Moveable Type

After a walking tour of the bookstores of Manhattan, and after almost inadvertently walking by a plaque commemorating Charlie Parker (he lived just to the east of Tompkins Square from 1950-54), I decided to do the Galway Kinnell and Frank O'Hara Memorial Walks.  Well, Kinnell isn't quite dead yet, but he does have a great poem called “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World,” about Avenue C, so I walked up that, and then over to Second Avenue, which is the title of a Frank O'Hara poem I can make neither hide nor hair out of, but which is still kind of fun:

“What spaking oppossums of sneaks are caressing the routes!
and of the pulse-racked tremors attached to my viciousness
I can only enumerate the somber instances of wetness.

Is it a triumph . . .”

Somehow, lines like these make sense in New York.  Well, not really, but if you wear your beret at the correct angle . . .  Anyway, I got home and figured out that I'd been on my feet for 5 hours straight and had walked, outside of bookstores, around 11 miles.  We had a good meal at an Afghan restaurant, got some beer at a convenience store on Eighth (though it does sound way cooler to say “picked up a couple forties at a bodega in Hell's Kitchen,” doesn't it?) and called it a night.