Live from Family Brooklyn (ft. Willy Staley)

October 31, 2021 The autumn has been long; and the weather, a mood.
The leaves are perfectly gold here on the Gold Coast (that swathe
of Brooklyn lining the East River - Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights,
Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens -- where the bourgeois-bohemian class
reproduces) and soon I, William Staley (more commonly and phallicly
known as Willy), will bundle my 8-month-old son into garb of a
Gnome, and take him out into the fall crispness to experience his
first Hallowe'en.  But before I could go prepare to take candy
from babies (it's a choking hazard) I had to endure a recording -
something it seems more and more of my literary Brooklyn peers are
subjected to these days. A man and woman appeared on my Zoom
screen. They wanted to talk to me about A Man in Love, that is, the
second book in the My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Shadowily (they were both backlit, in their respective lairs: the
man, a Morningside heights railroad apartment; the woman, a
half-finished suburban basement), they interrogated me about
fatherhood, about my son's primordial essence. about carnivals. I
answered gamely, and two and half hours later we still hadn't
covered more than twenty pages of this book, this Struggle, but it
was time for my son's nap and I begged to be allowed to end the
call, to ply my son with his yarn tomato and squishy soccer ball in
a bid to make him slumber, in preparation for this moment - his
Halloween parade, his gnomic journey, his induction into the world
of golden leaves and food co-ops. I rest for now. But something is
tickling at the back of my brain. It's a line from the first page
of this accursed donkey of a Norwegian's novel, which goes: "I have
never understood the point of holidays, have never felt the need
for them and have always just wanted to do more work." -- psst....
https://bookshop.org/shop/ourstruggle