As a writer you think of the day after your death more often than the average person. This is a professional deviation that all writers share, and it could probably even be claimed that if you often think of the day after your death, that you must have a talent to write. So I write. We man, we all, but writers especially, want to leave an eternal memory of ourselves to the world. Don’t we all see in our fantasy that sobbing circle of friends and family, as our beloved ones whisper their last words ‘we will never forget you.’ Finally, our consciousness slides into a happy oblivian.

Writers are different from philosophers who think more of death in abstract terms. But a writer thinks only of his own death. Writers turn up their noses for philosophers for this reason alone, because they will never satisfy the deeper objectives of their desires. A philosopher denies the very motives in him self that he acknowledges to be the driving force behind the desires of others. No, we writers envy another class of professionals, a writer really envies movie directors. Continue reading →

Arnon’s favorite place in New York City was a little book shop down at the corner of Court Street and De Graw. The shop was literally stacked with books and unlike most bookshops whose display of books consisted of neatly ordered rows of books, fit on the shelves so precisely that only someone with a total lack of understanding for the nature of books would order them this way, books here where crammed into boxes and shelves that were barely built to hold that many. A love for books and an appreciation for their true value only shows in such manner where the owner clutches on to their possession. The sheer number of books made one feel being at a graveyard of thoughts and ideas, piling one upon the other, indifferent of their importance in active life.

“Homosexuality with the Greeks,” “Miffy Counting Book,” “On Writing Well,” “1990 Edition Writer’s Resources,” “The Bulgarian Czars,” a purple and red colored basketball. The door would marginally be able to open in the morning, boxes had to be moved before closing the door at night. No two people could fit in the same aisle, and if two persons would meet here, one was forced to walk back his trail to allow himself in the first place to continue his way. Children you wouldn’t find here, books were piled too high for children to go through them. The air was so sour and musty that children are instinctively avoiding from entering. Continue reading →

Arnon Grunberg was a writer, living in New York City, unlike so many other writers. Grunberg was no New Yorker originally, he had grown up in Amsterdam. But he had found that the cultures in both cities were remarkably similar. When he had just moved to New York he had expected to experience a light form of culture shock, or at least that his humor would not be understood, that he dressed unnoticeably out of tune, or at least that his slim, tall posture would have an exotic appeal on the American girls. But not only did the women of New York prefer the slightly over-weight consultant on steroids look, ignoring him completely, every one in New York ignored his newly arrived, out of tune immigrant’s presence. The truth was that you cannot be out of tune in New York City, he quickly discovered. And thus, he didn’t even bother about the culture shock and assimilation difficulties that so many immigrants in Europe suffer from.

At first Arnon – or Yasha for his friends – was excited about this. He became one of the secretively and many freak obsessees. He would jump on the J train and cross the Williams Bridge to walk around Lee Street, or inhaled the stench of fish in China Town until his clothes would soak of its odour, walking in and out of the Chinese stores, observing the babbling cashiers on their rotten crutches. Continue reading →