If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a day cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words owl immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidences e of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-created and revived in disparate places on the earth whenever one of us says, “most eminent Signor Lipmann,” and we immediately here my father’s impatient voice ringing in our ears: “Enough of that story! I’ve heard it far too many times already!”
—Natalia Ginzberg, Farmily Lexicon, trans. Jenny McPhee, 31
Up 8.
Breakfast/coffee.
Read a story by Fabrizio Ramondino. Listened to a BBC podcast for the 100th anniversary of the Tractacus, from earlier this month.
Went to MoMa to see Reconstructions, a show of Black architectural projects (roughly). Two of particular interest from my L.A. perspective: J. Yolanda Daniels: black city, The Los Angeles Edition, and David Hartt, On Exactitude in Science (Watts), with a narration by Charles Burnett. And Tomeka Reid did the soundtrack. Looked around some other galleries, watched most of a curious video installation by Wu Tsang, we hold where study, titled from a Moten/Harvey essay, which he reads from; his two kids are in it. Read a fair bit of Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon, on the train.
Glad I went, but it’s a crummy rainy day - not really workable to sit anywhere and read/write.
Was famished on the way home, ate (inside, first time) at a Brazilian buffet. Tired when I got back around 3.
Listened to the rest of Dylan’s album; watched Sarah Friedland, Drills (a short) on Mubi.
Read first couple poems in John Ashbery, A Worldly Country. More Ginzburg in bed, lights out around 11.