First-person dispatches. Not essays. Not scheduled. The notebook is somewhere backstage and the dates are approximate.
An artifact. London, 17██. Recovered from the opera house after the incident. Partial survival. The rest is fire.
What survives: the title "The Count." The structure of three acts. The fact that there was a garden. The fact that there was twilight. The fact that the composer conducted his own orchestra. The word "spectacle." A note about pyrotechnical effects that is, in retrospect...
Read →A room. A boy. Naples, 1782. The light is wrong.
The mirror is four feet tall and slightly green. This is not a metaphor. The glass is Murano, shipped across the peninsula at a cost that would have fed the boy standing in front of it for a year, and it has a faint verdigris cast that the...
Read →A door. An alley that smells like lemongrass. A man with a brass token who has never once been wrong.
Reggie Delacroix has a system. The system is: there is no system. There is no list. There is no clipboard, no velvet rope, no earpiece connecting him to a man in a back office running names through a database. There is Reggie, a folding...
Read →A voice. A venue that does not appear on any permit. Tonight, doors 23:00.
Marian Okonkwo is sixty-nine years old and she has been coming to this party since she was twenty-one, which means — she does the math in the back of a cab, watching the meter click — forty-eight years, on and off, mostly on. She is not...
Read →A scene. The Loft, 99 Prince Street, Manhattan. February 1975.
The left Klipschorn is running hot. Alex Rosner knows this the way a cellist knows a wolf tone — not from the meter, which reads fine, which always reads fine because meters are liars, but from a texture in the upper midrange that has...
Read →✦ More forthcoming ✦