So every year I assign this extra Aciman piece to my writing class, after they’ve read his essay “Arbitrage” from Out of Egypt. In light of my students’ fascination with OprahFrey (because of my own, just maybe) it’s interesting that this ending has always been there:
—

“Perhaps this is why all memoirists lie. We alter the truth on paper so as to alter it in fact; we lie about our past and invent surrogate memories the better to make sense of our lives and live the life we know was truly ours. We write about our life, not to see it as it was, but to see it as we wish others might see it, so we may borrow their gaze and begin to see our life through their eyes, not ours.

“Only then, perhaps, would we begin to understand our life story, or to tolerate it and ultimately, perhaps, to find it beautiful; not that any life is ever beautiful, but the measure of a beautiful life is perhaps one that sees its blemishes, knows they can’t be forgiven and, for all that, learns each day to look the other way.”

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/082800aciman-writing.html

Downtown Traffic
Originally uploaded by Paulo C.

Brooklyn buzzing with late night light.

It’s inconceivable that you read this blog and somehow haven’t already heard – but this Thursday I’m reading with some witty high-rollers at Happy Ending. It’s Opium Magazine’s reading series, starting at 8.30 on Broome and Forsyth. I’m reading with:
– Thomas Beller (http://thomasbeller.com/ and http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/)
– Samantha Hunt (http://www.samanthahunt.net/)
– Dennis DiClaudio (http://www.parentheticalnote.com/bio_dennis.htm)
– Nick Poppy (http://www.zombie-american.com/bios.html)

I’d love to see each and every one of you. It’s free, there’s booze, there’s a short film on zombies. Can’t miss.

—-

OpiumMagazine.reading Series #11
(http://www.opiummagazine.com/events.html)

When: February 23, 2006, Doors: 7:30 p.m.; Readings start: 8:30 p.m. (Thursday)
Where: Happy Ending, New York City, NY
302 Broome St. @ Forsyth
212.334.9676
Directions
B,D to Grand Street or F, J, M, Z to Delancey
How Much: Free!

After a life-changing and magazine-affirming All-Star Gala, Opium’s
monthly reading series resumes with a series of brilliant
storytellers. Readers include Thomas Beller (How to Be a Man),
Samantha Hunt (The Seas), Dennis DiClaudio (The Hypochondriac’s Pocket
Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have), Ryan Sloan and
a hilarious short film, Zombie-American, by Nick Poppy. Plus, an
all-new set of Opium buttons will be on hand, and you’ll be able to
buy Opium’s .print2 on location!

people having seriously more fun than us
Originally uploaded by smitten.

Down the steps to Bethesda Terrace, Central Park.

Innertubes are so the way forward.

Flickr, by the way, has so many brilliant photos from the blizzard – you should check them out. Clearly, I keep doing so.

Federal Paza
Originally uploaded by jgo ★.

This is what I love about snow – the way we see things newly, strangely, freshly.

Great ancient snakes or park benches in the plaza, it’s still fascinating to me.

Soho Winter
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

I finally have my snow tonight, rolling down the avenues and blanketing all sound.

Can hear laughter below my living room window, the slush of cars like waves pushing against rocks. Whalesong of carhorns far off, suddenly close, distorted over distances. One lone cyclist threading his way through the fat whiteness of the street.

And as for my need to romanticize icy flakes of water, what do I do with that? It’s as if I grew up in a warm climate and never had to shovel snow. The wind picks up, the sky’s a low violet, the streetlamps buzz with a thousand furious bees. Footprints cut diagonally across intersections, thick parked cars disappear, half a block away the world becomes opaque, lost.

In the early nineteenth century sense of the word, in the darker edge of a storm, what isn’t Romantic about the raw, wet world outside tonight?

Young Sloan in Yorkshire, 1996
Originally uploaded by wrysloan.

I lived in Northern England a decade ago.

It’s hard to believe, really. Just this kid stumbling through the Moors and Highlands, discovering imperial pints and hand-carved snugs and Cromwell’s fallen arches.

And apparently I had very curly hair. This was taken by my friend Bart near the old monastery. He and I had the same old Pentax – I’ve got mine around my neck there, leather strap outward to hide the side with my father’s mid-80’s technicolor. You know the strap, you had it too.

We used to take photo expeditions through the city with long lenses catching people on the sly. Unposed portaits, especially audiences watching street buskers.

Later that summer, Bart and I traveled to Siena, Italy for the Palio races. Not lank, brooding Yorkshire by any stretch. We stand in the center of the piazza, fever-heat rolling off the thousands anxious to have their contrada’s rider be the winner. Bart supports the guy with the hedgehog on his kerchief; I pull for the rhinoceros and beobab. Once, twice around the track and only a third are still riding – others have been yanked off.

Third, fourth, the crowd around us screaming, pushing, hands in the air, Bart’s bellowing, “Come ON, damn you.” The horseman in the lead, the hedgehog, is nearly there and the second place man reaches forward and grabs him by the shirt and yanks him from his horse and the third-place rider wins and the crowd falls to ground around us, a high moan cutting up. Clutching at their hair. Crying. Wringing their hedgehog bandanas. I take off my rhino/beobab gingerly and dig for my camera instead.

And then we run for it.