Where does Crispin Glover buy his coats?
Where can you get coffee and a free newspaper at 6:30AM in New York City
7 A.M. in New York City
Jet lag is the sweetest gift. It’s one of my great joys to live on the wrong time zone in every country I’m in. I prolong it as long as I can. This way I can be a morning person in New York and a night person in France. (I’m actually neither. I do my best work in the afternoon.)
Yesterday I woke up at 4AM, threw my Christmas tree out of the window (I’m not about to sweep my stairs or engage with my super), rearranged my entire apartment (why not?), threw out everything that doesn’t fit (I no longer have fantasies of losing weight, I am married). By 7, I really wanted a coffee. Balthazar doesn’t open until 9AM on the weekends (8AM during the week!); Cafe Cluny opens at 8:30AM (get the donuts). The fanciest thing to do is to get a pot of coffee, and a free newspaper, at Dowling’s at the Carlyle Hotel uptown: Open for breakfast every day of the week at 6:30AM. It’s overpriced, but you don’t have to order anything except coffee.
I wanted something closer to home, and elected for a “new” (hotel) spot in town: The Chelsea Hotel. The cafe opens at 7, the Maître d' is a friendly, there are more waiters per person than necessary. And they carry all three papers (the FT is now really required reading in the states, not sure when that happened).
What I’m Reading Next if I can stop watching the Mike White Season of Survivor
So the purge continued throughout the afternoon yesterday. I threw out about 50 books: All the books I know I’m never going to read again (The Flaneur), the books I never even read (Moo, Ecstasy), and the books I gave up on because they sucked (The Green Dot).
The rearrangement of the book bench (I don’t like book shelves, have I talked about this?), pulled a lot of books to the top that I’d like to read this month. Some of them I’ve read many, many times in my past life (The Magicians, Radical Love). Others I haven’t got to, because they got lost in the piles. Top of this list is Fanny Howe’s Forty Whacks, which was described to me as her erotic writing, though I’m not even sure that is true. (Fanny Howe was probably the most important writer of my 20s, though I don’t own any of her poetry, which is what she’s known for?!) After I read Ravel, I bought up all the Echenoz books I could find, and promptly forgot to read them. My husband gave me copies of Highland Fling and Diary of a Nobody. (He’s given me a lot of Mitford. All of his recs are usually spot on, but I torture him by waiting months to read them.) I occasionally host play readings at my house, and the next installation is supposed to be a reading of In the Summer House, Jane Bowles’s only full-length play.
The way I can’t get any information about myself
I’m very preoccupied with finding the books I read as a child. I had the “brilliant” idea a few weeks ago to reach out to my elementary school library and my hometown’s public library and ask them for my checkout history. This turned up exactly nothing. Still, I encourage everyone to do the same. (I have a feeling in better-funded areas, you may be able to get ahold of this info?)
