Walking between the old squatter cottages in The Jitties–in cold air and near dark, through mizzling rain–I hear a voice coming from a parked car. It’s American, intimate yet resonant, penetrating, conscious of an audience, and it’s reading from someone’s new novel, one of those clever first person deliveries designed to imply a listener in the text. There’s no driver in the car. There’s no one in the car at all. Its engine is running, it’s stopped at an angle at a corner in a billow of its own smoke. I walk past and go home thinking how much I’d like to win that Radio Four lottery and have my new book read that way, loudly but personably, to an empty lane at the end of November.
—M. John Harrison
On the water's surface
Today in Hunterdon County
The day is young
*
Traffic light goes red
Green. Red. Green. Red.
The warm belly of the bus
*
Chasing laughter
The sun strikes
Feeling good in New Jersey
*
Leaves on the windshield
Thoughts of home
*
Mountain Avenue
Quite chilly
High up in the trees
*
Water like glass
A vacant lot
Far away
...in the city, memory is challenged by the sole constant of urban life: change.
—{x}
...bricks chip and erode, paint fades and flakes from the surface. Inhuman forces — the sun, the rain, the wind — operate in alliance with human action over time, eroding and texturising space. Thus memory writes itself indelibly on the literal surfaces of the city.
—{x}