm over in the States for the Windham-Campbell festival at Yale (Knausgaard!) and the Brooklyn Book Festival (Philip Lopate! Elif Batuman! Ann Powers! (whose Good Booty I've just started reading, on Fergus B's recommendation, and it's GREAT)). I'm here a few days early, so I've been wandering around mostly failing to get my bearings so am just looking at things: the beautiful buildings (some of which look incredibly like decorative hats), streets that look like healthy green salads, a variety of small dogs, slow-moving professor-types, young men with lustrous hair walking with their hands held behind their backs. My overwhelming impression is: many people here are very, very clean and ironed-looking, like they've just hopped down off a clothes hanger. Even the air feels tumble-dried. I'm conscious that I'm kinda scruffy, still bloodshot-eyed and shiny-foreheaded from jetlag, and alternately I'm dripping with sweat or the sweat is drying out into a thin, salty crust. (It's not massively hot, it's a kind of close warmth: but also I'm a stress sweater. When I feel it coming on, there's nothing to do but brace for the wave.) In an effort to tidy myself up a bit I went into a cosmetics store today and the lovely woman at the counter tried to put some makeup on me but like the octopus vanishing in a smokescreen of ink my face abruptly disappeared in a cloud of sweat. So. All of the Windham-Campbell writers are having our photos taken on Wednesday, in the