#100

#100, Freeman Alley, NYC

Welcome to the triple digits. We stand by our claim.

#99

#99, Dublin

This burnt-out shell of a car was festering in the parking lot of a convent school. It was a quiet April afternoon in a well-to-do section of Dublin, and apart from the ruins of a car, there was nothing at all amiss in the surroundings: birds chirping, leaves blowing softly in the breeze. The parish office was open, so I went in and asked the nice old ladies about it. It turned out to be the handiwork of a teenage pupil, and the car happened to belong to the parish priest. A dumpster had also been set on fire, and the air was fresh with the smells of burnt rubber. The school has, two years later, since closed down and the car was towed away without ceremony or fanfare. Some answers raise more questions than they answer. And some sights are all the more terrifying, more beautiful for being so out of place.

#98

#98, Soho, NYC

About sixty codfish eggs will make a quarter pound of very fizzy jelly. Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil queen and Jack. Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. No, Stephen King is not ghostwriting my blog and I haven't been hijacked by spammers. So what gives?

"A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Maybe this one is more familiar. This sentence, as you may recognize, is an arrangement of letters that includes each of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet at least once. I remember learning it when we were taught the lost art of cursive handwriting in school. Typographers use it as well to show off every serif and flex every muscle of a new font. But they also added a whole host of nonsensical phrases into the mix when I wasn't looking. Ergo, the codfish, evil queen, and black quartz.

Trying to match a vernacular example of type like this beautifully spiked 98 with a modern day counterpart is a little backward. The original was here first. But there's a curious need to know the names for things. City-dwellers and those unused to things like trees may notice this tendency when stolling into a botanical garden. Your eye may be drawn to the flower, but you also find the unstoppable urge to look at the tag to see what it's called. Ah, yes, Myosotis sylvatica, you say, filing this name away the way you would a street sign or name of a restaurant. (Or maybe you just call it by its common name: Forget Me Not.) There's satisfaction in knowing what something is called, even if the flower existed far before the name.

I went font-hunting for this unusual 98 and found a close contender in Retablo. It isn't an exact match (and, for the record, I think the original number I photographed nails it better) but it was still fun to try. For the curious, Identifont is an online source that lets you type in any small sample of text (letters and/or numbers) and see what it would look like in hundreds of different fonts far more exotic than your typical Times New Roman/Helvetica. But you can also try to track down the name of a font by going through a play-by-play questionnaire that helps the very smart computer identify it based on a combination of characteristics. (Is it sans serif or serif? Is it upright or slanted?)

And while you're there, you can also see your new favorite nonsense phrases played out in your font of choice. I, for my part, was very glad to receive news that the new farmhand proves strong but lazy, picking just six quinces. But maybe that's just me.

#97

#97, Buda, Budapest

Today, &7 takes a look at the mysterious wall plates of Budapest: What are they? What do the numbers mean? Why do they look like they've been poked with industrial-strength thumbtacks? And what's up with the arrows?

I was fascinated with these cryptic signs that I found all over buildings in Budapest. Each sign was smaller than a license plate and could usually be found at eye level in a relatively inconspicuous place: on the side of a building rather than near a door. There was never any accompanying text -- not that the Hungarian would've been much of a clue -- and I was left doing what I do best: wondering what it all meant.

Sifting through the archives to come up with today's 97, I was reminded of this 97's uncanny resemblance to 72. I wish now that I'd compiled more, but here's a sampling. A cryptic triptych, if you will. Say that five times fast. And if anyone knows what these symbols represent or wants to take a guess, let me know.

And put on your Advanced Hieroglyph hat for this last one:

#96

#96, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

#95

#95, Buda, Budapest

Because it makes things easier, I try to learn the language of the places I visit. I can say "I'd like the check please" in Czech and "I need help" in German. I once knew how to ask for a cigarette in Irish and I can drink to your health in Italian. One thing I cannot do, however, is make heads, tails, or middles out of Magyar, the Hungarian arrangement of the alphabet they insist on calling a language. Now, I know the Magyar tongue is a rich and complex language unlike any other European or romance languages, and I'm sure there is a beauty to the Finno-Ugric language group that is related, somewhat distantly, to Estonian, Finnish, and a handful of other minor languages found in Western Siberia, that I'm just not grasping. But what can I say? I can't be a master of everything.

This inscription comes from a museum plaque in Budapest. I know neither who nor what the text says and I haven't a clue what the 95 represents. So I'm opening this up to my readers, skilled as you are in navigating the unexplained intricacies of the Word Verification word system, to interpretation. Who, or what, is "OVAROSI TANACS"? Is it man, woman, mineral, or vegetable? Or is it something far more nefarious? And what's so special about that 95?

#94

#94, Royal Avenue, Belfast

I was going to subvert Chekhov’s famous line (“Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress”) to say that Dublin is my lawful wife and Belfast my mistress. But then I realized it's a much more convoluted relationship than that. Belfast is more than my mistress. Belfast is also my ex, the “it’s complicated” friend, the city I see far less frequently than I’d like, but when we meet again, it’s always a little awkward, a little familiar, and just when things start going good, I have to leave again. And then I realize Dublin is not my lawful wife at all, Brooklyn is, as I will have to report to the IRS very shortly, and so you can see relationship metaphors will only get you so far in life.

You see, I wrote a novel. It’s that famed first novel, the one that sits in a drawer and is read by no one. It sits on a shelf, actually, and it was read by a good number of fine editors at major publishing houses; it was looked at and nibbled on and declared tasty but no one took the big bite. I’m quite at peace with this now because I watch Dylan Moran’s short film on the nasty subject at least once a day. It helps keep the equilibrium as I finish work on the next one. The book-in-progress is set in Dublin; the first was set, in part, in Belfast. I’ve unfinished business with the place and while I don’t know the size or shape of the business, I do know it’s there.

This photograph was taken on an overcast, grey late afternoon in Belfast (is there any other kind?) after I'd spent a good hour or so writing and looking out the window of a coffee shop, admiring through a plate glass window the ghostly behemoth of an Art Deco building that stands guard at the end of Royal Avenue. Ireland’s banks evoke a whole host of feelings these days (see Bock , Sweary ) but on this day, it stood out as a singular beauty, imposing and odd, its streaked white façade and top like a melted-down, digitized Palladian dome.

I have, over the years, learned the joys of the fiction writer’s research trip. Its possibilities, whether wandering about with a pocket notebook, whiling away the hours in the streets or away in the pub researching the quality of Guinness while still feeling like you’re getting work done, are endless. The point of all the copious note-taking, presumably, is to gather material for the work you have yet to do. But in the moment, the notes and sketches, the scraps of overheard conversation and street signs, end up creating something almost as satisfying as the finished project.

And while Belfast may conjure certain associations and sights, I can guarantee none of them are quite as bewildering as this . There is glitter and disco and, while I can’t figure out what any of this has to do with the gray, once war-torn city I'm thinking of, a horrible and delightful earworm. You have been warned.

#93

#93, Monterey, California 

You've got the pleasure boats rocking in the harbor and the sky and water a brilliant marine blue. Now imagine about two dozen sea lions barking and bellowing on a rock in the background. Your stomach is full of clam chowder and fingers sticky with cotton candy. The smell of fish fills the salty air, and the warped wood of the boardwalk feels uneven but solid beneath your feet. It's a long way from the East Village to the West coast, but on some graffiti-crusted, bus exhaust fume-filled days, a little California dreaming doesn't do a bit of harm.

#92

#92, Kossuth tér, Pest, Budapest


This number always reminds me of a line from Edward Gorey's The Disrespectful Summons , a delightfully ghastly illustrated tale wherein a fiendish flying imp named Beelphasaur presents a lady, recently visited by the Devil, with a book called Ninety-Two Entirely Evil Things to Do . This she proceeds to read in bed with great curiosity. I love books within books, especially when they're books that don't exist. Borges and his libraries come to mind, as does Leopold Bloom buying The Sweets of Sin for his wife in Ulysses.

For the curious browser, there is, fortunately, the The Invisible Library, which has catalogued a list of titles of "imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound." Gorey's fictions-within-fictions appear here, including not just Ninety-Two Entirely Evil Things to Do but also The Toothpaste Murder. The Invisible Library is also the place for you if you are looking to peruse the complete list of works by Philip Jose Farmer (via Kilgore Trout, via Kurt Vonnegut), including classics such as Quarantine!, No Nose Means Bad News, and What Am I Doing on Your Table? Have fun wandering the stacks.

#91

#91, Remsen Street, Brooklyn

On the brick wall of 91 Remsen in Brooklyn Heights, just to the right of the brownstone's steep steps, a small red plaque stands. As I walked past recently and saw the plaque for the first time, I had my usual brief moment of syntactic confusion (I have tendencies to mix up Millers Arthur, Frank, and Henry). Then it clicked. Not Death of a Salesman (Arthur) and not the Sin City graphic novelist (Frank). Ah, that one: Henry! The one who wrote all that smut that was banned! Pleased, I looked longer at the plaque. The writer, born and bred in Brooklyn, lived at 91 Remsen for only a year, from 1924 to 1925. I still haven't read much of Henry Miller, just bits and pieces -- he's one on my list to delve into -- but I do remember that the recollections of Brooklyn I'd read of his were pretty disparaging ones. Take this paragraph:

It was in 1927, in the sunken basement of a dingy house in Brooklyn, that I first heard Rimbaud's name mentioned. I was then 36 years old and in the depths of my own protracted Season in Hell . . . I was then at the very lowest point of my whole career, my morale was completely shattered. I remember sitting in the cold dank basement trying to write by the light of a flickering candle with a pencil. I was trying to write a play depicting my own tragedy. I never succeeded in getting beyond the first act.

This is the bleak opening to The Time of the Assassins, Miller's study of Rimbaud. It's billed as such, though as Karl Shapiro notes in his introduction to Tropic of Cancer, the discursive and subjective Assasins is "one of the best books on Rimbaud ever written, although it mostly about Henry Miller." It's a decidedly weird book, bordering on the fawning and the fan-fiction, but I think it's the obsessive Rimbaud -- He's Just Like Us! mindset (such as one sees in celeb mags that fixate, with fascination, on the fact that stars -- not just us boring, ordinary chumps -- also pump gas, drink iced coffee, and reach to the top shelf for toilet paper -- OMG!) that makes it interesting. Another excerpt from the same book:

Like Rimbaud, I hated the place I was born in. I will hate it till my dying day. My impulse was to break loose from the home, from the city I detest.

With these less-than-flattering portraits of the borough in mind, I was curious about Miller's year at 91 Remsen Street. I was going by memory. Could this idyllic brownstone be the same basement flat where he spent his Season in Hell? Was this where he spent his miserable childhood? As it turned out, nothing could have been farther from the truth. At the time, mercurial Miller was on the upswing, building what he himself called his "Japanese love nest" with his new wife right here in Brooklyn Heights. He describes the space in his novel Plexus (many of Miller's novels draw heavily on autobiography):

The floors were of inlaid wood, the wall panels of rich walnut; there were rose silk tapestries and bookcases roomy enough to be converted into sleeping bunks. We occupied the front half of the first floor, looking out onto the most sedate, aristocratic section of Brooklyn . . . Most of the day, owing to the stained glass windows, it was rather somber in there, or should I say -- subdued. But when the late afternoon sun struck the windows, throwing fiery patterns on the highly polished floor, I enjoyed going in there and pacing back and forth in a meditative mood.

Vive la difference! You can see it just in his movements. In the first Henry is haggard, hunched over a desk in a "cold dank basement". In the second, the light is let into the room, he paces freely, he can gaze through windows out at the world instead of bleakly looking inward. Same old Brooklyn Heights, but vastly different places both physically and psychologically. The room lets in light, and so does he.

In June, 1924, Henry Miller married June Smith Mansfield. Shortly after the wedding, they made 91 Remsen their home and spent a happy year there living completely beyond their means. They survived on June's charm and Henry's not-very-lucrative attempts at self-publishing. In September of 1924, Henry walked out of his job at Western Union to make a living as a writer. He began furiously composing, creating a series of weekly mini-manuscripts known as the mezzotints. There is a beautiful description of the project here, down to the colored card stock and June's eyelash-batting attempts to sell them off. Basically, Henry's guidelines for himself were this: he would force himself to produce a 250-word piece every week: sometimes old material, sometimes new. He'd work on the piece, print it up (the mezzotint process is an old printmaking process, similar to intaglio) and try to hand sell copies to everyone from strangers in Greenwich Village to random people listed in the telephone book.

Henry and June and friend Joe O'Reagan all worked together on making these 'zines happen. There seems to be an atmosphere of excitement surrounding the enterprise, despite the financial woes and trouble getting other people interested. (You can just imagine the fever-eyed fellow on the subway running up to you and how feverishly you bury your nose into your book as this gargoyle approaches: Here! Read this thing I wrote! I printed it myself!) But his descriptions make it clear. It wasn't about selling. It was about the creating, the flurry of enthusiasm, the joy of self-imposed projects and deadlines. Miller describes the mezzotints in Plexus, calling them a "jigsaw puzzle" of a project. He would write some two or three thousand words and then hack and whittle away the prose poems and pieces down to the magic number, 250.

Henry and June lived happily at 91 Remsen Street until their eventual (inevitable) eviction a year later. But the slice of the high life must've been good while it lasted. But you have to wonder: What, oh what, would Rimbaud have said?

Rimbaud: This French poet hated his childhood home, too!