I put Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies into one of those Free library bins but not the one I’d intended to that will contain a lot of serious reading. (I’ve seen Mann, Nietzsche, Borges. I’ve taken from it a Willie Nelson biography.) When I went there, it was around school let-out time, and this was very near a school, and there was a big crowd around the free library, so I found another spot.
Though Auster doesn’t go much into specifics about it, it was nice to read a book about Brooklyn from the time that I was there, and when the worst thing we had to worry about was that Bush might beat Gore. (I have an image I associate with the result of that election but can’t recall if it was the day after it or what: a newspaper sheet strewn over a small stool or table in the kitchen of our squalid flat with the windows open on a rainy day.) That was calamity enough, yet it proved only to be the leading edge.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
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