March 2011
28 posts
Exit Music, intermission
Thank you for following Exit Music. I apologize if I am unable to respond to comments and questions, but rest assured I appreciate your interest and enthusiasm. If you’ve only started following this blog, Exit Music is an experimental “novel” I began on September 11, 2001, with the intention of recording as much as I can, both in the world around and inside me, for the next 365...
Exit Music, March 2002
March 1
A dream: I am about to conduct a class in some kind of construction area that looks like an open arena. I realize more and more students or spectators are coming in, and now I have more than a hundred and have to divide the class into three groups. I ask people from two large groups to come down from the rafters and join a third group; I have no trouble looking for volunteers. This...
Exit Music, February 2002
February 1
A dream: Someone is stalking me again, this time by sending me countless email messages that eventually make my computer crash. A technician at school helps erase the clogged-up messages. I ask him if he found out where they’re coming from, and he says he did, but when I ask for the sender’s address he says he cannot give it to me, as they are bound to protect identities of anyone who...
Exit Music, 2002
January 1
Diverses son les parles i diversos els homes,
i convindran molts noms a un sol amor.
People are many and many are their tongues,
and many names are needed for a single love.
Espriu.
A black man was playing Edith Piaf loud on his boombox –
Pigeons hobbling on the frozen lake –
A little girl pushing a doll’s stroller – the wheels sound like crunching ice –
A dried oak leaf...
Exit Music, 12/21-31/2001
December 21
Sometimes it occurs to me that the memory of unpleasant situations with certain people clings to me physically, like cigarette smoke, or more horrifying, has become a physical part of me, like a fracture.
I had promised Y., my neighbor downstairs, that I would go out to dinner with him, but today I couldn’t bear the thought of being with anyone, much less talking, so I sneaked back...
Exit Music, 12/11-20/2001
December 11
For the first time since 9/11, I took the subway with my walkman on. Before today I was convinced I had to be alert all the time, in case someone intended to attack the trains. Today, although my paranoia hasn’t abated, I just couldn’t bear the thought of listening to other people’s conversation, the noise of traffic, the rumble of the trains.
The President wants to withdraw the...
Exit Music, 12/1-10/2001
December 1
A young father making faces at his baby in a carriage. (Riverside Park)
Luminous day, the twigs of young elm bare and rose colored: so much beauty in the world, and yet so many of us remain unhappy –
After gym, I took the crosstown bus through 14th Street to Second Avenue, walked south, stopped at a bar on 12th and used the bathroom, left when I found no one interesting, walked...
Libya, a minefield of subtexts
Libya is not Iraq. Iraq was a lie. Libya is real. This is the message John Boehner completely misses or chooses to ignore whenever he takes a punch at President Obama. Mr. Boehner wants to reverse roles and have the Republicans do what opponents of their war on Iraq did years ago: to declare the assault on Libya as unnecessary, and perhaps an act of duplicity. Not so fast, Mr. Boehner. You guys...
Exit Music, 11/21-30/2001
November 21
A dream: A magazine pays writers in small bags of coffee beans. At payday, the writers have to queue up to get their beans. I am at the end of the line. There are three payroll people, sitting at a table like judges at a country fair. When my turn comes up, they hand me a three-pound bag of ground coffee, plus a one-pound bag of beans. Somebody in the line whispers jealously, oh, he...
Exit Music, 11/21-30/2001
November 21
A dream: A magazine pays writers in small bags of coffee beans. At payday, the writers have to queue up to get their beans. I am at the end of the line. There are three payroll people, sitting at a table like judges at a country fair. When my turn comes up, they hand me a three-pound bag of ground coffee, plus a one-pound bag of beans. Somebody in the line whispers jealously, oh, he...
Exit Music, 11/11-20/2001
November 11
Y. doesn’t want his mirror facing his bed, because he says, “What is the word? Superstitious?” Why do I find other people’s superstitions incredible, yet I cling to many of my own? As long as I do not talk about them, I can pass myself off as an entirely rational person.
Revised another story: some reassurance that I am not entirely useless.
Hearing Celine Dion’s maudlin...
Exit Music, 11/1-10/2001
November 1
In any group of people, large or small, in a class, in a group of friends hanging out at a bar, there will always be one who will act as the brat, the bully, the show-off. This person will very likely be the least stable among them.
Is it possible that anyone looking out at this sunset cannot feel some painful tenderness for the world? (Hudson River)
There was a man scribbling on...
Exit Music, 10/21-31/2001
October 21
He is afraid of the future only because he fears in the future he will still be as he is today, struggling to make money, to find somebody to love, writing a useless book, while everyone else will have “made it,” will be happy, will have changed. Therefore the ideal future is one in which everyone remains unhappy?
I forgot to mail a check for $23 to my credit card company on time,...
Exit Music, 10/11-20/2001
October 11
Suddenly remembered what B. told me in Paris last winter: You sound so American now. She said it with both admiration and reproof.
I want to send B. the poem I wrote last weekend. I want someone to feel good about my poetry, to feel good about the fact that I am still writing poetry. (Even though my topics are not very comforting.) A longing for Paris, for the south of France, for...
Exit Music, 10/1-10/2001
October 1
Today the thought once again that I would like to move to Europe, where it is not abnormal to think.
My rent notice stares at me like a condemnation.
How much longer can I endure not writing poetry?
Sometimes I suspect that I actually encourage people to abuse me.
An email from home. My sister finally coerces her husband, L., to admit that he’s been taking crack, he goes on a...
Exit Music, 9/23-30/2001
September 23
Father’s birthday. I did everything I could not to think about it.
F. marvels at everything he sees in the city, and keeps saying, It’s beautiful. We are sitting at the park on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, locals are playing baseball, kids are learning to skate, a young Latino man is walking around lugging an ice box full of empanadas. The sickly green onion domes of the Greek...
Exit Music, 9/17-22/2001
September 17
I wish I could barter my soul with the devil – but I already did that when I was 21.
I can speak so casually of God and the devil, but is it because I don’t really believe in them?
“We’re not talking bodies here, it’s all dust.”
He declares that something unfortunate will happen to him this year, that he will quarrel with this specific person, and then he spends the entire...
Exit Music, 9/11-16/2001
2001
September 11
By sundown about two hundred people had gathered at the pier on 68th and Riverside to watch the smoke from the rubble of the World Trade Center. The thick plume was eerily beautiful in this light, a pink tail rising out of lower Manhattan. It had been a fine autumn day, the kind of day that made you want to run out and soak the sun. Everyone was quiet on the pier. We all stood...
Exit Music Intro
Exit Music
Although this book dictates its form and content to me everyday, I have never before been so certain as to my objective: to portray a character who is convinced that the world is ending soon, and that he must make an effort to record as much as he can see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and remember, no matter how insignificant, to save everything from the certainty of oblivion. The futility...
Exit Music
Ten years ago, on 9/11, I decided to keep a journal and continue writing an entry a day until one year had passed. I called the manuscript “Exit Music,” but I never published it or showed it to anyone because (a) it was so unashamedly non-commercial, and I was certain no publisher would be interested in it, and (b) it is the most personal document I have ever written in my life. Well,...
