Wilfrid

Okay, I am equipped for that martini.

I am so totally out of touch with New York dining, especially compared with how obsessively followed it for so many years. Walking around downtown today after hiding from the rain yesterday, I walk past The Fulton at Pier 17 and then take some coffee opposite a little place called Le Gratin. Well, it looks little from where I am. Googling, I discover that these are Vongerichten and Boulud places respectively and that Le Gratin is actually a grand space inside the Beekman Hotel. I was completely oblivious to them. Consistently with that, the next four restaurant reservations I am holding are for St Louis.

No. Must revisit.

Oh for sure, understood.

I would say so, but googling found this on YouTube: I think it's an Edwin Starr song nevertheless.

Voyager. So sad. Please admins pin this.

Sardi's sold to the Shubert Organization which is, at least, invested in the neighborhood. Will close for renovation. Hope it is open for its 100th birthday next March.

A typically long, enlightening and hilarious essay by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB, this time about the work of Willa Cather. Here's Lockwood on biographers pussyfooting around Cather's sexuality: The essay led me to Cather's short stories for the first time, not least because Lockwood says she's more like Joseph Mitchell than Edith Wharton or Henry James. Highly readable and it has to be said she is all over the faces and bodies of her "heroines." Poor Eden Bower has to be nude a lot and also has to be taken aloft in a balloon in a fetching pair of tights. It's how Faulkner writes about women at his smuttiest! Lockwood (sorry if there's a paywall)

@small h What an aroma. I may need to buy some walnut liqueur.

Tripped and used my hand to save myself. Common cause of scaphoid fracture.

Should have got the hole in his shoe fixed.

My scaphoid is not fractured (small wrist bone where fractures are hard to detect). Two rounds of x-rays over two weeks and a lot of time in a brace -- and looks like it's just sore. Good, didn't want a pin in it.

I did get 8/8, but certainly on some of them I was just picking what looked like a British insult. Spoilers below if you're doing the quiz. I've never heard of a "melter" or a "dinlo." But you know "whippetcracker," for example, is made up.

Jeremy Prynne at 89, the remarkable poet and teacher. Almost comically productive in his last years, I have four of his most recent chapbooks on the way to me in the mail now. He has been a constant presence in my reading for around 25 years. From 2024:

Thank you.

Did not know there was a Beat specialist out there.

My fault, oblivious.

Braised goat (pictured), then because I was still working through a vast serving of pernil (pictured) the next supper was pernil shredded into the leftover goat broth (forgot to picture).

28. Jones, Mosquito 29. Joyce, Ulysses 30. Kazantzakis, Zorba 31. Kerouac, On the Road (done) Jumped ahead a bit. Ulysses next and I find it intimidating because I know my first reading of it was perfunctory. I came to it too young. I think I'll take Mosquito on an upcoming trip.

On a positive note, I was just reflecting on what a gateway it was to other writers and very memorable experiences. I bought the beaten up book below when I was 20. It contained an excerpt from Junkie and "Howl," probably my first experiences with Burroughs and Ginsberg. Of course, one of the characters in "Howl" ("who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened...") was Tuli Kupferberg, later of The Fugs. About 20 years after I bought the book, I was reporting on Tuli's posthumous 87th birthday party at The Living Theater, where Ed Sanders shared memories with me. Long before that, in my first year of college, I saw Slim Gaillard play and was able to meet him after his set. I think he's the only character in On the Road who appears under his real name.

On April 9 and too young, 68. I did not see any news coverage.

This kind of crap just ruins stories for me: "...had vampires been part of British popular culture." Where was Bram Stoker from and where was Dracula written and was it somewhat popular? The writer, Rebecca Mead, is British. Which makes it worse.

Well, On the Road hasn't aged well. No surprise I guess. I did remember Dean being somewhat annoying, but his behavior now seems far from cool or hip, not least his misogyny. Something I am sure I missed years ago: random characters are referred to as "fairy," "fag" or "effeminate." But not the characters based on Ginsberg or Burroughs and you'd never guess the original of Sal Paradise was bisexual.

St Louis trip is on. Booked Olive + Oak, Robin, Brasserie by Niche and Planter's House. Plus my airbnb is about a five minute walk from Pappy's Smokehouse.

Euphoria season 3. Just watched the first episode. It's crazy and silly and I would have many reservations about it. But Zendaya will win another Emmy. Nobody else is working at her ridiculous level.