07.21.16

i had a theory that no one would pay me to write things this summer—editors love their vacations—and that i should focus on pretending i'm bold enough to write and promote a book; to that end, i've been setting aside various instructive memoirs and conducting interviews with ben bird, who has nearly recovered from being stepped on at the hospital (and suffering a nasty broken shoulder) a couple of months ago. i can approximate his songs well enough to elicit responses—his full-fledged car-alarm routine, actually, which he hasn't been singing for anyone else—which is both exciting and a little terrifying (what if he's cursing? i might speak a bit of cardinal, but i can't hold substantive conversations yet). the staff assures me that it's his i haven't seen you in such a long time, friend song. i hope they're right.

i was wrong about no one paying me to write things! i mean, not dramatically wrong, but i file a piece or two each week. i'm getting better at interviewing doctors and researchers, though i'm still terrible at transcribing my conversations. a piece on ben (and a photo of us!) will be on newsstands this fall; a piece on thomas pynchon will be online in a week or two. the latter feels like a reported version of the writing i do here, which is very exciting; i'm hoping to ride that weird into more creative nonfiction.

i miss you.

Luke loves BHV for the music. All day long it plays excited, taped Christmas shopping announcements, backed with appropriate tunes. Some of the tunes we recognize—it plays the Looney Tunes theme, for instance—and some seem vaguely familiar but are hard to name, so we give our own names to them: "The Love Theme from BHV," "BHV's Victory at Sea," and the "BHV Christmas Anthem." His ears undimmed by fifteen years of the IRT, Luke can hear them all even over the din of appliance shopping, and when he notices a favorite, he rises from his stroller, a cobra in mittens, and sways solemnly back and forth.

(adam gopnik, from "the winter circus, christmas journal 1," in paris to the moon)