Curious generational event while on the 103 bus. I was studying my book when a black guy sitting next to me moaned in a voice worthy of Brando in The Godfather: “Charlie…”. Without thinking, without looking up or looking at the speaker, I simply continued, for him, “You was my brother…”. Then I realized I’d spoken aloud and glanced at the poor guy next to me, who was staring at me in suspicious bafflement. I suppose I could have murmured, “On The Waterfront… the taxi scene…” – but I felt this would have only compounded the weirdness, for him, and any more elaborate explanation would have made it only worse. We continued our journey without further incident. I attach today some pictures of my dear English Composition students. The setting is my office, where I teach all my classes. It holds up to 34 students. I shared it with the venerable Allen Ginsberg – until his death, I usually add, redundantly, although in a sense it is not only redundant but incorrect: he is in fact still in our office, for me at least, both before and enduringly, following his death. It’s an office larger than all but the college President’s, a seminar room give to Allen presumably because he was Allen, and which after he died I rebaptized via some initial transformations – I installed some 20 huge plants until I stopped teaching summer school for a while and feared for the survival of the plants, trees though some of them were. I took them home. One still survives in our sitting room.

For a while I kept Allen’s desk unoccupied and invited students to sit in his chair and absorb, through the seat, his lingering vibes. I set a bonsai tree on the desk – I cleared it of all else, in line with Allen’s extreme neatness and frugality. I then managed to kill the bonsai tree, somehow, and realized I was not born to be guardian of a shrine. (Some are.) Eventually, when fewer and fewer of my students knew who Allen was, had been, and is, I moved my stuff across the room and took his chair myself – not without a lurking sense of shame, of desecration, even – and so his desk is the mess it is today, thanks to me. Behind the students you can see an American flag – but it isn’t, it’s part of a wonderful painting by my wife, Claire. I still introduce the room as Allen’s (and mine), if only to explain why instead of a barren classroom they have a real room with books and mess in it – thank God! and thanks especially to the department Chair who placed me in Allen’s office rather as one might present a famous polar bear with a juicy tidbit or a Roman arena lion with a peculiarly plump and complaisant Christian.

I say this because with my upbringing among famous film stars and their ilk I offered Allen a feast of connections: he liked to enumerate how many of the people I knew in my childhood he had slept with, rather as in the genealogy game long played in gay circles whereby you can trace your ‘ancestry’ – degrees of historical separation, if you will – all the way back to Edward II, and, who knows, even farther back, along a tree of bedmates. (A complaisant story-teller I truly was, overcome to share a room with the author of ‘Howl,’ which I so well recalled reading in British boarding school.) Some of his own tales were, for me, classics, as when he was 3-in-a-bed in Tangier with Jack Kerouac and Sir John Gielgud. I’ve long wanted to dramatize this as a radio play. Those 3 voices! So – a major part of my joy, the other being my students themselves, during these soon-to-be-20 years of teaching at Brooklyn College, has been my wonderful, capacious, chaotic office/classroom, notorious, I suspect, among students past and present.

First the country – and a further glimpse of the Chinese buffet in Kingston. An ice cream – not mine! – draped like a Dharmic devise. On Saturday, another show in Kingston, featuring my dear friend Dr. John Froud as the guest (a repeat visit and may there be many more), and listened to attentively by station owner JP’s new household addition, the appropriately named Automne. Here’s a glimpse of my comfy corner in Studio C, no more than 30 minutes from my house.

Arrival at the Port Authority. Memorable for many visitors – witness the Japanese lady taking photographs – her first glimpse of Manhattan. Last week, as I went up to work with Jimmy at his apartment: in the subway, a rowdy rioting mass of 12 and 13-year-olds, en route to a play in Harlem, from Brooklyn, led by a nice Kingsborough student who may transfer to Brooklyn College and become my student. I’m trying to work on my laptop, standing up amid this chaos. To my surprise a boy offers me his seat. The boy turns out to be Fernando – nice fellow – his courtesy is a big success with the girls. I ask them where they’re going. They say they have no idea. (Later I learn where from one of their guides, the Kingsborough student.) At 96th street they get out and change to the 1 line, as I do, but I slip into a different compartment, for a bit of quiet!

Today a year ago, my beloved brother Noel died. To us, who still love him, he is always with us, as here, with his beloved, much-traveled guitar – the guitar he played for me when I was a small child, and which I hear always, along with his sweet singing voice, and his sweet soul.

Best leaves of all – outside our front door. 24 years ago I had the astonishing, unforgettable good fortune to find myself on a bus from Manhattan to Ithaca, where I was about to begin teaching at Cornell, in the midst of the finest fall-leaf display in recorded history. I had brought a book to read, but for four hours never managed once to take my eyes away from the window, where an illuminated manuscript formed by hill after hill of burning colors created a narrative so vivid – and so suspenseful: was it possible there was another painted hillside to match or top the previous one? – that it resembled the ultimate firework display, one staged by nature herself, thanks to an unsurpassable sequence of weather conditions.

The Chinese buffet in Kingston – the ‘trough’ as Robert and I like to call it – sports an astonishing chandelier. Somehow it’s perfect. This weekend is the last peepers’ rapture, as the leaves turn to grey. We barely had 2 days of perfection, while I was down in the city, this fine fall. So another visit to Platt Clove was called for, and the weather responded, clear but for a little cotton-wool-ball puff of cloud above us. Later we made the mistake of going to the movie, ‘Left Behind,’ which has claims to being the worst film ever made, a botched tale of a different kind of rapture, The Rapture, in which the chosen suddenly disappear leaving their clothes behind and a mess that looks not unlike my bedroom. “Where did they go? They were here a moment ago!” It was certainly enlightening: Hollywood is being invaded by born-again billionaire backers, who are replacing the old quasi-Biblical Christian tales that form a thread through the history of American popular culture, and replacing this with hardcore born-again values. An all-too-perfect sign of the times, and the alarmingly widening rift in America between its twin traditions of tolerance and intolerance.

Round the corner from the campus, a huge old bank building has finally emerged from an elaborate chrysalis to reveal itself as a ‘Burger Mac’ joint of Babylonian dimensions. Just what’s needed at ‘The Junction,’ the 5-road star-shaped meeting point (Flatbush Ave, Nostrand Ave and others) that the building abuts? Maybe. Maybe not. The MacDonalds right next to it across the road was a friendly night-time place once upon a time – it used to host all-night regulars, sleeping bums and the like, before the fast food joint cleaned up its act. Will Burger Mac be their new refuge?

At Columbus Circle for my Wednesday breakfast with Linda, I encounter a lady with long white hair bent forward almost to her waist, mumbling, incoherent, and rejected by local cafeterias. Upstairs, a model of the downtown development around the new Freedom Tower looks perilous, transparent toy-sized plexiglass buildings with a vulnerable look.

In the subway I meet another distressed but determined lady, traveling backwards in her wheelchair. I know she is headed towards a sudden slope, quite a long and relatively steep one, since I go this way twice each week and sometimes more. I stay close to her, thinking she may well know that the slope is approaching – but she doesn’t, and as the passageway turns into a descent her wheelchair veers wildly to one side, where a helpful guy catches her. I take over and pilot her down the slope – holding the wheelchair back from running away with us both – and along the tunnel to my own little exit leading to stairs and my train. By then she’s in command. She says she gets more traction going backwards. I watch her go, backing into the future as we all do.