“You see things differently when you’re in love. Two outpatients from a methadone clinic slap each other on the corner. A goiter rides the crosstown bus. We attend a dinner party; none of the dogs have tails. Men in the map room of the New York Public Library surveil passing breasts. Nights slip by. I sit on the curb outside a magazine launch and watch a famous author pour cold water down a woman’s arm. 'Don’t be jealous,' my companion says impatiently, cupping his own elbows. 'He’s only applying a temporary tattoo.' I was in love and then I wasn’t, and sometime during the drifting gray interim I was told by a bookseller friend to read Renata Adler’s 1976 debut, Speedboat, a novel that had long been out of print but was absolutely, he insisted, worth the trouble of the search.”
—Recommended Reading: Anna Wiener on Speedboat“I learned that my grandfather had purchased a portable cassette player on Canal Street, which he wore while biking around the city. He found this to be a serviceable method of ambient-noise avoidance, one that he wished to export to Japan. When only one ear is translating the world, street noise can make a man crazy. Sam’s plan was to explore the neighborhoods of Tokyo with a tape going at full volume. Walking through Ueno Park or past the Yasukuni Jinja shrine, he would be willfully deaf to the background of foreign language. For whatever it’s worth, I consider this one of the greatest pleasures of traveling; it can bring such solitude. Instead, my grandfather would reach into his jacket pocket and, with the squeal of the play button, be transported to England to buy flowers with Clarissa Dalloway.”
—In Search of Lost Time – Anna Wiener // Paris Review
“So much has been written about New York City as a city of histories—rich and public, deep and private. Commerce and bodies ebb and flow. For every New Yorker, there is a ghost city under the tangible one; this second, invisible layer contains the tangled web of memory and geography. I certainly have my fair share of associative ghosts; we all do. But New York City is also a city of forgetting, for better and for worse, and often against our best wishes.”
—Anna Wiener, “Red and Blue” at The Paris Review“You see things differently when you’re in love. Two outpatients from a methadone clinic slap each other on the corner. A goiter rides the crosstown bus. We attend a dinner party; none of the dogs have tails. Men in the map room of the New York Public Library surveil passing breasts. Nights slip by. I sit on the curb outside a magazine launch and watch a famous author pour cold water down a woman’s arm. “Don’t be jealous,” my companion says impatiently, cupping his own elbows. “He’s only applying a temporary tattoo.”
—Anna Wiener writes about falling out of love, flaking collages, affected intimacy, and Renata Adler over at The Paris Review Daily.“So much has been written about New York City as a city of histories—rich and public, deep and private. Commerce and bodies ebb and flow. For every New Yorker, there is a ghost city under the tangible one; this second, invisible layer contains the tangled web of memory and geography. I certainly have my fair share of associative ghosts; we all do. But New York City is also a city of forgetting, for better and for worse, and often against our best wishes.”
—Paris Review – Red and Blue, Anna Wiener
“The Manhattan of Friends is not a Manhattan I will ever know — that city does not, in fact, exist — but for a few formative years it was everything.”
—Anna Wiener in Medium
So this article is not really about Manhattan, but I just absolutely love this quote. Growing up in Tennessee, I sort of pictured this vague life as a New Yorker—but I always knew it was just a romantic vision of the city that never actually existed. Maybe it does for really rich people. And when I finally made it NYC, I did love it. It has a lot to offer. But it will never meet that make-believe life I painted in my mind. Also, read the article: TV on the Radio: Listening to “Friends”. It’s good.
