Back home, and it snowed overnight – harbinger of what we’re told will be a long hard winter, the second in succession. But how beautiful (at this early stage) it looks! Thursday I was up a little late and had to take a short, 20-length pre-breakfast swim at the Y, but could feel in me the stirrings of a 1-mile swim, and Friday morning I achieved it, and for the first time in 6 months accomplished what I previously – pre-arthritis – did every morning before breakfast. 4 months exactly since I got back from the bike odyssey and the arthritis-enflaming fast food diet I indulged in; 4 months of carefully increasing the distance – and thanks to avocados I’m back! The body was delighted with the swim. Time forbade, but I could happily have gone on and completed 2 miles, which I used to make a point of doing (for the hell of it and despite the tedium) once a year.

Back in the city, shuttling from the quad – that’s my building, where I teach, on the right in the photograph – to the Junction, immediately outside the campus (in a few strides you go from one planet, a pseudo-Harvard Yard, to another, the urban ghetto), where 5 roads meet, where five subway exits open their mouths into the underworld, where Target, Subway, MacDonald’s, Burger King, and soon a 7-11 punctuate a mass of bargain stores. Older people dally, now that metal benches have been erected on the sidewalks; young people dally too, and rush in and out of mobile phone stores; all these people, and the salespersons, black. The only whites are students and faculty, heading to and coming from home.

Farewells are tough, when it’s a loved one you’re saying farewell to. I never thought I’d feel so sad when the day came to surrender my Harley. No replacement is planned; this is it; 50 years of riding and good fortune. But to feel so sad? I wasn’t quite expecting it. Feels like a death. I’m reminded of Ezra Pound’s words about about reaching a time of no longer loving or being lovable: this is the real death, he mused, “the other is little beside it.” But come on! All this for an engine and two wheels? Strange how that comes to be a part of you, of who and what you are, without your being fully aware of this. At the same time, I’m ready, and I’m so grateful for my life both on and off a bike. This morning I shed a tear or two – or was that just the November wind in my eyes? – on the way to Harley Davidson, who’ve bought back the machine they sold me 12 years ago. Shook hands with all my old pals there. “You’ll be back!” But I doubt it.

This evening, a spectacular sky, cheering me up (even the heavens are giving my biking years a fine send-off) and a cloud of biblical bulk, captured by Claire.

(It doesn’t much care for me either.)

Brooklyn I love. But Manhattan, my childhood home (in a different incarnation, and on the border between Germantown and Spanish Harlem) – what a repellent place! Emerging from the subway at 19th and 7th Ave – not everyone’s Manhattan but yesterday for me it coalesced years of suppressed emotion – I attempted to find a snack. Many places were open. It was 3:20 on a Sunday. Behind a long front pretentious in its plainness, an eatery called Cafeteria beckoned. Cafeteria, perfect name for customers who wouldn’t be seen dead in a cafeteria unless slumming it in the half-mocking camp of a chic restaurant. Cafeteria, full of what seemed like slender 30-year-old fifteen-year-olds, similarly chic in a half-mocking camp style, with exactly the cultivated unshavenness to pass Manhattan muster, offered 4 or 5 available tables. The clientele seemed to convey the message that anyone not demonstrably gay (or pretending to be so) would be set upon and expelled, no doubt a just turn-about and payback, yet I wished myself anywhere in the humanly retarded MidWest (whose very idea of Manhattan this was); anywhere but here. I even missed Texas. None of the free tables was available, despite the absence of anyone waiting to be seated, and I was promised 5th place in the inexistent line. I fled gladly across the road to another eatery, this one of no name – the condition to which all Manhattan stores and eateries aspire. As with in-vogue clubs, names are too too vulgar. Here all the snacks were $20 and more, except for a tuna pita for $9 which I ordered only to be told that they had ‘taken it off the menu,’ as they patently had not. Bye-bye, nameless eatery. My next stop was a little salad bar-ish joint. A request for coffee, my needs growing more and more modest, was met with ‘Coffee? We don’t serve coffee.’ Oh for any of the diners we’d eaten in, Joe and I, on our 10,000-mile prowl this summer. I yearned for a mid-western face, a friendly drawl, in towns it pleased Joe to call “Buttfuck, USA.” I was ready to vote for Mitch McConnell. With barely enough time for a coffee I penetrated a Pain Quotidien and obtained a white bean soup, plus bread with a rind that would break the teeth of a Roman ox.

Thence to my destination, the launch of two books by my beloved friend Robert Kelly in Red Bull Studios, an over-designed multimedia mecca distinguished, for the uninitiated, by the fact that nowhere at the entrance does it say Red Bull Studios. Yes, I hate Manhattan. Psychedelia, long gone and rightly unmourned, has declined to the unapologetically garish, defining our age. All it takes is one dose of Manhattan – not only in its Chelsea incarnation, but that’ll do – to make me want to join the Tea Party, take up hog farming, and rush into the arms of the Philistines wherever they may be (Gath, Nebraska? Ashkelon, Idaho?), anywhere so long as I never have to hear the word ‘art’ again. Polite applause. Surfeit of the bien-pensants. Jules Laforgue foresaw it all, over a century ago: Un couchant de cosmogonies / Ah que la vie est quotidienne! (The man even foresaw Pain Quotidien!) Mercifully, to read or listen to Robert takes me to an entirely different planet, that of the heart.

This year’s superb World Series was being written off, after the first two games, by commentators all across the media, as the most poorly watched in baseball history. So what? What fools! It was a thrilling contest. I feel sorry for anyone who missed the Forester (my version of Baumgartner, Madison Bumgarner’s Ur-Name) and his unprecedented achievement. I dedicate this update to my ever-beloved Peter Capell, an actor whom I first saw on our little 86th Street television screen, playing the unshaven master-scientist villain in an episode of Captain Video (anyone remembering this is probably at least 70, like me), an early TV Scifi effort with deliciously cardboard sets. He had a long and honorable acting career, as imdb.com attests; my parents, actors themselves, knew him – I’m not sure how – and his wife Annie later became an important figure in helping to guide my mother’s literary career. Both Peter and Annie were gay, and shared what my mother always called the happiest marriage she knew. Peter adored baseball, and would take me for long walks – one in Munich that I’ll never forget – describing the World Series that year. Our walk was unforgettable because of Peter’s sheer glorious enthusiasm. I was still a child; the dear fellow never put a hand on me, and I say this because he well could have, although I doubt if I’d have received it gladly, and maybe he knew this, and/or was afraid of jeopardizing his and Annie’s relationship with my parents. This is all so long ago – and all parties long dead, and I the only offspring – that perhaps such things can be mentioned without disguising names. There’s nothing here to anyone’s discredit. My mother, I realized later, had been a little anxious. She needn’t have worried. Dear Peter – I loved you fondly then, and still do.

Last night a dinner at Landau’s, a Woodstock eatery in which all of us are regulars: Peter Wilson, Robert and Charlotte Kelly, Claire and I. Distinguished company. Claire and I received a sweetly-dedicated copy of Robert’s newly-published collected essays, a huge volume (appropriately so). [Dear reader, if such there be (sometimes I fancy this is just a diary – and in any case such fun to write – only to discover that there actually are people reading it): note, in the preceding paragraph, the incorrect, outdated locution, ‘whom I first saw.’ This The New York Times has officially proscribed. The newly correct usage is ‘who I first saw,’ although according to the Times we may still write ‘to whom I spoke.’ The dear old accusative case survives, clinging by its fingernails to the parapet of history, but only when preceded by a preposition.]