December 3, 2018 Issue

Now here’s a cool idea – “An Archival Issue.” This is a first, as far as I know. “This week, we’ve opened the archive and republished stories, essays, poems, drawings, and cartoons that evoke New York in deeply personal ways,” say The Editors in “Talk of the Town” ’s opening piece, titled “The City of Dreams.” The Table of Contents is a smorgasbord of interesting selections, including Frank McCourt’s “New in Town” (originally published in the February 22 & March 1, 1999 issue), Hilton Als’ “Spinning Tales” (August 26 & September 2, 1996), James Baldwin’s “Letter From a Region in My Mind” (November 17, 1962), Nancy Franklin’s “No Place Like Home” (October 16, 1995), Dawn Powell’s “A Diamond to Cut New York” (June 26 & July 3, 1995), and many other delicious morsels in the “Talk” and “Critics” sections, as well. My favourite is Franklin’s “No Place Like Home,” an essay on her sixteen-year conflicted relationship with her Upper West Side apartment – “a misbegotten shell of a space,” she calls it. Her descriptions of the apartment’s flaws are quite funny. For example:

If I’m reading in bed and someone next door closes any door in that apartment, the wall behind my head gives a little shudder, and when someone walks down the long hallway next to the wall my floor creaks. I can hear sneezes, the ringing of a telephone, light switches being flipped, the clatter of pots and pans. I hear voices all the time, though only once have I been able to catch a complete sentence: “Oh, my God, I forgot to iron a blouse for tomorrow!”

And, as she candidly admits, her own domestic dishevelment (she calls it “slippage”), is part of the problem:

Eventually, after I’d spent several years living alone, the thick coats of discipline that my parents had applied to me began to peel off in large chunks, revealing a psychic infrastructure with progressive mettle fatigue. Does it really matter if I make the bed? Mmm, let me think. . . . No. I used to be incapable of leaving dishes in the sink overnight, but I gradually loosened up to the point where I could ignore them for days. So what? I’ll get to them. Is there any reason I should pick up that Lord & Taylor flyer announcing a sale that ended three months ago off the floor and throw it away? Name one. And if I’m done with the ironing board, wouldn’t it be a good idea to put it away, so I don’t have to do a subway-turnstile hip swivel every time I walk by it? I guess.

I laughed when I read that. I identify with the “creeping chaos” of Franklin’s home life. When she says, “My life wasn’t adding up; it was just piling up,” I know what she means.