Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Over the past ten days or so, I’ve been reading Paul Auster’s THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES, a novel that caught me off-guard with its charm and willingness to use a familiar character type from another century of story-telling as its first person narrator. The benevolent uncle is a figure I had figured would long have been relegated to a distant costume warehouse, but Auster’s dexterity at blending description and dialogue makes the improbable believable and left me feeling redeemed by the companionship of an imaginary character who will accompany me in my remaining allotment on this planet. I didn’t expect to be so moved by what amounts to an old-fashioned comic romance in which so many things that start badly, if not ominously, in the first half manage to reverse course by the novel’s culmination. It is probably the best possible novel that anyone could read at this particular juncture in this country’s history. I’ve always admired Auster as a translator, novelist, and literary advocate. Without his efforts, would Joe Brainard’s minor masterpiece be as well known as it is? I doubt it, and how could he not deserve substantial gratitude if not for that alone?
On a local level, our little corner of Long Beach was vandalized by a busy-border who apparently couldn’t stand the pleasure that the entire neighborhood got out of a bougainvillea bower kitty-corner to the house we rent. One recent morning we looked out from the porch, and it was gone! It’s been there for over a dozen years, growing ever more effulgently luscious as the source of a shadow anyone could enjoy while pausing underneath a stain-glass arch of translucent blossoms.
Apparently, someone claimed that it was a “public nuisance” and called some bureaucrat in City Hall and a notice was posted giving the owners seven days to chap it down or the city would come out and do the job themselves, while charging the owners for the cost of the removal?
By chance, I had taken photographs of it just a few weeks earlier, and this is the way I will prefer to remember that passageway.
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