Another summer reading another novel about old new york. Turn-of-the-century, things gone past, baseball games, immigrant families, tenements. This one, 'Ragtime' by E. L. Doctorow, is more direct, having less properties of constructing higher skies and deeper nights, as Underworld did. Instead it propels me more into the now, a kind of slingshot into me and here and New York East Village Brooklyn Washington Heights, proper nouns first emphasized and pointedly proper, then as use grows and people start to connect, capitals sanding down into smaller, more intimate units of measurement and endearment: thecity, firstandfifth, fortgreene, oneseventieth.

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slowly it feels like I'm so young so young so so very young oh so so so young. and it's great. young young young argumentative and angry, consisting and construed from the smallest things: shape of glasses, the way we hold ourselves and exude body language from the knees elbows arms and hands. This: Now: Time: Nice, not an apogee, no highest point to measure, just the strong jolt of propulsion kicking into drive. oh to be in my twenties. oh to be twenty. oh to have a whole life ahead of me and to distill this cherishing at night, alone, during walks, inbetween trees and half in the street, to solidify these things into creation and expectation and action and desire and drive and to force themselves into solid objects, to swing them around and to make them mine, ours...