What is the connection between artistic expression and the joy of living? How can one best live a literary life? This book is a collection of small word-projects. Each examines a book, a moment, a story that helps to deepen the author's literary adv...
It finally turned out, that after all my time walking the red and black sidewalks of New York, I slipped into one of those many cracks in the feet in which they were made-- those endless feet that stretched on for miles at a time and turned into the sentinels of organization and painted order that had become Jonathan Conrad's life.
And it was these things--New York especially, but also Conrad--that led to my murder.
My death came from the simple fact of the matter--which really was not simple at all, although he tried to make it that way--that every time Conrad looked up he tried to convince himself that the sky was blue. He needed the sky to be blue, because in the small confines of his skulled cubicle he needed all the things a blue sky meant to a man who breathed none of the air of nude finger paints and charcoal after-images; he needed the raw abstraction of a reality within a cube within a cube, because with all these things came a blue sky, and without a blue sky, Jonathan Conrad couldn't handle his own smeared, oblong self-portrait.
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His had to be his boss breathing down his neck, and his yearly progress report coming up, the man in the elevator obviously having it in for him; these were all things that he could point to with a blue finger, and say with confidence, were not the smeared intestines of the better half of Jackson Pollock.
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Somehow, I had become Jonathan Conrad's under-self, the one who followed him wherever he went and told him that any second that other man behind the corner was going to paint his ugly caricature all over the billboards of New York, right next to the piled up corpses of Jazz, Joseph Beuys, and that nude of Marilyn Monroe Balthus never got around to painting. And all the time he would tell me those same words that exploded into New York's putrid effulgent air--because, as everyone knows, New York has little tolerance for such absurdities--which were: I feel fine, he said again, and the last time he felt more comfortable even though he was sure he could hear him creeping up behind him; that other that was stalking both of us like two limp pagans caught in the middle of the second Armageddon (the sequel is always better than the original). And if he listened closely he could hear the city noises he was sure were like the sky and its established color.
