Song Of the Open Road - New York - Extracts

The Fountain of my country's destiny
And of the destiny of Earth itself,
That great emporium, Chronicle at once
And Burial-place of passions and their home
Imperial, and chief living residence.
-Wordsworth

He said to me: "Where are you from?" And I said: "New York." He said: "Ah, New York! Yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?" And I said: "Oh, yes!" And he said: "Why do you think they don't leave?" I gave him different banal theories. He said: "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all." He said: "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built, they've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made, or to even see it as a prison. And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said: "This is a pine tree." He put it in my hand and he said: "Escape, before it's too late."
-My Dinner With Andre

Eventually we all wound up in New York studying or looking for jobs-- which reminds me of a point I would like to make about New York, namely, that is you live in most other places, like San Francisco, Paris, or Bloomington, you are, almost against your will, taking a stand of some kind, and the stand is that you are not living in New York. If you live in New York, however, you are probably not doing so because you like it or feel it expresses you, but because it's the most convenient place: there are people, jobs, concerts and so on, but it doesn't add up to a place: one has no feeling of living 'somewhere.' New York is really an anti-place, an abstract climate, and I am not prepared to take up the cudgels to defend such a place, especially when I would much rather be living in San Francisco.
-John Ashbery

"I had a dream that when I woke up, the city was under siege."
-A friend of a friend, who is kind of a Bro

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
-Wordsworth

Paul Allen has mistaken me for this dickhead Marcus Halberstram. It seems logical because Marcus also works at P&P and in fact does the same exact thing I do and he also has a penchant for Valentino suits and Oliver Peoples glasses. Marcus and I even go to the same barber, although I have a slightly better haircut.
-American Psycho

Sitting in a corner of the gallery
I notice that Albers scratches a tiny A
in the lower right corner with the date
and the paintings are like floodlights
on my emptiness
that I am out of context waiting
for the place where my life exists like a tree
in a meadow
the warm traffic going by is my natural scenery
because I am not alone there
as the sky above the top of a tenement
is nearer
which is what the ancients meant by heaven
to be with someone
not just waiting wherever you are
-Frank O'Hara

The little island wedged between three rivers,
from which our letters come and go, is the personification of hope.
The buildings are black and white like sonnets. And enveloped
in between the first sweet cherries of the season are being delivered.
-Henri Cole