The other day I wrote this Ryan McGinley review on my iPhone, on the high line. It was beautiful.

For Bullett. Photo c/o Team Gallery.

To the guy at McNally Jackson whose preferred use of my time was to argue with me that non-fiction is categorically more important and more life-changing than fiction: let me respond, now that my hangover has ebbed to a less threatening level, with as huge a generalization. Non-fiction tells you what to think, and how. Fiction gives you something to think about. Also, I remembered what is the best book about atheism, and it’s not by Richard Dawkins. It’s by Hemingway. Byeeeeeee.

Play spot the difference with me and my sister! Hint: she is the best one.

Summer style inspiration: Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny wearing a black floral slip and saying “dead-on balls accurate,” the end.

I have never written a proper book review. For one thing, I haven’t been asked. For the second, I find it trickiest to write about writing. Dancing about architecture makes more sense than dancing about dancing, I think. I’m not saying I will never review a book. David Balzer’s book, though, which I just finished in its beautiful .pdf entirety, will not be the first. 

This is cos I adore David. I’ve written about a lot of people I adore, but those are people who do things I can’t and don’t do; this would be different, too obvious, too make-lovey. There are times his book—it is a book of short stories and it’s titled, adequately, Contrivances—makes me envious. There are times it makes me uncomfortable. These are not good feelings but they’re good compliments.

Once, in the summer just past, David and I went to the island. It was a weekday and the two of us. I remember what I wore because I bought it that day (a wide-striped tent of a dress, made to float) and because he liked it. I remember our conversations eidetically. We talked and read and talked; we were surprised by some clandestine similarities. He told me about his childhood and about his book. It seemed the second one wouldn’t exist without the first; is that true for all writers? For all first books? It’s so thrilling to me that he has this first book, which you can and should order today, and that he is proud of it, which he can and should be. 

David’s writing doesn’t feel “natural” or “effortless.” I don’t prize effortlessness, you should know. As an art critic, he’s formal and rigorous and sophisticated, and this book, which comprises many lessons about why we have art (to protect us from each other, is one answer), is no less so. It’s richer though, and funny. It’s needle-pointy. It’s full of startling flesh. He is not afraid to get strange in the greater interest of making something true. (Also, his reference library, I MEAN: “Old Hollywood, Gothic novels, art-world gossip, and maybe a Lifetime movie or two…”)

David writes, I think, like he’s painting in a great tradition. You can see the individual strokes, the painstaking word choices, the small wrought movements, and it’s so descriptive that you think you see all there is to see. You don’t really understand what you don’t see until you step back from the whole thing and sigh.

P.S. David, we need to talk about The Abortion.