Graffiti Graphomania, or, The Flâneur with Tourette’s: KEO, PRAY & Katie Merz In Lucy Ives’ new novel, Life is Everywhere, she writes: “Everyone who has ever lived was born into something that was already taking place.” As children in New York City in the 1970’s, we were born into a…

Voiceover for a film about a man in a garage — “Painters love the winter, they hunker down and begin masterpieces.” — William Parker, Painters Winter I AM TRYING TO ENTER MY FATHER’S STUDIO I hold four or five memories of my life before Brooklyn, my life in Kansas City, where my parents lived until I was three. …

excerpted from A Horse With No Cake In 1974, a year after they’d beaten my Mets in seven I irked my mother rooting for the Finley A’s Against the Dodgers in the Classic. She corrected me two ways We were a Senior Circuit family (as I now tell my boys) …

On Knowing Michael Blumlein My first visit with Doctor Blumlein came in 1987, when I was twenty-three. Michael, I now know, was thirty-nine; he seemed younger. He would always seem younger, even when he succumbed after a long struggle with cancer, at the age of 71. When I met Michael…

A Brief Exultation On Emily Joyce’s Paintings I want to live in an Emily Joyce house. The house would be under the garden. The house would be made of smooth plywood sliced at a thickness of .000001 microns. The upstairs would be downstairs. The house would have no ceiling or…

Chad Gerth’s A Day in the Life Wins the Long Game One day in 1999 I met Chad Gerth’s “A Day in the Life” (full title: “A Day in the Life, 5 Minutes 3 Seconds, The Beatles, 1967”) in a gallery in Toronto. In an unaccustomed burst of acquisitive urgency…

A Fugue on Time Pilot, Richthofen’s War & Me In Dissident Gardens, I wrote about a kid, raised as a Quaker, who’s into video arcade games, but wants to avoid symbolic violence. The kid isn’t me, but his relationship to Time Pilot was derived from my own.

Pulp Paperbacks in Conversation My sister (a literary translator who’s been nominated for and is winning all sorts of awards these days) and I used to enjoy sorting through my substantial collection of paperbacks and find groupings that amused us. For a while we imaged we’d put together a book…