Check out Cami’s blog–she’s doing a lot over there.

Living in a rental property across from the Forbidden City, he continues to believe he rules the city though his officialdom has been reduced to selling devices for those wishing to see as little as he does.

As Adam pointed out to me, there are places on the streets and sidewalks where sand piles retroreflect light. They have a sheen when you walk by them that’s disorienting at first, then kind of nice, like caffeine, then disorienting again.

The seal of the city of Providence contains the question, What cheer?

Here, people go around singing, at least in our neighborhood they do. There’s a woman who sings to herself in a language I don’t recognize while she does her wash in her yard. There’s a man who sings very loudly in Spanish about his amor. There are girls who sing songs to each other that were popular before they were born.

Also, there seems to be a lot of hair from wigs scattered on the ground. Not sure yet how this relates to the above.

I also like to move on tracks–recently I was on a train. From a window I watched an old man walk down a narrow path between shrubs and a concrete stairway, holding the railing of the stairs while he followed a more gradual way. Then the train moved and he turned into clothes pinned to wind.

I like when someone else is moving with huge news in them. Running in a downpour is a variation of this movement.

I like to move downhill in sled tracks that suddenly bend my breath between trees.

I’m moving soon to a new town. Most of the way there I’ll be conveyed by air.

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“What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind–back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view.”

[Anne Carson in the introduction to "The Life of Towns"]

I first started Swann’s Way when I was seven. My parents had a copy with a cover that frightened me. The cover showed a man being elongated by forces far away. Or perhaps the forces changing the shape of his body were intrinsic to him. I wanted to read the book to find out about the forces acting on the man. I wanted to know about something far away that could also be in him. I moved my eyes along the words but couldn’t really make sense of them.

When I found another instance of the elongate man I tried reading the book again. This man was in our basement under a sheet; he lived in a painting my uncle had made. My dad said this man was their father who was dead. The man was in a wheelchair because he had a strange head. I tried reading the book to find out about the elongate man with the now-strange head but again I couldn’t understand the words though many were familiar to me.

Then later I found the man in another painting, that one by Edvard Munch, The Scream. This time I did not try to read the book again. Instead of reading the book I thought about reading the book. I decided the man was definitely elongating because of forces inside him, the same forces inside me.

And several more times after coming across the man I thought about starting the book again. Sophmore year of college the man helped me up after my bike slid on wet brick. He offered me a tissue for the blood coming from my head then hurried away through a narrow passage between buildings.

I saw him sitting on a bench in Barcelona.

I saw him pushing a shopping cart on the street.

I imagine the elongate man lives surrounded by curliques and narrow, twisted streets. He curls himself toward their ends.

I cannot find an image online of the version of Swann’s Way with the elongate man on the cover.

Then the Lydia Davis translation came out. Last summer I checked it out from the library and started it again. This time there were not so many curliques; the streets through which Swann moved were not curled and he was not elongate, just thin. I read maybe 100 pages before I stopped again.

Now I am beginning the Lydia Davis version again.