Wilfrid

Where does one find haddock in NYC?

Local supermarket offers very decent pork at crazy low prices. (Paprika giving it a tan.)

I picked six contenders from Faulkner and literally rolled a dice. The Sound and the Fury it is. Meanwhile, I skipped through the obvious Gogol shorts, "The Nose," "The Overcoat," "Diary of a Madman."

Delightful event at NYSL tonight with Susan Cheever talking about her book about her father. Then the journey home, feels like teens. I was waiting just inside the front doors with another member, both our phones showing the crosstown bus 8 minutes away; then it rolls right in and thank god she noticed. The 1 train is pulling in as I get to the barrier and a guy also running lets me go through first. When I get on board my body is going to stop the doors closing until he makes it. This would all be so relaxed in September.

A 1984 thriller about Mafia activity in the neighborhood. 😅

Dead Souls was fun, fast and easy, even if minor character Nozdrev can be quite annoying. I think I may be flipping coins to choose a Faulkner. I have just about all the fiction, but I don't know what is crying out to be re-read.

Uncertain about the new Patricia Lockwood (Will There Ever Be Another You). I read a review that queried whether it should really be categorized as a memoir than a novel. The dustjacket calls it a novel and there is even the blurb about resemblance to real people being coincidental. What nonsense. The narrator is clearly Lockwood, Jason is her husband in the book and real life--with the same medical problem, and we even get reacquainted with her mum and dad from Priestdaddy. A memoir. Maybe none of that matters; maybe it has deep significance. The thing is, it's all so fragmented. There's a long commentary on Anna Karenina which is a slightly crazier version of one of her LRB essays. There's a rather tedious detour around the craft of making jewelry. I think this is intended: holding up a mirror to the chaos of COVID and Lockwood's own long COVID. It might be true to life. Is it true to literature? @AaronS Did you get around to reading it?

I always work from home, tomorrow I may work from bed. Now have three comforters. I know we are New York wimps. Anyway.

I looked back over the thread and didn't see the name of the restaurant. Did I miss something?

I saw a segment about this on NY1 and was wondering why I had never been there. But it seems it's quite out of the way, upstairs space somewhere in Dumbo.

Of course, if I am listening to CDs (or vinyl) it's not music from the '20s. Add my Hinds consumption this year and my age would dramatically drop.

RIP. I see Eater corrected the spelling of the restaurant within the body of the news item, but not everywhere...

Totally due to scouring old jazz and blues from the Harlem Renaissance period, for which I rely on Spotify.

Putting another comforter on the bed tonight. That's usually a January thing. Walked the 20 blocks from home from 125th today and the wind down Broadway was brutal. (For here, I know.)

Dead Souls is such a romp after Karamazov and Middlemarch. And I was correct to remember it as very funny -- especially the chirpy conversation Gogol maintains with the reader, explaining what he's doing and why.

I just imagine fighting for the soap. Only memory I have of a communal sink in the dining room is a backstreet place in Kuala Lumpur where you were eating with your hands (roll up the rice ball) and where they pretended they couldn't serve me the goat intestines, presumably because I looked nothing like any of their customers ever. Tortaria had a good run, I thought.

The new(ish) Santo Loco in the old Tortaria space: Good. Hopefully there's a restroom too.

I am amused that it is located down that narrow alley off the Bowery where I used to go to a little restaurant for its long list of duck blood dishes.

Dismaying review in NYRB says the first forty-five minutes are really good.

Well done guys, that's the stuff I was half remembering.

Wise advice, although personally I dislike tomato juice.

I am surprised the last day was 10/13 as I thought I had visited more recently. I often stopped for a cider after visiting Formaggio (cider, you see, is okay for daytime drinking as it's really a kind of fruit juice).

I didn't know about that place, even though it's ancient, and it's clearly a place worth knowing about.