...and, what’s more, that’s not even his real name. The hardest thing when writing is to make the characters feel real—especially when they are real.

One of the most endearing things about American myopicism is that you can, as a foreigner, tell them you haven’t heard of anything and they will believe you. Hmmm, “jeans”? We do not have this in my country. My mate Bunny reckons I should turn up the heat, slowly. Coffee. Umbrellas. Shoelaces. Yellow paint. Does the college assign goat parking, or do I have to go private? And blood donations, are they monthly or fortnightly? Just need to plan my iron intake. When’s the curfew around here? The goal is to construct in the American imagination a vision of New Zealand that is somewhere between Transylvania and North Korea.

The visit of a poet is, to a seasoned host of parties for graduate students, frequently cause for alarm. It’s the aura of unease generated by the knowledge that every conversation one might foreseeably have with a poet has a non-zero chance of being unfaithfully adapted into a truly revolting sonnet the following day. A poet having a Pulitzer only raises the stakes. She insisted that art is supposed to have those; stakes, that is. Something of the author’s must be at stake or else… what? The mulling I was doing about this made the swift verbal left-hook even more unexpected: she put down her notebook and told the circle of us that there is nothing more beautiful than to be called by the name with love. Vision haloing, ears ringing, I flailed for the ropes; yet the uppercut came. Everybody deserves excess, she said; deserves to be considered a larger container of feeling. Excess is sensuality, and there are those of us who have been denied it.

always with the fucking spacing

The bar is often a poor field site. It’s easy to get a bad Martini, but harder to find a bad Old-Fashioned. Hardest of all to find something that’s just a bloody cocktail; the insistence upon some poor classic drink being variously smoked, seasoned, topped with exotic fruits, burnt with a torch, or otherwise excruciated truly boggles the mind. This is the country that invented the damned things. The American shake of plainness mixed with two dashes of gaudy aggrandisement makes for a heady cultural cocktail indeed. There’s a human performance of this at the field site, too. Blokes in quarter-zip sweatshirts and plain trousers whose tongues drip like hyenas raiding a beehive as they reluctantly (erotically) tell you that they’re in law school now, but used to intern for Morgan Stanley.

It is not totally without its insights, though. I recall being informed after $75 worth of drinks (three) that the limit-stones of ethnography lie at the humanist equivalent to science communication. The best we can do is to argue, convincingly, that these other guys are people too, and we should take their culture seriously. It’s not easy. It’s more effective to tell an American that building a shopping mall on top of an indigenous burial ground will result in being Haunted By Indian Ghosts than it is to convince him that it’s morally wrong to dig up other people’s ancestors. Certainly, these blokes in the bar didn’t buy it.

New York City tends to go by in vignettes, punctuated by the dental-clinic too-bright lights of the subway. Its sterile glare gives the ubiquitous dirt a certain dignity. Clubbing to Alicia Keys on a rooftop is great, because of (and despite) the constant playing of that one song. The Met has these earthen vases with painted hoplites riding dolphins. The couple from Gisborne—no, the man from Gisborne, who had taken his faithful, determinedly supportive wife all the way to Vienna to see one Klimt, and then across the Atlantic to the Neue Galerie to see the other—stared at it rapturously and insistently usurped the art historian trying to tell us about all the eyes. The authentic (that watchword of supermodernity) gulasch they sell in the basement is so red and tasty it practically reflects off the shined, checkerboard floor. Fuck, it's good.

I’ve been upstairs discussing Romanian affairs that you couldn’t even dream of. There was an Irish or two there, too. One Kennedy. Once, I was dressed with pajamas afterward; a sublime tenderness not made less so by my classmate’s name grinning at me from within the letters of the t-shirt. The bodied-ness comes the next day. It’s a moment at which your viscera remind you of themselves. One remembers one’s flesh with a certain glumness and a certain relaxation.

Sure! Here are some helpful tips to select the best olive oil—from a baker who works near me.

• Pack date. Ideally in the last eighteen months—twenty-four at the most. A pack date being printed at all is a good sign.
  
• Origin. Look for single-origin oils for richer, more consistent flavour.
  
• A fruity, mild smell. An oil gone off will smell waxy, or like crayons.
  
• Purpose. A finishing oil should be selected with more care than a cooking oil.
  
• A glass bottle. Always preferable to plastic.
  
• Cold-pressed. Heat cooks off some of the best flavours.

She has a strong fear and reverence for the wind. That’s a quote, actually. My mate Bunny said the above was “wopaganda”. Actually, he didn’t; that was me.

It’s the holiday season. My Jewish labmate just returned from Vegas, where she took care of all the other girls. “My mom got me a fire blanket for Hannukah. For the stove.” It’s funny how domestic and culinary ritual can be elided in the physical imaginary with the laboratory ritual. The scientific method is a ritual whose outcome is truth. It’ll always need an epistemological fire blanket.

“How’re you doing, Hector?” asks the barmaid to the Latino man sitting next to me.
He murmurs.
Not two pages prior I had read in the Iliad (Hobbes’s translation; impertinently monarchistic) of the Greeks’ fear of great Hector and his thew.
I wonder if Hector knows.